Much of world history has entailed a struggle between conservatives trying to maintain the status quo versus those (often called liberals) striving for a more equal societal distribution of wealth, power and opportunity. The history of the United States has been no different in that respect. With the founding of our country, a major step was taken towards reducing inequality among human beings. The U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the philosophical foundation for a nation where all people were to have equal opportunities for a fulfilling life. The
ratification of the U.S. Constitution 12 years later represented the initial attempt to provide a permanent legal basis for that philosophical foundation.
For much of our history, liberals won most of the battles to expand democracy and thereby provide the basis for reducing inequality: From 1812 to 1856,
property qualifications for voting were abandoned; passage of the
15th Amendment to our Constitution in 1870 prohibited the restriction of a person’s right to vote on the basis of race; passage of our
19th Amendment in 1920 prohibited the restriction of the right to vote on the basis of sex; passage of the
23rd Amendment in 1961 gave residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote for President; our
24th amendment in 1964 prohibited the use of poll taxes to restrict a person’s right to vote; and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 went a long way towards facilitating enforcement of our 15th Amendment.
Beginning with the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, our country began taking major steps towards
economic equality in addition to
voting equality. Prior to that time,
great income disparity existed in our country, with the top 1% of individuals accounting for 17% of annual income and the top 10% accounting for 44% of annual income. But FDR initiated a wide range of policies – collectively referred to as the
New Deal – which had the effect of substantially reversing income inequality for the first time in U.S. history. These policies included: Progressive taxation;
labor protection laws; and several policies to provide a social safety net for Americans and otherwise reduce income inequality, including the
Social Security Act of 1935, the
GI Bill of Rights, and the development of several policies to facilitate
job creation.
These policies were so successful that they lasted for several decades, despite tremendous opposition from the conservative elites whose wealth had been reduced. From 1932 to 1978, Americans voted for a Democratic President 8 times and
a Democratic Congress 22 times, compared to a Republican President 4 times (The Republican Presidents of that era did
not attempt to dismantle the New Deal) and a Republican Congress only 2 times. This 46 year bout of relatively liberal voting was accompanied by what Paul Krugman refers to as the
greatest sustained economic boom in U.S. history, with
median family income levels rising from $22,499 (in 2005 dollars) in 1947 (when accurate statistics first became available) to more than double that, $47,173 in 1980.
The tide shifts to conservativesBut then the gains in political and economic equality described above began to be reversed. Beginning in 1980, and for the next 25 years, except for some moderate growth during the Clinton years, there was almost no growth in median income at all, which rose only to $56,194 by 2005 (85% of that growth accounted for during the Clinton years).
The stagnation of median family income during this period of time was accompanied by a tremendous rise in the wealth of a tiny proportion of our population. This is vividly
described by Jack Rasmus, who points out that “More than $1 trillion a year in relative income is now being shifted annually – from roughly 90 million middle and working class families to the wealthiest households and corporations.”
The consequences have been devastating for the middle and working class and the poor: Today, 46 million Americans are
without health insurance, which results in thousands of premature deaths every year, including
thousands of infants; approximately 7 million Americans who want jobs are
unemployed; 12% of American households
lack adequate food; approximately 3 million Americans are
homeless in any given year; and 37 million Americans are in poverty, while the poverty rate
continues to rise under George W. Bush’s administration.
These reversals, which have returned us to levels of income inequality not seen since pre-New Deal days, have been accompanied by intense and largely successful attempts by conservatives to dismantle the New Deal. It is not coincidental that concurrent with the grim economic statistics noted above, we have had a Republican President for 19 of 27 years and a Republican Senate for 17 of 27 years (though we did have a Democratic House for the first 14 years of that period).
EIGHT STRATEGIES FOR CONSERVATIVE VICTORIES IN U.S. ELECTIONS As noted above, democracy is a form of government that should result in reductions in inequalities of wealth, power, and opportunity, since such reductions are in the interest of the vast majority of people when inequality is high. So, what is it that has enabled conservatives in recent decades to create legislation and policies that expanded inequality to record high levels, and yet continue to remain in office? They have used many strategies for this purpose, and we should take a good look at all of them:
Disenfranchisement of votersThe enfranchising of African-Americans poses a big problem for conservatives because a very high percentage of African-Americans vote Democratic. For example, in 2004 George Bush received
only 11% of the African-American vote for President. Consequently, various means have been devised to limit or reverse the enfranchisement of African-Americans.
