Still from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
“Don’t expect civilization here… This is a brutal place… It may be that the centers of government were always this way and now we’ve merely pulled off the mask, exposing the truth of the matter.”
– The White Plague, by Frank Herbert, 1982)
“So, at this point there is no really authentic way for us to say who or what to look for and guard yourself against.”
– Radio newscaster, The Night of the Living Dead, 1968)
US citizens swim in this election like fish in water, without understanding it. We are so over-saturated with coverage that we have almost no hope of seeing anything clearly, or grasping its real significance. After the election at the end of the world (2012) and then the election after the end of the world (2016), here is an election before the beginning of the world: an election in limbo, held during an interregnum not just in US politics but in planetary history; when the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born; elections in a time of monsters – the night of the living dead democracy.
Wang Huning came to the USA in the 1980s “to get to know this #1 capitalist country in more detail and in a more realistic way… to explore the political and social management processes of American society.” The book he wrote based on his extensive research, published in 1991, was titled “American Against America.” He returned to China and rose to prominence within the government. Renowned as “the grey eminence” he is a respected and influential figure in Chinese party politics, and is sure to be advising decision makers about how to understand the 2024 presidential election.
The book weaves the quotidian details of American life together with profound philosophical questions. He investigates how presidential elections take place, but also asks far more difficult questions, such as “why is there America?” Huning is hardly anti-American, indeed, his regard and admiration for this country pervades every page. He writes for a Chinese audience, but I think US citizens, for whom current events are something of a mystery, might benefit from his insight. For Huning there is no mystery: “American society is the least mysterious society,” he writes: “Politics is full of mystery in many societies, and Americans are the least mysterious about it.”
In 1931 century Kurt Godel published a startling discovery in mathematics with wide implications for our theories of knowledge. With his ‘incompleteness theorems,’ he was able to prove that there are unprovable truths. Closed systems have these unprovable truths, and the only way to reach them is by reference to something outside the closed system; “proof by diagonalization.” With this in mind, rather than spar with other analysts in the USA, I find it more important to look at this election from the outside in. Through the lens of America Against America, we’ll check out the candidates, the media, the two party system, the lobbies, the ‘American values’ which are tirelessly invoked, and finally, the planet — the rest of the world, which doesn’t get to vote, but which has as much if not more at stake in this race to the top and the bottom.
The Candidates…
“Where did the president come from? It may seem like a strange question,” writes Wang Huning. And indeed it is, because nobody asks it. To answer with a technical catechism about how to ascend the hierarchies of the US political system according to all the time-honored rules, is to dodge the question. This should be obvious by now, looking at the candidates. “Where do politicians come from?” George Carlin asked and answered:
“They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.”
Or as Frank Herbert wrote in The White Plague: “We ourselves created this Madman. We have done this to ourselves. We are both action and object.”
This is not a comfortable answer for most US citizens. We don’t want to be held collectively responsible for someone as crazed as Trump, or someone as craven as Harris for that matter. But I won’t follow that road any further – the personalities of both candidates have already been thoroughly plumbed, ad nauseam. We should be more interested in the strange question of where these candidates come from, than their trivial and ultimately boring personalities. And to understand that, we have to put them aside. Frank Herbert and The White Plague again: “Analysis in depth was a thing that had to happen outside the President’s presence.”
The Media…
“It’s hard for us here to believe what we’re reporting to you, but it does seem to be a fact.”
– TV newscaster, The Night of the Living Dead
The media makes the elections. It sows and reaps. There’s nothing particularly new about this. Journalism has never been a noble disinterested profession; it has always been the province of charlatans and sellouts. Read Lost Illusions by Balzac. Of course there have always been noble exceptions, but they prove the rule; especially when they speak out and are silenced or ignored. There are many real journalists in the USA – for instance Seymour Hersh, Greg Palast, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, Max Blumenthal… but most voters have never heard of them. So, nothing to see here folks? Well, we must grant that there are some novelties in the 21st century.
Wang Huning writes: “One of the characteristics of American society is that the political arena has been turned into a big commodity market, and politics has become a kind of trading market like the economic market.” What’s different in our times is that this trading market has been cornered and centralized by a few large media companies. To follow Huning’s metaphor, the media functions like a stock exchange for the trading market of candidates – if the stock exchange also issued and advertised the stocks. When it comes to the voting market, the media are monopoly and monopsony combined; the only seller and the only buyer.
Maybe we can think of the media in relation to elections like a bank in relation to its customers. Media companies give out elections like banks give out fiat currency. Banks don’t need to have much money in order to give out a loan; they can give a loan of $1000 even if there’s only $100 in their vaults. Nonetheless, we are compelled to do real work to earn real money to repay loans of fake money. In the same way, the media compels us to attempt real politics with fake candidates. Like our loans, our politics are pretty much guaranteed to default.
