America's Got Democracy!: The Making of the World's Longest-Running Reality Show

By Danny Katch

A humorous but passionate look at the criminal silliness of the US political system from the author who has “better comic bomb sights than John Stewart” (Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door).
 
In this raucous, irreverent book, Danny Katch diagnoses the various mental disorders peculiar to those who have way too much money and power—and the politicians who work for them. He shows how the very elections that are supposed to be our way of bringing about change have become a tool to get us to accept the insane status quo.
 
“The funniest, smartest, and most dangerous political writer you never heard of is Danny Katch. You’ll laugh. You’ll get pissed off. You’ll disagree. And you’ll wonder how you read this terrific book in one sitting. A welcome antidote to what passes for political writing in an election year.” —Dave Zirin, author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down
 
“From Cocoa Puffs to melting ice caps, Danny Katch’s America’s Got Democracy gets to the heart of how and why our political establishment creates economic, social, and environmental crapification, and he does it with a flair even the most disaffected café barista with a PhD will love. But if you enjoy reading dry, abstract political works in which the words go clopping across the page on little wooden feet, don’t read Katch’s book.” —Sherry Wolf, author of Sexuality and Socialism
 
“Guess what? It’s even more boringer reading it than talking about it.” —Lila Katch, seven years old

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781608462988

Book preview

America's Got Democracy

© 2012 Danny Katch

Published in 2012 by

Haymarket Books

PO Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

www.haymarketbooks.org

773-583-7884

ISBN: 978-1-60846-298-8

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

In Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, www.palgravemacmillan.com.au

All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation

and the Wallace Global Fund.

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction: The Notorious Salma Hayek Sleeper Cell of 2004

Part I Oliganarchy

Absolute Power Deranges Absolutely

Corpopaths

We Got 99 Percent but the Rich Ain’t One

A Paranoid State

Part II Universal Suckerage

The Cheddar Evolution

We Vote, They Decide

Why We Buy In

Patriotism and Self-Loathing

Part III Change Was Gonna Come

That 2008 Magic

Splendid Little Wars

BPOTUS

Conclusion: True Independence

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Notorious Salma Hayek Sleeper Cell of 2004

On a mid-October evening in 2004, I sat in the crowded lobby of Hunter College in Manhattan, watching a debate between President George W. Bush and his challenger, Democrat John Kerry. Most of the crowd despised Bush for his wars and his lies and his proud ignorance, and we had a fine time mocking and hissing every other word out of his mouth.

What I remember most clearly about that night, however, took place midway through the event, when the moderator raised immigration policy and Kerry saw an opportunity to land a few jabs on Bush’s reputation as a national security hawk. Number one, he began, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is, we haven’t done what we need to do to toughen up our borders, and I will.

The imagery of leaking borders has been thrown around so often that I wonder how many of us remember that it’s just a metaphor and that the jurisdictional line between the United States and Mexico is not made of Tupperware. Borders are in fact abstract concepts drawn across hundreds of miles of ecosystems and civilizations that unpatriotically flow back and forth, as they have done since before politicians roamed the earth.

But that was just typical candidate rhetoric. After Bush replied with a defense of his record in keeping America1 locked, sealed, and weatherproofed, Kerry pressed on further:

The fact is that we now have people from the Middle East, allegedly, coming across the border. And we’re not doing what we ought to do in terms of the technology. We have iris-identification technology. We have thumbprint, fingerprint technology today. We can know who the people are, that they’re really the people they say they are when the cross the border. We could speed it up. There are huge delays.

Kerry seemed to be calling for everyone crossing the border to be iris-scanned and fingerprinted—as a way to make things move faster. And that was the more intelligent part of the comment.

The real doozy was the implication of a shadowy threat to the homeland, a group ominously named people from the Middle East. I’m surprised Kerry showed restraint and didn’t try to freak folks out by revealing that there are actually over a million Mexicans of Arab descent, including actress Salma Hayek and gobzillionaire Carlos Slim.

Perhaps Hayek is part of a century-old sleeper cell plotting to reconquer the American Southwest for Mexico, which would then be turned into an Islamo-Aztec caliphate where everyone has to be politically correct and say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas or else they’ll be stoned to death.

You might think I overreacted. After all, these days it’s a job requirement for Republicans to say strange and cruel falsehoods about Muslims and immigrants. But in 2004, even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hadn’t invoked terrorism paranoia to justify making life more miserable for Mexican immigrants. It was the Democratic presidential nominee that night who took us all one step closer to Crazy Town.

Of course, at the time I couldn’t foresee this. But I was struck by the reaction to Kerry’s comment by the boisterous, jeering crowd at Hunter College: silence.

