Michael
K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
In
a recent interview Noam Chomsky declared that there “was a big difference”
between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential elections, a
difference “you could count in several million corpses in Indochina.” But,
Chomsky added, “a lot of the young people on the left said, “I’m not going to
vote for Humphrey. He’s a corporate Democrat. I can’t sully my hands on that.
So I won’t vote.” In effect, said Chomsky, this meant that they “help[ed] Nixon
win,” and more specifically, they “help[ed] kill a couple million people in
Indochina, plus a lot of other (bad) things.”
In other words, Humphrey was the lesser
evil in 1968.
Twenty
years ago, speaking with David Barsamian of Alternative Radio about the very
same elections, Chomsky said the opposite:
“I could not bring myself to
vote for Humphrey. I did not vote for Nixon. But my feeling at the time, and in
retrospect I think it’s probably correct, was that a Nixon victory was probably
marginally beneficial in winding down the Indochina wars, probably faster than
the Democrats would have. It was horrendous, but maybe less horrible than it
would have been.”
In
short, Nixon was the lesser evil in 1968.
Houston,
we’ve got a problem.
In
the 1960s Chomsky occasionally voted for Republican candidates if they opposed
the Vietnam War, but as the GOP turned increasingly reactionary he voted more
and more for Democrats, which habit he considers morally obligatory for anyone
on the political left. This has proven to be a tough sell, however, since the
Democrats are not so much the lesser evil as they are the more effective evil.
Precisely because of their (false) reputation for being more humane than
Republicans, they can act more viciously than the GOP (Clinton ending welfare
“as we know it,” for example) at times, and this is in fact their assigned
role. Furthermore, as an opposition party the GOP is formidable, while the
Democrats are pussycats, rolling over for everything a Republican president
wants, often conceding even more than is asked for (Pentagon spending, for
example). The focus of “opposition” since 2017 (laughably referred to as “the resistance”)
has been Trump’s insulting tweets and boundless vulgarity, not his right-wing
policies, which are allowed to advance unimpeded.
In
short, no matter whether or how we cast our ballots, policy is insulated from
voter preferences and keeps moving to the right. Nevertheless, Chomsky takes
leftists who abstain or vote third party (in swing states) to task for failing
to carry out what he considers to be a straightforward exercise in damage
mitigation.
“It’s very frustrating,” he says, that
“this is constantly happening,”
i.e. that some on the left refuse to vote according to a simple lesser evil
formula. Unfortunately, Chomsky doesn’t even recognize that he has been unable
to keep his story straight as to which side actually is the lesser evil, in spite of the allegedly “big difference”
between the two corporate parties. In fact, this year he goes even further and
says – try not to laugh - the difference (between Biden and Trump) is not
merely big, but colossal.
Though
he’s mentally absent much of the time, even Biden has more sense of political
reality than that, promising rich donors just last year that “nothing would
fundamentally change” in a Biden administration. But Chomsky wants us to be
impressed by a slate of disingenuous Sanders-Biden position papers crafted for
vote-harvesting purposes, rather than Biden’s devastating dedication to “more
effective evil” politics extending back over forty years.
Chomsky
well knows the emptiness of electoral politics under capitalism. Through the
years he has advanced a scathing indictment of U.S. elections, saying that they
are really more “public relations extravaganzas” than ideological contests,
that they therefore mean very little, especially at the national level; that he
himself votes “less and less” at that level; that the system is not generating
issues that resonate with the public; that there really can’t be said to be any
political parties, but only “candidate-producing organizations” driven by
marketing concerns; that the quadrennial farce that plays out at the
presidential level is worth no more than “five minutes time,” and that only to determine which candidate
represents the greater threat, in
order to vote against him; and that,
in view of all this, we should reserve our main political energy for vastly
more important work, such as popular education, union organizing, and cultural
resistance/transformation.
Nevertheless,
in recent years, the significance of voting has loomed large in Chomsky’s mind:
he warned that failure to vote for Hillary Clinton was a “big mistake,” that
allowing Trump to win could be “the death knell of the species,” and that the
2020 elections are the “most important in human history.” This represents an
escalation of election year hype, which in previous cycles has modestly urged
us to “vote or die” in “the most important elections in our lifetimes.” By
2024, we may have to resort to the “most important elections in the history of
the universe.” In any case, what’s noteworthy is Chomsky’s juxtaposition: voting
is both trivial and urgent, likely to
determine the fate of the earth and
not worth more than a few minutes of our attention. Are these assumptions
really reconcilable?
