Are we not entertained?
Okay, so I know I promised some sweet, sweet rain barrel action this week, but it’s gonna have to wait. Life has been pretty hectic recently, and it won’t slow down until after Labor Day. Also, it’s gonna be nearly 100 degrees over the next few days, which is too damn hot to do anything outside. So, bear with me.
Instead, I’m going to do what everyone else on the internet is doing and share some thoughts about the DNC. Let me preface this by saying that I didn’t go (sadly, wasn’t even able to make it to the protests - again… it’s been busy recently). I didn’t even watch any speeches in their entirety. I did watch/read DNC news coverage. My favorite thing about the DNC was seeing Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez from Democracy Now together again.
I loved Gonzalez’s analysis of the convention. He said:
“We’ve seen that both the Republican convention and the Democratic convention show the two faces of American capitalism. On the one hand, with the Republicans, you have a party of a white supremacist capitalism, of anti-immigrant xenophobia, of patriarchy and of war on the working class. And now, this past week, we’ve seen the party of multiracial neoliberal capitalism, for a party that seeks a kinder and gentler form of mass deportation and border militarization, and one that is even more aggressive in the imperial policies of the United States than even the Republican Party…”
He also said: “...One of the things that struck me most was the level, as I said, of choreographed mass spectacle of this convention that would be really worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, the famous Nazi, Hitler’s filmmaker and propagandist, in terms of controlling the narrative that the American people receive of what the Democratic Party is about.”
Now, before you get angry about this - no, Gonzalez is not comparing the Dems to Nazis. He’s talking about the use of storytelling, spectacle, and entertainment as propaganda. Riefenstahl was a master of this.
It brought to mind a quote from Frank Zappa that I also came across during the DNC, which I love:
“Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”
I mean, whew! How apt.
Just think of the way this entertainment industry operates - 24/7 spectacle on Fox News and MSNBC. Conventions featuring Oprah! (You get a president! And you get a president! And you get a president!) Beyonce songs! Our favorite political celebrities like Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren! Rallies where we get to cheer on our team together as if it were a Bears game. Buy mugs with Momala’s face on it! Buy t-shirts that say “I’m speaking” or “She persisted.” Prefer a more judicial flavor to your political entertainment? Have you checked out RBG’s line of swag? And how wonderfully diverse is our team?!
Whatever your taste, be it old school Joe Biden and his Ray-bans, Hillary and her pantsuit, or maybe a real throwback to Bill and his saxophone - we’ve got the goods for you to consume.
Listen, I’m not immune to this. I’ve definitely got some Bernie and AOC swag. I also used to approach politics like cheering for a sports team. But, since 2016 (even 2012, honestly, since Obama’s first term was such a disappointment, as I’ve written about), I’ve slowly been waking up from my political entertainment coma.
I wrote recently about how I hate turning politicians into celebrities. But watching the DNC spectacle unfold and listening to the cogent analyses of Gonzalez and others helped really hit home that it’s bigger than that. This whole charade is carefully packaged for our consumerist enjoyment and to obscure any inconvenient complexities.
When we finally have team players we’re excited to cheer for, what great fun election season can be! And since it’s essentially our team’s job to keep winning the game every 2-4 years, the fun never stops!
I know there are folks out there who argue that we should be able to find joy in politics. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun and that’s what turns people out. But I think there’s something deeply disconcerting about the fact that we need to be entertained in order to engage with the people, policies, and systems that govern our very lives. I don’t know, perhaps one role of the state has always been to condition people to enjoy the spectacle of governance so we’re more willing to ignore the bad stuff?
When we decide to just enjoy the entertainment, that means we’re more likely to ignore things like, well, genocide, human rights and international law violations. We pretend like it’s totally chill that Kamala was up there talking about building the most lethal military in the world to chants of “USA! USA!” We look the other way when our political team tells us that Black Lives Matter and representation matters but we’re gonna keep throwing money at the police to incarcerate and murder Black folks. We’re too busy having fun waving our Democratic Party foam fingers at the rally (figuratively… or maybe they’re a real thing?) to be alarmed that our party is adopting the same narrative as the other team, which says immigration is bad and our borders need more cops, walls, and weapons.
If politics is a game here to entertain and distract us while our military slaughters people around the world and destabilizes other countries so a handful of rich assholes can get richer, then of course, we want our team to play strategically. (I’m being reductive, but also, this is sort of the essence of politics in this post-Citizens United era of unfettered plutocracy.) The Democratic Party strategy for decades now seems to be to “play it safe” and appeal to the moderate voter, who they apparently think is very fond of many of the Republican talking points.