One means has been the “
War on drugs”, declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. Since then, the U.S. prison population has risen from 300,000 in 1972 to about 2.1 million by mid-year 2004, according to
Bureau of Justice statistics, despite a
falling crime rate since 1991.
2006 international statistics show that the U.S. incarceration rate of 738 per 100,000 residents is now the highest rate in the world. The United States, with only 5 % of the world’s population, holds one quarter of the prison population of the world.
Of the total U.S. prison population in 2004, more than one quarter,
530,000, were imprisoned for drug offenses, and almost a tenth of those were for marijuana only. And many of those were for mere possession, rather than manufacturing or selling. For example, of 700,000 marijuana arrests in 1997, 87% were for mere possession, and 41% of those incarcerated for a marijuana offense were incarcerated for possession only.
Whenever and wherever victimless crimes are prosecuted and punished, especially when
mandatory minimum sentences are on the books, the opportunity for arbitrary enforcement of the law based on racism or other nefarious factors is magnified tremendously. Therefore, it is not surprising that blacks constitute a
highly disproportionate percent of the population arrested for (37%) or serving time for (42% of those in federal prisons and 58% of those in state prisons) drug violations. That is despite the fact that 72% of illicit drug users are white, compared to 15% who are black, according to the
Federal Household Survey (See item # 6). Magnifying the effect of imprisonment on disenfranchising voters are laws in many U.S. states that
prohibit former felons from voting, thus extending the period of their disenfranchisement for the rest of their lives.
And it gets worse. In an effort to suppress the Democratic vote in the 2000 Presidential election, Florida Governor Jeb Bush worked with a contractor (ChoicePoint) to develop a system that would purge from the voter list, not only ex-felons (who by Florida law were not allowed to vote), but also close computer matches of ex-felons. As most of the close computer matches were black (because of similar names), and therefore likely to be Democratic voters, this cunning plan was intended to target black voters. The plan worked,
disenfranchising about 11,883 legal voters, thus delivering Florida and the Presidency to George Bush.
Currently, some states are proceeding with laws
requiring voters to show picture identification before they can vote, as a means of disenfranchising poor voters. This ploy is so similar to the poll tax, prohibited by our 24th Amendment, that it is hard to imagine how they can get away with it. But given the conservative composition of our federal courts today, they just may do that.
Election fraud Now that we have increasing computerization of our voting system, the potential for election fraud would appear to be multiplied. Large discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts, with the official vote counts favoring the Republican Party, have led to strong suspicions of stolen elections through electronic manipulation of voting machines in the
2004 Presidential race, several
2006 Congressional races, and others.
Sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Democrats regarding intent to program electronic voting machines to switch votes to George W. Bush, as well as numerous reports by voters of their
votes switching to Bush when they tried to vote for John Kerry, add greatly to these suspicions. Claims by voting machine companies that their
voting machines are “proprietary” and therefore immune to government inspection prevent adequate investigation of these many anomalies. The end result is that we are likely to face many more episodes of electronic election fraud until something is done to prevent it from occurring.
Elections are also stolen by illegally purging voters who are legally registered to vote. This apparently resulted in the
disenfranchisement of close to a couple hundred thousand voters in highly Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, as well as many tens of thousands more voters
in other Ohio Counties, in the 2004 election. That was probably the means by which George Bush won Ohio in 2004, thereby handing him another stolen four years of Presidency. And as Mark Crispin Miller points out in “
Fooled Again” – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why they’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless we Stop them)”, illegal voter purging has not by any means been limited to Ohio.
Other schemes that enabled George Bush’s Ohio victory in 2004 include a
massive shortage of electronic voting machines in heavily Democratic Franklin County and a wide variety of
dirty tricks to keep people from voting.
Control of telecommunicationsWith passage of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, a very small number of very wealthy corporations began to monopolize our national news media. The result has been a national news media that has
sunk to new depths in their failure to inform the American people about the most important issues of the day. To the extent that they
are interested in important issues and events, their objectives are primarily to
misinform the American people into quietly accepting the continued dismemberment of FDR’s New Deal and the consequent continued widening of inequality in our country.
The examples are legion. Our corporate news media largely gave George Bush a free ride in his two Presidential election bids: They utterly failed to explain how his
tax cut proposals would benefit only the top 1-2% of wage earners in our county; they utterly failed to enlighten Americans concerning
the lies that the Bush administration used to lead us into war against a sovereign people who posed no danger to us; and they failed to pursue Bush’s
going AWOL from National Guard duty as a young man. But when it comes to Democratic candidates for President, the amount of attention lavished on the most trivial unflattering but unsubstantiated details is absurd in the extreme, as shown by the great amount of attention given during the 2004 election to unsubstantiated and false accusations made by the “
Swift Vote Veterans for Truth” against John Kerry.
