Barak Obama: Saving American Democracy from the Voter Apathy it Deserves?
Writing from the bowels (or even the colon) of one wing of the neoconservative Ministry of Information, the National Review, Jonah Goldberg ('The Democrats' feel-good guy', Los Angeles Times op-ed, 12-12-07) is right to mock the faith of Democratic voters in change brought about Democratic victory, even if he is a mouthpiece for the bald Machiavellians that have made the need for change more acute than ever. He's also right that Barak Obama is the one candidate (acceptable to elites) that seems most likely to re-fire that false hope.
American democracy is a joke (not as blatantly a joke as democracy in the cruder systems, like Putin's proto-fascist Russia, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless). Goldberg, of course, is in on the joke and, as usual, the joke is on us. The U.S. Presidential election game is longer and more crowded than ever, shall we assume that democracy is more profound than ever before? But the huge crowd of candidates and the exasperatingly lengthy campaigning season give our democracy - now more than ever - a patina of authenticity it doesn't deserve while making it seem desperate for popular trust. (I would guess that the ever more lengthy and heavily populated political campaign is as manufactured as the timely reappearance of the immigration wedge.) But the reasons American democracy is a joke are still in place and unlikely to be named, much less attacked by the crowd of candidates. The process selects elite candidates from which the delirious fools among us then choose. The process selects candidates that can't and won't bring about meaningful change. They are where they are because they've internalized the limits of the system and the lies that require credible repetition. If a maverick actually slips through (extremely unlikely), the real checks and balances will kick in. Even though their plans for change are not all that Earth-shattering, except in some relative sense, does anyone believe the likes of Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich actually stand a chance? The bipartisan attacks on their sanity stand as not-so-mute testimony to the real nature of the selection machine. (I would argue further that democracy couldn't help but be a fraud: a massive authoritarian system (the nation-state) is inimical to real democracy, especially (but not exclusively) one dominated by baldly authoritarian economic entities (corporations). The need to maintain the fraud has to do with controlling the population.)
However, 2000 and 2004 showed that even the narrow, elite-favoring selection process is not narrow enough for the neoconservatives and their conservative suppositories. Even Al Gore and John Kerry, as mainstream elite as anyone, weren't good enough - since the prefab neocon agenda called for someone more extreme, or more amenable at least. Fixes were needed and fixes were made [link to Conyers report and others]; years later that truth is still forbidden, politically incorrect (distant historians unfettered by present biases will no doubt record those elections as obviously stolen).
But now the catastrophic depravity that is the Bush regime may allow for a brief ray of light (cue heavenly music), making the election of, say, Barak Obama possible, saving our democracy from the appearance, if not the reality, of fraudulence. After all, if a black man named Barak Obama can run for and perhaps even win the American presidency at a time when public enemy number one is someone named Emmanuel Goldstein er, Osama Bin Laden, how much more authentic can American democracy be? Then the Jonah Goldbergs, while releasing creepy policy papers plotting the neocon resurgence (complete perhaps with huge bright flashes and billowing mushroom clouds), can spend the next four or eight years denouncing the new president's liberal extremism (denunciations tailored for the conservative wing of The Fools) and the need for a return of character.
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