https://truthout.org/articles/elections-are-treated-as-political-consumerism-and-democracy-is-suffering/
[links in online article]
Elections Are Treated as Political Consumerism and Democracy Is Suffering
Michael Meurer, Truthout
Published August 6, 2019
The displacement of meaningful civic engagement by political consumerism
and lurid media spectacle is suffocating U.S. democracy. In the record
$6.5 billion 2016 election cycle, a total that excludes untraceable dark
money, the consumerist conquest of civic life became nearly complete,
with empty partisan noise reverberating 24/7 through global media echo
chambers in inverse proportion to the shriveling substance of daily
civic life.
Before the advent of spectacular politics, former Presidents Jimmy
Carter and Gerald Ford accepted public funding during the 1976
presidential campaign and spent $35.5 million and $33.4 million
respectively, an inflation adjusted total of $158 million. Today, the
multibillion-dollar campaign spectacle is permanent, punctuated only by
a single day for elections.
A healthy democracy is predicated not on what philosopher Guy Debord
described as “an immense accumulation of spectacles” but on the daily
practice and attitude of engaged civil life by citizens working far
outside the nexus of corporate-sponsored political parties.
Countering the devolution of democracy into consumerism requires
understanding its underlying rationale and organizational mechanics.
The Role of Political Parties and Media in Election Spectacles
The U.S. Democratic and Republican Parties of the 21st century are
money-laundering operations in which cash investments are converted into
political capital for a small donor class consisting of corporations,
banks and the wealthy, who delivered 67.8 percent of all political
donations in the 2016 election cycle.
The job of the parties is to stage-manage and relentlessly promote a
permanent multibillion-dollar electoral competition among dozens of
candidate-contestants vying to represent one of the two major brands in
the final November round. In the 2020 election cycle, 24 Democratic
presidential candidates declared their candidacies 80 to 100 weeks
before the election, while President Trump filed for re-election January
20, 2017, the day of his inauguration.
Once the officially sponsored candidates are selected, the job of the
parties shifts to promoting the coming election blockbuster in the most
apocalyptic terms possible in order to rouse a weary electorate and
divert attention from the imperial ethos underlying the entire enterprise.
The template was established in the 1964 presidential election by former
President Lyndon Johnson’s infamous “Daisy ad” warning of nuclear
holocaust if his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater were to be elected.
In 1968, former President Richard Nixon continued the theme with a
campaign tagline admonishing voters, “This time, vote like your whole
world depended on it.” Every election is touted as “the most important
of our lifetime,” with nearly certain apocalypse if the wrong candidate
is elected.
The parties subcontract lucrative marketing duties for this end-of-days
spectacle to media outlets controlled by billionaire news entrepreneurs
such as Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post), the Sulzberger family and
Carlos Slim (The New York Times) or Rupert Murdoch and family (Fox News,
Wall Street Journal) and a constellation of global corporations (Viacom,
Time-Warner, GE, Disney, Clear Channel) that control the majority of
other major news outlets — NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, et al. Social media
duties are farmed out to Facebook and its subsidiaries (WhatsApp,
Instagram, Oculus Virtual Reality), Alphabet (Google and YouTube) and
Twitter.
In exchange for being given carte blanche to drive ratings and pad their
bottom lines, the primary job of this cluster of traditional and new
media conglomerates is to normalize the permanent marketization of
spectacular politics in ways that ensure outcomes causing minimal
disruption to the structure and operations of global capital and the
permanent warfare state.
OpenSecrets estimates that from July 2015 through October 2016, Trump
received free media worth more than $5.9 billion, while former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton received nearly $2.8 billion. In exchange for
this free news coverage, 3.3 million paid TV ads ran in 2016, generating
a record $2.3 billion in revenue, while Facebook ad revenue jumped 57
percent over 2015 to an all-time high of $26 billion.
At the lower end of the media spectrum, tens of thousands of small
donors (32.2 percent of total donations) give enthusiastically to
candidates promising radical change while claiming not to accept special
interest money.
These donors are like amateur political day-traders investing in
alternative political brands and scrappy campaign startups that rarely
succeed. The process of surviving the spectacle’s demeaning vetting
process ensures that any candidate who emerges is captive to the
financialized global system that spawned them.
Even campaigns built around themes of change and a politics of hope
quickly morph into governance predicated on permanent warfare, capital
consolidation and the inexorable growth of economic inequality.
