“Fictive,” of course, does not mean simply “false.” It’s not
a word that describes some internal flaw of a discourse, but that describes a
specific relation between a discourse and its audience. The difference between non-fiction and fiction
is not exactly that the former is true and the latter false, but that the
audience is expected to fault the former, but not the latter, for describing a
world in which werewolves roam London and Russian nationalists nuke Baltimore,
when they don’t. (Everybody knows it’s vampires, and they’re in Louisiana. Or is it Seattle?)
During this presidential campaign, liberals and progressives
have, rightly, been busy excoriating Romney, Ryan, and the Republicans for
their blatant falsity, their
proclivity to make assertions and accusations that, it is easy to demonstrate,
are contrary to fact. Romney is also,
correctly, charged with constantly taking positions that are contrary to his
own previous statements and actions.
These charges can, and should, persuade those citizens whose capacity
for intellectually-honest critical thought is not overwhelmed by other,
captivating, non-rational identifications to reject Romney-Ryan-Republicanism
as false and dishonest.
Unfortunately, a large portion of the American electorate at
this point makes political/voting judgements based not on the truth or falsity
of the candidates’ positions, but on the attractiveness of the fiction in which
those candidates weave themselves as characters. The reason Romney is losing this election is
not because he is lying, but because he is not creating a fiction captivating
enough to make his lies invisible – not because he’s talking about monsters,
but because he can’t get enough of the audience to suspend their disbelief in
them. His fiction comes across as pure
falsity, and his storytelling as dishonesty – and not just to those liberals
and conservatives who were predisposed against him.
Liberals and progressives do not like to acknowledge the
obverse: that the reason Obama is winning this election is not because he is
lying any less, but because “he” (meaning Team Obama) is hands-down better at
crafting a captivating fiction in which his lies disappear. He has more control
of his audience. For various reasons – his
and his team’s intelligence, his personal charm and empathetic life story – with
all but those who were predisposed
against him, he does a better job of soliciting identification and suspending
disbelief. His fiction comes across as
sincerity. This will probably assure him
a victory in November.
(Aside: Such a prediction is premised on the unfolding of
this “fictive” politics within a “normal” electoral campaign. As the astute political analyst Mike Tyson
points out: "Everyone has a game plan until they get smacked in the
face." History is rude, and has a
tendency to smack everyone around in the form of a crisis at an inconvenient
moment, often one involving a lot of dead bodies and/or people scrambling into
helicopters. There are quite a few
sucker-punchers – Israel, Afghanistan, etc. – out there who are entirely
uncaptivated by, and willing to bust up, the American electoral fiction, in
unpredictable ways.)
We’ve had weeks now of liberal pundits gloating over the
true-enough fact-checking, etch-a-sketching, and foot-munching of Mitt Romney. If
liberals and progressives want to have any credibility, they should at least
make a pass at acknowledging that there is no dishonesty in American politics
surpassing that of Barack Obama. This is
not just a matter of how congruent the candidate’s discourse is with facts, although that is certainly an
indispensable element of such a judgement. More importantly, it is a matter of how the
fiction his character inhabits is misleading as a whole, of how unreliable and mendacious is the implicit voice
of its narrator, of how thoroughly it is structured in its aesthetic and
political totality, to mislead.
Let’s look, for example, at an issue that bears centrally on
Obama’s major claimed difference from Romney -- namely, that Obama has
significantly greater concern for ordinary working people, and will therefore,
presumably, enact significantly better policies on their behalf. Having proved himself more authoritarian –
more dismissive of limits to his and future presidents’ war-making,
surveillance, secrecy, detention, and assassination powers – than Bush, Obama really
needs to portray himself to progressives as, if not exactly Robin Hood, the
best, or at least the only available (it keeps getting weaker), defense against
Romney’s mustache-twisting villainy.
This is why his ostensibly progressive media supporters talk about
nothing but Romney’s cluelessness, and disappear all those inessential issues
of war, peace, civil liberties, etc.
In this regard, it is quite astounding to note that, while
the campaign is presenting Obama in this way, he is at the same time pushing
forward – and managing to keep invisible
– an actual policy initiative that is likely to have devastating effects on the
very working people for whom his rhetoric drips with concern. Remember NAFTA, which 2008 candidate Obama
promised to renegotiate because it has been so detrimental to American
workers? Because, as
Kevin Zeese points out, as of 2002, it has “caused the displacement of
production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those …high-wage positions
in manufacturing industries.” Because it
has also “contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for
production workers, weakened workers' collective bargaining powers and ability
to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.”
