💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › noam-chomsky-elections-2000.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:57:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Elections 2000
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: January 2001
Language: en
Topics: Elections, United States of America, George W Bush
Source: Retrieved on 23rd June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200101__/
Notes: Published in Z Magazine.

Noam Chomsky

Elections 2000

The most striking fact about the November 2000 elections is that they

were a statistical tie (for Congress as well, virtually). The most

interesting question is what this shows, if anything, about the state of

functioning democracy. For many commentators, the fact that the

presidency “is hinging on a few hundred votes” reveals the extraordinary

health and vigor of American democracy (former State Department

spokesperson James Rubin). An alternative interpretation is that it

confirms the conclusion that there was no election in any sense that

takes the concept of democracy seriously.

Under what conditions would we expect 100 million votes to divide 50–50,

with variations that fall well within expected margins of error of 1–2

percent? There is a very simple model that would yield such

expectations: people were voting at random. If tens of millions of votes

were cast for X vs. Y as president of Mars, such results would be

expected. To the extent that the simplest model is valid, the elections

did not take place.

Of course, more complex models can be constructed, and we know that the

simplest one is not strictly valid. Voting blocs can be identified, and

sometimes the reasons for choices can be discerned. It’s understandable

that financial services should overwhelmingly support Bush, whose

announced plans included huge gifts of public resources to the industry

and even more commitment than his opponent to the demolition of quasi-

democratic institutions (Social Security in particular). And it is no

surprise that affluent white voters favored Bush while union members,

Latinos, and African-Americans strongly opposed him (“supported Gore,”

in conventional terminology).

But blocs are not always easy to explain in terms of interest-based

voting, and it is well to remember that voting is often consciously

against interest. For example, in 1984 Reagan ran as a “real

conservative,” winning what was called a “landslide victory” (with under

30 percent of the electoral vote); a large majority of voters opposed

his legislative program, and 4 percent of his supporters identified

themselves as “real conservatives.” Such outcomes are not too surprising

when over 80 percent of the population feels that the government is “run

for the benefit of the few and the special interests, not the people,”

up from about half in earlier years. When similar numbers feel that the

economic system is “inherently unfair” and working people have too

little say, and that “there is too much power concentrated in the hands

of large companies for the good of the nation.” Under such

circumstances, people may tend to vote (if at all) on grounds that are

irrelevant to policy choices over which they feel they have little

influence. Such tendencies are strengthened by intense media/advertising

concentration on style, personality, and other irrelevancies (in the

presidential debates, will Bush remember where Canada is?; will Gore

remind people of some unpleasant know-it-all in 4^(th) grade?).

Public opinion studies lend further credibility to the simplest model.

Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project has been monitoring attitudes through

the presidential campaign. Its director, Thomas Patterson, reports that

“Americans’ feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high,” with

53 percent responding “only a little” or “none” to the question: “How

much influence do you think people like you have on what government

does?” The previous peak, 30 years ago, was 41 percent. During the

campaign, over 60 percent of regular voters regarded politics in America

as “generally pretty disgusting.” In each weekly survey, more people

found the campaign boring than exciting, by a margin of 48 percent to 28

percent in the final week. Three-fourths of the population regarded the

whole process as largely a game played by large contributors

(overwhelmingly corporations), party leaders, and the PR industry, which

crafted candidates to say “almost anything to get themselves elected,”

so that one could believe little that they said even when their stand on

issues was intelligible. On almost all issues, citizens could not

identify the stands of the candidates—not because they are stupid or not

trying.

It is, then, not unreasonable to suppose that the simplest model is a

pretty fair first approximation to the truth about the election, and

that the country is being driven even more than before towards the

condition described by former President Alfonso Lopez Michaelsen of

Colombia, referring to his own country: a political system of power

sharing by parties that are “two horses with the same owner.”

Furthermore, that seems to be general popular understanding.

On the side, perhaps the similarities help us understand Clinton’s great

admiration and praise for Colombian democracy, and for the grotesque

social and economic system kept in place by violence. The fact that

after a decade in which Colombia was the leading recipient of U.S. arms

and military training in the hemisphere—and the leading human rights

violator, in conformity with a well-established correlation—it attained

first place worldwide in 1999, with a huge further increase now in

progress (Israel-Egypt are a separate category).

