[PREFATORY NOTE: This post is a modified and revised version of an opinion piece publish under a different title by CounterPunch on July 29, 2022.]
Donation Politics: Biden’s Global Hypocrisy Starts at Home
Photograph Source: Palácio do Planalto – CC BY 2.0
Donation Politics: Worse than Hypocrisy
A few days ago, among the many solicitations for funds to support Democratic candidates around the country in the 2022 elections came one that caught my eye because of its obviously phony seductive line “I’d like to give you a call, Richard.” Reading the next line, none other than the U.S. President apparently with much time to waste, was supposedly eager to learn my views on what government might do better to meet my needs and uphold my values, purporting even to be on a first-name basis with me despite the utter absence of any prior contact. To dumb down the President for the sake of a hypocritical pitch struck me as distasteful, but also eroding of trust, already compromised, between the state and the citizenry upon which the viability of democracy crucially depends.
This manipulative hucksterism became even more personal a day or two later when the same lure line was attributed to Jill Biden, herself cast in the demeaning role of a political party team player. The First Lady went on to expatiate upon the cynical view that Democrats are so desperate for a chance to interact with the President that they would fall for any come on, however absurdly misleading. In her supposedly revealing words that struck me as utterly contrived: “Throughout the years, I’ve learned that there are at least three things that can make Joe smile from ear to ear: Our kids and grandkids, chocolate chip ice cream, and getting to talk one-on-one with Americans like you, Richard.” And she goes on, “Having the chance to hear your hopes and dreams grounds Joe and motivates him to keep fighting the hard battles. That’s why Joe would love nothing more than to give you a call soon.”
Then come the unsurprising hooker, really what motivated the message and explains its atonality —nothing more or less than a crass appeal for money coupled with a delayed ‘admission’ that, after all, actually receiving a call from Biden was as unlikely as Donald Trump committing civil disobedience as a consequence of becoming an ardent anti-nuclear activist. I didn’t have to read much further for these suspicions to be crudely confirmed. The price of admission to Biden’s specious ‘inner circle’ of solicited political feedback dupes was disclosed. It turned out if I wanted to be among those who were now to be MERELY informed they MIGHT receive such a call, all I had to do was ‘to chip in’ as little as $7 to get on a list from which a fraction were selected to receive a call from the President. The only puzzle left to solve is whether the chosen one were picked at random or because they had donated the most or hailed from swing states. This more plausible interpretation of this offensively personalized message no longer resembled in feeling and substance what was claimed on Biden’s behalf when he initially reached out to me, which had I been less jaded, I would have interpreted as expressing an unconditional wish by a conscientious leader who was, however foolishly, sincerely interested in learning my views on national policy issues, and was not just another snake oil salesman sending me an email in the form of a hook baited for donations.
Surely, if calls directly from Biden were up for sale, surely they would be priced much higher if indeed swallowing the donation bait was all that was required. Such a bargain price sent an unmistakable signal that I would wait until at least the age of 90 before I could expect the phone to ring and be thrilled to discover Biden waiting on the other end impatient to begin ourconversation. If the price of admission had been pegged at $10,000 or more, I would have interpreted the appeal as a somewhat imaginative ploy to reach authentic ‘good Democrats,’ that is, not the thinking kind but the contributing kind. In any event, for those remotely in the know, party politics had long been preoccupied with chasing ‘rich Democrats’ while relying on robocalls and mass digital mailings to gather donations from presumed sympathetic political loners like myself, not knowing or caring that I was almost as alienated by what the Democratic Party establishment had foisted upon the country than by the evil doings of the radical right. In my case some overworked party hack must have misread my political profile if he added me to the DNC rolodex for donor prospects.
When it became clear that this was just a somewhat different, and deceptive, way to plead for small donations, the mysterious prospect of actually receiving the phone call actually took a prominent place in a zone of extreme improbability. This was a discrediting revelation being conveyed to prospective donkey donors like myself by not so subtly letting us know that only after receiving a donation would we became eligible to receive the phone call, and even then only fools would hold their breath in anticipation. I now understood that my donation would have resulted, at most, to adding me to what I assumed to be a lengthy list. Perhaps during a lull in Biden’s presidential activities, a few contributors would be chosen to fulfill the literal commitment of the solicitation. In effect, you were being asked to buy a million-to-one lottery ticket with a tiny fraction of a chance of being chosen, and even this might be fanciful as I doubt that even Biden would find himself so at loose ends as to risk receiving a harangue from someone like myself. This disarming personalized solicitation was always about money never about soliciting views. Given the dependence of many valuable civil society initiatives on public funding and private trust, the Democratic Party should be ashamed to be giving responsible appeals for support a bad name associated with deception, contempt for the intelligence of grassroots supporters, and an unscrupulous manipulative ethos.
