Desolate landscape

The deliberate drift of the two establishment parties to the right means that the political landscape in the U.S. is greatly reduced. No wonder that too large a section of the population is unconcerned about the elections.

Sitting between flights at Dallas (Texas) airport, my family is accosted by a man across from us. It is Sunday, and the airport is busy with travellers eager to get home for work. This man does not subscribe to the philosophy of rest. His T-shirt advertises his energy delivery firm, and his hand luggage also carries its logo and its slogan. His wife and daughter have abandoned him for the shops. We are his captives. Where do you live? he asks, and then quickly, How expensive is your electricity? Without exchanging names or learning anything of each other, he gets right down to business. There is no embarrassment in such aggression.

Our friend is a cliched character in American fiction, either as the high-powered financial baron Frank Cowperwood in Theodore Dreisers The Financier or as the revivalist preacher Elmer Gantry in Sinclair Lewis novel of that name: neither suffers the bourgeois worry about propriety. They want to get something, they get it; they want to say something, they say it. We are not so keen on switching to his Enron-type electricity delivery business (cheapest rates possible, he says, and we wince, afraid what this means in labour costs or in government subsidies to his firm that offset the costs of delivery).

Our friend switches gears. He now wants to regale us with his theory that if the United States properly vitiates corporate taxes, manufacturing firms will rush back and open industrial shops in a country that has already substantially wiped out union protection for workers and health and environmental regulations to hold back the animal spirits of entrepreneurs. Not far from the company logo on his T-shirt sits an innocuous-sized pin: it bears the flags of the U.S. and Israel, conjoined.

This pin is de rigueur amongst a large section of evangelical Christians who believe in the theory of dispensationalism, namely that Jews must rebuild the temple in Israel only to be slaughtered in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These Christian Zionists, numbering about 10 million in the U.S., are fervent supporters of the state of Israel, even as their own eschatology requires the genocide of the Jewish population in that country. As Rabbi David Rosen put it, very often those who love Israel dont really love Judaism, or Jews. A weird mishmash of Austrian economics (Friedrich Hayek in particular) melded with evangelical Christianity to give our friend hope that a Mitt Romney era would spark another American Century.

As we sat in the airport lounge, the Republican convention had just ended in Tampa (Florida) and the Democratic convention was getting ready to begin in Charlotte (North Carolina). In the major southern airport hubs like Dallas (American Airlines) and Atlanta (Delta Airlines), Republicans on their way home bump into Democrats on their way to their convention. Election season is in full swing, with supporters wearing the names of their candidates on their bodies (shirts and caps) and on their cars (bumper stickers).

Every four years, frenzy grips about a fifth of the population, which retreats into its chosen corner to back its party until the finish in November. A third of the population looks on bemused, comfortable in the assessment that it is independent, and therefore willing to wait until the lonely hour of the voting booth to settle accounts for a further four years. Too large a section is unruffled, unconcerned about elections and unwilling to vote actively. Only half the voting age population actually casts its ballot in the presidential election (56 per cent in 2008, which was a particularly historic election, with an African American on the ballot, and 49 per cent in 1996), while only a third of the voting age population votes in the midterm elections. Surveys of this section by the Census Bureau indicate that they were too busy to vote, didnt like the candidates or simply did not care. This is an indictment of the U.S. electoral system.

On the Far Right

Our friend from Dallas is a Republican. His standard bearer this year is Mitt Romney, who has run for this position for almost a decade and has spent millions of his own money for the privilege. Romneys father, George, made his wealth as the head of American Motors Corporation (1954-62), was the Governor of Michigan (1963-69), and worked in Richard Nixons Cabinet (1969-73) after a failed run for the presidency in 1968. George Romney was born in a Mormon colony in Mexico before the 1911 Revolution returned them to the imputed Mormon homeland in Utah. George Romneys own experience in a religious minority led him to a belief in social freedoms (including civil rights). He was a tax and spend Republican, who vastly increased the scale of Michigans government and then the Housing and Urban Development Department in the U.S. government.