It seems quite clear the Dems have decided they can win this November without the Arab vote (you may have heard that over four days and hours and hours of speeches, they simply could not spare two minutes for a Palestinian-American to speak). The plan seems to be to out law-and-order the law-and-order party. You think the Repubs are tough on crime and “terrorists?” Well, we’re gonna build the deadliest death machine you’ve ever seen!
You may say, “but Liz, if this is how they’re gonna beat Trump, then this is what we gotta do!” or “There are no perfect candidates!” (Lord, do I KNOW there are no perfect candidates.)
But here’s the thing that would be clear if we were like most other normal countries that have more than two political parties. This strategy of the Dems of appealing to the center (or center-right, as it were) has seen them slowly ratcheting to the right election after election (thanks, Bill Clinton, for turning Dems into Republican-lite).
There are lots of folks out there who would like to point out that Biden is the most progressive president we’ve seen since FDR. Perhaps that’s true, but the bar is low. He is certainly more pro-union than any Democrat in recent memory; I’ll give him that. But in terms of long-term, material change like significant labor law reform, that hasn’t really happened. Union membership has actually dropped slightly during Biden’s presidency; it hovers around 10%. By contrast, at the beginning of FDR’s presidency, union membership was at about 5%; by the end, it was at about 21% (thanks, The Nation, for this info). Also, the federal minimum wage still stands at $7.25/hour, which is just absolutely insane. And the fact is, Biden’s strong support of unions makes him an outlier in the mainstream Democratic Party. That’s why it’s remarkable. I can’t help but think about how Dems would look in comparison to an actual Labor Party, if we were the kind of country that had a real Left party.
People also want to point to the Inflation Reduction Act as a monumental piece of climate and infrastructure legislation. It is. And also, the reality of the climate impact is not what it would seem. This recent piece by Peter Gelderloos is a good rundown of why the Dems’ climate accounting doesn’t add up. He says:
“How did the Biden administration’s boost to green investment play out? It was effective at incentivizing the purchase of EVs and hybrid vehicles, though the sale of electrics and hybrids were already trending upwards. On the contrary, it was ineffective at encouraging a shift to renewable energy generation (which actually fell slightly in 2023). Nearly the entirety of the embarrassingly modest 3% reduction in emissions that the US can claim in 2023 is due to a switch from coal to natural gas.
What’s worse, this 3% reduction is an illusion of carbon accounting standards. In 2023 the US saw a tremendous increase in gas and oil production that completely wipes out the supposed 3% reduction, though fossil fuel production doesn’t count under US greenhouse gas inventories according to the IPCC system. Why? Because the US sells most of those fossil fuels to poorer countries (“developing economies”) and they get blamed for the emissions. This model of creative carbon accounting is the reason why major oil and gas producers like Norway, or gas producers, arms manufacturers, and international financiers of fossil fuel like the UK, can claim to be reducing emissions.
This explains why global emissions (the only important measure, for people who live on a planet) are rising as investment in green energy also rises globally. A country’s economic strategy can be largely based on oil and gas production, but it dodges accountability for those emissions by selling the product to countries that cannot currently afford renewable options. To put it more plainly, the most promising models of growth in green energy production are paid for by gas and oil.”
I really encourage you to read Gelderloos’ article to understand why the “green-growth” model, beloved by Dems because it’s capitalism-friendly, is yet another story designed to make us feel good and distract us from the billionaires behind the curtain.
Anywho… I dream of a day when we stop giving a shit about being entertained by our politicians and having them make us feel good and bring us joy. (Why the hell can’t we find joy somewhere else? There are SO MANY other options! Like puppies! And ice cream!) I’d really like for us to start getting a bit more sober about the people who have the nuclear codes and the power to decide to what extent our employers can exploit us, whether to open up yet more federal lands to fossil fuel production, and whether or not to bomb people off the map. You know, breezy stuff.
I know I’m a wet blanket and being serious is perhaps not the way to bring people into the tent. Probably a lot of folks will disagree with my take. But we’re allowing the propagandists to dictate the terms of our engagement, much to the detriment of a great many people.
Politics is serious, it’s complex, and unless you’re among the privileged, it can be life or death.
We are not supposed to be entertained.
Agree! It is also absolutely obscene the amount of money being raised and spent on this election and what it costs to entertain the American people who require a Broadway style production in order to make them pay attention to anything serious and therefore boring. Send some of those millions to care for all the orphans and displaced people in Gaza.
The DNC was said to be a great follow up to the Olympics - which was also a major Hollywood style production costing obscene amounts of money. Yes this old lady remembers the day when would be Olympians had full time jobs and squeezed in training and had to rely on gifted talent instead of endless, 24/7 365 days a year preparation and or drugs in order to compete.