How the United States' Two Major Parties Helped Destroy Democracy
A voter casts a
ballot at a polling station at David R. Cawley Middle School in Hooksett, New
Hampshire, February 9, 2016. When all ideas must first be filtered through the
umbrella of the Democrat-Republican cartel, it dictates the pedigree of ideas
both old and new - therefore severely limiting any competition from threatening
its hegemony. (Photo: Hilary Swift / The New York Times)
Cartel: An
association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining
prices at a high level and restricting competition.
A little over
two decades ago, on December 2, 1993, the principle engineer of Colombia's
infamous cocaine empire, Pablo Escobar, was killed while fleeing police on the
barrio rooftops of his hometown, Medellin. Before he died he had amassed an
organization of state-like power, challenging, in fact, the government of
Columbia itself over the question of its extradition policies-and winning.
Dubbed the Medellin drug cartel, his international cocaine operation grew to
prominence functioning similarly to the corporations which dominate today's
global economy. Escobar knew, by controlling every possible link in the drug
chain from production to retail, he could corral suppliers under a single
umbrella, dictate the price of his product, and severely limit any would-be
competitors from challenging his power.
Escobar was
not alone in learning from the strategies of corporate giants. If anything he
was late. Few organizations have pervasively and durably monopolized a market
as well as America's Republican and Democratic parties. The two dominant
machines steering the U.S. electorate have consistently diminished the
potential for a freer America. That's because the reality is, rather than arch
rivals, liberals and conservatives are two factions of the same team. Both are
capitalist. Both are imperialist. Both are white supremacist surrogates. And
both are controlled by a plutocratic elite who have discovered what Escobar
learned in his early twenties, that competition is best neutralized by
eliminating all possible outliers. We merely perceive the two parties as
markedly different because of the degree to which the spectrum of possibilities
has been narrowed.
American
Cartel
Politics, at
its barest, is a market characterized by power-and the struggle for how power
will be distributed. As CrimethInc illustrated some time ago, in
this market ideas function similar to currency. Delineated by ideas which can
build capital enough for the acquisition of more power, and those which might
unbind power, political parties are tethered to the same basic operating
principles of any capitalist enterprise. They must solidify market share in the
realm of ideas and grow, wherever and whenever possible, or go bankrupt.
Incubated within this constant power play, self-preservation becomes the
party's central priority; and it does not matter if the ideas which accomplish
this outcome are beneficial to the electorate or detrimental, so long as it achieves
the imperative to survive.
Political
organizations which maintain growth long enough to survive often do so by
normalizing their ideological framework. When they have obtained a
disproportionate amount of influence over their immediate surroundings, they
can metastasize into monopolies and control large swaths of the idea-economy.
New ideas about how society ought to function can enter the market to contest
old ideas, but usually encapsulated within reforms incapable of unseating the
dominant paradigm. Characteristic of any capitalist system, once market
monopolies are established "power tends to flow upward to the top of a
hierarchy, from which the masters, the ones qualified to employ it, decide
matters for everyone else."
Remember the
age-old question, what do all those with power want? More power. As such, two
monopolies have dominated American politics for over 150 years-the Democratic
Party, founded in 1828, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Together,
they form a political cartel, or an association of political parties with the
purpose of maintaining concentrated power and restricting or repressing
competition. Throughout the past century its loosely managed agreements, often
wholly unofficial, but embedded deep within its standard operation, have been
the quasi-coordinated production, distribution, and enforcement of a set of
normalized choices which reflect only the range of needs of private corporate
power.
Essentially,
to solidify and gain greater control, the two parties staked out a set of
positions within a predetermined and standardized framework which express the basic ideas of the
status quo. This way any "new" solutions about what
might be possible tend toward ideas which pose no serious danger to the
framework itself, which produce reforms only capable of gutting radical
resistance while leaving the underlying problems intact. Any outliers are
assimilated or positioned to enhance the
strength of current institutions. In other words, all ideas must first be
filtered through the umbrella of the Democrat-Republican cartel, which dictates
the pedigree of ideas both old and new, and therefore severely limiting any
competition from threatening its hegemony.
