Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

There has been a lot of discussion within progressive circles recently about whether Barack Obama’s candidacy poses a real threat to the political establishment. Of course, he has won the hearts and minds of the grass roots liberal and progressive communities, but can a person who has advisers like former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig really be that much of a revolutionary? I use this excerpt from Wolves, to remind us that the threat isn’t necessarily the candidate, but the flow of political reformist insurgents they bring into the party apparatus.

“The two-party system was never anything, just two political factions fighting over jobs, money, influence and power. We have only one political party, the Party of Property, which has two right wings: Republican and Democrat, and that’s it. There are no great differences.”

Many of you will be familiar with this verbiage, long has it been the mantra of the great American novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal. This is the way he put it to me during our interview just a year after George Bush began his second term in the White House.

Vidal’s indictment of the American political system does not exist in a vacuum of conspiratorial anti-establishmentarianism. In fact, it is exactly because of the way that Democrats and Republicans have ganged up on third party candidates that “bipartidism,” the academic term used to describe a two-party system, has evolved into a pejorative.

The bipartidism critique focuses on the control of the two-party system by a myth in which Democrats are supposedly the party of the people, while Republicans are the agents of establishment power. The parties, critics assert, use hot button or wedge issues like abortion or health care reform to compartmentalize the political discourse, while ultimately supporting economic policies that favor their true constituents, the wealthy and corporate elites in the country. Writing in his book Contours of Descent, economist Robert Pollin noted dryly, “the general requirement of product differentiation in an electoral market entails that, at the margin, any Democratic president will offer more social concessions than a Republican of the same cohort. But we should be careful not to make too much of such differences in the public stance of these two figures, as against the outcomes that prevail during their terms of office.” Pollin’s book targets the supposed ’90s “boom” under Bill Clinton, explaining that, even while Clinton was seen as a friend of the poor, his policies actually did more to harm average workers whose wages stagnated as they faced more job insecurity than under his Republican predecessor, Bush Sr. So, the theory goes, while modern day political leaders trade off their party’s conservative or liberal legacy to keep voters entranced, in reality, as country music legend Waylon Jennings once said, “There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.”

That wouldn’t have surprised American historian and political economist Walter Karp, who analyzed a century of collusive political scheming in his hard-to-find volume Indispensable Enemies. Karp’s book exposes a political system run at both state and federal levels by “party bosses” whose sole mission is to maintain control of their party organization. With their power and wealth dependent on the measure of influence these bosses exert on their parties, Karp explains “every elected official is a potential menace.” Thus, American political history can be viewed through a radically different lens, especially in those instances when, as Karp alleges, bosses have purposely lost elections in order to protect themselves from internal threats in the form of “insurgent” candidates. Citing examples that span from the late 1800s right through to the early 1970s, Karp argues that once reformist candidates win office, they often turn their attention to the corrupt party machine itself.

With the support of the electorate, there is nothing to stop them from “attempting to oust local party leaders, from bringing new men into the party ranks, from passing reforms that weaken the party organization, from winning public support so strong that the organization cannot deny him renomination… There are times, therefore, when losing an election becomes an absolute necessity.”

Extrapolating these Machiavellian tactics to the broader state and national political scenes, where Republicans and Democrats portray themselves as ideological enemies, Karp is no less thorough in his deconstruction. Looking back over seventy years of political action, he points to the fact that in most states the relative power — ie. minority or majority status — of each party had remained virtually unchanged. How can this be, he asks, if the sole purpose of each party organization is presumably to do all they can to win elections? Can the party organizations in their respective districts simply fail that consistently to field winning candidates without a major overhaul? According to Karp, it’s common sense. For party bosses whose real concern is not winning, but maintaining power, it is far more important to strike alliances with their supposed opposition so that they can collaborate in maintaining and protecting each other’s base of power.