When an election is a largely meaningless statistical tie, and a victor

has to be selected somehow, the rational procedure would be some

arbitrary choice; say, flipping a coin. But that is unacceptable. It is

necessary to invest the process of selecting our leader with appropriate

majesty, an effort conducted for five weeks of intense elite dedication

to the task, with limited success, it appears.

The five weeks of passionate effort were not a complete waste. They did

contribute to exposing racist bias in practices in Florida and

elsewhere—which probably have a considerable element of class bias,

concealed by the standard refusal in U.S. commentary to admit that class

structure exists, and the race-class correlations.

There was also at least some slight attention to a numerically far more

significant factor than the ugly harassment of black voters and

electoral chicanery: disenfranchisement through incarceration. The day

after the election, Human Rights Watch issued a (barely- noted) study

reporting that the “decisive” element in the Florida election was the

exclusion of 31 percent of African-American men, either in prison or

among the more than 400,000 “ex-offenders” permanently disenfranchised.

HRW estimates than “more than 200,000 potential black voters [were]

excluded from the polls.” Since they overwhelmingly vote Democratic,

that “decisively” changed the outcome. The numbers overwhelm those

debated in the intense scrutiny over marginal technical issues (dimpled

chads, etc.). The same was true of other swing states. In seven states,

HRW reported, “one in four black men is permanently barred” from voting;

“almost every state in the U.S. denies prisoners the right to vote” and

“fourteen states bar criminal offenders from voting even after they have

finished their sentences,” permanently disenfranchising “over one

million ex-offenders.” These are African- American and Latino out of any

relation to proportion of the population, or even to what is called

“crime.”

“More than 13 percent of black men (some 1.4 million nationwide) are

disenfranchised for many years, sometimes for life, a result of felony

convictions, many for passing the same drugs that Al Gore smoked and

George W. snorted in years gone by,” University of New Mexico Law

Professor Tim Canova writes. The few reports in the mainstream U.S.

press noted that the political implications are highly significant,

drawing votes away from Democratic candidates. The numbers are large. In

Alabama and Florida, over 6 percent of potential voters were excluded

because of felony records; “for blacks in Alabama, the rate is 12.4

percent and in Florida 13.8 percent”; “In five other states—Iowa,

Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia and Wyoming—felony disenfranchisement

laws affected one in four black men” (NY Times, November 3, citing human

rights and academic studies).

The academic researchers, sociologists Jeff Manza (Northwestern) and

Christopher Uggen (Minnesota), conclude that “were it not for

disenfranchised felons, the Democrats would still have control of the

U.S. Senate.” “If the Bush-Gore election turns out to be as close as the

Kennedy-Nixon election, and Bush squeaks through, we may be able to

attribute that to felon disenfranchisement.” Re-examining close Senate

elections since 1978, they conclude further that “the felon vote could

have reversed Republican victories in Virginia, Texas, Georgia,

Kentucky, Florida and Wyoming, and prevented the Republican takeover”

(Los Angeles Times, September 8).

Citing the same studies, the Santa Fe New Mexican (November 19) pointed

out that 5.5 percent of potential voters in New Mexico—where the

election was also a statistical tie—were disenfranchised by felony

convictions. “As many as 45 percent of black males in the state can’t

vote—the highest ratio in the country,” though the total figures are not

as dramatic as Florida. Figures were not available for Hispanics, who

constitute 60 percent of the state’s prisoners (and about 40 percent of

the estimated population), but the conclusions are expected to be

comparable. “Neither party seems interested in addressing the issue,

Manza said. Republicans feel they have little to gain because these

voters are thought to be overwhelmingly Democratic. And, he added,

‘Democrats are sufficiently concerned about not appearing to be weak on

crime that I’m sure they would not be jumping up and down on this’.”