Probably
not. If it is really true that we are at a “tipping point” vis-à-vis global
warming, then it does not make sense to spend the vast majority of our
political energy working for the long-term goal of transforming the U.S. into a
country where a decent person could live without shame. Far better to throw
ourselves unreservedly into the circus campaign to elect Biden now, in order to
insure ourselves the time to deal with longer term matters later. But many
Bernie Sanders voters will not do this, to say nothing of those farther left,
and even Chomsky is not recommending it (though a Chomsky lesser-evil editorial
IS being used as a campaign ad for Biden).
Chomsky
favors an independent political party in principle. “I think it is important
the building of a political party which could enter the political arena and
represent the population, and not just business interests.”
However, he favors a “safe states” strategy in determining how to cast ballots
whenever an independent left candidate faces off against the capitalist
duopoly, which virtually guarantees failure. The reasons why are captured well
by journalist Matt Taibbi, who offered an evaluation of the safe states
approach back in 2004 when David Cobb of the Greens ran “against” George W.
Bush and John Kerry:
“For those of you who didn't follow this story Cobb snatched the Green
Party nomination away from (Ralph) Nader last week largely through his embrace
of the so-called safe states strategy, known affectionately in political
circles as the 'crack suicide squad' approach to campaigning. In this scenario
Mr. Cobb agrees in advance to refrain from campaigning in any state where the
Greens might have a chance to affect the outcome of the Bush-Kerry race.
Bravely, however, he condescends to campaign balls-out in any state where a
vote for the Greens doesn't matter.”
In
other words, all the left’s energy was directed towards not influencing the
outcome. Though he hardly needed to, Taibbi explained the absurdity:
“ . ..This is the kind of
politics you get when you raise a generation of people who don't understand the
difference between brand identification and ideological conviction. Much the
same way that Burger King and McDonald's are scrambling to figure out a way
that you can be on the Atkins diet and still spend your money at their vile,
ass-inflating restaurants, Cobb and his party basically figured out a way that Nation subscribers can wear Green this
fall and still keep their friends. They have turned politics into a shoe and a
handbag, a conquered market demographic.”
The
last part is key to all the rest. In a fake democracy voting means lining up
with your assigned market demographic, not electing leaders, much less
determining policies. As Taibbi jokes:
“Vote Green - elect Kerry!
Lose weight - drink Low-Carb Coca Cola! It's the same thing, on many different
levels. Because both decisions really boil down to the same compromise: trying
to fit an instinct to reject corporate consumer culture into the ruling
paradigm of corporate consumer culture.”
Rejection
by affirmation - touché. Taibbi rubbed the point in for effect:
“Logic dictates: if you want
to lose weight, the way to do that is not to drink the right kind of Coca Cola. The way to do it is to not drink Coca Cola. It doesn't take a
genius to figure this out, but it is apparently beyond the grasp of most
Greens.”
And,
as always, there was a lot more to reject:
“Similarly, if you don't
believe in things like corporate personhood, if you are against the war in
Iraq, if you are against the scourge of corporate money in politics, if you are
in favor of a reduction in military spending, if you want to abolish the WTO
and NAFTA, if you want to end the export of arms, if you want to break up media
monopolies, if you want to get Channel 1 out of public schools, if you want to
end the targeting of children by corporate advertisers - if you believe any of
these things, or more to the point, if they are embedded in your party
platform, then you can't vote for either the Republicans or the Democrats,
because they're united against you all the way down the line.”
Updating to 2020, we can say that if you are against
funneling trillions of dollars to banks and other mega-corporations, while tens
of millions of Americans face homelessness and coronavirus with little or no
income and no health insurance, then you can’t vote for either Republicans or
Democrats, because they are united behind such policies all the way down the
line. (For the record, the GOP was initially less stingy on direct cash
payments than the Democrats, and the lone vote against the CARES Act, a
multi-trillion dollar give-away to the rich, was Republican Thomas Massie’s.
But the differences are slight).
