Noam Chomsky - Politics in the USA

Democrats and Republicans aren't a category. The Republicans and Democrats differ, like on the rare occasions when I vote, and they're pretty rare, sometimes I vote for Democrats, sometimes for Republicans, sometimes for somebody else. It's not a sharp split - they're two factions of the same party. We have a One-Party-State with two somewhat different factions with alot of overlap - the 'business party' has a couple of factions. You find some differences between them, I wouldn't say there's no difference on the average.

So, what should you do in that case? Well, like everything it's your own choice. Do you want to live in a democratic society or do you want to live in the society we have? Which remember is not a democratic society and is not intended to be. If you take a course in political theory here, I'm sure they'll teach you that the United States is not a democracy. It's what's called in the technical literature a 'Poliarchy'. It's the term invented by the leading democratic theorist Yale Professor Robert Dahl. But the idea is old, very - it goes way back to James Madison and the foundation of the Constitution.

A poliarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the 'wealth of the Nation', the 'responsible class of men' and the rest of the population is fragmented, distracted, allowed to participate every couple of years they are allowed to come and say "yes, thank you...why don't you continue for another 4 years". And they have a little choice among the 'responsible men - the wealth of the nation'.

Now that's the way the country was founded. It was founded on the principle explained by Madison in the Constitutional Convention, that the primary goal of the government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. And then the Constitution was designed to ensure that, there's been alot of struggle about it over the years, alot of victories have been won by the public so it's not the same as it was two centuries ago...but that remains, it remains the elite ideal and it's a constant struggle, and most of the population is well aware of it.

So, for example, take the November 2000 Election. There was alot of - among intellecuals, educated people, you know university professors and people like that - there was a great deal of outrage about the 'Stolen Election' and article after article about the Supreme Court shenanigans and Florida this and that and so on. If you read through that literature, which was vast, you notice there was a constant refain - nobody could understand why the public didn't care. This is a game among intellectuals, the public just didn't care. "So ok, the election was stolen - who cares?". It was never an issue among the public.

Why wasn't it an issue? Well if you look at...this is very heavily...attitudes in the United States are very carefully monitored, business wants to know what people are thinking - and in fact there is for example at Harvard, at the Kennedy School of Government, a project called the 'Managing the Voter' project where they study closely the attitudes of people towards the government...It turns out on the eve of the election, so like, before the election, before Florida and the Supreme Court, about 75% of the pupulation didn't think there was an election going on at all. As far as they were concerned, their attitude towards the thing happening was that it's some kind of a business involving rich contributors, political leaders...and the public relations industry which is training candidates to say meaningless words that they don't understand, that they think will maybe pick up a few more votes. Well, that's only 75% of the public, so of course they didn't care very much if the Supreme Court happened to hand it over to one of them instead of the other.

In fact, most people voted against their wn interests, and consciously, because they knew it didn't matter much. They were supposed to vote on what are called 'qualities', not issues. Like, 'Do you like the guy?' 'Would you wanna meet with him?' Would you want to have a drink with him in a bar?'...or something like that. That was the issue in the Election - people didn't even know where the candidates stood on issues. And it's not because they're stupid, it was extremely hard to figure out where they stood on issues and they're trained to make it hard. And in fact most of the issues that the public cared about weren't even allowed to come up.

So the major issues, if you look at public added concerns, the major issues have to do with economic affairs, international economic affairs, what's misleadingly called 'globalisation' and the 'trade deficit' 'job security' and things like that...none of that stuff come up. You can't bring those issues up in the elections. The Free-Trade area of the Americas was coming up - there was going to be a summit of the Americas in a couple of months - issues on which the public has extremely strong opinions - but none of it could be brought up in the election and for a very simple reason.

If you look at attitudes, there's a very sharp split between elite opinion which is strongly in favour of all of this stuff, and, the public which is strongly opposed to them, and therefore it can't come up in the Election. And didn't. These issues are unmentioned. Virtually nobody knew that the free-trade area of the Americas was coming along.

So what do you do? Well, you have to decide whether you want to live in a democratic society or not. If you want to live in the kind of society say, that Madison envisioned, ok, that's a choice, but certainly not necessary. Over the last couple of hundre years there has been a very substantial extension of the right of the population, of the ability to participate and make a difference. It's not overwhelmng, and there's always a struggle to beat it back, but there's no reason why that can't continue. That's the alternative. It's not a matter of naming one party or another, but just changing the whole framework in which politics persists. Largely because of the extremely narrow concentration of economic power which removes from the public arena most decisions that belong there. There's a major effort underway right now to reduce it even further. But you don't have to acept this.