Three excellent books about the extreme conservative turn of our national news media in recent years are: “
Into the Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press” edited by Kristina Borjesson, “
What Liberal Media? – The Truth About Bias and the News” by Eric Alterman, and “
Lapdogs – How the Press Rolled Over for Bush” by Eric Boehlert.
ReligionConservatives of course need a much larger demographic group to vote for them than only the rich and powerful. Since the 1980s, perhaps the largest demographic group in their corner has been fundamentalist Christians. Conservatives have worked very hard to cultivate and activate this group.
There is no evidence that this move of fundamentalist Christians towards the Republican Party in recent years is because of Republican policies being more representative of the Christian religion than are Democratic policies. In fact, Democrats favor policies that are much more in accordance with the heart of the Christian religion than do Republicans.
Jesus Christ was a liberal. As explained by Gary Vance, a Christian Evangelical Minister:
Jesus was the ultimate liberal progressive revolutionary of all history. The conservative religious and social structure that He defied hated and crucified Him. They examined His life and did not like what they saw. He aligned Himself with the poor and the oppressed. He challenged the religious orthodoxy of His day. He advocated pacifism and loving our enemies. He liberated women and minorities from oppression.… Jesus was the original Liberal. He was a progressive, and He was judged and hated for it.
Then how have conservatives managed to convince fundamentalist Christians to vote for them in such large numbers? They do it through hate and fear. Mostly, they convince a certain segment of fundamentalist Christians that liberals are out to destroy their religion. They say that liberals have proclaimed
war on Christmas; liberals are out to destroy Christian marriage by pushing for
equal rights for homosexuals; and they say that by keeping prayer out of the public school system liberals would deny the right of Christians to practice their religion.
This is all a smokescreen. Liberals have no interest whatsoever in destroying Christianity. They simply believe in the separation of church and state, and they believe that minorities should not be discriminated against in the interest of those Christians who are intolerant of the beliefs of others. Vance puts this all in perspective:
I am glad that conservative Republican candidates advocate for the family and a few Christian issues, but we must quit pretending that they are the only ones that Christians should consider voting for. People should not call themselves pro-life if they are only anti-abortion and yet feel no twinge of conscience over the unfair application of capital punishment or wars fought for dubious motives. A true pro-life position cares just as passionately for the born as the un-born and views war as a last resort when all other options are exhausted.
RacismPaul Krugman, in “
Conscience of a Liberal”, explains how the radical conservative movement in our country has used racism to take back the South as a major part of its electoral strategy. The American South, due to its legacy of slavery, has long been the most conservative and the most racist region of our country. They had also long adhered to the Democratic Party, simply because it was the Republicans of the 1860s who
ended slavery.
But with the passage of legislation like the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, all that changed, as conservative white Southerners began to leave the Democratic Party in droves. The extent of Southern antipathy to the Civil Rights Act can be understood by looking at the
Senate vote totals for that Act. Despite the fact that a Democratic presidential administration sponsored the bill, a much larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it:
Republicans: 27 aye, 6 no (including the lone Southern Senate Republican)
Democrats: 46 aye, 21 no
Non-Southern Democrats: 45 aye, 1 no
Southern Democrats: 1 aye, 20 no
Here is an
assessment (see 3rd quote) by three Harvard economists that describes the dynamics of how race, economic and social equality, and welfare programs in our country have affected Southern politics:
Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly to minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left wing policies… America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.
However, it remained for a charismatic politician, Ronald Reagan, to pick up this idea and make it into a national movement, while being careful to speak in a code that wouldn’t alienate too many non-racist whites. Reagan was a master at doing that, which accounted for much of his political success, which greatly accelerated the hemorrhage of racist Southern whites to the Republican Party. Krugman explains:
The Ronald Reagan who became California’s Governor in 1966 (served as the) vehicle for white voters angry at the bums on welfare… The image is clear: Welfare chiselers were driving up decent peoples’ taxes. Never mind that it wasn’t true… that “welfare” never was a major cost of government, and that cheating never was a significant problem… Reagan didn’t need to point out that a substantial portion of those who entered the welfare roles were black.
Money and legalized briberyThe role of money in American politics is a pernicious system that perpetuates itself. Big moneyed interests “donate” (actually ‘invest’ would be a more accurate term) large amounts of money to politicians, and in return those politicians enact legislation that helps those interests to get more money, at the expense of the public, thereby enhancing their wealth and power and enabling them to continue to feed the beast.
