[Bret L]

Signs of the Times, Part II: Post-Democracy in the Age of Simulation

E. R. E. Knutsson



"Democracy — the exception to the rule in world history — belongs to the unique cultural signature of Western civilization. The societies of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans all shared a similar proto-democratic, tribal organization going back to a common Indo-European social order. In the course of its civilizational history, Western democracy has been transformed from direct city-state democracy to modern representative nation-state democracy. In the final, “globalitarian” state of its evolution, democracy resembles a “red giant” running out of fuel, gradually collapsing into a “white dwarf” called post-democracy.

Detail from the Acropolis, Athens

Jacques Rancière observes that the term ‘democracy’ does not strictly
designate either a form of society or a form of government. Every
state is oligarchic; every democracy contains an oligarchic nucleus —
a “creative minority,” whose “creative power,” in Arnold J. Toynbee’s
interpretation, has been crucial to the rise and demise of
civilizations throughout history.

Since government is “always exercised by the minority over the
majority,” Rancière points out, there is strictly speaking “no such
thing as democratic government”:

We do not live in democracies. … We live in States of oligarchic law …
where … [oligarchic elites] hold free elections. These elections
essentially ensure that the same dominant personnel is reproduced,
albeit under interchangeable labels, but the ballot boxes are
generally not rigged and one can verify it without risking one’s
life. ... Peaceful oligarchic government redirects democratic passions
toward private pleasures and renders people insensitive to the public
sphere. … [T]he multitude, freed of the worry of governing, is left to
its private and egotistical passions.

In a post-democratized world run by inevitable oligarchies, Colin
Crouch points out, “political elites have learned to manage and
manipulate popular demands,” persuading people to vote by “top-down
publicity campaigns.” Governing today, says Baudrillard, “is like
advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved — commitment to
a scenario.” The political world, thus, intensively imitates and
recycles the methods of other more self-confident spheres like show
business and the marketing of goods. From this, emerge the familiar
paradoxes of contemporary politics:

[b]oth the techniques for manipulating public opinion and the
mechanisms for opening politics to scrutiny become ever more
sophisticated, while the content of party programmes and the character
of party rivalry become ever more bland and vapid.

This state of affairs can be illustrated by the last US presidential
election. One of the key players in Obama’s election campaign was his
chief strategist and “stage director” David Axelrod, the son of Jewish
refugees escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Axelrod has a long
history of getting racial and ethnic minority candidates elected into
key positions of power, apparently in an attempt to transform
Tocqueville’s democratic “tyranny of the majority” into a post-
democratic “tyranny of the minorities”: Carol Moseley-Braun in
Illinois; Dennis Archer in Detroit; Harold Washington in Chicago;
Michael R. White in Cleveland; Anthony A. Williams in Washington,
D.C.; Lee P. Brown in Houston; John F. Street in Philadelphia, Eliot
Spitzer in New York, Deval Patrick in Massachusetts (introducing the
later recycled mantra “Yes, we can”), reaching a crescendo in the
swift rise to power of Barack Obama — sometimes portrayed as an
African-American parallel to the African-Roman emperor Septimius
Severus.

Axelrod thus seems to fit into a larger picture of minority activism,
guided by a special relationship — a "Grand Alliance" — between
African Americans and American Jews. In this setting, Jews have often
seen themselves as shareholders in a moral crusade. According to Hasia
Diner, the Jewish cultural construction of Blacks has operated along
the lines of a morality tale in which Blacks have been seen as noble
victims, who, by virtue of their suffering, fall outside of the usual
category of "goyim," thus occupying a unique locus in the Jewish
understanding of the world.

Despite Jewish self-conceptions, the realities “on the ground” have
less to do with Jews as moral crusaders than about forming anti-White
coalitions of minority groups. Lawrence R. Marcus points out that the
coalition of African Americans and Jews came about because “both
feared WASPs, non-Jewish white ethnics, and conservative Republicans
more than they feared each other.” As Scott Atran notes, Jews have
survived over time as a group by “sanctifying and steadfastedly
implementing an ‘Us versus Them’ strategy”. Guided by this ancient
Manichean instinct, “a highly sophisticated and pernicious two-faced
moral system” has been developed, according to which “humanist and
universalist” language-games are intended “for show mainly to non-
Jews,” while parallel “deeply racist and isolationist” strategies are
employed to “maintain moral integrity among Jews alone”:

Jewish cultural and genetic separatism, combined with resource
competition and other conflicts of interest, tends to result in
division and hatred within the larger society. From this viewpoint,
anti-Semitism is a ‘defensive’ response of the larger society from
which Jews isolate themselves in order to better dominate it. … Jewish
group evolutionary strategies, like those of its competitor groups and
even those of other animal species, depend crucially on deception and
self-deception […]. In the Jewish case, a key (self?) deception is to
deny that proactive Judaism is a direct cause of anti-Semitism.

