The Democratic presidential primary contests are now turning into
aggravated hyperreality. It has suddenly turned into a three-way battle between
anti-billionaires, a billionaire and a group of billionaire devotees. The
panicked party’s nagging doubts about its capacity to win an election against
incumbent Donald Trump have erased from nearly everyone’s thoughts the question
of what they stand for and whom they represent. When the goal is winning, the
only thing that matters is how you pay for the victory.

The search for a magic anti-Trump bullet has turned the media’s
attention to the richest man ever to seek the presidency: Michael Bloomberg.
They seemed resigned to the idea that if political ideas or familiar names like
that of a former vice president can’t defeat Trump, money can. If Rosa Parks
were alive today, she might conclude that, race no longer being the principal
factor, what they are proving is that money can buy you a seat at the front of
the bus.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper decided that, airtime being limited, the best way to clarify today’s political debate would be to interview retired TV journalist and sheep farmer Sam Donaldson. He may have no moral or intellectual authority, but people recognize his face. And, of course, he was known for covering presidents in his active days, so he must have something insightful to say. 

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It was a strange interview. Cooper skirted around the real question most
people are wondering about: the role of money in politics. In any incredibly
indirect approach, he reminded Donaldson that Bloomberg hadn’t actually
campaigned. Donaldson understood the meaning of the question and was more
direct, replying: “Unfortunately, money buys elections. Thanks to Citizens
United, the Supreme Court’s case, everybody’s money can get in and do so.
Bloomberg is putting his own money in. He’s not going to beholden to anybody
when he wins this race … I’d rather have Bloomberg’s money than their money.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Unfortunately:

A convenient word to use at the beginning of a sentence as a way of making it appear that as a realist you willingly accept and condone what others consider to be unacceptable while empathizing with their criticism.

Contextual Note

The meaning of Donaldson’s explanation can be translated by the
following reasoned thought (or cop-out, depending on one’s moral point of view):
“If we lived in a better world, I wouldn’t trust the results of an election
that was bought with hard cash, but as we live in the world whose rules have
been written by other less virtuous people, we have the duty to play by their
rules and to follow those who have the means to skew the game in our favor.” He
clearly states his belief that Bloomberg’s money is cleaner or more respectable
than “their” (the Republicans’) money. 

This entails a logical as well as a moral problem. It limits electoral
logic to a choice between smelly money and perfumed money. It peremptorily
excludes from consideration anyone who claims that democracy is not
fundamentally about money and that it can be conducted on the basis of
democratic principles by allowing the people to express themselves rather than
act as consumers of political advertising. 

So why not listen to the democratic Democrats or Republicans rather than
plutocrats? The implicit answer to that question is that if the truly
democratic contenders can’t put up similar amounts of money to the plutocrats,
their arguments won’t be worth listening to because they won’t even be heard.
The idea of “worth” literally becomes a purely monetary concept. This was
already the case before Citizens United, but Donaldson seems to be saying that
now that the Supreme Court has made it official, let’s accept that as our
reality.

To make his case, Donaldson invokes the most maudlin of American myths: If
we don’t get this right, we may lose the things that have made this country the
best place to live in the world and that shining city on the hill that Ronald
Reagan used to talk about, which was the envy of the world.

Cooper appears to accept this patriotic babble rather than asking this
follow-up question: If we count on one man’s money to save the nation, wouldn’t
that prove that we have already lost the fantasized, romantic ideals Donaldson
invokes? He might even have pointed out that Ronald Reagan’s borrowed the stale
metaphor from the 17^th -century New England Puritan John Winthrop,
who called
democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”

So why does CNN consider Donaldson’s jingoistic ravings in defense of plutocracy as news? Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now pointed out the possible reasons today’s media have for calling on irrelevant voices favorable to Bloomberg’s candidacy: “The media, the commercial media, directly profit from Bloomberg’s rise, because they’re going to be collecting all of the ad revenues that he is putting out across television nationwide. So there is an actual economic interest in continuing to see Bloomberg’s rise in the poll on the part of many of the commercial media.”

In the US today, you never have to seek very far the reason for the
hyperreal show that masquerades as political news and analysis. Follow the
money.

For several months, the Democratic Party has been desperately seeking to
avoid having to nominate at its convention a socialist who calls into question
the party’s now established ethic of rallying around sources of money rather
than ideas or social needs. The media has developed the reflex that guarantees
its success. It consists of a trio of motivational factors. The first is the
imperative need to respond positively to the desires of its sponsors, and Bloomberg,
in this campaign, is a rich and generous sponsor. 

