Edward S. Herman
In many
ways the system is working beautifully right now. First of all, money dominates
the initial selection and weeding out of presidential candidates, so that only
those who will serve the corporate interest on the basics–advancing "free
trade," keeping the lid on or shrinking the welfare state, and preserving
and strengthening the military establishment and pursuing the ongoing
imperial strategies–can qualify as credible and electable. While there is a
fair amount of grumbling about soft and hard money and the essentiality of big
bucks for election status, the mainstream media normalize this and accept the
process as entirely legitimate. And the public, or at least half of the public,
also goes along and participates with their vote.
As part of
the normalization process the media argue vociferously that the two candidates
on the take offer adequate options, have sufficient and important differences,
so that nobody else even needs to be heard by the public.
The New
York Times made the first point in its editorial of August 20 ("Two Visions
of Government"), where it contested Ralph Nader’s claim that there are no
meaningful differences between Gore and Bush, arguing that there are
"measurable differences" on how to deploy federal resources that
"may not be enough to satisfy Mr. Nader’s aggressively populist
inclinations, but if the election were held now, they would give the voters a
real choice." So if the editors are satisfied with the choices offered by
Gore and Bush, the general public should be as well; no "aggressive
populism" need enter the lists. (I wonder if there is such a thing as an
"aggressive centrism," or an "aggressively pro-corporate
agenda"?)
The Times
has supported this position by completely marginalizing Nader (and Buchanan as
well), refusing to allow him to make his case while inundating its readers with
trivia on the money-election candidates. Effectively, they declared Nader’s
candidacy illegitimate and by their fiat ruled him out of contention. Then in
its editorial of August 22 ("Stop Arguing and Start Debating"), after
having refused to allow Nader to make his substantive case and develop any
constituency, the paper justified Nader’s and Buchanan’s exclusion from the
debates on the ground that they had no "demonstrated national
support"! This is a remarkable combination of media authoritarianism and
chutzpah.
Of course,
the rest of the mainstream media did the same as the Times, producing a
self-fulfilling prophecy of lack of mass support by marginalization and some
degree of trashing.
In the
abysmal Philadelphia Inquirer, their chief election commentator Larry Eichel
finally devoted a column to Nader entitled: "The bench is the key,"
with subtitle "Democrats call Ralph Nader ‘dishonest’ for discounting the
Supreme Court as an election issue." Eichel himself had never discussed
Supreme Court appointments as a key issue or indicated any dissatisfaction with
a Bush win in this regard, but for the sake of disposing of Nader he effectively
turns his column over to Gore protagonists to make what they believe is their
strongest case against Nader, with no Nader right to reply. Nader is not only
declared to be wrong, he is "dishonest" for disagreeing with a Gore
support position. (The last time Eichel was strenuously upset over election
candidates was back in 1987-1988, when the populist threat of Jesse Jackson
caused him to depart from his usual focus on horse-racing and take some nasty
swipes at that earlier deviant.)
But the
beauty of the system is most manifest in the reaction of liberals and leftists
to the monied versus principled and populist candidates. It is an all-or-nothing
election, and there is always the argument for the Democratic lesser evil, so in
each election we see vast liberal-left abandonment of the principled and
populist in favor of the lesser evil. As with the media’s process we have
another contribution to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Remember
the allegation that business corporations have too short a time horizon? Could
this not be said of the liberals and leftists who jump on the lesser evil
bandwagon? Maybe this is a national trait.
A number
of liberals and leftists have argued vigorously that a vote for Nader is
virtually immoral, given the differences between Gore and Bush and the costs of
a wasted vote. But the counter-immorality position seems to me more potent: a
classic moral rule laid down by Immanuel Kant was his "categorical
imperative": act in a way that you would want generalized. If you act on
the basis of calculating what others are likely to do this can not only assure
an immoral result, it erodes the basis of moral action altogether. Furthermore,
as I watch Clinton in action in Colombia, enlarging exactly the kind of policies
this country carried out in Guatemala and El Salvador, and putting more pressure
again on Iraq in implementing the most genocidal policy carried out in recent
times, and competing with the Republicans in urging an increase in
"defense," I am intrigued by the ability of liberals and leftists to
consider candidates and parties supporting these actions as legitimate
authority. Could they vote between candidates on the basis of their offering
different rates of incineration in gas chambers? If living in Yugoslavia could
they vote for Milosevic as a lesser evil if his opponent was even worse than he?
Part of
the answer gets us back to the power of the mainstream media and the virtual
absence of a left media.
Voting for
Milosevic would be tough because his badness has been driven home thousands of
times, with photos of streams of refugees, women and children in pain, dead
bodies, and supportive analyses, accusations, and war crimes tribunal
indictments. Clinton-Gore have been responsible for far more suffering in Iraq,
East Timor, and Turkey, among other places (see Chomsky’s New Military Humanism,
chap 3, or my "Clinton Is The World’s Leading Active War Criminal," Z,
Dec. 1999), and if there were photos of the victims, weeping women and children,
generous details of the terror, analyses of the source of the criminal behavior,
indignant charges, and war crimes indictments proportional to the victimization
for which Clinton-Gore bear heavy responsibility, I suspect that the lesser evil
contingent’s numbers would quickly erode. I think even honest reporting of the
pain of the hungry and homeless folks "empowered" by the 1996 Personal
Responsibility Act, and the condition and histories of the prisoners victimized
by the drug war, would take a heavy lesser evil toll.
In short,
I find myself unable to accept the candidacies of spokespersons for the ongoing
range of policies and must protest these horrors in some manner. Joel Bleifuss
in In These Times tells us to vote for Gore because it is important that we
"Win This One First" (Sept. 18). Joel seems to think that
"we" will win if Gore wins, despite the Clinton-Gore record and Gore’s
selection of Lieberman. I feel that we will lose if Gore-Lieberman OR
Bush-Cheney win.
And if
Gore-Lieberman do win, and Al From and the more-pro-business-than-thou crowd of
the DNC consolidate their position in the Democratic Party, where is political
change supposed to come from in the future?