A popular postmortem sentiment is the idea that what happened in the US in
this month's election is what has happened all over the place in developed
democracies, in the wake of the inflation that accompanied the recovery from
the Covid pandemic all over the world, when angered voters punished the ruling
parties in a frustration with the way democracy is
seen to be failing:
“There’s an overall sense of frustration with political elites, viewing them
as out of touch, that cuts across ideological lines,” said Richard Wike,
director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center.
He noted that a Pew poll of 24 countries found that the appeal of democracy
itself was slipping as voters reported increasing economic distress and a
sense that no political faction truly represents them.
and even though inflation in the US wasn't nearly as bad as in some of those
other countries, our voters just did the same thing.
I wanted to check that hypothesis out for the flood of big elections between
2021 and 2024, and found evidence for a much more nuanced picture: a bad time for a few ruling parties, but not so great either for Trumpies and like-minded individuals on the nationalist, anti-immigrant, authoritarian side of the right (loosely characterized as "fascist" below, sue me if you don't like it):
Who says we're hopelessly divided into camps that are unable to communicate
with each other? Here's David F. Brooks of The New York Times ("Why on Earth Is Pelosi Supporting the Trumpists?") agreeing with Jeet Heer of The Nation ("Why Centrist Democrats Love Promoting Right-Wing Extremists") that the Democratic establishment ought to stop buying attack ads against
"moderate" Republican primary candidates in what seems to be the hope of
helping the wacky candidates become the ones Democrats will face in November.
Which seems to be what some of them have been doing:
In Illinois alone [writes Brooks], the Democratic Governors Association
and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent at least $30 million
to attack a Trumpist’s moderate gubernatorial opponent. In Pennsylvania, a
Democratic campaign spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
on ads intended to help a Trumpist candidate win the G.O.P. gubernatorial
primary. A political action committee affiliated with Nancy Pelosi worked
to boost far-right Republican House candidates in California
and Colorado.
Pritzker
actually
spent $32 million of his own money attacking Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora,
and the DGA another $18.4 million, which is certainly an awful lot—Irvin
himself had a war chest of $50 million, from the Citadel hedge fund manager
Kenneth Griffin, who's been mostly concerned with stopping Pritzker from
replacing Illinois's flat income tax with a graduated one. Irvin, an African
American veteran and former prosecutor who voted as a Democrat in the 2016 and
2020 primaries (Illinois has open primaries) and hedged publicly on his
feelings about Trump, but not in text messages unearthed by
WTTW-TV:
According to Andrew Cockburn's Letter from Washington in the current Harper's, the good news is that spending billions of dollars on TV ads and direct mail campaigns can't win elections; the techniques simply aren't effective, especially not in comparison to the much cheaper method of having volunteers go door to door and talk to voters. The whole "election-industrial complex" is a scam run by political consultants and the broadcast media to enrich themselves.
The bad news is that politicians don't believe it (though some, notably Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz, are making good use of the effective techniques this year), and continue to maintain this monumentally wasteful system. I don't know whether the most depressing aspect is that they'll remain as they have been for decades, openly for sale and spending the bulk of their time on fund-raising instead of the people's business, or just that they're so dumb.
It's a great long read, in any case. I would add only that I was saying the same thing myself nearly four years ago, if without the benefit of all the relevant facts Cockburn has gathered, but taking the argument an important step further, in a post of June 2012, reproduced below:
But I found myself really liking the video, at the same time as I realized how manipulative it was. Kind of the way I feel about Puccini.
And the words devoted to the theme of inequality.
"The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion." Clinton says announcing 2016 candidacy.
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) April 12, 2015
There was a young woman called Hillary
Who deserved to be more than ancillary;
But when she essayed
To come out of the shade,
She always got put in the pillory.
Eric Lipton at the New York Times on business as perhaps a little more than usual at the House Financial Services Committee:
Now, half a year into his first term, [Andy Barr, R-KY] has emerged as a telling example of why the panel is sometimes called “the cash committee” — a place, critics say, where there are big incentives for freshmen to do special favors for the industry.
Mr. Barr, 40, a first-time elected official, has raised nearly as much money this year from political action committees run by major banks, credit unions and insurance companies as longtime lawmakers like Speaker John A. Boehner and other party leaders.