Well, the Obama administration is now in the process of
creating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is, as Lori Wallach
in The Nation describes it, “NAFTA on steroids.” It is an agreement that extends to the
Pacific region, and eventually to Japan and China (Mexico and Canada will join
in October), an entirely new, corporate-controlled regime of investment that
will effectively supersede national labor and environmental regulations. It
will give “grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent
constraints on government regulation [including] new investor safeguards to
ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources, and severely
limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural
resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.”
The TPP will “expand the parallel legal system included in
NAFTA …[which] empowers corporations to sue governments—outside their domestic
court systems—over any action the corporations believe undermines their
expected future profits or rights under the pact.”
Transnational corporations will have “special authority to
challenge countries' laws, regulations and court decisions in international
tribunals … [I]f a country has an environmental law that will cost a
corporation $50 million in profits over five years, the corporation can sue to have
the country pay the corporation for those lost profits. … [T]he members of the
tribunal – the judges – will for the most part be corporate lawyers on
temporary leave from their corporate job.[sic]”
And it is the Obama administration, through US Trade Representative
Ron Kirk, which is pushing some of the worst provisions of this new
agreement. Leaked documents show that it
is the US that “pushed into the text
aspects of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would limit Internet freedom,”
that “push[ed] to expand …[the] notorious corporate tribunals,” that advocated
“forbid[ding] countries from using capital controls, taxes or other
macro-prudential measures to limit the destructive power of financial
speculators,” and that proposed “protecting
the profits of Big Pharma ... by extending patent protections which keeps [sic] drug prices artificially high.”
This last provision was rejected by
every other country, leaving the Obama administration as the only voice –
among such progressive societies as Brunei, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and
Vietnam – to stand up for prioritizing profitability in healthcare. Obamacare International.
As Zeese quotes Judit Rius, the U.S. manager of Doctors
Without Borders Access to Medicine Campaign: "Bush was better than Obama
on this. It's pathetic, but it is what it is. The world's upside-down.” He also
cites the concerns of the Sierra Club and the Electronic Freedom Foundation
about the dangerous effects of this agreement.
Of course, for workers, “the TPP would give these companies
even more low-wage, low-regulation countries to do business in. Americans will
either have to lose their jobs, or be willing to work in horrendous conditions
for little pay.…There is no question that transnational corporations will go to
a country where they can pay pennies on the dollar for labor. There is no way
for U.S. workers to lower their wages enough to compete...“[W]hile President
Obama says he will stop outsourcing, in fact he is negotiating a treaty that
will do the opposite.”
Thank god Obama’s
here to protect American workers from greedy Romney and his evil Bain
outsourcing machine! And, thank god the
Democrats have raised more money from Bain Capital than the Republicans! Huh?!
There’s something, uh, ”upside-down” with this picture.
Most tellingly, the whole process of negotiating this new
world corporate order is taking place under a Romulan cloak of invisibility: “[T] he public, press and Congress are locked
out. Astoundingly, Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate committee with
official jurisdiction over TPP, has been denied access even to US proposals to
the negotiations...But 600 corporate representatives serving as official US
trade advisers have full access to TPP texts and a special role in negotiations.” Furthermore, “The Obama administration is
expected to avoid debate, committee hearings and amendments in Congress by 'fast
tracking' the legislation.“ When asked, the U.S. Trade Representative refused
to commit to the normal democratic procedures of committee hearings and a full
Congressional debate.
The administration of the president who promised a new era
of open government has not been shy about why it considers such secrecy
necessary. As The Nation notes: “Trade Representative Kirk noted that after the
release of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) text in 2001, that deal
could not be completed. In other words, the official in charge of the TPP says
the only way to complete the deal is to keep it secret from the people who would
have to live with the results.”
And the only reason we know anything about it know is
because of leakers of the ilk that Obama is prosecuting relentlessly.
As Zeese sums it up:
They know that if the TPP is
debated it will not become law as it only serves the interests of transnational
corporations and undermines the interests of everyone else….
It is no wonder, especially during
an election year, that the TPP and especially the U.S. proposals are being kept
secret. The president does not want the
public to know that what he is saying in the spotlight of the campaign trail is
the opposite of what he is negotiating behind closed doors on behalf of his
corporate donors.
Can anything be more dishonest than this?
Speaking of pathetic, The
Nation points out that: “The Obama administration initially paused the
talks, ostensibly to develop a new approach compatible with candidate Obama’s
pledges to replace the old NAFTA-based trade model. But by late 2009, talks
restarted just where Bush had left off.”