This is not democracy. It is an elaborate form of empty political
consumerism that has been drained as nearly as possible of meaningful
political agency.
How the Political Consumer Spectacle Works
There is a symbiotic relationship between the methods used in consumer
marketing and the strategies and tactics employed in political campaigns.
The management of consumer discontent in the form of incessant brand
switching has become a dominant issue of U.S. business culture.
Marketing analysts describe a “switching economy” in which regular brand
changing has increased nearly 30 percent since 2010.
The new lingo of the marketing class is therefore laden with political
jargon about strategies that promote “meaningful engagement” and
“empowerment” by giving consumers “authentic experiences” to earn
loyalty and trust.
These tactics and strategies are now used to manage political discontent.
Gallup reports that in June 2019, between 41 and 46 percent of Americans
self-identify as Independent, among the highest percentages since
Gallup’s polling of party affiliation began in 2004. Conditioned to
think and act like consumers, and feeling they have no meaningful outlet
for their most deeply felt political impulses, a considerable cohort
among the electorate has grudgingly shifted their desire for change into
political brand switching in a new electoral market centered on the
endless distractions of permanent spectacle.
Rolling Stone political correspondent Matt Taibbi observes that Trump’s
fundamental insight in 2015-16 was that U.S. presidential elections are
“basically just a big reality show … with bad characters” in which show
producers have the impossible task of turning “human sedatives” such as
former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham
into political stars who might appeal to voters.
Taibbi notes that Trump realized the show needed new production values
with a “reality actor in the middle … to take advantage of the
stagecraft” that comes with a multibillion-dollar production budget.
There is ample evidence that many voters reject both party brands and
want to send the entire system up in smoke. For example, a post-election
analysis by The Washington Post found an electorally significant
percentage of Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. They shared
comments such as, “We need to change everything,” and “I’m excited to
see him blow the place up.” The New York Times reports that, “The voters
who switched from President Obama to Mr. Trump in 2016 were decisive.”
Further, 7.8 million voters cast ballots for third-party candidates in
2016, leading analyst Stuart Rothenberg to conclude: “Their strong
showing was due to the unpopularity of the two major-party nominees.”
Given the current weakness of party identification, electorally
significant numbers of voters can be convinced to switch political
brands as easily as consumer brands based solely on over-the-top
marketing blandishments offering the cheap thrill of taboo-breaking. In
2016, Trump’s carnivalesque campaign, with its unbridled fascistic
exaltation of nation and race above community and civil life, gave them
a vehicle for doing so.
With the U.S. confronting nuclear threats and environmental crises
across the globe, the multibillion-dollar politics of performance,
spectacle and racist carnival are not only inadequate to today’s
political challenges, they are a clear threat to democracy and peace.
Reimagining Democratic Political Civilization
French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that,
“Democracy depends on many things besides voting.” Rather, he believed
the most important and distinguishing characteristic of U.S. democracy
was the universality of “free voluntary civil association.”
Civil association, in which neither government nor private markets are
sovereign, is democracy’s training ground. It creates emotionally mature
citizens, not partisan voters easily manipulated by divisive party
politics. That is its vital function.
The U.S. no longer bothers to train citizens in democracy; that is,
teaching people to become effective citizens and members of their
community rather than partisan voters. Voting, with its devolution into
political consumerism, opens the door to fascistic demagoguery and is
clearly insufficient to sustain democracy. This is not a small thing. It
is at the center of current U.S. political dysfunction.
Finding ways to bring accountability to today’s permanent political
spectacle is necessary and vital work. Yet, it cannot become a
substitute for the long-term labor of reimagining and rebuilding a
modern democratic civil society.
Sharp political disagreements are inevitable, but the core of a healthy
civil society is civility and ultimately civilization itself. It is only
through civil association that citizens learn how to deal with their
differences to advance a common cause.
Parties cannot do the work of building civil society. Only citizens can.
Their work has traditionally taken place in the non-monetary social
economy, a space outside the consumerist pull of the market where they
can come together voluntarily to solve community problems, such as the
role of Black churches during the civil rights movement.
Over the past decade, new forms of open-source social mapping have begun
to chart the variety of civil associations and to facilitate connections
among them based on the belief that collective action depends on the
social networks that civil associations embody.
Absent the associative practices and buffering effects of civil
association, social problems become national in scope, while political
life, defying the maxim that all politics are local, devolves into
consumer spectacle.
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