To be honest about my own feelings, I would not have welcomed such a call if by some dark twist of fate I had received it, nor would Mr. Biden have liked what I had to say given this rare opportunity in the spirit of talking truth to power. It would lead me to express my deep forebodings for the future of America as a peace-oriented constitutional democracy reinforced by an extensive social protection available to all of its residents as part of a national commitment to human security. My skepticism about such an affirmative future for the country arises from the lethal passivity of the nominally pro-democracy political forces in the U.S. The anemic response to the growing strength of a pre-fascist violent movement on the extreme right is convincing evidence, activating memories of the fate of Weimar Republic, and the drift toward world war.
Of course, the cynical depths of appealing for political funds on the basis of an entirely contrived intimacy and a false claim of wishing to gain valuable feedback from representative ‘good Democrats’ is more than a cheap shot to empty the pockets of gullible folks many of whom have little cash to spare. This type of ‘donation politics’ offers us an apt metaphor for the overall debasement of electoral politics by shining its Madison Avenue spotlight on the essential source of societal corruption—namely money and profits. What is conveyed to a concerned citizen or permanent resident is that the quest for money even in miniscule amounts is the core reality of what politics has become. As a result it destroys the trust of those who truly wish for a more participatory process joining state and society. This would truly induce a presidential leader to make serious efforts to find effective ways to take account of the views of ordinary citizens, rather than expend their energies on doing the bidding of special interests who have earned the right to unlimited presidential access and responsiveness solely as a result of their sizable donations. For instance, the majority of Americans favor a more balanced approach to relations between Israelis and Palestinians instead of as agenda set by AIPAC, or less military spending and a host of other issues that Biden would certainly rather not hear about from disgruntled citizens.
If he had the personal misfortune to receive this sort of angry response, rather than fulsome praise about how well he was doing, it would quickly replace Joe’s supposedly big smile with an angry smirk. Whether it is Wall Street or defense contractors, it is no secret that the citizenry wants less inequality and more social protection, but whether public preferences of this sort will be respected in coming years seems ever more in doubt. It is, at best, a perilous time to champion a politics of planetary liberation. Yet without such a politics, the country and the world will continue to experience dysfunctional global governance.
Writing so shortly after Biden’s clumsily mismanaged mid-July visit to Israel and the Saudi Arabia makes this conjecture of dysfunction more than an abstract fear. Biden’s telling gesture of ingratiating himself to his Israeli hosts by proclaiming himself as a non-Jewish Zionist bonds him with the only prior such public affirmation of which I am aware, that of the white supremist, Richard Spencer [See Tony Greenstein’s extraordinary, scrupulously researched comprehensive critique of Zionism for confirmation: Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of the Holocaust (expected publication, 2022).] I am not intending to imply that Biden is at all sympathetic with white supremacist ideology, but that this pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself by identifying so ardently with legally, morally, politically and spiritually dubious claims to Jewish supremacy in Israel. In context, it was rightly perceived as even more extreme than such an affirmation, given Biden’s silence about Israeli apartheid so authoritatively documented during the last two years and considering the ordeal inflicted on the Palestinian people by the Zionist Project for over a century.
If this is what being a ‘good Democrat’ in America has come to mean, then the Democratic party may be in worse shape than even I imagined. Of course, Biden would disavow such association with extremism, but his hyped identification with Israeli ethnocracy should be deeply disturbing to every American, regardless of party, who affirms the fundamental aspirational identity of the United States as a multiethnic democracy. The only future with any hopes of national recovery from the horrors of January 6th and a Supreme Court that foists the regressive views of the voting radical right majority on the American people. There exists enough evidence of Biden’s vanity to be confident that he would have hung up the phone long before I got to my most severe political complaint of all: That by opening more widely the portals of political extremism and geopolitical confrontation Biden is being derelict in his presidential performance at a time of multiple planetary and species crises.
At least Nero made music while Rome burned. I prefer a leader who fiddles to the Biden hucksterism of the soft sell. We need to ask ourselves with a sense of urgency, ‘where is the outrage?’ and ‘why are the streets empty?’ Bob Dylan’s message of the sixties rings truer than ever: ‘The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.”
Trumpism: What Will 2020 Bring?
8 AugTrumpism: What Will 2020 Bring?
During the height of the Cold War when it was viewed as disloyal and compromising to show a sympathetic interest in Marxism or sympathies with Soviet ideology, someone at the U.S. military base at Frankfurt distributed to the soldiers stationed there, a handwritten version of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of petition. Very few of the soldiers approached were willing to affix their signatures, most alleging that this seemed a subversive document circulated by enemies of the United States, and was Soviet propaganda. Somehow the Western propaganda message that the Cold War was about the defense of ‘the free world’ against a totalitarian enemy had made no impact, or alternatively, that the free world had nothing to do with the substantive elements of freedom as social practice.
