John Chuckman
EXTENDED COMMENT REGARDING A CAITLIN JOHNSTONE ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Puppet Pete Says Revolution & Status Quo Aren’t Mutually Exclusive”
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/11/puppet-pete-says-revolution-status-quo-arent-mutually-exclusive/
I do like the “Puppet Pete” motif. Very suitable. He is a manufactured candidate if ever there was one. And he says some very odd things.
I don’t believe the American political system can possibly deliver meaningful change. And by the political system, I include the conditioning and attitudes of the country’s people, their public educations and their news sources and their various social institutions. Those are integral parts of the society, and they function to maintain the status quo, always allowing for a bit of leeway here or there, but only a bit, to maintain an appearance of democratic government.
Caitlin Johnstone’s “Change is going to come from people using the power of their numbers” is unrealistic. Huge numbers of Americans working towards change is not something that is going to happen under normal circumstances – that is, no social collapse owing to war or to the economy or to natural disaster.
A great many Americans, and not including the privileged elites, are simply satisfied with what they have. Look at how quiescent American society is with its many injustices and terrible wars. Where is the rage? Where are the demonstrations? Many buy into the concept, without even thinking about it, of America as a great set of lotteries, each person believing he or she has some chance at winning a jackpot. And Americans do love gambling and lotteries.
A season of political campaigning with one fairly charismatic candidate cannot be compared with huge numbers working over time for change. They are quite different things. A political campaign in America actually resembles a large sporting event, right down to details like campaign banners, hats, and t-shirts. Bernie’s enthusiastic crowds are not that much different than the enthusiastic crowds at a World Series. When the last game of the series is over, they return to routine lives.
(Just aside, revolution in America, given the country’s massive armed forces and national guards and military-style police forces, is simply an impossibility. It is the very argument I use against the feeble notion that the Second Amendment works to protect America against tyranny with an armed citizenry. The history of revolutions, while full of drama and great hopes, has not been a happy one. Bloodshed, disappointed hopes, and the emergence of new tyranny feature heavily. The Russian Revolution. The French Revolution. The American Revolution is misnamed since it was a colonial revolt against the mother country with the decisive assistance of a third country, France.)
Some on the Right regard Franklin Roosevelt as having been a terrible Left-wing threat to America at a time when its people were extremely vulnerable. And it was so in his own day, given one serious assassination attempt and a serious overthrow plot by a group of financial elites which came to light from the retired military hero, Major General Smedley Butler, they tried secretly recruiting to lead it.
In truth, Roosevelt saved the system, then genuinely under some risk of popular rebellion or civil war.
He was a gifted leader, and he did many interesting and unorthodox things. But the political establishment survived, and, indeed, today, his legacy, huge as it was, has mostly been buried. And that was already largely true forty years ago. In America, even the mighty works of Roosevelt had no longevity.
And that fact derives from the reality of an immensely wealthy American establishment and a great empire serving that establishment’s needs and desires.
Bernie himself, and I do like Bernie in many ways, it seems to me is not a force for great change. His social programs sound revolutionary to some Americans but that is only because they are so unfamiliar with how things work in much of the rest of the advanced world. That’s a measure of how extreme American social conditioning and education are.
But, regardless of how you view his proposals, if he were elected, he would be unable to deliver on them. No one is going to unseat the hundreds of members of Congress comfortably ensconced in how things are. The roles of lobbying and campaign financing in American politics are not going away. They are part of the foundations of the power establishment. Big social programs are not popular in either party, but more importantly, there are no means for enacting them. The Constitution’s system of divided government helps prop things-as-they-are up.
A new tax structure would be a fundamental need for change in America, a tax structure which shares better, does not keep feeding the cancerous growth of wealth disparity and generating plutocracy, and which largely pays for what the country does, putting a burden of responsibility on politicians.
But America already had something somewhat along those lines, and it was gradually dismantled. How could it ever be restored, short of a terrible set of circumstances like those of Roosevelt’s day?
The American military and security services spend about a trillion dollars a year, and literally all of it is borrowed, their total annual cost being very close to the annual increment in America’s massive debt. Where is there room for financing big social programs, even ignoring the hostile attitudes of politicians and their financial backers towards them?
The very sense of concern by the establishment we already see over Bernie – as reflected in everything from the nature of Buttigieg’s candidacy and Hillary Clinton’s shrill attacks to countless editorials and articles and comments – shows what little it takes to fire up its engines.
The massively important military and security and imperial establishment is something Bernie has never seriously challenged, and were he or any other candidate to try, I do think the fate of John Kennedy in Dallas serves as an indelible reminder of the consequences. There can be little doubt that Kennedy’s death reflected the fact of his having opposed the establishment on large and important matters abroad – matters including America’s relationships with Cuba and Russia.
While I love the puppet motif for Buttigieg, the author’s full expansion of the theme into America’s “puppet theater” makes little hard sense to me. America’s establishment is not any kind of illusion or performance or transitory thing. It represents immense and enduring power. There is only a sense of “theater” in the facts that it rarely bares its teeth at home and that the corporate press works full-time to generate certain illusions about it and what it does.
But you’ve only to look abroad at the terrible work of the Pentagon and security services to see that they are not just capable of baring their teeth but capable of tearing countries apart and destroying leaders. They avoid such behavior in America, on the whole, but they are equipped and remarkably experienced at jumping into action.
You cannot possibly have America’s massive investment in military and state security and imperial schemes and have it all up for possible change every four years in elections. The American political system is designed to protect against the possibility. In other words, you cannot have both an empire and an honestly democratic country.
That is just the way power works. America’s political system protects power. Everything from divided government and a two-party system and the role of money in politics plus other considerations are effectively part of the design. The country’s entire web of social and educational and political institutions has been shaped and colored by that same reality of power.
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As an interesting footnote, there was an article recently in a respectable alternative news source suggesting, from parts of his background, that Buttigieg may well have CIA connections.
I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
AN ADDED NOTE
Sanders is the man who can get rid of Trump in the election. His candidacy would motivate the young and enthusiastic.
Most presidents achieve relatively little. Being the trashman for Trump would not be a bad historical achievement, even if he got nothing else done.
As far as most of Bernie’s domestic proposals being enacted, I just don’t think that can happen in the United States.
