examines the reality behind the rhetoric about the American two-party system.
Socialist Worker, October 23, 2008♦
DURING THE last presidential debate, John McCain fired off a desperate last-minute accusation about forces “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history…maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
His claim was that the anti-poverty organization Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was trying to fix the election for Barack Obama by turning in fraudulent registrations. The charge didn’t seem to have any grounding in fact–since ACORN itself pointed out the questionable registrations to election officials.
The Republican complaints about ACORN make a mockery of the very real stories of disenfranchisement in the U.S.–most notoriously, hundreds of thousands of African American voters in Florida, who were struck from the rolls in 2000, assuring George Bush’s theft of the White House.
The fact that ACORN pays workers to go out and sign people up to vote–mostly in poor and minority neighborhoods–raises another problem. Why, if the right to vote is so important to the fabric of U.S. democracy, doesn’t the government make its own effort to register the disenfranchised?
The truth is that even when no one is stealing a vote or intimidating a voter, American elections are far from democratic.
TAKE THE way the president is actually chosen. The president isn’t elected by popular vote, but by the Electoral College. Each state has electors based on their number of senators and representatives in Congress–which means every state gets at least two electors, no matter how many people live there. Because of this, states with small–and usually rural and overwhelmingly white–populations are overrepresented in the presidential election.
There are only two political parties in the U.S. that get a real hearing at election time. There have been times in U.S. histories when third parties threatened to shake up the two-party system–such as the 1930s, when there was sentiment for a labor party to represent workers–but these initiatives were almost always smothered.
Thus, third parties are kept out of most debates by rules and regulations written by the mainstream establishment, they are forced to jump through often insurmountable hoops to even appear on the ballot, and they are shut out of the media.
The Democrats and the Republicans, while they tout their differences during the election season, fundamentally represent the same interests–those few at the top of society who control the wealth.
So while the majority of people are supposed to believe that they are voting for a certain set of ideas or political positions represented by their party’s candidate, the reality is that the job of politicians, first and foremost, is to make sure that the interests of Corporate America are protected.
The U.S. calls itself the “world greatest democracy.” But there’s no real evidence to back up this claim. As Lance Selfa notes in his book The Democrats: A Critical History:
Although the Democratic Party is one of the longest-existing mainstream parties in the world, it doesn’t really compare to many of the world’s political parties on the most basic levels. It has no fixed membership or membership requirements…The party has no stated set of principles or programs…
As party conventions have developed into little more than trade shows rolling out that year’s model (the presidential candidate), the party platform is usually synonymous with the candidate’s talking points. In any event, the Democratic Party candidates–from the presidency to the city council–are free to follow or to ignore the party platform in their election drives…
The standard picture of a political party handed down to us from civics and political science classes is one of a collective body that people organize to get collectively from government what they can’t get as individuals. The political party in a democracy represents the citizens who indicate their preferences about what they want from government when they vote to put the party’s candidates in office. And yet it’s clear that the oversimplified model does not reflect reality.
A case in point, Selfa writes, is the overwhelming Democratic Party victory in 2006 congressional elections–which was mostly the result of voters’ opposition to the Iraq war and their determination to throw out the pro-war Republicans. Despite this, the Democrats didn’t lift a finger to end the war after taking control of Congress; rather, they continued to fund it.
This undemocratic democracy isn’t relegated to the U.S. It exists the world over in different forms. This is because at the heart of bourgeois democracy is the illusion that elected officials make decisions based on the best interests of the people who vote them into office.
It is not simply that politicians are bought and paid for by particular wealthy people or industries–though they are corrupted by the system of campaign contributions. Beyond this, politicians are part of a state machine whose job is to preserve the status quo.
Like the cop and the judge, the elected official ensures that the basic class relationship prevailing in society doesn’t change–that a tiny minority controls all the wealth that is produced by the vast majority, the working class. The state poses as a neutral body, but as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
There are also many crucial decisions about the direction of society that aren’t made through the ballot box. Voters don’t decide what is a fair wage, or whether they have health insurance, or whether their working conditions are too dangerous. The majority of the population sure didn’t have a say about the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street or the future of families hit by foreclosure.
But this doesn’t mean we’re powerless to make change. The actions of ordinary people have achieved extraordinary things–the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow segregation, the eight-hour day–because those people organized themselves and fought for what they wanted and needed.