The estimates of how much money has been spent on this election cycle are coming in at around $16 billion. And where does this money go? To the media! To buy more ads, etc. So just like a virtual broadcast of fiat currency yields a harvest of billions of dollars of real money earned with sweat tears and sometimes blood, so a broadcast of a fiat election campaign yields a harvest of billions of dollars which the candidates raise and then turn over to the media. The media advertises the election, the election advertises the media, and all the other advertisers pay the media for election primetime spots; so the media rakes it in from the candidates and the corporations. Nice work if you can get it!
This has an affect, of course, on the political process and on the politicians themselves. “People who gained power in a bureaucracy… tended to be media-minded,” explains Frank Herbert in The White Plague: “They wanted headline items, the more dramatic the better. Simple answers, no matter how wrong they might be proven later. Drama, that was the thing – a most powerful advantage in a conference room, especially when presented in the driest and most analytical terms.”
This helps explain all the dreadful decisions we have witnessed in recent years. In Ukraine or Puerto Rico, on the US-Mexico border or in the South China Sea – in both parties, not just in the White House but in the Congress and Senate. Often there is no hidden logic, sometimes there is no functional deep state strategy which is behind the curtains of the latest headline. Just media-minded, power hungry bureaucrats, itching for any drama to deploy in the conference room, oblivious of the historical consequences. “The uses of power require a certain measure of inhumanity,” explains Frank Herbert: “Imagination is a piece of baggage you often can’t afford to carry. If you begin thinking about people in general as individuals, that gets in your way. They are clay to be shaped. That’s the real truth of the democratic process.”
The media is the potter’s wheel, which spins us all into shape, and the election is the kiln, where we are baked and hardened into constituencies – commodities to be bought and sold. This time around, the wheel is spinning faster, the kiln is burning hotter, and the presidency and the people both are likely to turn out either burnt or half-baked. But that’s no problem for the media, which will make more and more money the uglier and scarier it gets. “Reports, incredible as they may seem, are not the results of mass hysteria.” (Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead)
Two Parties….
We’ve all heard criticisms of the two party system. But for those born and raised inside this closed system it’s difficult to think outside its ballot box. Voting for a third party in the USA is like touching the third rail — instant electrocution. Throwing your vote away; voting your conscience – parables for a short-circuit in the participation mechanism which only allows two choices. It probably seems too crazy to Americans to imagine that a Chinese scholar, who comes from a country with only one party, might have anything useful to say about this. We see the Chinese government system as fundamentally anti-democratic. We see ourselves as having a choice where they have none, and we believe we are ideologically diverse, while they are homogeneous. But Huning finds something interesting as he studies and observes the US political process. He was in the USA during the Bush vs Dukakis race of 1988. “In fact,”he learned “there is no ideological difference between the two parties; there are only differences on basic and specific policies under the same ideology… ‘choice’ is not a very accurate word… this is putting a commodity, the candidate, on the market; in terms of voters, this is shopping among the commodities available in the market.”
And how is the commodity put on the market? And what is a party anyway? Huning offers us fast food for thought:
“American politics is run by both parties, but neither party is really a political party, just an ‘aggregated mass.’ Compared to most Western and Eastern political parties, they are even ‘rabble’… neither party has a set system of membership… neither party has a systematic theory… neither party has a complete platform, and if you want to find a copy of the Democratic or Republican party platform, you will never find one… So neither party can tell people clearly what they really want… their strength lies in such looseness… no theory, no party platform, no fixed membership, and no idea how to connect…. You can do whatever you want as long as you play under my banner… National franchise stores, such as McDonald’s, Hardee’s, or KFC, are available nationwide. The head office has no idea what they are doing other than selling the same goods. Americans implement the same ideas in politics and economics. The two parties are like a national franchise, with each branch doing its own thing to sell its products…. The two parties do not have clear boundaries… no mechanism to exclude those who are willing to support them… both parties… main purpose is to win elections and do not have a fixed political goal… It is sometimes unbelievable that two major parties that can dominate politics are so loosely organized. In fact the energy of the two parties lies in the looseness.”
The energy and their resilience of the two parties lies in their looseness. Otherwise how could both parties have switched demographics a century ago? How can the party of slavery become the party of African Americans, and the party of Lincoln become the party of the South? Or much more recently, how can the Republican party suddenly re-brand itself as the anti-war party? The answer is that they can do whatever they want. The looser they are, the wider the net, the bigger the umbrella, the broader the base. But we may be seeing in this election something like a limit. They are so loose they are losing it. The rabble overwhelms the head office. The Democrats have become the Republicans, and the Republican party is becoming a fascist party. Until now the centrifugal force of looseness has been counteracted by the centripetal force of the party leadership, which does whatever it wants regardless of its many franchises. But as that leadership wavers, the donors become the only center that holds when nothing else can…
Lobbies…
“You can be the boss down there, I’m boss up here!”