The second is the media’s quest to build a titillating electoral drama.
In this case, with Sanders as the current frontrunner and Bloomberg as the
challenger, they can build the drama around a showdown between a billionaire
(Bloomberg) and a self-appointed billionaire killer (Sanders). 

The third factor of motivation is of course the requirement of remaining
within the bounds of the corporate agenda. This means that the news must not
contradict the interests of the corporate entities that are at the core of the
national oligarchy. 

The sudden, and now apparently overwhelming, promotion of Mike Bloomberg
in the media proves two things that reveal how radically American democracy has
evolved. The first is that Americans now see democracy itself as a form of
entertainment. They endorse the idea that the biggest spender will be the one
who puts on the best show and who will see it as natural when the biggest
spender wins. You might call it “Political America’s Got Talent.” Like the
news, politics must offer entertainment, which is the real reason the oafish
clown, Donald Trump, may get reelected. And as everyone knows, entertainment
has become an industry that requires heavy investment and seeks big, quick
profits. Amateurs abstain!

The other revelation is that it should now be clear that no real distinction exists between the Democratic and the Republican parties. If the 2020 election ends up as a contest between Trump and Bloomberg, it will be between a Republican president who was once a Democrat and a Democratic candidate who was once the Republican mayor of New York. Who belongs to which team? It’s all about talent — and talents, the ancient money in Biblical days. Like in professional sport, the best players will end up on the teams that can pay the price. Or, like in the NBA, the best players will choose the teams on which they’ll have the best chance of winning, partly because that will attract better sponsoring deals.

Historical Note

Dodging one of Cooper’s attempts to ask a more pointed question, Sam Donaldson insists on drawing attention to the notorious injustice done to Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams, in the Georgia gubernatorial election. By all traditional measures, Abrams should have won the 2018 election but was denied due to massive election fraud perpetrated by her opponent, Brian Kemp, who at the time was secretary of state in charge of election procedures.

Donaldson credits Bloomberg with giving Abrams $5 million and frames it as an act of disinterested generosity, though Bloomberg had a decidedly self-interested reason for making that offer as he needed to counter the terribly negative image he had with the black community, whom he notoriously victimized as mayor of New York. Stacey Abrams is a black woman.

Bloomberg’s gifts to Abrams are part of what The New York Times calls the former mayor’s “empire of influence,” which has permitted him to use philanthropy and well-targeted campaign funds, grants and favors to build a network of local politicians and especially mayors who subsequently feel indebted to him and who are now endorsing him.

In the meantime, Abrams has risen to celebrity in the Democratic Party as a political martyr, the victim of Brian Kemp’s decidedly evil ways. She is now focusing on exposing the system of voter suppression that Kemp used to defeat her in the 2018 election. The central irony here, which none of the media have highlighted, is that Bloomberg’s money is serving to hire the services of Greg Palast, the investigative reporter who has dedicated his career to unearthing the various forms of voter suppression practiced for decades most brazenly by Republicans across the nation. Brian Kemp became one of his most conspicuous targets. 

The fruit of Palast’s multiple and persistent investigations into the organized subversion of democracy took the form of a book and a documentary film with the title “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” Its subtitle is “A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.”

Neither Palast nor anyone else would accuse Bloomberg of being a “ballot
bandit.” But Bloomberg has clearly stepped into the public role of “the
billionaire who buys elections” even more brazenly than Donald Trump in 2016,
mainly because he can spend $1 billion without it making a dent in his
fortune.  He does it legitimately, through advertising and indirect
influence rather than through electoral skullduggery. But pouring money into
branding and influence-peddling isn’t quite what one thinks of as democracy. It
certainly isn’t what Jefferson, Madison, Washington and the other Founding Fathers
had in mind, however committed they were to rule by the propertied classes (whose
property may well have included Stacey Abrams’ ancestors).

No one can say that American history, even as
it unfolds today, is devoid of irony. But do Americans see it? Bloomberg
apparently doesn’t and seems unconcerned with the idea that others may notice
it. As often as not, the ironies of US history tend not to play out in the
traditional comic context people associate with irony, but rather in its tragic
form. 

The 2020 election may turn out to be a prime
example of tragic irony. Observers from abroad, particularly from the UK, have
consistently noticed that US culture has a problem finding a place for
irony. They tend to miss the point. Back in 2015, Business Insider offered a
very serious take on “The Real Reason Americans Don’t Get Irony.” The American author of
the article, Gus Lubin, sifted through the theory about contrasting cultures
and came up with this simple conclusion that “we’re pragmatic talkers, inclined
to speak in terms that will maximize clarity for the maximum number of people,
and we expect others to do the same.”

And, as everyone knows, nothing clarifies
better than money.

 [In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Source: World Politics - fairobserver.com