RE: [Marxism] Forwarded from Anthony-more on US elections

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To start with, I'd respectfully caution against seeing the ruling class
is static and ahistorical.  This isn't the ruling class that led the
American Revolution or fought the Civil War...for lots of very obvious
reasons.  For one thing, this ruling class relies very heavily on new
cultural mechanisms for producing that legitimacy, but it still has very
serious problem justifying its rule, most evidently among African
Americans.

That said, those mechanisms provide part of why we have to understand
that the very small vote for third parties doesn't reflect the entirety
of support for radical alternatives.

Just a couple of points....

1. What I call "the Mad Fifth" is evident in most polls that show
between 15%-20% of adult Americans' taking positions that are, for one
reason or another, stupified.  At most junctures in the Cold War, that
portion favored nuking the Russians.  About a fifth see liberalism as
secular humanism, which is communism and the work of the devil.  About a
fifth said they favored Dan Quayle for president and the death penalty.
Global warming is just a conspiracy to confuse us. About a fifth see
angels, don't want to see genitals in art textbooks, and believe in the
literal truth of the Bible...a book they've not read but heard Mrs.
Grundy talking about.

2. Voter participation has fallen very drastically from the onset of the
Cold War.  If you have about half the qualified voters participating in
a national presidential election--and only around a third in off-year,
Congressional elections--between a sixth to a quarter of the qualified
voters can win.  See point #1, and it's clear how well-funded
conservatives who pander to the loonies will usually win.

This doesn't mean that non-voters are radicals, but proportionately more
are radicals because the less alienated are disproportionately plugged
into politics as usual.

3. Most people who vote for major parties don't really like or trust
them.  I remember the exit polls of Reagan voters in 1980.  The vast
majority of them said they voted for him because he seemed like a nice
old man, although they had serious reservations about his foreign policy
saber-rattling...oh, that and his domestic saber-rattling over the
budget.  Most of them didn't agree with what he said but voted for him
anyway.

Referring to point #2, Reagan's media-touted "landslide" amounted to
winning a bare majority of a bare majority, scantly more than a quarter
of the qualified voters in the US.  So long as the conservative
Republicans can continue to mobilize large numbers of the "Mad Fifth,"
they can keep winning,

***

With all these considerations in mind, the last things that should
concern us is Bush.  It's about how we use the election to change the
equations.  How can we best remobilize constituencies for change?

Solidarity!
Mark L.






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