– Ben, The Night of the Living Dead
Other countries talk about bribery, nepotism and corruption, but as Che Guevara said, “in the United States, everything is done legally.” The lobbies were analyzed many years ago by Wang Huning who got to the root of the matter quickly: that in the United States, it is property relations which constitutes the meaning of so-called pluralism. With bribery re-branded as lobbying, and mafias retooled as interest groups, honor among thieves is sanctified as pluralism. And so lobbying has become not only institutionalized, but a central operating mechanism of the whole legislative process:
“Interest groups are also considered to be the basis of pluralism. Politics is pluralistic when interest groups can influence the decision making process… privatization of the economy is also the basis for the creation of interest groups…. There is nothing derogatory or dishonorable about the concept of lobbyists, and it is not sneaky or unseen… there is no sin here. It is essential… Legislators also need lobbyists…. That’s why legislators often do not sit and wait for the lobbyists to come to them, but go to them on their own initiatives.”
Huning was writing long before corporations became people and money got freedom of speech. Collecting data in 1985, he notes that AIPAC at that time had a budget of $5.7 million. This used to be controversial, but everyone saw the standing ovations for genocide, and who is still innocent enough to be confused? But it’s hardly just the Israelis. Who else is paying for seats in the people’s house? Big Tech. Big Ag. Big Weapons. Big Pharma. Big Media. Big Banks. Where would we be without them? How else would politicians know what to do? They are much too busy raising money for election campaigns (which will go to the media) to actually research and write legislation. So the lobbyists slowly and surely become the legislators. And if that’s the case, if this election is to democracy what moneyball is to baseball; if this isn’t a democracy (as conservative Ivy League professors concluded ten years ago) and just a numbers game to make money…. Well, then, can it go on forever? Will people put up with it? Is greed the only American value?
“American Values”…
Every election campaign is built upon appeals to American values. What are they? Wang Huning has some interesting observations:
“Americans are still a rather conservative people in terms of values… There is a peculiar phenomenon in this nation: the masses embrace the oldest and most time-honored things, but also relish the most novel and bizarre things…. The American nation is a nation that places great value on tradition. This situation seems a bit strange: how can Americans, who are so innovative and individualistic, value tradition in such a way… Tradition becomes the only thing modern people can rely on.”
This peculiar phenomenon helps us to understand our strange situation: A conservative people which relishes the bizarre, which relentlessly modernizes and clings to tradition, holding an election in the time of monsters… This dialectic between conservatism and innovation, between the old and the new, between the time-honored and the disruptive, finds ideal expression in both of the candidates. Both of them in apposite ways appeal precisely to this dynamic paradox of American values. Trump is modernity incarnate, but hearkens back to the deepest strata of patriarchal colonialism – he is orange but also white. Harris is a black woman; a radically different look for the presidency– but she also promises a return to the good old days. Her genuine rapport with the Cheneys, the endorsements of so many other Republicans, her record locking up African Americans, and her Glock, all show that she too wants to make America great again.
The question becomes, once we set aside the novelties, which tradition are we invoking? For Trump it is a particular business tradition; the America of rugged individualist rich white Christian men; and he’s hardly the first to run or win on these lines. For Harris, the tradition is racial diversity in the service of empire; upward assimilation, and she wouldn’t be the first to win along those lines either.
It’s not a pretty picture either way. Another tradition and American value which underlies all this is greed and world domination. Both candidates appeal to it, but Trump is less restrained. Both promise to force another American century on the planet. Both insist like George HW Bush that the American way of life is not negotiable. American exceptionalism is not going away, and neither is Trump, alas, because he embodies it so precisely; the hustler grifter fame and fortune Wall Street cowboy composite hero who every working class loser wants to be when he wins the lottery. And so this poor sot we shall have with us always, this character devoid of any redeeming quality… His best ally and his only alibi is the Democratic Party.
The tension between the American values of freedom and equality and the also American values of domination and greed is palpable in both campaigns, and it won’t end tomorrow or the next day. The traditional solution for a century or two was Westward expansion, and when they ran out of land, they turned to consumerism and covert operations. “We lied, we cheated, we stole,” explained Mike Pompeo. Zombie apocalypse. Wang Huning saw trouble coming:
“Nihilism has become the American way… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained? A society without a core value system encounters the greatest political coordination and management difficulties… in the one hand, social progress requires a new value system, breaking the shackles of the old one; on the other hand, social harmony and institutional stability require maintaining the core part of a society’s value system, otherwise a society’s value system will come to an end and it is inevitable that the whole society will fall into a chaos and moral crisis.”