Nonetheless,
Taibbi concedes there is a logic to the “anybody but ________” idea (Bush,
Trump, etc.):
“I understand the logic . . .
it is a rationally defensible position, one that makes sense on some primitive
level. What does not make sense here is why the burden of 'anybody but
_________’ should fall on the Green Party. The burden really rests with the
Democrats. If they want to end the Green Party problem, then those votes are
there for the taking. All the Democrats have to do is renounce the WTO and
NAFTA, create a universal health care system, and slash the defense budget,
putting the proceeds into education and health care. Among other things.”
Sixteen
years later, the Democrats have still done none of those things, and Taibbi’s
main point is more valid than ever: the burden of anybody but Trump (i.e., any
blue will do) should not fall on the Green Party or Bernie Sanders supporters,
to say nothing of those farther left. (Or, more accurately, those farther down the wealth pyramid.) Over
forty percent of the electorate – the poorest part of the wealth pyramid - never votes for president, because it’s
a foregone conclusion that they will continue to be brutally exploited no
matter which wing of the duopoly wins a given election. What possible sense
does it make to tell them that they should care more about electing Biden than
the Democratic Party itself does? The Democrats know perfectly well they are widely
detested by the working class, but they get to share power even when they lose;
the poor get nothing either way. That’s
why they don’t turn out. The job of the rest of us is to define and deliver
on a politics that alleviates their plight and makes it worth their while to
vote, not tell them they have a moral duty to kiss the boot crushing their
neck.
Why
do the Democrats refuse to adopt policies that induce their base to vote?
Taibbi stresses the obvious:
“They're too addicted to
corporate money. They're money junkies. And as anyone who's had any experience
with junkies will tell you, junkies cannot be trusted. They'll say anything you
want them to say about going straight, but at the critical moment, they'll
still steal your television and shoot it right into their arms.”
Obviously,
offering to help a junkie desperate for a fix is sheer folly:
“The only way to deal with a
junkie is to change your phone number or, if you ever find him in your house,
chain him to a radiator. . . . the one thing you can't do is keep giving him
that one last chance. That only guarantees that he will come back again very
soon, covered with mysterious bruises and needing 200 bucks to pay for - tchya,
right - a hepatitis shot.”
The
political version of this story is even uglier, notes Taibbi:
“Shit, just look at what's
happened since the last election. The junkies got kicked out of office, which
ought to have been a wake-up call, and what did they do? They went out and
almost unanimously voted for the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and
two wars. . . . And now here they
come four years later, and they say: ‘We need all your votes right now or we're fucked.’ Am I the
only one laughing?”
Two
economic collapses, five more wars, and a pandemic later, and everyone’s well
beyond laughing, but there’s still a lot of puking over what the Obama/HRC
junkies have been up to since they left office: establishing an entire
propaganda industry blaming the village idiot for everything from bad breath to
jock itch, relentlessly pushing slimy, red-baiting charges about (imaginary)
Russian collusion with Trump, squandering impeachment on an equally worthless
Ukrainegate diversion, and preventing desperately needed change by successfully
rigging elections against their own democratic base, which is what produced
president Trump in the first place.
In
short: we can vote for Trump, or for what produced Trump, guaranteeing a
president worse than Trump in short order.
Taibbi
concedes there’s a method to this Democratic madness:
“I also understand the
Democrats' point of view. I used to take a lot of drugs, too. And when you take
a lot of drugs, absolutely nothing matters except getting off. In the quest for
drugs, any kind of behavior is excusable. . . . .That's junkie morality. That's
why from the Democrats' point of view it makes perfect sense to nominate a
gazillionaire, missile-humping aristocrat who'll have more corporate logos
pasted on him than a NASCAR driver when he gets into office (John Kerry).
What's the difference? We got off!
Why is everybody complaining?”
Right,
and in 2020 it makes perfect sense for the Democrats to nominate a senile,
prison-humping pimp for billionaires, who tortures the poor with fees and
penalties while exporting the job base and railroading a generation of
desperate black and brown people into jail on petty or trumped-up charges, not
to mention drowns the Middle East in an ocean of blood on ludicrous WMD
pretexts. And that’s just for starters.