The Republican Party could not elect its candidates to office in the face of an accurate assessment of its performance and agenda by American citizens. The Republican agenda is anti-people, and very few Americans would vote for it if they understood what it is. But largely because of the money they receive from wealthy and powerful interests, Republicans are able to run political campaigns that do an effective job of concealing their true agenda.
Ironically, the current Republican nominee for President played a very important role in taking a big step towards solving this problem – by working hard for passage of the
McCain-Feingold bill, which accomplished some laudable goals, such as banning unlimited contributions to political candidates and parties and unlimited use of so-called issue ads (political advertisements that do everything except actually tell you to vote for a particular candidate). I say
ironically because his Democratic opponent will raise and spend
significantly more money in the 2008 general election than McCain will – perhaps the first time in our history that the conservative candidate for President will be outspent by the more liberal candidate.
Unfortunately, it appears that McCain is
unwilling to abide by the terms of the statute that was named after him.
Nationalism and militarismThere are many powerful people in our country and elsewhere for whom war is a very profitable business. Hence President Eisenhower’s warning to the American people in his
farewell address to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” And hence the
belief of many people today that one of the primary motivations for war throughout history has been private profit.
How do a nation’s leaders convince young men and women to risk their limbs, lives, and future by fighting in a war? The typical way they do it is through appeals to nationalism, which they call “patriotism”. And let us never forget that appeals to nationalism are one of the favorite tricks of
fascist dictatorships.
Conservatives put nationalism/”patriotism” to political purposes by using it to criticize liberals who question arguments for war or for military spending in general. If a Democrat criticizes the Bush administration’s war policies, or even votes against them, the Republicans
attack him or her as being “unpatriotic”. The validity of the criticism need not even be considered, since they would have us believe that it is “unpatriotic” to criticize our president in time of war
under any circumstance. Since George Bush has declared us to be in a state of perpetual war, that would mean that from now until the end of eternity it will be unpatriotic to criticize our president, no matter how incompetent or ill-intentioned (unless our President is a Democrat of course).
This kind of strategy has resulted in one of the few advantages that Republicans enjoy today over Democrats on actual issues. By painting Democrats as “weak on defense” they kill two birds with one stone: They appeal to our fears in order to get the American people to vote for Republicans; and at the same time they encourage their Democratic colleagues to vote for most of their war aims.
Fake populismThe ultimate in hypocrisy is the fake populism that today’s conservatives use to appeal for votes. They do this, with a tremendous assist from the corporate news media, largely by constantly referring to liberals as “elites”. This is the ultimate in hypocrisy because the virtual
definition of today’s conservative movement is elitism. How could anyone believe otherwise? Our conservative leaders seek to maintain and expand their many privileges over the vast majority of other Americans. Those conservatives who do
not have an abundance of wealth and power may be conservative in many ways, but they certainly aren’t among the movement’s leaders. Rather, they have been suckered in by the many tricks that the conservative leaders use to convince them that up is down, war is good, and it is the liberals who are the “elites”.
The current presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama, is beginning to get first hand experience with this ploy. He is said not to be a “regular guy”, and therefore is an elitist, because he is a
poor bowler, he was seen
choosing orange juice over coffee, and because two of the demographic groups
that most support him are African-Americans and the college educated – in other words, not “regular people”.
CONCLUSIONEach of the eight strategies discussed above have a great deal in common and is based on a common underlying need. The ugly truth of the matter is that conservatives cannot win elections based on merit. They cannot win elections as long as the American people understand what their real views are and what they’re really up to.
Thus they must make themselves and their opponents to appear to be what they are not. They play the fear card to make religious Christians believe that liberals are out to destroy their religion. They play the fear card and the nationalism/”patriotism” card to get us to support their wars without asking why and to believe that they are the ones who will protect us. They play the fear card to stir up racial animosity and thereby split us up. And they play the populist card to make us believe that their conservative agenda is really a liberal agenda with a different name and that the liberal agenda is
their agenda.
To do all this they need to get their message out. They do that by using their natural money advantage (which they have because of their wealthy base) to distribute their misinformation and lies to the American people. And they do it through their shills in the corporate news media.
But even all that isn’t enough to make most people believe that they are the ones who have the interests of the American people in their hearts. So they must resort to their ultimate firewall – limit democracy by disenfranchising those who are likely to vote against them and by using voting machines that count our votes in secret.
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