The last comment directs attention to a critically important matter,

discussed prominently abroad (see Duncan Campbell, Guardian, Nov. 14;

Serge Halimi and Looc Wacquant, Le Monde diplo- matique, December 2000;

also Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Christian Science Monitor, December 14). For

the past eight years, Clinton and Gore disenfranchised a major voting

bloc that would have easily swung the election to Gore. During their

tenure in office, the prison population swelled from 1.4 to 2 million,

removing an enormous number of potential Democratic voters from the

lists, thanks to the harsh sentencing laws. Clinton-Gore were

particularly devoted to draconian Reagan-Bush laws, Hutchinson points

out. The core of these practices is drug laws that have little to do

with drugs but a lot to do with social control: removing superfluous

people and frightening the rest. When the latest phase of the “war on

drugs” was designed in the 1980s, it was recognized at once that “we are

choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities”

(Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the few Senators who paid attention to

social statistics). “The war’s planners knew exactly what they were

doing,” criminologist Michael Tonry wrote, reviewing the racist and

class-based procedures that run through the system from arrest to

sentencing—and that continue a long and disgraceful tradition (see

Randall Shelden, Controlling the Dangerous Classes: A Critical

Introduction to the History of Criminal Justice).

Twenty years ago, the U.S. was similar to other industrial countries in

rate of incarceration. By now, it is off the spectrum, the world’s

leader among countries that have meaningful statistics. The escalation

was unrelated to crime rates, which were not unlike other industrial

countries then and have remained stable or declined. But they are a

natural component of the domestic programs instituted from the late

Carter years, a variant of the “neoliberal reforms” that have had a

devastating effect in much of the third world. These “reforms” have been

accompanied by a notable deterioration in conventional measures of

“economic health” worldwide, but have had a much more dramatic impact on

standard social indicators: measures of “quality of life.” In the U.S.,

these tracked economic growth until the “reforms” were instituted, and

have declined since, now to about the level of 40 years ago, in what the

Fordham University research institute that has done the major studies of

the topic calls a “social recession” (Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff,

The Social Health of the Nation; see Paul Street, Z Magazine, November

2000). Economic rewards are highly concentrated, and much of the

population becomes superfluous for profit and power.

Marginalization of the superfluous population takes many forms. Some of

these were the topic of a recent Business Week cover story entitled “Why

Service Stinks” (Octember 23). It reviewed refinements in implementing

the 80–20 rule taught in business schools: 20 percent of your customers

provide 80 percent of the profits, and you may be better off without the

rest. The “new consumer apartheid” relies on modern information

technology (in large measure a gift from an unwitting public) to allow

corporations to provide grand services to profitable customers, and to

deliberately offer skimpy services to the rest, whose inquiries or

complaints can be safely ignored. The experience is familiar, and

carries severe costs—how great when distributed over a large population,

we don’t know, because they are not included among the highly

ideological measures of economic performance. Incarceration might be

regarded as an extreme version, for the least worthy.

Incarceration has other functions. It is a form of interference in labor

markets, removing working-age males, increasingly women as well, from

the labor force. Calculating real unemployment when this labor force is

included, the authors of an informative academic study find the U.S. to

be well within the European range, contrary to conventional claims

(Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, American Journal of Sociology,

January 1999; also Prison Legal News, October 2000). They conclude that

what is at issue is not labor market interference, but the kind that is

chosen: job training, unemployment insurance, and so on, on the social

democratic model; or throwing superfluous people into jail.

In pursuing these policies, the U.S. has separated itself from other

industrial countries. Europe abandoned voting restrictions for criminals

decades ago; in 1999, the Constitutional Court of South Africa gave

inmates the right to vote, saying that the “vote of each and every

citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood.” Prior to the “neoliberal

reforms” and their “drug war” concomitant, the U.S. was heading in the

same direction, the National Law Journal (October 30) comments: “The

American Bar Association Standards on Civil Disabilities of a Convicted

Person, approved in 1980, state flatly that ‘[persons] convicted of any

offense should not be deprived of the right to vote’ and that laws

subjecting convicts to collateral civil disabilities ‘should be

repealed’.”

Without continuing, the Clinton-Gore programs of disenfranchising their

own voters should be understood as a natural component of their overall

socioeconomic conceptions. The elections themselves illustrate the

related conception of the political system of two horses with the same

corporate owner. None of this is new. There is no “golden age” that has

been lost, and this is not the first period of concentrated attack on

democracy and human rights. Insofar as the November 2000 elections are

worth discussing, they should, I think, be seen primarily from these

perspectives.