For me, and for the person who was using the petition to assess the commitment of Americans to the values of a free and democratic society, it conveyed the reality that what freedoms exist can be easily swept aside by an opportunistic or autocratic leadership. This perception has been confirmed, at least provisionally by Trump’s extreme encroachment on American institutions and civil liberties during his first term as president. A final confirmation would occur if Trump is able to hold onto power either by being reelected in November or by somehow managing to remain in the White House even if defeated by his electoral opponent.
There is another more subtle interpretation of the Frankfurt test. The political reality of systemic racism and discriminatory practices is so engrained in the lived experience of America as to make the U.S. Constitution seem indeed a radical document that must represent the views of an adversary ideology intent on undermining the American way of life. In effect, to implement fully the Bill of Rights would require nothing less than a revolution, and in this sense aa cross section of American soldiers were undoubtedly not so minded, and acted appropriately by refusing to endorse such drastic departures from their experience.
More disappointing to me is the degree to which Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 exhibited massive support for a regressive and demagogic leadership by an alienated American electorate. Of course, there were attenuating factors. Hillary Clinton, despite a poor campaign and a militarist foreign policy profile, won the popular vote by three million votes. Part of the
rightest populist backlash reflected a global trend, which was a result of the alienating impact of neoliberal globalization, and its production of drastic forms of inequality and its tendency to homogenize identity. Additionally, the American experience emphasized hostility to immigrants and Islam blamed for destroying the quality of life and bringing terrorism, crime, and drugs to the country, as well as losing a white identity for America as prefigure by the Obama presidency.
Now almost four years later, there is even less reason than in 2016 to regard Trump as an acceptable candidate even for Republicans who subscribe to a social contract that is based on a governing process of laws not men, and upholds ideas of separation of powers, checks and balances, and judicial independence, as well as the Bill of Rights. On matters of material interests the two party system is hobbled by the persistence of the Cold War ‘bipartisan consensus’ that creates commonality of views on militarism, Wall Street capitalism, and Israel/Saudi Arabia. Such a consensus means that there is no pragmatic reason for Democrats or moderates to vote for Trump to uphold liberal/moderate self-interest and worldview. Although Republican campaign strategy and Trump rally rhetoric uses inflammatory rhetoric to portray Biden and the Democratic Party as ‘socialist’ and ‘radical’ to make the middle of the voting spectrum to fear the material threat to their class interests if Democrats control the White House and Congress. In reality, only progressive have reason to ponder not voting or voting for a third party candidate as Biden, seen in abstract, offer little to hope for and nothing to inspire.
In the end, the future of the United States, and indirectly the world, rests on whether the fear of fascism exceeds the fear of left liberalism, as the balance plays out given the peculiarities of the electoral college system. It seems clear that the Trump base responds positively to Trump partly because he offers the prospect of a fascist future for the country premised on white racial supremacy and partly because of indifference to his ideas, giving their support having succumbed to the numbing excitement associated with his demagogic style of leadership even if it could cost them their life. For many in the muddled political middle, distressed by the Trump base but also wary of the more radical demands of Black Lives Matter and AOC Squad, the challenge is one of choosing the lesser of evils, which is analogous to the dilemma of progressives who wonder whether they can persuade themselves to pull levers that favors Democrats and Biden. The difference being that the moderates believe that the Democratic Party even with Biden will be pushed toward adopting the progressive agenda while many progressives believe that Biden will be ‘a feel better’ version of Trumpism, leaving the plutocratic and militarist pillars of neoliberal capitalism, somewhat deglobalized, but as sturdy as ever.
The immediate future of the United States will likely be determined by the results of the November election. For the first time in my life the prospect of a peaceful transfer of power respectful of the will of the people cannot be taken for granted. Unless Trumpist support shrinks dramatically the fascist threat will remain part of the scene even if Trump loses and leaves the White House without putting up a fight. If Trump should lose the election, despite rigging and gerrymandering, and yet refused to leave the White House, the resilience of the constitutional order will be severely tested, and left to the tender mercies of the military leadership, the deep state, and private sector elites, which in turn will assess the intensity of public outrage and the risks of civil strife. Trumpism will also be tested as to. whether its fascist leanings and demagogic submission are sufficiently belligerent to launch a second American civil war rather than loosen their grip on state power.
Tags: Biden, Bipartisan Consensus, Democratic Party, Fascist Threat, November Elections, Pre-Fascisim, Trump, Trumpism