That's $150,000 in six months. And I really hate when they say "both sides do it" but in this case it would be kind of hard to deny:
After the elections in November, Democratic Party leaders gave a PowerPoint presentation urging their freshman members to spend as much as four hours a day making fund-raising calls while in Washington, and an additional hour of “strategic outreach” holding breakfasts or “meet and greets” with possible financial supporters. That adds up to more time than these first-term lawmakers were advised to spend on Congressional business.
BooMan breaks down for you how corrupt it is. For the cui bono question, I'd just refer you to what I wrote a little over a year ago.
Plus (thanks, Boo):
Most congressional seats are so safe they wouldn't need to advertise if it did work. What they get out of the system is status in their little club, from flaunting it and from passing it out to the lowlier members.
Washington Post wants to know why presidential campaigns in the US spend so much money on television advertising, even though it is known that it doesn't really work very well in general elections :
The notion that all that TV money will buy relatively little is
almost as old as TV itself. Dozens of academic examinations since the
1940s have shown that TV ads have limited persuasive effects on voters
in general elections, often accounting for no more than a 1 or 2 percent
difference, and often considerably less.
What’s more, outspending
a rival on advertising in a general-election campaign doesn’t guarantee
anything; John Kerry and his Democratic allies ran almost 200,000 more
commercials than George W. Bush did in 2004 and lost in a close
election. On the other hand, Obama had a narrower advertising advantage
over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and won relatively easily.
They have an idea for an answer, but it seems pretty lame to me; that they "can't afford not to." It's not likely to make any difference, but they figure you never know:
[Former Howard Dean advisor Steve] McMahon says the great danger for any campaign is to lose your “share of
voice” — the ability to match or exceed an opponent’s advertising. Such
imbalances could crop up more frequently in this election because of
unlimited spending by super PACs.
It's like saying we should go spend more money on a clearly ineffective missile defense system because maybe it could help in a real pinch. Oh, wait.*
I had an idea about this once that might be worth developing. You know the famous revolving door between the military and the defense industry, where muck-a-mucks leave the service to join "private" enterprise and their job is to tell the generals and colonels that were once their junior officers to buy the company's products, whether they need them or not? And the equally famous revolving door between politicians and their staffs and the K Street lobbying firms?
Maybe there's the same kind of thing going on between campaign operatives and pollsters and media folk, advising politicians to make themselves known and then moving back to their ad agencies and PR firms, convincing each other that that TV market is really really important precisely because it's so expensive, i.e., profitable for the company, just like an F-35 or a $640 toilet seat.
And look how much money and fame there is in it! Look at the late William Safire, if you will, an advertising man from the start, or George Stephanopoulos**; look at the abominable Mark Penn!
So it's basically a con game, with Sheldon Adelson as the hapless mark. Looking at it this way really ought to make me laugh out loud, but it doesn't somehow. Not because, or not just because the relatively good guys must do it as well as the relatively bad; and certainly not because of what it does to my own TV, since we get almost none of that here, New York not being a swing market.
No, it's because of what advertising is primarily used for, to give value—buzz value, or wishful elegance, or significance—to the crappy stuff we are expected to buy, McDonalds food, the Adam Sandler movie, Paloma Picasso earrings. It's that our candidates see themselves as intrinsically valueless, as needing that kind of semiotic inflation. Which is true, in a sense, because the amount of money you raise governs the amount of attention you get from the news media, broadcast and print, such that only a candidate with x many millions of dollars is a serious candidate, and a striking ad is a news story in itself, with made-to-order visuals, way better than a policy speech.
And who sells advertising? Exactly. It's another revolving door.
*That's what poor old Mr. Cheney called the 1% doctrine, isn't it? That was a funny one, anyway. Even the most skeptical skeptic would admit that there's at least a 1% chance that human-created global warming would make our planet uninhabitable within a couple of generations, but that didn't rouse the Big Dick to action. Or maybe that probability is just too high; like, "OMG, Mr. Vice President, looks like the North Koreans are going to build a nuclear weapon!" "Well, there's just a 1% chance Iraq might do it first, so let's go whack them."
**I saw George Stephanopoulos once, toddling up West 79th St. from Riverside. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in 20 years of living in New York that is my biggest celebrity spotting, unless you prefer Julia Child, which I do—Julia Child was gratifying, because I was studying an interesting restaurant menu, and I thought she beamed at me. Now she's gone, of course, and Stephanopoulos is still around, even though Blogger thinks his name is misspelled and underlines it with angry red dots.
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