The art of politics has been called the art of the possible. American politics should be called the art of the spectacle. What bothers me most is the current of falsity which runs through it all.
I wondered why the mainstream news media gave so much unfiltered coverage of the political convention, rather than handling it in their usual scripted fashion. It did not take me long to realize the answer. It is because conventions are already so scripted and choreographed by the power elite that there is no need for the news media to perform its usual job of filtering content on ideological lines.
It is somewhat amusing to see how divorced from fact political discourse in the public sphere has become. Clint Eastwood suggested that it was time we had a businessman in the White House rather than lawyers. He conveniently forgets that we tried that for eight years and the results were not sparkling. Mitt Romney could, with a straight face (perhaps the straightest in all of existence), imply or otherwise insinuate that the economic collapse and massive debt was the result of Obama being elected president in 2008. It was not the that America faced in the face of two massive wars, a Medicare prescription drug plan, severe tax cuts, and an inadequate response to major natural disasters which greatly contributed to the economic and fiscal nightmare that we currently face. By definition that could not be true, because Republican policies were responsible for those events and Republican policies are necessarily good.
During his speech Romney highlighted that his running mate was a simple small town man with a kind heart. Too many of America’s citizen struggle to differentiate the schizophrenic paragons who are gentle spirits in their private lives but monsters in their political roles. Ryan may volunteer in his local community and have no problems making friends, but he want to take health care away from the elderly—the people who need it the most.
The Republicans talk about government out of both sides of their mouths. It was honorable for Mitt Romney’s father to be a public servant, because public service is a good thing when the office is discharged by a morally sensible Republican. Private sector entrepreneurs are the real job creators and not government yet a Republican needs to be elected to the presidency in order to create jobs.
The really interesting thing is that over the course of these political spectacles we see the culmination of the efforts of thousands if not millions of political operatives, often ordinary people who are actively engaged in and do the real grunt work of politics, in the form of a moment in the spotlight for a single man. This is the inversion of democracy which occurs on democracy’s most prominent stage. The pinnacle of American politics, its apotheosis--its highest manifestation--is the moment when the people are reduced to spectators and the great men the age are thrust onto center stage and are proffered as the answer to our collective problems. Both parties are guilty of this charade. But at least Democratic politics emphasizes the extent to which we are inextricably connected and bear a moral imperative to solve our collective problems in a coordinated way. Republican politics is the politics which glorifies the individual man in his freedoms—which are of course bestowed by god through inalienable rights.
In Romney’s speech the dramatic penultimate moment was when he employed the first of Schopenhauer’s 38 stratagems and compared Obama’s ambitious proposition to heal the world to his simple, specific, and modest proposition to help “you and your families”. I find it ironic that at the long-sought height of his ambitious, self-serving political career Governor Romney chose to stress the modesty of his proposal.
Perhaps the most interesting political idea that has come out of the blogosphere recently is this notion of the socialization of social status. This is at the heart of Republican politics. I assure you this idea is not my own though with great shame I do not know to who it should be attributed. Republican leaders are like high school principals trying to build school spirit while at the same time help build individual self-esteem through attachment to a superlative collective entity. The socialization of social status is the reassurance that you are great in spite of the fact that you didn’t go to an Ivy like I did, or inherit and then compound millions like I did; you are great just because by some accident of the universe you happened to be born an American (or come here on your own to your great credit). It is amazing that this nonsense has any traction in a party who seems to intuit Spencerian social Darwinism. And yet they are united around a national identity not founded on bonds of common ancestral origin or a ethno-mystical creation myth but on the constitutional scribbling of antediluvian libertarian lawyers who were more concerned with waxing poetic on checks and balances, natural individual rights, and other procedural matters than social justice (and who did so in a time before the global corporation had power to countervail against confederated yet separated government powers).
My conclusion as a product of this spectacle, yet another personal observation of this pattern, is that the problem with American politics is not the spectacle, the MSM, the corrupt elite, the autocrats, the 1%, the right-wing populists, or an activist right-wing judiciary. The problem with the American politics is the American people. The problem with America is that it is full of Americans—people who would rather be entertained than informed; people who make decisions based on symbolic meaning rather than the imperatives of survival in a changing world. Democracy and republicanism fail the test of rationality. That is the real tension between the government and the public. The bureaucratic aristoi have institutional rules which are designed to drive impartiality and collective rationality and yet are accountable to this disastrous political system of the people who fail as a group to satisfy the standards of collective rationality as predicted (for example, I believe it was Condorcet who demonstrated that democratic voting systems can fail to exhibit transitivity of preferences, a basic condition of rationality). Within the breast of the ideological system of Anglo-American liberal capitalism, with its propagandists like Thomas Friedman, intelligentsia like Zbigniew Brzezinski, mandarins like Lawrence Summers, nomenklatura like Cass Sunstein, technocratic theorists like Barack Obama, right wing populists like Paul Ryan, or charismatic hollow-shell front men like Mitt Romney (manipulative utilitarians all), lies nothing which could constitute an emancipatory project. Let us abandon it.