But
the any-blue-will-do rationale makes no sense for the Green Party (or any
independent workers party), says Taibbi, because “If you're going to suck a
cock in a train-station lavatory, you ought to at least get something for it.” True, but the logic of “safe states”
doesn’t allow for this, so in 2004 “the Greens [were] going to roll over for
John Kerry, and in the best-case-scenario all they [were] going to get for it
[was] another insane trade agreement, more troops in Iraq, more corporate
handouts, and another my-dog-ate-my-homework health care fiasco.”
As
it turned out, they actually got a worst-case
scenario: the Greens rolled over for Kerry, Kerry bent over for Bush, and the
American people were left bleeding badly from the anus, the usual outcome of
“democratic” elections administered by capital. At the moment, everyone seems
certain that Dementia Joe has the 2020 race locked up, but whether he does or
not is far less important than our will to fight the crackpot logic that says
we have “no choice” but to keep submitting to this abuse.
It
simply doesn’t matter that lesser evil logic makes a crude kind of sense,
because it just aggravates the damage it is intended to mitigate. Taibbi
reminds us that it’s the system that requires bad candidates that should be our
real concern:
“Yes, ________ is a moron and
a monster (Bush, Trump, etc.) and it would be better if he were not around. But
America's political problems are bigger than ________. The real problem
in American politics is the rule of calculation and money over principle, and
until this problem is fixed, the _________s of the world will always be
with us. The Greens used to offer a solution. They've now become part of the
problem."
Exactly.
In a fake democracy voting for corporate candidates just legitimizes our
servitude. That’s the problem. Of course, Chomsky has always advocated committing
our major political energy outside electoral politics, forming and expanding
social movements that can bring pressure to bear on the elite political system
to make democratic concessions. And on this basis he rates the two Bernie
Sanders runs for the presidency a success, because the Sanders-Biden task
forces have now, Chomsky says, crafted the most democratic policy positions
since FDR (not coincidentally, the last president before the creation of the
National Security State). In other words, Sanders is moving Biden to the left.
This
is nonsense, of course, as there is nothing binding in position papers, and the
Sanders campaign has already surrendered whatever leverage it had by giving
unqualified endorsement to Biden in advance. Obviously, the DNC loathes the New Deal policy positions
favored by Sanders, which is why they torpedoed his campaign – twice. And now
we’re to believe they’re going to make concessions to the agenda they just
defeated? Why would they do that? In the midst of a pandemic, they refuse even
to concede on Medicare For All, much to the amazement of the rest of the
developed world, which implemented one or another version of single payer
national health insurance decades ago.
As
Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC (former senior advisor to Senator Daniel Moynihan) points
out, pressure from the left is irrelevant to Democrats:
“If you want to pull the
major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking to what you’re thinking,
you must, you must show them that
you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of
not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I
worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen, or have to listen, to anything on the left while I was working
with the Democratic Party, because the left had nowhere to go.”
That’s
the voice of experience, not advocacy.
Unfortunately,
the advocates of so-called damage mitigation voting show a marked tendency to
insult those who recognize that reflexively voting Democrat just aggravates the
“nowhere to go” problem. For example, Chomsky dismisses the efforts of Bernie
Sanders supporters who refuse to vote for Biden as “go[ing] off and sulk[ing]
somewhere,”
when in fact they have formed the Movement For a People’s Party, and are
currently engaged in a host of popular actions to extend the $600 a week
federal subsidy to the unemployed and help tens of millions of working people
avoid being thrown into the street in the middle of a pandemic. That would seem
to qualify as an example of popular grassroots organizing for positive change,
which Chomsky ordinarily favors, but apparently not in this case.
In
any event, those who feel moved to support “Lunchbox Joe” and the Biden/J. P.
Morgan/Bain Capital/Noam Chomsky National Liberation Front should certainly
feel free to do so. Our corporate-administered electoral choices are truly
awful, and voting is a deeply personal matter.
As
for Joe Biden, what can one say? Following the highly rational strategy of
keeping his mental disintegration out of public view, he emerges only rarely from
his basement, usually to take his Corvette for a spin, or confirm that he
hasn’t the faintest clue as to his own whereabouts or what day of the week it
might be.
But
on the burning issue of coronavirus, at least, which has sent Donald Trump’s
poll numbers plummeting into the dirt, he has the best thought out plan his
keen presidential mind is capable of:
“Get
things into place where there are shortages of.”
Truer
words were never spoken: any blue
will do.
