No, No, No (Step One)

 

We New Yorkers don’t attract any attention in the presidential sweepstakes as our 29 electoral votes are safely blue. But because we are getting pummeled by political ads for some hot congressional races—one in a Staten Island-Brooklyn district and another for a seat representing the Long Island suburbs—we get a chance to view what passes for political debate in our beleaguered nation.

It’s not an encouraging picture.

The Malliotakis-Rose slugfest on Staten Island pits a Blue Dog Democrat against a garden variety Republican. The advertising battle, which has cost some $7 million so far, is presumably aimed at some tiny slice of undecideds. The two candidates relentlessly and repetitively smack each other over who is more pro-cop, pro-military, and better able to pander to the fears of white conservatives who apparently anticipate hordes of dark-skinned gang members popping up in their back yards. Malliotakis’s ads show retired NYPD officers standing around bemoaning how much they suffer; Rose’s brags about how he fought to add a half billion dollars to the NYPD budget on top of the $6 billion a year they now get. Rose also appears in his service camos and showcases his support from veterans.

No one dares breathe a hint of criticism of the force responsible for the very public 2014 strangulation death of Eric Garner in that same district. Voters disturbed by that event are invisible.

A similar dynamic is at play in the Gordon-Gabarino race in New York’s 2^nd district, which now extends beyond Nassau County into exurban Suffolk. The district was reliably blue until going heavily for Trump in 2016. But it also consistently re-elected retiring Islamaphobe and torture enthusiast Peter King to Congress for more than a decade.

A TV viewer wouldn’t know much about Republican Gabarino since until recently he didn't promote himself at all but instead spent his campaign chest on trashing Jackie Gordon, the Democrat running neck-and-neck with him for King’s seat. For her part, Gordon foregrounds her stint as an army officer and flashes photos of herself fully suited up and ready for action wherever the Empire sends her. Any voter wondering if the nation’s treasure is wisely spent maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and intervening in every conceivable corner of the world has nowhere to go for a thoughtful discussion.

Speaking of thought or discussion, little to none of either is on display in these insanely expensive artillery barrages of jangling imagery. Whichever of these four candidates eventually decamps for Washington, D.C., it is fair to assume that those who provided the millions they just spent chewing up the psychic terrain will be calling the shots. So we can expect minor tussles over how much (or little) to regulate the plutocrats, how many overseas wars we need to engage in (not whether we need an empire), how cleverly to chip away at the Medicare/Social Security/food stamp safety net, what kinds of deficit-reducing austerity is needed to rein in the GOP spending spree, how much window-dressing will be required to cover up Trump’s onslaught on the environment, what soothing phrases are needed to resassure us of our “bold commitment” to fix climate change, etc. 

That is, given the total control of the process by the holders of the moneybags, how to keep things mostly where they are today while the masses, dumbed down by this fantasy wrestling match, remain enthralled.

That said, the significance of the imminent election is perhaps less about our vision of the future than mass dissatisfaction with the present. The residents and citizens of Chile, where I lived for two decades, had a similar opportunity in 1988 when the military dictatorship staged a plebiscite on Pinochet’s continued rule. The voting options were “YES” and “NO,” and NO won in a walk. Or as a saucy opposition newspaper headlined it, “Pinochet Runs Alone and Comes in Second.”

Trump isn’t running alone, but he might as well be. Biden, so undefined as to be virtually (and for a while literally) invisible, is a stand-in for “None of the Above.” Under normal circumstances, a good half of the population would have done the traditional thing and ignored the voting business entirely. But to know what you do want, it helps to know what you don't want. 

This time, people have realized that not only is the country’s policy direction at stake but also our ability to have anything at all to say about it in the future. Scroll down for a prediction in which I boldly risk total humiliation.

Whether you agree with me or not, political discourse remains woefully debased despite this glimmer of light. So what does it mean for the rickety ship of state plowing through rapidly heating oceans? 

I’d say that at the very least it means the imbalances, strains, and festering crises that produced Trump are going to be largely intact long after his departure. Instead of the urgently needed crackdown on financier looting of the economy, we will have more bailouts of zombie enterprises and more backstopping of corporate debt bubbles by Wall Street’s ICU nurses at the Fed. 

Instead of emergency alleviation of human economic distress, we will have slavish attention to stock prices. 

Instead of Medicare for All, complex new means-tested partial repairs of the damage done to Obamacare; instead of infrastructure stimulus spending, piecemeal public-private partnerships designed to buy off this or that lobby; instead of a living minimum wage, “bipartisan” bonuses exchanged for corporate immunity from COVID lawsuits. 

Instead of the Green New Deal, the same old deals for the green.

Could anything interrupt this discouraging scenario under a President Biden? Yes: sustained, militant mobilization by large numbers of people immune to bullshit promises. There are several elements contained in that phrase.

“Sustained”: Mobilization doesn’t mean a big march, even a gigantic march. Those are easily ignored with some calming rhetoric, at which Democrats are expert.

“Militant”: The demands have to be practical, focused, and radical. The usual timid reforms should be rejected as woefully incommensurate with the gravity of the situation on all fronts.

“Large numbers”: We need people to refuse to go back to sleep just because Trump is finally not in our faces any more. This is a tough one given the desire of so many to do exactly that.

“People immune to bullshit”: Even tougher. Democrats love to convince us that they are on our side and that we should just trust them and wait. Many cautious liberals want nothing more. Success requires that we refuse on both counts and say so clearly. Results are convincing; cordial tea parties aren’t.

It is popular to say that the Democrats are craven, weak, or incompetent. This is false. They are extremely skilled at doing what they want to do: pretend to side with popular demands, neutralize them, and protect the status quo. What looks like failure is actually its exact opposite. Their role is to soothe the populace into passivity with promises of a bright future on a “someday” that never comes. Once in power, they’ll call for “coming together,” “reconciliation,” and renewed “bipartisanship” because their class interests are fully compatible with most of the Trump program, and they will only overturn it at the point of a spear. We, the abused majority, have been bullied for too long.

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P.S. My prediction for Tuesday (once all votes are in): Biden carries all the swing states, plus Texas, and amasses 413 electoral votes.