The 2016 election season grinds on, and in keeping with the mode of the last two-and-a-half decades, the bourgeois media deport themselves like Tiger Beat for ugly rich people.
Dominated by personalities, mainly Donald Trump’s with an occasional riff on Hillary Clinton’s likability, they exert themselves only as hard as needed to produce content (and consent) without asking questions. Capital being capital, the rate of return on what our society has nostalgically come to think of as “real journalism” is lower than ever. The circus of marketable vulgarity is what we deserve and what we get.
Occasionally I’ll hear an NPR type ask what happened to real journalism, the kind that focused on serious issues presented with a decent regard for the facts. I try to keep a straight face since I’m a polite revolutionary socialist, but among us chickens we know it was all a myth, the product of privately owned outlets where presenters with sober expressions reported on the battles of different factions of capital, carefully avoiding any explicit revelation of their nature. The journalistic front of eminence and professionalism is both shield and sword to keep the national discussion within acceptable bounds.
So it is with our major parties, both of them relying on the stupidity and vulgarity of our culture to narrow a discussion that’s not intended as anything but a program to channel votes and obfuscate facts. Where they concern the ruling class, the purpose of both journalism and politics is not to tell the truth, but to manage it.
On the surface it seems odd that the major parties’ declining membership and internal crises have done nothing to weaken the two party lock on the levers of power. Don’t fewer members mean fewer votes? As with journalism, the real story lies beneath not just the top layer of brightly colored sewage, but under the next layer down, the fondly curated memory of a political culture that never existed. Breathless reports of civil war in the Republican party and “Bernie or Bust” in the Democratic party can do nothing to mask a fundamental truth about our TV show democracy and the latest episode the writers are calling the 2016 election: the struggle in both parties is, as ever, about who represents Capital.
It doesn’t matter that Republican establishment politicians are being stalked by the monster they created. Politically, they will acclimate or die, slain by Trump’s militant white dupes. The Republican party will live on, changed only in who operates its capital-serving machinery. For Democrats, the outward terms of the struggle seem similar: an outsider with populist tendencies stands at the gate, ready to take power from the morally bankrupt establishment and, in theory, place it in the hands of the people. But here, the challenger could not rely on the disdain of the party rank and file for normal politicians; he also came late to a party that was planned and paid for by the only relevant Democratic faction.
Unlike the Republican elite, which has reason to believe Republican malcontents will follow through on their anger with actual votes, the Clintonite establishment feels confident that, once allowed their fantasy in the primaries, Democrats hungering for a return to New Deal principles will either fall into line or find themselves replaced by voters on the Republican margin. This is why the Democratic establishment consistently holds the party’s “left” in contempt. The left almost always punks, and when it doesn’t, for every leftist vote the party loses, crass triangulation gains it at least one vote on the right. This was once the essence of Clintonism; it is now the essence of the liberalism and the Democratic party.
How does capital benefit from shrinking party membership?
We’ve heard much about how declining party identification and the growing ranks of independent voters illustrate the morbidity of the traditional parties.
How can they survive when Republican party identification is 26% and Democratic party ID is at 30%? At the current rate, it won’t be long until a majority of the electorate rejects both parties.
The key is to see the parties’ future through the lens of capital: popularity doesn’t matter, power matters. Unless there is a massive and militant shift in American political culture, the two parties and their elites will continue to control the nominating process, numbers be damned. Shrinking party membership is not a negative. It simply means less interference as capital chooses who will represent the only acceptable factions.
As Chomsky famously noted: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...”. Of course that includes limiting the electoral choices available to us. For capital to keep power, it must. Unless challenged boldly, those choices will shrink until even the current sham democracy is gone.
To the majority, this election appears to be one of great turmoil and uncertainty. One contestant promises to protect the status quo by redrawing political boundaries to include at least the middle 51%, blowing off the ineffectual left and smiling rightward to welcome refugees from the ranks of nervous establishment Republicans. The other operates by upending the conventional political discourse, valorizing the anxieties of aging white cranks, and re-positioning the goals of the commercial republic allegedly to favor the white working class.
For our real rulers, it’s a very different story, one where either outcome protects the influence of capital while at worst relying on the deep state to keep the winner within bounds. There will still be competition among factions of the ruling class, there will still be winners and losers among them, but the commanding heights of power will remain in capital’s hands. Capital may change political partners, and it may find new ways to distract the public’s attention from its thievery and mass murder, but whatever the outcome, capital remains.