DUCKPOND

When Vice President R Cheney was challenged by the evidence of public opinion, he infamously said in effect “so what”. Implicitly, I take that to mean the proposition that “we can shape public opinion by our control of the corporate media”. Yet if the explicit meaning is accepted then the proposition is an espousal of the anti-democratic notion that majority opinions, or for that matter minority opinions, should be ignored. Cheney’s arrogance reflects an embedded institutional violence to democratic principle and practice.

Democratic theory supposes that public opinion should be reflected in the legislature, at least in the House of Representatives, and few people seem the slightest bit disturbed that this transparently mostly not the case. So much for our democratic duty for our fellow citizens when the views of the public can be dismissed by the bodies that make the laws and rules under which we live. We are to mistake in our monumental democratic doublethink the voices of the powerful and strong in terms of resources and organization as the voices of reason and expertise denied the possibility to the humble persons determined supposedly by carrot and stick motivations.

Glenn Greenwald reflects on this situation as it applies to United States elections referencing international opinion polls. These show in the US and many other countries their is a view that Israel-Arab relations should be treated impartially, and by the striking apparent similarity of the views of both Americans and Iranians in the resolution of their countries differences. Of course polls can be contrived, but the assumption might be that these are professional and reliable measurements of public opinion.

He then observes:

There are all sorts of reasons why our presidential elections center on personality-based sideshows (even Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said as much about her own paper’s coverage today). Those gossipy matters are easier for our slothful, vapid media stars to digest and spout. They require very few resources to cover. The campaign consultants who run national political campaigns are experts in P.R. strategies for packaging personalities and indifferent to policy debates, etc. etc.

But one principal reason is that so many of the Government’s most consequential actions are concealed behind a wall of secrecy and thus not subject to public debate. Meanwhile, those policies which are publicly disclosed are kept off-limits from any real debate and, even when they are debated, public opinion is almost completely marginalized in favor of the minority elite consensus (see, for instance, the endless Iraq war even in the face of long-standing, overwhelming support for its end).

That remarkable dynamic of debate-suppression is most conspicuous — and most urgent — when the policies favored by the political establishment are ones that are vigorously rejected by the citizenry. Thus we have the extraordinary fact that a policy that has long been favored by the vast majority of Americans — even-handedness in the Israel-Palestinian conflict — is one that no mainstream American politician of any national significance can espouse without triggering an immediate end to their political career. That discrepancy is a rather potent commentary on how our democracy functions.

By the way, I am anticipating not just debate-suppression, but big time voter-suppression come November. Still there is an encouraging finding here, that while marginal voters may be influenced and so become influential in the electoral process, the majority of people for some reason form opinions independently on the corporate media. Given the rabid behavior of some American commentators, and advertisers, no sane person could take them seriously. Public relations and marketing is aimed at target buyer audiences. In the process, perhaps they do not care that they ignore the larger segment of the population. Communication theory, in so far as I understand it, would suggest that a more balanced approach to issues is likely to be more influential.

That Obama, for example,clearly a person of considerable political acuity, acting as all politicians do – and who can blame them? – out of expediency so as to be influenced by minority opinions, is highly significant. The conclusion, I draw is the importance of enduring political organizations to aggregate both opinions and interests. It is not enough to be an individual actor, even as a blog writer. Nor, was it sufficient to be opposed to invasion of Iraq in 2003 by marching in the streets, regardless of how many people took part. Nor, do I believe, that political actions should be designed for consumption by the mass media, but rather directed at the population at large. Political actors should be armed with knowledge. Theory should direct the unfolding political actions as a development, in which elections are one phase. I tend to think that democracy must be a way of life, and in that sense include the notion of transformative citizenship, which should as much global as national.

That in all probability is to say nothing that has not been thought and said before better with the qualification that provisional reliability of any knowledge does not make it absolute, but makes those political actions a learning process which are democratic to the extent that it enjoys broad-based active engagement.