Something like this is going on, in both camps. The chaos and the moral crisis are upon both houses. On one side, we have good old fashioned world domination, the kind of nihilism best expressed in the top secret document written by George Kennan in 1948, “PPS23”:
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity… To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”[1]
And on the other side, we still have all those idealistic slogans, those sentimental daydreams about vague and unreal objectives like human rights and democracy – we hold them dear. As Huning wrote, “The memory of liberalism still grips the mind. This challenge will continue for many more years.” We can see this challenge in both campaigns. Harris bends over backwards to pay lip service to liberalism, but is reduced to the most vague platitudes since she also continues to endorse arms shipments to Israel and brags about her power to ruin lives with the swipe of a pen. Both parties have given up on human rights, but Trump’s camp is much less restrained. He tacks wildly between liberal values like the rights of individuals and then takes up straight power concepts when it comes to mass deportations. This is one reason that Trump has the upper hand; he fearlessly expresses the greed and domination which run deep through American values, while Harris’ mind is still gripped with the liberalism which believes in its own checks and balances.
“We’ve heard all we need to know,” says Ben in The Night of the Living Dead: “We have to try to get out of here.” But we don’t have to leave Turtle Island. There are other values in America. Indeed there is an other America altogether; the basis for an alternative civilization really. From the First Nations of American Indians to all the nations which have arrived here from across the oceans, from Merrymount to the Dismal Swamp to the Oakland Commune, from Black Reconstruction to Standing Rock, from Jazz to Hip Hop, from sports to cinema: people in this young country have charmed and inspired the whole world. American Empire has these redemptive antibodies – values of dignity and heroism, harmony and solidarity, sacrifice and virtuosity – which provide the basis for the potential humanization of its citizens. Maybe this other America cannot rise until the American empire falls. Or perhaps the American empire cannot fall until this other American civilization rises. Either way, there are no seats outside the ring.
Planet Earth…
“In the next century,” Wang Huning predicted, “more nations are bound to challenge the US as well. It is then that Americans will truly reflect on their politics, economy, and culture.” The moment has arrived. The US is no longer the sole world economic and military superpower. It has slipped from that place and seems to be falling fast, on many fronts simultaneously. Not only has its military capability in important respects fallen behind countries like Russia and China, but it has been forced to retreat from the Suez canal, right smack dab in the middle of CENTCOM, scared off by some of the poorest, most bombed out people in the Middle East. Moreover the USA has fallen morally in the eyes of the world. First Trump revealed the core values of greed and domination, then Biden revealed both senility and heartlessness in the face of genocide. Perhaps this accounts for another paradox; how little the rest of the world cares about this election. Most people in the USA believe that this election is pivotal; no superlative has been left behind in describing its significance. But a great many analysts outside the USA don’t see much at stake. Both candidates promise to facilitate genocide and threaten nuclear war; there is no ideological conflict, just a collision of aggregated masses.
As a result, America is in an acute identity crisis. Can it go on being America and not rule the world? Can it be just another nation, or must it, like Israel, be a nation of chosen people, ready to bomb the world to hell if it refuses to play along? This election is a symptom of this identity crisis. Both candidates are Zionists, but significantly, tens of millions of people won’t vote.
Is there any chance that the other America might emerge here, the one that the rest of the world still loves, the one that could be radical and revolutionary and redemptive? Wang Huning does a little investigation into radical political groups in the USA and concludes:
“Because of the huge gap in economic and social development, organizations and ideas that advocate reforming the capitalist system will have no great impact on Western society. Therefore, American society also leaves them to their own devices. If one day the economic level between East and West is reversed, I am afraid that they will have to be regulated. Inf act, we won’t have [to] develop beyond them, just pull even, and the ideological battle may rise again… with a few more serious recessions, there will be a market for radicals.”
And so as a new multipolar world order is kicked off in Asia, while the United Nations system is rendered useless by genociders and climate destroyers, while the US military chokes on its own proxy wars, the ideological battle begins again, and the market for radicals opens. “Don’t you know what’s goin’ on out there? This is no Sunday School picnic!” (Ben, Night of the Living Dead)
Notes.
[1] Kennan, regarded as the liberal, when briefing US ambassadors to Latin American countries in 1950, said that the main policy must be “the protection of our [their] raw materials.” And how? “The final answer might be an unpleasant one but… we should not hesitate before police repression… It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.” (Noam Chomsky 1985)
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Publish date : 2024-11-07 11:00:00
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