The Possibility of an All-Too-Existent Democracy

After listening to the State of the Union Address of 2014, I am rethinking some of the ways I understand consumer capitalism, American politics, and the priorities of the politicians in the two major American political parties. I generally want to accept evidence that we live in a plutocracy, where Ultimate Control of the political process lies in the minority hands of monied interests, corporate and individual. Counter-evidence, however, has occupied an expanding portion of my consciousness, creating the dreaded Cognitive Dissonance that a skeptic like myself must not ignore.

I fear that the aspects of our political and economic systems I dislike are ultimately supported and reproduced through democratic, not plutocratic, processes and mechanisms. I am terrified at the prospect that it is the collective will of The People - society, the unwashed masses, whatever language symbol you hold in your mind when referring to people collectively - that creates and perpetuates systems of oppression. And yet despite my strong desire for this not to be true, evidence seems to be piling up, while the cognitive dissonance increasingly demanding a resolution.

This nagging hypothesis, that people can and constantly do democratically control the priorities of politicians, comes into conflict with a lot of my existing beliefs. I admit, because I can clearly see, that politicians consistently prioritize private, corporate interests, and pursue policies of war and terror abroad. But what if politicians are doing this not because they are under the sway of the plutocrats and the nefarious 1%, but rather, what if politicians pursue and prioritize these things because they are popular among their voters?

I think I've seen plenty of evidence to suggest that this hypothesis, though it contradicts a lot of what I believe about the world, is valid. People want jobs. In american culture, jobs = life. So why wouldn't the democratic 'consensus' reward politicians who are pro-corporate, pro-privatization? People want militarism. In America, military = national pride, security, identity. So why wouldn't the democratic consensus reward politicians who are pro-military imperialists?

If you listen to the President's State of the Union address, it might as well be a dramatic rehash of the Horatio Alger myths. The words 'jobs', 'opportunity', and 'middle-class' were probably used a combined 7,000 times (give or take), paired almost constantly with phrases like 'hard-working', 'industrious', and the devious 'deserving'. It's enough to make a left-leaning anti-capitalist sick.

But why would the President choose this framing for basically all of his policy statements and political priorities? The explanation that makes the most sense to me is, he wants votes. Barack Obama is not oblivious to his audience, and he would never in a million years give a speech like the SOTU without being very deliberate about the desired effect on the presumed audience. This is a midterm election year. Whatever the President chose to say, the only reasonable assumption is that he said it with the intention of getting more Democrats elected to Congress in November.

I loathe to admit it, but I honestly think it was a good choice of strategic messaging. I have every reason to believe, given what little I know about my culture and the tendencies of voters en masse, that the rhetoric he chose is the rhetoric that makes Americans want to vote for the guy saying the words.  But admitting this is a gateway to admitting that maybe the corporations and the monied elite and the 1% don't exert quite as much influence on the politicians as I might want to believe, or at least not as much as the typical radical left framework might suggest.

The almost-too-terrifying to mention corollary to this, which I am adding as an edit, is that perhaps the media, corporate controlled though it might be, doesn't kowtow to the special interests, but to the people. What makes more sense - that the advertising industry, the news industry, the political propaganda machines, all of them feed the masses lies and misinformation because the monied interest are trying to control their thoughts and actions? Or is it more likely perhaps that all of them tell the masses what they want to hear because it gets them better ratings and ad revenues? Does the constant messaging and propagation of ideas dictate what people want and believe, or does it simply reflect what people already want and believe in order to be as appealing as possible?

What does it mean for activists on the Left if Neoliberalism is a direct result of democracy? What if a plurality of people that form a majority of voters in so-called Western democracies want their politicians to pursue a Neoliberal agenda? Doesn't that shift in perspective turn some of the rhetoric around the 1% and the corporate plutocracy into dangerously inaccurate propaganda for a fight that demonizes groups and forces that are not actually ultimately responsible for the problems we seek to remedy and the systems of oppression we seek to dismantle?

I'm honestly not sure I know what to believe, or how to reconcile competing sets of evidence to decide what, ultimately, creates and perpetuates violent political and economic systems of oppression. If these are constructed democratically around the will of the people - if corporatism, imperial militarism, the state police-prison industrial complex, and the media institutions that seem to support these, are all symptoms of what I would consider a social illness, if they are a direct manifestation of our collective preferences and desires - then that makes a big difference in terms of how I might try to make meaningful change, doesn't it?