Afterward, some students defended Kerry’s attack as a necessary evil for him to get elected while others were outright enthusiastic that he might have found a weakness in Bush’s homeland protection resume. Many of them were immigrants, children of immigrants, or friends with immigrants. Had a warning about Middle Easterners crossing the border been raised in one of their classes, many of them would have shot up their hands to respond to such garbage. But coming from the man running against the enemy George W. Bush, it became legitimate, even clever.

I felt that night that I had caught a glimpse of a normally elusive dynamic in our political life. Although it is commonly assumed that elections are the means by which the people influence their rulers, it’s usually the opposite. Elections are the time for our rulers to reveal the limited menu from which we get to place our order. As our rulers grow more myopic, miserly, and mean-spirited with the passing of every four years, so too does the menu.

This process doesn’t depend on voters being passive sheep, mindlessly grazing on the propaganda. I knew a bunch of those Hunter students; they were smart and they followed politics. In fact, it was their enthusiasm to finally be able to vote and take part in defeating Bush’s policies that made them willing to accept and integrate Kerry’s bullshit. Independent critical thinking was a small price to pay in what was widely seen as the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME.

That’s what they called it in 2004. And in 2008 when the economy collapsed and Barack Obama became the first African American president. And of course we’re saying it again in 2012 with mass unemployment and a frightening Republican backlash against women, immigrants, and basic human kindness. Whoever first came up with that phrase must think that we have the lifespan of fruit flies. 

Maybe we should just officially name our presidential contests THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME and give them roman numerals like Super Bowls. It’s inevitable that each election is terrifyingly crucial in the moment even if, looking back, we can see that the sun probably would have similarly risen and set even had Adlai Stevenson defeated Dwight Eisenhower. 

I also feel that urgency and excitement in the autumn of every fourth year, even though I don’t support Democrats or Republicans. When Obama won in 2008 I partied in celebration that my country had voted for racial and economic justice even though I thought he couldn’t and wouldn’t deliver it. In 2004, I mourned Bush’s victory because it would legitimize his first stolen election, and every other rotten thing he did, and further demoralize the once promising antiwar movement that had already hollowed itself out by supporting the pro-war Kerry.  

It’s hard not to be sucked into a battle that seemingly puts your very values and tastes up for a vote. The year 2004 was when we all started talking about red states and blue states, phrases that were said to describe not just how people voted in certain regions but encompassed the entirety of their opinions about politics, religion, sports (NASCAR versus soccer), food (steak versus sushi), and anything else (uh . . . stud poker versus Uno?). All this while the actual platforms of the two parties presented all the contrast of red versus rose. Possibly salmon.

This year there are more substantial differences between the two parties, mostly because the Republicans have gone feral. The essential point of this book is these differences are still not enough to merit the term democracy.

As a Marxist, I admittedly have high standards. I start from the premise that it should be possible to live in a society in which residents decide how to be policed, workers organize where they work, and soldiers vote for war and peace. I’m not going to rail at Barack Obama for not creating large-scale communes in abandoned Rust Belt factories (although . . .) but we can only appreciate how piss-poor our democracy is by considering what it could be. Even if you don’t agree with this book’s socialist premise (some of which has appeared in my columns for Socialistworker.org), you will hopefully find this perspective useful.

And funny. Politicians trumpet small ideas with grandiose self-important rhetoric. I like it when radicals put out big ideas with a dose of humility and humor appropriate for those of us whose dreams still far outpace our accomplishments. I’m not going to lay out a systematic critique of US democracy, capitalism, or any other four-syllable word (that plan was dashed when my editors nixed my groundbreaking chapter on armadillos). Instead I aim to look at some of the absurd aspects of our political process that we consider normal.

And if it turns out that I was able to make just one person laugh and look at our society in a new light, then there’s something wrong with the rest of you because I think this book is amazing.

1 This is the one of many instances—including the book’s title—in which I refer to the United States of America by its incorrect name. If you don’t think it’s a big deal to call it America, you probably don’t come from Mexico, Brazil, or anywhere else in . . . America. I imagine it would raise some eyebrows if Germany started calling itself Europe. Unfortunately, the founding fathers showed zero imagination in naming this country—just think, we could have been the United States of Awesome—and America has become so widely used that it’s hard not to use it when trying to express or lampoon ideas that are also widely used. Apologies to my fellow Americans throughout the hemisphere.   

Part 1

Oliganarchy

Chapter 1

Absolute Power Deranges Absolutely

Imagine if the United States were ruled by an imbecile king who was the product of generations of royal inbreeding. Each year he would stand drooling before Congress and spin fantastical State of the Union addresses, strange syphilis-addled tales about Iran’s covert underground dragon program and our own secret army of charming but unstable James Franco clone warriors. Congress, of course, would keep interrupting him with bursts of furious applause.

Since Cocoa Puffs was His Highness’s favorite cereal, by George, it would be Cocoa Puffs every morning all across the