Peace and Justice Post 
John McCain in the Echo Chamber
October 29, 2008Republican presidential candidate John McCain is reflected in a teleprompter at a rally in Belton, Mo., last week.
By Gore Vidal | Truthdig, Oct 27, 2008
October proved to be the cruelest month, for that was the time that Sen. McCain, he of the round, blank, Little Orphan Annie eyes, chose to try out a number of weird lies about Barack Obama ostensibly in the interest of a Republican Party long overdue for burial.
It is a wonder that any viewer survived his furious October onslaught whose craziest lie was that Obama wished to become president in order to tax the poor in the interest of a Democratic Party in place, as he put it in his best 1936 voice, to spend and spend because that’s what Democrats always do. This was pretty feeble lying, even in such an age as ours. But it was the only thing that had stuck with him from those halcyon years when Gov. Alfred M. Landon was the candidate of the Grand Old Party, which in those days was dedicated to erasing every policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose electoral success was due to, they thought, Harry Hopkins’ chilling mantra, “we shall … spend and spend and elect and elect.” Arguably, the ignorant McCains of this world have no idea what any of this actually signifies; Hopkins’ comment is a serious one, and serious matters seldom break through to cliché-ridden minds.
Although I am no fan of the television of my native land, I thought that an election featuring two historic novelties—the first credible female candidate for president and the first black nominee—would be great historic television, yet I should have been suspicious whenever I looked at McCain’s malicious little face, plainly bent on great mischief. Whenever Obama made a sensible point, McCain was ready to trump it with a gorgeous lie.
When Obama said that only a small percentage of the middle class would suffer from income tax during his administration, McCain would start gabbling the 1936 Republican mantra that this actually meant that he would spend and spend and spend in order to spread the money around, a mild joke he has told for the benefit of a plumber who is looking forward to fiscal good fortune and so feared the tax man, using language very like that of long-dead socialists to reveal Obama’s sinister games.
Advice to Obama: No civilized asides are permitted in McCain Land, where every half-understood word comes from the shadowy bosses of a diabolic Democratic Party, eager to steal the money of the poor in order to benefit, perversely, the even poorer.
So October (my natal month) was no joy for me, as the degradation of our democratic process was being McCainized. McCain is a prisoner of the past. Later, in due course he gave us the old address book treatment: names from Obama’s past, each belonging to a potential terrorist. Even from the corpse of the Republican Party, which Abraham Lincoln left somewhat hastily in the 19th century, this was an unusually sickening display.
Happily, physicists assure us that there is no action without reaction.
There were still a few bright glimmers of something larger than a mere candidate of the Republican Party, but Mr. McCain seems to be in the terminal throes of a self-love that causes him to regard himself as a great American hero. From time to time, he likes to shout at us, “I have fought in many, many wars,” and, “I have won many of them,” but he has, so far, never told us which were the ones that he has actually won, since every war that he has graced with his samurai presence seems to have been thoroughly lost by the United States. Consistency is all-important to the born loser as well as to the committed liar.
So what little fame he has rests on the fact that he was taken a prisoner of war by the Vietnamese—hardly a recommendation for the leadership of the “free world”—and thus aware of the meagerness of his own curriculum vitae, for his vice presidential choice he then turned radically, in the age of the awakening to power of women, to an Alaskan politician; a giggly Piltdown princess out of pre-history.
Her qualification? She has once been mayor (or was it “mare”?) of an Alaskan village and later governor of what had been known as “Seward’s Icebox,” named for Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, who had over the misgivings of many bought all that ice from Russia.
One does get the impression that the senator from Arizona is living in a sort of echo chamber of nonsensical phrases, notions and unreality.
To further add insult to injury, as it were, he describes himself as a “maverick,” which one critic in the audience assures him he is not, anyway, like the great Maury Maverick, a New Deal congressman from Texas who was so dedicated to freedom that he allowed his cattle to roam unbranded, freely on the range—a tribute to a time when Texans were freer than now in the post-Bush era.
The critic in the audience said that he was no maverick in the usual sense on the ground that he was simply a sidekick. That just about sums it up: Sidekick to the only president we have ever had who lacked any interest in governance.
As we are going through a religious phase in this greatest of all great nations, I am reminded of Chancellor Bismarck’s remark about us Americans in the 19th century when he said: “God looks after drunks, little children and the United States of America.”
Amen.
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Tags:Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gore Vidal, John McCain, pow, Russia, Sarah Palin, socialist
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