Karp uses the failed insurgency of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy to illustrate this dynamic. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Democratic Party bosses had a problem. McCarthy stepped into the campaign and channeled the energy of the Kennedy delegates into his own reformist campaign. Young students and hippies traveled across the country, cutting their hair and going door-to-door for their candidate under the slogan “Get clean for Gene.” Worried about the destabilizing influx of new party activists, Karp contends, the bosses decided to push “party hack” Senator George McGovern, who would put forward his own reformist agenda to splinter McCarthy’s rank and file. Then, using their power at the party convention to engineer the Democratic presidential nomination for Hubert Humphrey, despite the fact he had not won a single primary, the bosses threw the election to stem the tide of reformist idealism that was sweeping through the party. As Karp explains, a victory “could only make genuine insurgency more promising to many and encourage yet more newcomers to enter active politics. On the other hand, a defeat… would strengthen the party oligarchy considerably. Newcomers to active politics would be crushed with disappointment, branded as losers and quickly returned to private life.”

Beyond their mutual need to protect each other’s control of the party organization, the party bosses must ensure that the economic support base—namely, their wealthy and corporate donors, many of whom spread their charity to both parties—is not harmed by a reformist candidate. Karp even goes as far as saying that since the authority for policing elections and operating election machinery is left to the state parties—who are assumed to be rivals—the opportunity for colluding in vote fraud, in the case of an upstart victory, is very real.

Of course, many of America’s best-loved presidents have campaigned and won on a tide of populist hope. But Karp spills a good flow of ink to show how programs like FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society were powerful rhetorical vehicles that, upon reaching Congress, were subjected to a scheme of self-sabotage in which one wing of the victorious party — the obstructionists — would play the role of bad cop to the reformist wing’s good cop, thus shutting down much of the original value of the platform.

While much of Karp’s analysis involves specific examples of skullduggery and planned outcomes of various state and federal campaigns, he also posits a larger, more far-reaching assertion about the intent of these collusive political tactics. Karp was an anthropologist and, in applying a macro lens to the phenomenon he was exposing, discovered that, in order to protect its power, the fundamental mission of the party machine was “to eliminate the political condition that breeds independent ambition.” In other words, to engineer in the electorate a sense of apathy or, as he puts it, a “gratitude for small favors and a deep general sense of the futility of politics.” While this claim is the most difficult to prove, it is interesting to note that around the same time that Karp was writing Indispensable Enemies, Harvard intellectual and foreign policy analyst Samuel Huntington generated a report for the Trilateral Commission which warned that the rise in radical consciousness and civil unrest during the 1960s would have long- term effects on the governability of American society. More, he warned, it had endangered the establishment authority, which was “based on hierarchy, expertise and wealth.” Aptly titled The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington’s report reminded its readers that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

We don’t need to look much farther than the statistics on American voter turnout to see that, whether inculcated by elites or from a widespread sense of boredom, political apathy has always been a fact of nature in U.S. politics. Addressing the media one week before the 2004 presidential election, Curtis Gans, the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, told reporters that Americans are “now 139th out of 172 democracies in the world in our level of voter turnout…” In fact, the highly contentious 2000 election inspired a turnout of approximately 106 million people, representing 54 percent of the eligible voters. Comparing the turnout of voters to that of the sixties era, he cited a long list of factors including “a lower level of trust in our leadership than perhaps at any time” in American history. Yet, while professing a general sense of pessimism about the future of voting patterns, he did predict that the 2004 election would yield a marked surge in people 30 and under. As it turned out, he was right.

[According to the Census Bureau, nearly half of all eligible voters 18-24 came out in 2004; up from 36 percent in 2000. With an increase of over five percentage points, the youth were the biggest gainers of all age groups. It’s no surprise, considering the heavy pressure on the rap fans to “Vote or Die,” as a high profile national billboard campaign featuring Hip Hop gangsters and divas warned. At election time, it was the Democrats who ruled Generation Y with Kerry taking 56 percent of votes cast by people aged 18-24, while Bush earned 43 percent.]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.