The Non-Election of 2004, by Noam Chomsky

The Non-Election of 2004
The electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry

By Noam Chomsky
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The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of discussion, with exultation in some quarters, despair in others, and general lamentation about a “divided nation.” They are likely to have policy consequences, particularly harmful to the public in the domestic arena, and to the world with regard to the “transformation of the military,” which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of “ultimate doom” and to hope that U.S. militarism and aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of peace-loving states, led by—China (John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such words are expressed in the most respectable and sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is the despair of the authors over the state of U.S. democracy. Whether or not the assessment is merited is for activists to determine.

Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very little about the state of the country, or the popular mood. There are, however, other sources from which we can learn a great deal that carries important lessons. Public opinion in the U.S. is intensively monitored and, while caution and care in interpretation are always necessary, these studies are valuable resources. We can also see why the results, though public, are kept under wraps by the doctrinal institutions. That is true of major and highly informative studies of public opinion released right before the election, notably by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland (PIPA), to which I will return.

One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for anything, in fact, barely took place, in any serious sense of the term “election.” That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan’s victory in 1980 reflected “the decay of organized party structures, and the vast mobilization of God and cash in the successful candidacy of a figure once marginal to the ‘vital center’ of American political life,” representing “the continued disintegration of those political coalitions and economic structures that have given party politics some stability and definition during the past generation” (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden Election, 1981). In the same valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the election as further evidence of a “crucial comparative peculiarity of the American political system: the total absence of a socialist or laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral market,” accounting for much of the “class-skewed abstention rates” and the minimal significance of issues. Thus of the 28 percent of the electorate who voted for Reagan, 11 percent gave as their primary reason “he’s a real conservative.” In Reagan’s “landslide victory” of 1984, with just under 30 percent of the electorate, the percentage dropped to 4 percent and a majority of voters hoped that his legislative program would not be enacted.

What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the powerful backlash against the terrifying “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s, which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite enormous efforts to crush this threat to order and discipline, has had far-reaching effects on consciousness and social practices. The post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular movements dedicated to greater justice and freedom and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had previously been granted free rein. The Vietnam War is a dramatic illustration, naturally suppressed because of the lessons it teaches about the civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South Vietnam launched by JFK in 1962, after years of U.S.-backed state terror that had killed tens of thousands of people, was brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered whether “Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity” would escape “extinction” as “the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”—particularly South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to the rest of Indochina—terrible crimes, but secondary ones.

much more........http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/chomskypr0105.html

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Noam Chomsky is a linguist, social critic, and author of numerous articles and books, including Hegemony or Survival (Owl/Metropolitan Books, 2003) and Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (South End Press, 2002).

are up to. This is it.

It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as it did; probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of the world’s major energy reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the “most strategically important area of the world,” “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Apart from what one historian of the industry calls “profits beyond the dreams of avarice,” which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated hydrocarbon reserves—uniquely cheap and easy to exploit—provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called “critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called “veto power” over them. These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even more so in today’s evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EU became each other’s major trading partners in 2004, joined by the world’s second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.

Note that the critical issue is control, not access. U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S. will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S. were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the “stupendous source of strategic power” and to gain “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes reflects similar concerns.

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jan2005/chomskypr0105.html

Europe and Asia will unite to become Eurasia and U.K and U.S will become Oceania.....

Excellent article! I was particularly interested in the discussion of the mass marketing campaign.

snips
"As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in its regular vocation sells toothpaste, life-style drugs, automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine the “free markets” we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational choices. In such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information about their products: cheap, easy, simple. But it is hardly a secret that they do nothing of the sort. Rather, they seek to delude consumers to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GM does not simply make public the characteristics of next year’s models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers, featuring sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs to a heavenly future, and so on. The business world does not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed “entrepreneurial initiative” and “free trade” are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. The last thing those who dominate the society want is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too familiar to merit much discussion."

"In 2000, “issue awareness”—knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues—reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About 10 percent of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate’s “agendas/ideas/platforms/goals”: 6 percent for Bush voters, 13 percent for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls “qualities” or “values,” which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly..."

As Chomsky points out at the end of the article, this indicates that there is a lot of untapped opportunity to educate voters as he states, "They show that there are substantial opportunities for education and organizing, including the development of potential electoral alternatives."

It also means that our PR campaign sucked and there is a lot of room to improve that as well. GOOD MARKETING is key.

