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Politics
without Publics
- The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers
speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen,
paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of
military and business interests.
- A crucial feature of the political apparatus in America is that greater
differences are harbored within each major party than the differences existing
between them. Instead of two parties presenting distinctive and significant
differences of approach, what dominates the system if a natural interlocking
of Democrats from Southern states with the more conservative elements of the
Republican party. This arrangement of forces is blessed by the seniority system
of Congress which guarantees congressional committee domination by conservatives
-- ten of 17 committees in the Senate and 13 of 21 in House of Representatives
are chaired currently by Dixiecrats.
- The party overlap, however, is not the only structural antagonist of democracy
in politics. First, the localized nature of the party system does not encourage
discussion of national and international issues: thus problems are not raised
by and for people, and political representatives usually are unfettered from
any responsibilities to the general public except those regarding parochial
matters. Second, whole constituencies are divested of the full political power
they might have: many Negroes in the South are prevented from voting, migrant
workers are disenfranchised by various residence requirements, some urban
and suburban dwellers are victimized by gerrymandering, and poor people are
too often without the power to obtain political representation. Third, the
focus of political attention is significantly distorted by the enormous lobby
force, composed predominantly of business interests, spending hundreds of
millions each year in an attempt to conform facts about productivity, agriculture,
defense, and social services, to the wants of private economic groupings.
- What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privatelyheld
power is the organized political stalemate: calcification dominates flexibility
as the principle of parliamentary organization, frustration is the expectancy
of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress becomes less and less
central to national decision-making, especially in the area of foreign policy.
In this context, confusion and blurring is built into the formulation of issues,
long-range priorities are not discussed in the rational manner needed for
policymaking, the politics of personality and "image" become a more important
mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords each voter
a challenging and real option. The American voter is buffeted from all directions
by pseudo-problems, by the structurally-initiated sense that nothing political
is subject to human mastery. Worried by his mundane problems which never get
solved, but constrained by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly
slow accommodation of views, he quits all pretense of bothering.
- A most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling for changes
in these conditions. Only a handful even are calling on the President to "live
up to" platform pledges; no one is demanding structural changes, such as the
shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party. Rather than protesting
the state of politics, most politicians are reinforcing and aggravating that
state. While in practice they rig public opinion to suit their own interests,
in word and ritual they enshrine "the sovereign public" and call for more
and more letters. Their speeches and campaign actions are banal, based on
a degrading conception of what people want to hear. They respond not to dialogue,
but to pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen sees even greater
inclination to shun the political sphere. The politicians is usually a trumpeter
to "citizenship" and "service to the nation", but since he is unwilling to
seriously rearrange power relationships, his trumpetings only increase apathy
by creating no outlets. Much of the time the call to "service" is justified
not in idealistic terms, but in the crasser terms of "defending the free world
from communism" -- thus making future idealistic impulses harder to justify
in anything but Cold War terms.
- In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all government
activity is rationalized in Cold War anti-communist terms, it is somewhat
natural that discontented, super-patriotic groups would emerge through political
channels and explain their ultra-conservatism as the best means of Victory
over Communism. They have become a politically influential force within the
Republican Party, at a national level through Senator Goldwater, and at a
local level through their important social and economic roles. Their political
views are defined generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists:
complete individual freedom in the economic sphere, non-participation by the
government in the machinery of production. But actually "anticommunism" becomes
an umbrella by which to protest liberalism, internationalism, welfarism, the
active civil rights and labor movements. It is to the disgrace of the United
States that such a movement should become a prominent kind of public participation
in the modern world -- but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of
the United States that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed
toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican
Party in the South and an exclusion of the "leftist" elements of the national
GOP.