In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, people are reacting with shock or elation depending on their political affiliation. Explanations abound, particularly for the anomaly of Trump being elected, a media-driven celebrity having no experience in elected office. Rather than engage within the typical bipartisan framework, according to which I inhabit the categorical box of “liberal” or “democrat”, I prefer to take a bird’s-eye view of our political system and the plutocratic mechanisms that drive it.
Let’s go back eight years to Obama’s first election. Bush was disliked intensely by most people, had extremely low approval ratings, had served two full terms. It doesn’t take a political science degree to see that even a mediocre democrat was likely to win in 2008. Obama is good public speaker and was certainly refreshing, given his inarticulate and incompetent predecessor. Generally speaking, of course, within the Murica and Libmerica binary scheme, presidents generally get two terms at the most (sometimes one) and then the other political party gets a turn. Overall, the true scheme is the incumbent party is running against the change party. Neither party actually accomplishes all it claims or promises and, over time, the plutocratic mechanisms (of, by, and for the 1%) that dominate government policies guarantee that over time people’s dissatisfaction with plutocratic governance. Whatever party is in office has its deficiencies exposed over time within the bipartisan media talking point framework. Depth of analysis does not yield ratings. But the war between political parties does produce ratings. The puppet-masters fund the elected officials, dictate policies for these officials, and employ lobbyists who write laws that serve the puppet-masters rather than the voters. This is how a plutocracy, a government of, by, and for the 1% works. The essential mechanisms remain intact as people express satisfaction or dissatisfaction within the bipartisan scheme, which serves people who join parties like members of a tribe or sports team. The mainstream media aid and abet this tribalization and “sportsification” of bipartisan politics.
The true rulers of our government and media, as many of us acknowledge, are wealthy corporate oligarchs, corporate executives actively exploiting their lofty societal positions to determine media content to get us to love Trump or Hillary, or, in this particularly venomous political year, they inspire hatred for both candidates and this lights up people’s limbic systems and ratings too. When someone outside the typical scheme, a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, enters the picture and upsets the predicted Hillary-vs-Trump polarity, then he is found guilty by the plutocrat puppet-masters as upsetting the binary scheme. Whether he supported Hillary or continued to fight on, Libmerica would have been split. This split inspires heated animosity of liberals against liberals. This particular issue I leave to others to discuss. My focus here is on the larger plutocratization process and political tribalization and sportsification processes.
Clearly, the liberal side of our nation’s tribalization was more divided than the conservative side, even with Trump’s huge pile of “deplorable” attributes and ludicrous adolescent-level improvised “policies”. Yes, we should have a more sophisticated, more nuanced system of multiple viable political parties, and perhaps this fact, above all else, gave the election to Trump. The electoral college seems to benefit Murica and its republican voters who are spread out wider than the Libmerica coastal zones and small Great Lakes zone. Swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina tilted to Trump based on rural white conservatives voting more than urban liberals. Murica extended its reach into what been Obama’s Libmerica. After eight years, more Muricans voted for “change” in these “purple states” to flip them to Trump, even though Hillary piled up huge vote totals in California in the Northeast that gave her a greater popular vote total than Trump.
Focusing on large-scale political dynamics, I look at the media and our two-party system, which create an incumbent-vs-change dynamic. People typically don’t think deeply about why they are either satisfied or dissatisfied. If you’re satisfied, you generally stick with the incumbent party. If you’re dissatisfied you vote for “change”. This short-term focus is a huge problem because the two parties have been “plutocratized” or moved to the right over the past 36 years or more. From 1968 to 1992, republicans succeeded in changing the political climate and cultural war climate whereby “big government” became an epithet and snobbish “liberal elites” were used by republicans to recruit the “Joe Lunchbuckets” who had voted for democratic presidential candidates before. The only democratic president between 1968 and 1992 was Jimmy Carter, remembered for gas lines, high inflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan came along and hearkened to 1950’s nostalgia and “the shining city on a hill”. Democrats produced such illustrious candidates as Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. So Bill Clinton decided to run as a centrist. The old liberal democratic party basically had to be killed because the new formula was established when George Bush Sr overcame Dukakis’s 17-point lead in the polls by attacking him as a “liberal”. Bush was the ideology candidate and Dukakis was the competence candidate. Plus the attack ads pummeled the American psyche. African American furloughed murderer Willie Horton was featured. He was let out on a weekend pass by Dukakis. The basic political advertising methodology has changed little since then.
I am not saying the two parties are equally plutocratized. It is a matter of degree and the republicans use their austerity-for-the-99% and welfare-for-the-1% formula for huge plutocratic domination. With the democratic party, certain “special interests” like big banks, telecoms, drug companies, health insurance companies, etc. find certain receptive democratic receptacles (candidates) and they use more compassionate talking points and set themselves as opponents to the republicans’ trickle-down and anti-big-government rhetoric. Sad to say, the power of the binary two-party framework meant that socialist pioneer candidate had to defer to the democratic political establishment and Libmerica (blue state America) was not as solid as Murica, where Trump had no conservative rivals for his admiration within his Murica realm.
This political system has its media lapdogs write drama for the 2 major party presidential candidates. Add to this layers of social media drivel and our heads starving for useful knowledge are polluted with a confusing melange of superficial blather, interviews of ill-informed people supporting their chosen candidate, tweets du jour, scandals du jour, and smaller amounts of policy positions. The menu of candidates is not adequate and the process of choosing from this menu is seriously screwed up.
So what are we the people going to do? What emotions, what political tribal affiliations, what level of knowledge of plutocracy’s domination over politics–will influence what we do as we prepare for Trump’s presidency?
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