There are more working PR people than journalists at this point in time. That's one clue.

Another clue -- one of the biggest media conglomerates is RELIGIOUS radio. Millions of listeners all the time -- if you doubt it, just turn your FM radio dial to the left and count how many progressive community stations you get, vs. Bible stations. (If you're driving in the south, don't take your hands off the steering wheel as you count all the religious stations on your fingers.)

~~~~~~~

Amy Goodman, speaking the other day:

Looking at the network media coverage of the 2005 inauguration --

"If we had state media in this country, how would it be any different?"

"We have to challenge the most powerful weapon the Pentagon has deployed - the media. It is the greatest threat to democracy in this country."

Amy Goodman, Progressive Dems meeting, January 2005

~~~~~

Note: Also in Z Magazine:

Bertell Ollman:
"Should The Left Ignore The 'Stolen Election,'"
January 26, 2005
ZNet
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=7110

Can you suggest web sites in addition to Media Matters and the DU forums for good source material about this and related subjects, like:

1. Sites and articles to aid brainstorming about how this (moving people from propaganda-filled news media to more truthful ones) is to be accomplished. And are there any books you would recommend?

2. Online and print resources documenting trends in deliberate abuse or sabotage of alternate media, especially when it is orchestrated by the administration. (For example, planting of bait stories or false stories, organized troll posting, disruption of activist efforts.) I'm also interested in documentation of how corporate media apparently try to smear alternate sources, for example by ridiculing cherry-picked (and possibly planted) posts on progressive internet sites like DU.

I'm at a preliminary stage of putting together material for articles intended to publicise the benefits of alternative news sources and also how they have been deliberately mis-described, abused and sabotaged by the administration and the corporate media. If there are good resource sites for this subject other than Media Matters and the DU forums, I'd appreciate hearing about them. Most of the standard blogs cover this issue once in a while, but not in enough documented detail or consistency to be all that useful at this stage.

Whether or not you have sites or other resources to suggest, thanks for the very interesting link in your post.. Are there parts of it that you plan to update?

...is "Turn off the TV, put down the book or close the browser window, wait a few minutes, decide what you want know about first, then open the browser back up and google it."

But I do see your point. Media research isn't my specialty, however, so I don't really have many resources bookmarked. I would note Daily Kos can be a good read sometimes, and that factcheck.org is starting to pick their pace back up a bit, though it's hardly worth the effort to check back every day.

As far as my sig link, really I'd be wasting my skill set to continue editing that... there are other activists here that have gone much further in compiling material, plus there's demopedia if that's still working. Mainly I'm going to be concentrating on USCVprogs where I can lend some of my more specialized skills to the cause.

Anyway, following my own advice, a google search on the terms 'mainstream alternative "news media"' turns up some interesting stuff like this:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/mediacrit.html

It seems to me that making people aware that they have been lied to is a rather crucial step in restoring democracy to this country. As long as they float along with the happytalk, they won't be bringing pressure to bring change. Many of them don't use the internet for anything or else feel that it doesn't have anything to offer,so why bother. They trust their favorite anchors and don't want to believe that the lies are so fundamental.

So the question is, how to wake them up? And how to keep the freedoms that the alternative media have now if the administration starts thinking we might develop into a threat to their dominance?

These aren't my areas of expertise -- my training is in biochemistry and cell biology -- but it seems vital to me to find some answers and get moving on these things. (Of course, the area you are choosing for your part of the fight is absolutely vital as well. With tainted elections, change is blocked.)

Thanks again and good luck to you, to all of us.

Here is the last sentence:

"As always in the past, the tasks require day-to-day engagement to create—in part re-create—the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle."

If you agree with this article then tell me, why is the public excluded from the "crucial economic area" in principle? :shrug:

over 400 time the income of an average line worker.

In other words they earn in an Hour what many people earn in a Year.

I could be wrong but I think this is what he is referring to the disparity of wealth in the American Economic model.

...as in the question where is the democracy in that? Honestly. I do not know. :shrug:

Because I'm wondering, based on this rhetoric, what is OUR role when we "the public" are excluded from "the crucial economic area"? If so, is it a wonder that people profit from making sure that our votes don't count? (As in Diebold, etc.)

edit: typo

Worker Bees......

I wonder how much they paid him off?

He always makes a critical miscalculation: The people in this world are just not as smart as he thinks there are.