American
Sicarios
Central to the
project of any cartel is control. And within most drug cartels there is an armed
group responsible for carrying out violence in an effort to maintain it. In
Colombia they were called sicarios. Though the violence is systematically
different, American sicarios are most accurately found in state institutions
like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI). Such an observation should not be seen as hyperbole. Even
the most marginally informed American should know their government frequently
has been involved in shameful acts of violence, whether it was the
assassination, framing, and political neutralization of black, brown,
indigenous, and left-radical movements and their leaders, or organized coups in
theMiddle East,Africa, andCentral or South America.
Without
enforcers America's political cartel simply could not exist. As I wrote
in Gangs Of The State: Police And The
Hierarchy Of Violence, our society operates on a clearly
defined, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy of violence; and the function of
politicians and police agencies is to normalize and enforce that violence. As
an institution, these agencies act as state-sanctioned gangs, or, in this
instance, the sicarios of America's political ideology, charged with the task
of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism.
Wherever and whenever possible, they are tasked with solidifying a monopoly of
power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower
can be normalized into business as usual. Any deviation from the status quo,
any resistance whatsoever, is met with brutal repression.
For those
familiar with United States history, the record of repression against
anti-capitalist groups has been a source of considerable alliance between
Democrats and Republicans. In A People's History of the United States,
recounting America's anti-leftist atmosphere after Russia's Bolshevik
Revolution, Howard Zinn wrote:
"In early September 1917,
Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on forty-eight IWW
[International Workers of the World] meetings across the country, seizing
correspondence and literature that would become courtroom evidence. Later that
month, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiracy to hinder the draft,
encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes.
One hundred and one went on trial [en masse] in April 1918; it lasted five
months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time… [T]he
jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced [IWW president William
"Big Bill"] Haywood and fourteen others to twenty years in prison;
thirty-three were given ten years, the rest shorter sentences. They were fined
a total of $2,500,000. The IWW was shattered."
Commonality
between the United States' two major political parties has been most visible
when viewed through its historically imperialist and anti-communist foreign
policy. Beginning with the expansion of Soviet influence, the relationship is
best described by a popularized euphemism of the Cold War Era: Partisanship
ends at the water's edge, meaning, if the two factions of the cartel could ever
totally agree, it must be on the dismembering of communism everywhere. As the
growth of nationalist and anti-colonialist movements abroad strengthened in
concert with labor movements in America, a fierce need for bipartisan crackdown
to preserve the dominant regime emerged. Zinn once again lends clarity:
"The
United States was trying, in the postwar decade [of World War II], to create a
national consensus-excluding the radicals, who could not support a foreign
policy aimed at suppressing revolution-of conservatives and liberals,
Republicans and Democrats, around the policies of the Cold War and
anti-Communism. Such a coalition could best be created by a liberal Democratic
President, whose aggressive policy abroad would be supported by conservatives…
[I]f the anti-Communist mood became strong enough, liberals could support
repressive moves at home which in ordinary times would be seen as violating the
tradition of liberal tolerance."
Repressive
moves were exactly what happened. Imperialist consensus not only generated
cohesion on issues of foreign policy, it refined a coordinated relationship of
narrowed domestic power between Democrats and Republicans, providing the
groundwork to enact an increasingly clandestine police-state. Repression of
previous magnitude would continue against not only anti-capitalists, but
against movements for self-determination throughout the '60s and '70s
among black people, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and indigenous populations, most notably through
theFBI's COINTELPRO operations. The tactics
for gutting competing political currents pioneered by police agencies then
became standard operating procedure, evolved into pervasive surveillance
apparatuses, and have been deployed in both recent uprisings against Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protesters.