So, adding injury to insult, Obama, after a slight pause to let it be
known that the memory chips were to be flushed, not only blew off his
commitment regarding NAFTA, he went full-steam for the supercharged, planetary
“NAFTA on steroids.” Even more pathetic:
This is the guy for whom, the progressives he shat upon last time are now
telling us, we just must, memories clean, vote again – because, really, really,
this time he’s going to protect workers.
Maybe Rahm Emanuel wasn’t all wrong.
It is Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, not Mitt Romney
or Bain Capital, who is cobbling together a new, infernal, eternal (the TPP has
no expiration date) global outsourcing machine that will further hollow out the
American economy and undermine the social security of American workers. We’re supposed to be protecting workers from
the “worse evil” Romney, but can Romney do worse than to turn the US into
another desperate island of the archipelago or capital?
This is a single policy issue, bearing on one of the crucial
putative distinctions between the candidates, that has been rendered virtually
invisible to the electorate – in order to keep the distinction from fading into
invisibility itself. There a number of
others, equally important.
Romney and the Republicans have the problem that they do not
want to object to a policy like this in principle, from the left, and, as Glenn Greenwald has
pointed out a number of times, on many crucial issues, it’s very hard to
get to the right of Obama. In order to establish
a rhetorical difference that probably won’t mean anything after the election
anyway, Romney has to move so far to the right to that he sounds ridiculously extreme. And, however more or less “evil” he is than Obama,
he is a hell of a lot less artful. (I would avoid the theological word “evil” if
at all possible, but it’s part of an inescapable phrase in this context.)
But let’s watch Romney’s 47% video on MSNBC again!
It’s called misdirection, and it’s part of the
artifice. The fiction of Obama as the
workers’ champion cannot stand unless this crucial policy issue, which will have a bigger effect on the jobs
and lives of American workers than any vote they cast for president in November, is kept invisible to those workers.
Establishment “progressive” media outlets and personalities work
together to keep the fiction plausible, to keep the disbelief suspended, by
keeping the attention where it has to be. The fiction, no matter how dishonest,
must not be seen as a lie. Again, Obama
is no less, but just more artfully, dishonest than Romney.
Like it or not, it is especially incumbent on those who want
to argue, to leftists and progressives, that they have some kind of
ethico-political necessity to vote for him, to acknowledge this state of
affairs regarding Obama. Leftists and
progressives who voted for Obama in 2008 – especially those who did so because
they were repelled by, and saw him as an alternative to, not only Bushy
arrogance but also Clintonist corporatism – have not failed to notice that
Obama turned out to be Bush and Clinton bis,
a president who has managed to normalize the worst of both worlds. To pretend
that this is not so, to ignore these disenchanted progressives’ well-earned
disgust, is a stratagem more likely to insult them than to persuade them of the
categorical political imperative to vote for the Democrat once more.
A better, shrewder, and more difficult, tactic is to
confront this disgust head-on, acknowledge its legitimacy, and try to work your
way back to the desired political imperative from there. A friend of mine, Tom Gallagher, has provided
an excellent example of this in his aptly titled article: “Vote
for the War Criminal – It’s Important!”
We’ll take a look at the problems of such a rhetorical and logical maneuver
in a later post. For now, let’s just say
that, no matter how shrewd, such an argument gets diminishingly persuasive, and
much less worthy of exclamation, when one starts adding “Outsourcer” and other damning-but-accurate
descriptors to the name of the candidate for whom it is so important to vote.
Finally, to raise considerations I’ll take up in a later
post discussing what progressives should do in this election, any argument that
we must vote for the Democrat, based (as virtually all are) on an imperative to
do the “lesser evil” or “minimize the harm,” becomes not much of an argument at
all if the terms of the question are changed to ask, not who is the “lesser,”
but who is the more artful, and therefore (as Glen
Ford so cogently puts it), the more effective
evil.
Links Cited:
“Obama Says One Thing in Spotlight, Another Behind Closed Doors,” http://truth-out.org/news/item/11563-obama-says-one-thing-in-spotlight-another-behind-closed-doors
“NAFTA on Steroids,” http://www.thenation.com/article/168627/nafta-steroids
Glenn Greenwald, “Democrats and Bain,” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/21/democrats_and_bain_2/singleton
“Why Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil,” http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-barack-obama-more-effective-evil/
And see/read the debate between Glen Ford and Michael Eric
Dyson on Democracy Now, at http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/7/effective_evil_or_progressives_best_hope
“Dylan Ratigan Show, with Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ggzNu6sUIk
“Vote for the War Criminal – It’s Important!” http://www.opednews.com/articles/Vote-For-the-War-Criminal-by-Tom-Gallagher-120910-972.html
Glad you wrote it ...keep em coming
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