Barack Obama was handed a clear victory last night in the U.S. election, beating Mitt Romney by nearly 100 electoral votes. Going by the popular vote, it wasn't nearly that drastic, with only a 2% difference separating the two candidates. Voter turnout was lower in 2012 than in 2008. The Senate will stay Democrat and the House will stay Republican. So everyone dislikes the government and nothing changes.
The result isn't surprising. The biggest tragedy for me personally was that third parties got so little support.
Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party just barely missed 1%, but Jill Stein of the Green Party got even less, with 0.3%. These pathetic numbers show just how pervasive and powerful the electoral propaganda system is. This was not an election about ideas, for if it had been, a third party candidate would have most definitely won. Every poll shows that the majority of Americans agree with third party candidates much more than Democrats and Republicans on the issues. This election was a propaganda war. Billions of dollars were spent by the Obama and Romney campaigns thanks to Citizens United -- wasted on scare tactics and lies to manipulate Americans into hating each other.
Ross Perot was allowed to participate in the 1992 presidential debates. As a result, he received 18% of the vote. Abraham Lincoln was a third party candidate, and he participated in debates all across the country. He won. In 2012, all third parties were barred from participating in any debate whatsover, Obama and Romney actually signed a secret agreement (which leaked) to ensure that it didn't happen. They weren't even allowed to enter the discussion. There was a near total media blackout on these candidates, and in the few times they were mentioned, they were simply mocked. On the very day of the election, Chris Matthews lambasts "idiots" for not voting for who he's voting for.
"If you vote for one of these numbskull third or fourth party candidates like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, and say ‘I was surprised at what happened.’ No, you shouldn’t be because idiots like you voted for third and fourth party candidates and they don’t know how the system works.
This was moments after he begged his viewers to go vote. More than anything else I've seen this election cycle, this reveals the sad hypocrisy of establishment Democrats. Americans need to GET OUT THE VOTE and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD -- unless you're voting for someone who's not a Democrat. Then you're stupid and you're not doing the democracy right. These people don't give a rat's ass about the actual act of voting, on its own.
The reason why progressivism and anti-war sentiment did so terrible in 2012 is because the propaganda system didn't allow it to happen. In 1920, with the American labor and socialist movements at their high water marks, Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs got nearly a million votes -- by campaigning in a prison cell. This amounted to 3.4% at the time. As a result, the government proceeded to trash their offices and arrest their leaders. Political suppression is the only response we should expect when people try to enact actual change, so we should prepare for it in the off chance that any alternative movement take off in the years to come. We're already seeing some of it in Occupy.
I'm feeling very disenfranchised right now. With Occupy and the labor movements happening, I assumed that we would do a little better. We need a leftist political movement outside the Democrats now more than ever, but libertarianism seems to be the rising fad for some reason. I'm not quite sure where leftists are supposed to go from here, or what our role is supposed to be.
The Republicans are going to have to do that serious soul searching they've been putting off since Bush. The demographic shift people have been predicting for years is finally happening. White people just can't win elections on their own anymore.
Rush Limbaugh said,
"I went to bed last night thinking, 'we're outnumbered,'... I went to bed last night thinking we'd lost the country. I don't know how else you look at this. The first wave of exit polls came in at five o'clock. I looked at it, and I said ... 'this is utter BS, and if it isn't, then we've lost the country.'"
O'Reilly was more upfront about it,
“The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things? The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore.”
Watching the Republicans is going to be interesting. You'd think they would start to realize that it's not the country that's idiotic, it's them. I don't think that's going to happen. I predict that they're only going to shift to the right even further, because that's what they did in this exact same situation in 2008. I've already seen reactionaries in my facebook feed hint at armed revolution in complete seriousness. Maybe libertarians will try to nudge their way in and there will be a civil war. Maybe the Tea Partiers and the religious fanatics and the racists and all the maniacs they've been welcoming with open arms will get into the fray, and the entire party will tear itself to shreds. I'm extremely worried about this. Rob Johnson pointed out on the Real News Network earlier:
"Well, I think all the indications are that—both historically and in this context, that when people lose faith in the regime, they yearn for order; they kind of dispense with their principles and they want to see order restored. And that often takes a right-wing, authoritarian direction. I think that was featured very vividly in the business writer Peter Drucker's first book, The End of Economic Man, which was written in the 1930s in Germany. And while things don't need to be as ominous there, Hans-Joachim Voth's work on Latin America in the '80s, when they were going through the grinder, or his recent work on Europe, and particularly on Spain in the present context and on Greece, suggests that downturns and disillusionment do produce a rightward shift. And whether it takes the form of violence or not, it's not clear."
Liberals have been saying that we're going to get the "real" Obama after the election, since he doesn't have to worry about being reelected anymore. I suppose now we'll see. But since Obama bombed Yemen hours after winning reelection, and he's planning on making catastrophic cuts to social and welfare programs mere weeks from now, I'll remain the cynic. In fact, I predict that the Democrats will also join the Republicans in their further rightward shift. That's "coming together" and "bipartisanship," after all.
Democrats continue to ignore Obama's police state policies. By now most people I talk to have at least heard of the NDAA or Obama's assassinations, but then they either defend it, or simply call you a conspiracy theorist or a sensationalist. This trend of willful ignorance will continue as more of these totalitarian policies are implemented in the years to come. Democrats have been tolerable up to this point, but they may very soon become outright enemies -- even more dangerous than Republicans, due to their effectiveness at implementing these policies on an apathetic populace. The future looks very bleak. Global riots are predicted due to the massive crop failures this summer, so watch out for how the reactionaries respond to this. Obama plans on implementing austerity measures similar to the ones in Europe, which obviously resulted in further collapse, followed by riots. In Greece, there's an up and coming political party, the Golden Dawn, who openly and proudly call themselves fascists, and half of the police force voted for them. Greek police tortured antifascist demonstrators in custody in September. Freedom of the press is being suspended. Greece is an extreme example, but it's just something to keep an eye out for. Mark Steiner, from that same Real News interview:
"But the larger thing here is we have to be realistic about what this future looks like. And the future's very dangerous ahead of us, because this, the capitalist system, the transnational capitalist system cannot figure out how to plug the holes in its dyke. And there's no alternative, other than repression, to keep a lid on things. That's the fear that we have to face, and that's what we have to be ready to fight for over the next few years. I think that anybody who believes in democracy, believes in an equitable society, has to be now prepared to really fight for the survival of [incompr.] our nation and this planet. And then that's what we're facing, and we have to deal with that in reality."
UPDATE: A candidate running openly as a socialist received an historic 27% in Seattle. Maybe we're not down and out yet.
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