American Crime
Lords
If there is a
position within the cartel's classic hierarchy embodied by most liberal and
conservative politicians, it would not be the rank of crime lord, but rather
that of lieutenant, the second highest position. Lieutenants are responsible
for supervising the sicarios within their own territories-in our case, their
respective states. They are allowed discretion to carry-out the day-to-day
operations of the cartel, to ensure its smooth operation. Crucial duties
include voting on legislation filtered through existing idea-monopolies, which remain
firmly rooted within the sanctioned political spectrum, and policing the
spectrum's established borders by criminalizing outliers, especially ones that
cannot be assimilated and must be repositioned to reinforce the existing
framework. If they perform well enough, they become the focus of investigative
inquiry and obscure the higher authority they serve.
The rank of
real crime boss goes to richest of the rich. The
multi-billionaires of America who-in recent years-have given up to 42 percent of all
election contributions, andcaptured the state in the process.
Brothers Charles and David Koch, owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately
owned company in the United States, are known for funding the Republican
political machine, giving over one hundred million dollars
to far-right causes. But the Kochs are no more alone in their policy purchasing
than Republicans are in begging the super wealthy for campaign funds. Democrats
have increasingly relied on it too. Money awarded to Democrats from corporate
PACs now far outstrips what used to come from labor unions and trial lawyers.
For instance, corporate PACs donated $164.3
million to Republicans during the 2010 election season and $164.3 million to
Democrats also. Unions gave $59-$79 million.
Owning a
cartel may not seem cheap, but it pays dividends. It accomplishes this not only
through generating enormously disproportionate wealth, or even through buying
elections, but by imposing upon the impoverished a set of values which ensure
their continued exploitation. Karl Marx himself pointed this out,
explaining that "the class which is the ruling material force of society,
is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." For the poor American
voter this means individuals are made to develop in such a fashion that their
development fosters the strength of the capitalist state. At their core,
working class people are constantly being sold and resold their own
disempowerment, until finally we sell it to ourselves-over and over again. It
is a sinister, but brilliant, stroke of genius-what better way to destroy the
possibility of expropriation than to make disparity gold.
Michel
Foucaultdescribed this process of perpetually
re-inscribing within ourselves, and each other, the relation we have to power
as the effect of unspoken warfare, a war where we build within our social
institutions, and our very bodies, an ultimate disequilibrium. We self-police
so thoroughly that when power's effects upon
us begin self-reproducing "there is no need for arms, physical violence,
[or] material constraints," just an inspecting gaze, "which each individual
under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own
overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against,
himself." In short, we become our own worst enemies. The rules and values
of the rich become the self-inflicted rules and values of the poor. But they
never benefit us. And we quit asking why.
American
Plutocracy
Democracy
describes today's America by only the most facile standards. It has
never really described America anyway. Plutocracy is the accurate
word. And our plutocratic overlords keep us in a hamster-wheel choosing which
lieutenant we will take orders from next for practical reasons. It gives them,
and the political parties they own, a sort of object permanence. We understand
the prescriptions of those in power even when we cannot observe them directly;
because we have been inundated by their surrogates and transformed into a
passive body meant only to ratify our subjugation. Imagine waking up in a
prison cell with the choice to continue sleeping on an unpadded iron bench or a
concrete floor. No matter what "decision" you make, neither can
destroy the cage. This is the reality of our political climate, a series of
non-decisions masquerading as choice.
Ultimately,
the emergence of plutocracy has not been the fault of the working class. Even
though we have internalized many of the mechanisms used to exploit us, we
constantly have been outpaced, outgunned, and outright demoralized. And in our
attempts at democracy we have fundamentally failed to understand that political
freedom cannot exist in the absence of economic freedom. They are inextricably
linked, like a tree to its roots. Now that many Americans are beginning to see
how capitalism has been the physical incarnation of inequality, we must move
forward in this moment and reconcile with another unassailable truth: That
capitalism's relation to democracy will always be characterized by adversary,
not coexistence. In such an environment, America's major political parties
remain henchmen to a perverse and morally bankrupt distribution of power.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout
with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without
permission or license from the source.
Frank
Castro is a Honduran American and a Jackson, Mississippi, native. He currently
works as an independent journalist, radical educator and blogger in the Bay
Area. He is author and curator of the blog AmericaWakieWakie.com.
Follow him on Twitter or Medium.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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