Mitt Romneys own views are as far from his fathers as the Republican Party of today is from the party of Nixon. Mitt Romney made his money in arbitrage as well as mergers and acquisitions, which is a section of the world of finance more tuned to making money through de-industrialisation than through industrialisation. A serial panderer, he moved along with his party from a genial liberalism to a harsh social conservatism. His mobile personality oscillates between a dull opiate and a well-groomed fraternity president. But this vacuousness has a purpose: it shrouds Mitt Romney from the vicious programme that he is committed to implement if he becomes President.

The Republican Partys platform, ratified at its Tampa convention, is a mixture of harsh austerity for the poor as well as social constraints on women and politically marginal populations, and tax freedom and social licence for the rich. Drawing from Ayn Rand, the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal, the collected works of Friedrich Hayek, and the Sunday sermons of the evangelical mega-preachers, the platform decries any attempt at state intervention on altruistic grounds (health, education and well-being), but supports state intervention for repression (of women namely through a ban on abortions; of immigrants namely through a validation of the Arizona experiment; of gays and lesbians through its archaic notions of the sanctity of heterosexual marriage; of other countries through its muscular slogan of peace through strength). Romneys slogan, Keep America America mimics the Ku Klux Klans 1920s slogan (Keep America American), offering a friendly wink to the camp of hard-core racism.

The 1 per cent, the natural constituency of the Republican Party, is freed from state interference, while the full gamut of state intervention is to be visited upon the 99 per cent, including our friend in the Texas airport whose salesmanship is a sign that he has not attained his entry pass into Richistan, the most exclusive enclave in the U.S.. He had, as the writer JoAnn Wypijewski put it, left his brains on the porch steps.

On the Near Right

If you translate the political spectrum in the U.S. to Europe, the Democratic Party would fall somewhere in the vicinity of the Christian Democrats, which are European conservatives. Until the 1990s, the Democratic Party resembled a coalition of a vast array of interests, including trade unions, social movements for politically disenfranchised populations, limousine liberals and a small contingent of democratic and agrarian socialists. In the late 1980s, a group of political activists committed to neoliberal economic principles made the kind of accommodation with Reaganism that the Labour Partys Tony Blair made with Thatcherism in Britain: they felt that there was no alternative to the market and to finance, and they wanted to curtail the influence of organised labour and liberalism on their operations. In the U.S., the Democratic Leadership Council (founded in 1985) methodically pushed aside or co-opted the old warhorses of liberalism and discredited the old slogans of social and economic justice on behalf of a new commitment to economic freedom, notably free markets and free trade, free workers (no unions) and free choices (no social wage). The Democratic Party, by the time Bill Clinton took the helm, became a party of the Near Right, as the Republican Party was untethered from its own conservative moorings into the uncharted territory of the Far Right.

Given that the U.S. electoral system is designed for two parties to battle it out in elections, the deliberate drift of the two establishment parties into the Right means that the political landscape in the U.S. is greatly reduced. No wonder that the voting rate hovers at 50 per cent and that almost a quarter feel that the candidates do not inspire them or that they simply do not care about the process.

Under Clinton, the Democratic Party governed against the best interests of the 99 per cent. In quick succession, Clinton passed a crime Bill (1994) that effectively made poverty into a crime, passed a social welfare Bill (1996) that ejected the indigent and unemployed from state support, and passed an anti-immigration Bill (1996) that tightened the surveillance of immigrants and allowed their easy deportation. Meanwhile, the repeal (1999) of the Glass-Steagall Act enabled finance greater freedom, with retail banks now using the savings of the population in risky investment ventures which set up the increasingly unregulated financial sector into the shoals of the financial crisis that set in a decade later. It was George W. Bushs recklessness in war and economics that exaggerated the shaky foundation provided by the Democrats. President Barack Obama inherited Bushs immediate disasters of foreign policy and economic policy, but he also inherited this mantle as the leader of a party that was as committed to the same policies, but with a much more sober temperament.

Absent the scurrilous questions about Obamas birth and religion, and the divides around abortion and same sex marriage, there is little that divides the policies of the Republicans and the Democrats. Where there is a serious gulf is in their temperament, with the Republicans comfortable in an exaggerated patriotism and a generous dose of xenophobia. The Democrats are more open to differences, and perhaps slightly guilty about the wars that they seem as eager to prosecute and about the evictions from homes that they seem unwilling to stem. It is this difference in attitude that appears to distinguish the two parties.

Two right-wing parties, too desolate a political landscape.