This administration does not have the long-term plans many believe. Most of their vast resources are put into short term goals with little or no thought given to the long term consequences. Their unprecedented plundering of global resources are with an ignorance of effect that is suicidal in nature.

in terms of systems.

Lookit this again:

In brief, we learn very little of any significance from the elections, but we can learn a lot from the studies of public attitudes that are kept in the shadows. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to try to induce pessimism, hopelessness, and despair, the real lessons are quite different. They are encouraging and hopeful. They show that there are substantial opportunities for education and organizing, including the development of potential electoral alternatives. As in the past, rights will not be granted by benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions—a few large demonstrations after which one goes home, or pushing a lever in the personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics.” As always in the past, the tasks require day-to-day engagement to create—in part re-create—the basis for a functioning democratic culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle.

I will take that to heart.

But I still profess that in his greater body of work Chomsky believes in a directed intelligent plan to exploit where often it is the persistence of greed with the opportunity afforded power.

I've much work to do on Chomsky. So, I defer to your opinion until I can formulate one of my own.

It was very interesting, though, tonight as I watched "The Manufacturing of Consent" to see just how far ahead he was, probably painfully so.

Intuitively, I'd say, Chomsky doesn't understand personality, let alone individuals, lol! But, I don't know that and defer to you until I read more.

Beth

Damn! I DO think the man utterly brilliant.

I always note your posts. Carefully measured, mature and respectful, no matter which side of an issue you fall on. People like you are the reason I stay at DU.

I think DU has been going through a lot of turmoil. And I'm a relative new comer. The vets must have quite an arsenal of stories.

Let's see how we do,
Beth

politics during the early days of the labor movement. There are plenty of other examples around the world today and in history of ordinary people managing to understand where their interests lie, and create movements to fight for them. It is not that people are not smart enough.

It s not that side of the equation I question. I never meant to imply those fighting for equality were not as able as implied. It is the other, more controlling aspect that I believe to be less intelligent in design.

I am terribly sorry not to have been clear on that point!

no matter how you define long term, plans laid twenty years ago are still being put into effect, and plans laid ten years ago are as well.
anyone who thinks they are improvising isnt thinking.

are NOT what are being put into play. That is just their opportunity for graft and the complete disintegration of infrastructure to allow for maximum exploitation. The end result is not domination, but destruction, chaos, and the eventual collapse of the entire union.

Support of PNAC put this administration in power, but they are not following its doctrines.e need to recognize just how corrupt, immoral, and incompetent the Bush administration are.

same old FEMA plans and so forth. This aint off the cuff. There are reasons the same dirty skanks like Negraponte and his crowd come back to haunt us.

and the one that was written by a team of PhD's in response to the Mitofsky-Edison apologia for the exit polls. Maybe he already knows about it, but it really makes a sham of every survey about vote patterns and voter sentiment. When you can't trust the vote, you can't trust anything in a democratic society.

DEMAND A VOTER-VERIFIED PAPER BALLOT AND AUDITS FOR EVERY ELECTION.

This article takes umbrage with Chomsky's once potent, point of view, analysis.

Should The Left Ignore The 'Stolen Election'

......... by Bertell Ollman January 26, 2005

In the course of his very rich article, "The Non-Election of 2004" (Z Magazine, Jan., 2005), Noam Chomsky sought to minimize the importance of the fact that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. And if there is still any doubt in the anti-Bush camp that this past election was stolen, it is - in my view - chiefly because most opinion formers (including writers in the "New York Times", the "Nation" and the "Village Voice") have (mis)understood "stealing" on the model of robbing a bank, where someone has to catch the winning candidate piling boxes of unopened ballots into the back of his pick-up truck before one can say it has occurred. Stealing an election, however, is more like stacking a deck of cards where a devious sleight of hand ensures that the same party wins every time.

Absent a belief in the divine right of kings (or presidents), and without evident superiority of breeding or intelligence or wisdom, and unable to obtain sufficient popular support through brute force, this government badly needs to have most of the Americans who voted for other candidates (or didn't vote at all) believe that they lost fairly and squarely. Otherwise, why should they do any of the things this government and its agencies and representatives ask - except for their fear of being fined or arrested, and even then? And right now a large portion of Americans are starting to ask this question.


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=7110

STOP! Extremist End-Timers

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

innovators, doubt it will trouble him for more than a second.

Would that the general populace could be so "stale".

I know Chomsky is considered something of a kook by Repugs, but I know he is one of the smartest men in the world.