by Christopher Roach
We are in the middle of a presidential campaign year. This was supposed to be the Super Bowl for political junkies like me. But it feels strange and muted, and for now its vibe is uncomfortably 2020-ish.
The 2020 election was weird because of Covid, which became an excuse to change the laws to rig the results. There is no such excuse for a “basement campaign” this time. It’s true that Biden is elderly, delicate and unpopular. And Trump has been sidelined, quite deliberately, by a spiteful New York judge who won’t let him travel and conduct his signature rallies. However, the problem now affects all electoral politics.
There used to be rituals common to all political campaigns, but you don’t see them very often anymore. This included many events taking place daily, announced in advance and open to the media and public.
Pizzerias, restaurants, churches, factories, local party meetings, parades, town halls and clubs often hosted visits and tiny speeches from one candidate or another. It can be seen in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries and sometimes in local races, but lately it has rarely been seen in presidential and congressional campaigns.
Political campaign of the Kabuki Theater
Biden’s recent visit to Tampa got me thinking about this. There was news announcing his visit before, but it was impossible to find out where it was. The media did not even acknowledge their own silence, taking it for granted that citizens should not hear the president’s speech.
When Biden arrived on a local college campus – a location announced during his last possible move – he met with local party elected officials and gave a rather extreme speech in which he approved of abortion as if it were the eighth sacrament.
Wherever he goes, Biden almost never meets with ordinary people. It’s completely different asset or Bill Clinton, who liked hanging out with regular people. There is no doubt that if he had done things the elderly way, many of these ordinary people would have done so heckle Or at least not show too much respect for President Biden. However, previous presidential candidates have faced this risk, and many have turned these stages into assets charm and broad skin.
The media praised Biden shared touch and empathybut his campaign managers seem downright afraid of him interaction with society or the press in anything other than the most choreographed way.
Publicly ignoring the rules
Also disrespectful to society extends to politics. There has always been a discrepancy between politicians’ priorities and society’s priorities, what voters are promised and what they ultimately get, but the government has never been so detached from reality and indifferent to public opinion.
Residents of both sides of the political divide have been complaining for months about rampant inflation and a leaky southern border. Instead of dealing with these issues, our recent GOP speaker met with Democrats to give tens of billions of dollars worth of American military equipment and borrowed money to Ukraine and Israel. The Republican Party speaker promised that this would only happen if the bill first provided funding for border security, but then backed down.
This is not the only way parties are moving in directions that only affect tiny factions of their coalitions. The response from congressional Republicans to protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza was to brutalize the First Amendment.
It recently passed draft anti-Semitic law is obscene and destroys one of America’s most cherished rights. It also shows a complete disconnection from the GOP has previously expressed concerns about censorship a handful of conservatives on campus. Anyone who voted for this bill should be ashamed of the adulation this unconstitutional bill has on the donor class.
There are other shortcomings in local government that do not receive sufficient attention. Trump is being dogged by multiple completely absurd criminal prosecutions. These cases are being argued in state courts in hostile places like Atlanta, Georgia and New York. He also faces an even more sinister federal case that could cloud any future president’s governance because there will always be criminal prosecutions following an election. These attempts to crush the presumptive Republican Party nominee are supposedly protecting Our Democracy™.
One party does exist and is very observable on issues such as spending, foreign policy, tax policy, civil liberties and the treatment of outsiders. Elected politicians don’t have control, which means the American people don’t have it either. Bureaucrats obviously have some power, although their power is mainly in form: In fact vetoing policy measures they don’t like through slow-walking and other machinations.
Big donors are the real supporters of aid: the super-rich, most of whom are interested in maintaining their wealth but also in promoting their own elite-skewed ideological views. Politicians who do their bidding receive cuts, both directly in the form of PAC donations, but also indirectly in the form of stock tips, insider knowledge of intricate markets, information about companies that will benefit from pending laws and regulations, and the like.
Therefore, the number one priority of the political class is to maintain the status quo in governance and protect the wealth of the donor class, part of which goes to politicians as a reward. Noticing and responding to public sentiment, placing conditions on the well-being of the majority, or otherwise acting in the long-term interest of the country is largely irrelevant.
Blind ruling class
Most political rituals of the past, such as debates and personal battles with voters, led to the inclusion of public opinion in the politician’s knowledge of the world. Today, the political class is completely out of touch with reality and often consists of figures like Joe Biden, who is completely dependent on his superiors, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who has never had much contact with the private sector beyond soliciting donations. He was an activist, then a state representative, and then he ran for an open seat in Congress.
We call our system a democracy or a republic, but oligarchy is a better description of its current state. This means that we live in a world where a handful of companies own assets exceeding the GDP of entire countries; their owners make huge political donations and control the media, finance and other critical sectors of the economy, easily persuading politicians to do their bidding.
Politics naturally reflects the character of society and its various centers of power. We used to be a middle class country with more widely dispersed wealth. This was widely considered to be an essential foundation of republican self-government.
Maintaining and extending these conditions does not seem to be a priority for either side at this time. Taxes, inequality, safety nets, health care, the manufacturing sector, the stock market, well-paying jobs, trade policy and many other issues that affect people’s daily lives are almost unheard of.
Republicans sometimes lash out at inflation, which is happening bad and persistent. But neither side has a comprehensive agenda focused on cutting government spending or increasing the country’s collective well-being. A notable exception was economic nationalism, which was central to Trump’s original agenda.
Symbolic issues – abortion, transsexualism, the alleged January 6 terror, and the like – tend to suck all the oxygen out of the room. Focusing on these issues, especially when the likelihood of resolution is low, allows politicians of both parties to serve the interests of billionaire oligarchs from the donor class while pretending to fight for society.
This inexplicable and irresponsible system will continue if voters on both sides remain steadfast to their parties and fail to retaliate against “rug-pulling.” It should be obvious that the current GOP speaker would be a ficus. Nothing about it screamed character, perseverance or solidarity with people, but here we are. Similarly, it should be obvious to the economic left, which supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, that Biden will not do anything for them either. All this continues because we allow it and because of the unknown and under-researched ways in which elections and political outcomes are rigged.
There was a touching moment during a recent campus protest in Israel. During the protests at the University of Alabama, both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel cohorts began to alternately shout at each other the widespread and vulgar crystallization of public opinion: FK Joe Biden. Even though he promised unite ushe probably didn’t mean to do it that way.
It was a good reminder that there is great dissatisfaction on both sides with the indifference and lack of accountability in the system. Thus, there is forceful support among voters of both parties for an outsider candidate and dissident policies. Two groups of teenage people condemn the incumbent president. This is what happens when a fraudulent, donor-dependent oligarchic system masquerades as a responsive and democratic system.
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Christopher Roach is an adjunct professor at the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, Washington Legal Foundation, Marine Corps Gazette and Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
“President Joe Biden” photo by Joe Biden.