As Kevin MacDonald confirms, “Jewish motivation need not be seen in
defensive terms ... but rather as aimed at maximizing Jewish power.
The reality is that the rise of the Jews in the United States, as well
as the rise of their black allies and the millions of post-1965 non-
white immigrants has been accompanied by a consequent decline in the
power of the old white Protestant elites.”

Indeed, not only was the organized Jewish community the most effective
force leading up to the 1965 immigration law that resulted in massive
non-White immigration, the organized Jewish community has made
alliances with other minority groups (Latinos, Asians) that have
established themselves in the US as a result of a liberal immigration
policy regime. The result has been a well-established pattern for non-
White minorities to cluster in the Democratic Party, while the
Republican Party gets over 90% of its votes from Whites. It is
therefore no accident that the first non-White US president has been
incubated in the ranks of the Democratic Party.

Mapping the “Carnivalesque” Stratagems of “Obamamania”

As noted earlier, Western societies “are increasingly moving towards
the post-democratic pole”: Politics and government are “slipping back
into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of
pre-democratic times.” Elections become tightly controlled spectacles,
“managed by rival teams of professional experts in the techniques of
persuasion,” while the mass of citizens “plays a passive, quiescent,
even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them.”

In the battle for America 2008, Obama’s choreographer David Axelrod
was in command of the successfully orchestrated transformation of “a
whisper in Springfield,” into “a chorus of millions calling for
change.” The Obama campaign strategy was the work of a man who knows
his trade: the business of astroturfing — i.e., the faking or
manipulation of grassroots support, for example by setting up front
groups that appear to be independent but are, in fact, backed
financially by Axelrod’s corporate clients. One of Axelrod’s
companies, the highly secretive ASK Public Strategies has been
described as “the gold standard in Astroturf organizing.”

The “hyper-reality” of “Obamamania” — a bipolar phenomenon
fluctuating between excessive celebration of racial tribalism (dressed
up as “post-racial” egalitarianism) and a flagellant masquerade of
promiscuous out-group altruism — reveals itself in the fact that the
real-life Obama campaign followed the script of the fictional
presidential contest in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Sorkin’s
involvement in the “Obama spectacle” should not come as a surprise: He
has reportedly promoted interracial sex as a way to overcome racism,
and has been part of a wave of cinematic leitmotifs orbiting the US
presidency: Dave, Speechless, Wag the Dog, Bulworth, Primary Colors,
and The American President, among others.

Eli Attie, one of the West Wing scriptwriters, modeled his fictitious
presidential candidate on Obama, at the time (2004) not even a US
senator. Attie consulted Axelrod regarding how he was orchestrating
Obama’s approach to his race. Axelrod's answers helped inform the
fictional presidential candidate Matt Santos's approach to his
Hispanic racial identity. It was an inside joke on the West Wing that
“the show had a prophetic quality”; Axelrod told Attie triumphantly
that “we're living your scripts!”

Barack Obama and The West Wing's Matt Santos

Baudrillard judged Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” to
be “the key formula of the age of simulation” in a social world filled
with copies of copies for which there is no original — rootless,
circulating images and fictions without origin or referent, displacing
discursive meaning with a stream of “random intensities” and a
“fetishism of style and surface”. As noted by Baudrillard:

Indifferent to every truth, reality becomes a sort of sphinx,
enigmatic in its hyperconformity, simulating itself as virtuality or
reality show. Reality becomes hyperreality — paroxysm and parody all
at once.

So, what happens when life starts to look a lot like art?
Scriptwriters, spin-masters and benefactors dwelling in the shadows of
the West Wing would probably have reacted to observations of empty
rhetoric, false hopes and bad dreams with a shrug: “The medium is the
message is Obama,” or, in Attie’s twist of words, “art imitates life
imitates art advises life“ — a situation described by Baudrillard as
trans-aesthetic, effecting “the dissolution of television into life”
and “the dissolution of life into television.” Obama (BHO), also known
as the “HBO president,” was reportedly so addicted to Entourage and
The Wire that he rearranged his campaign commitments in order not to
miss an episode — apparently spellbound by the media world’s ability
to be more real than “ordinary life.” As Baudrillard notes,

[T]he truth of mass media is that they function to neutralize the
unique character of actual world events by replacing them with a
multiple universe of mutually reinforcing and self-referential media.
At the very limit, they become each other’s reciprocal content — and
this constitutes the totalitarian ‘message’ of the consumer society.

Turning life into escapist entertainment is, Neal Gabler observes, “a
perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of modern
existence.” Celebrity — one of the manifold obsessions of our age — is
the (post-)modern state of grace, “the condition in the life movie to
which nearly everyone aspires.”

It is not any ism but entertainment that is arguably the most
pervasive, powerful and ineluctable force of our time — a force so
overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life. As a tool of
analysis, entertainment may just be what undergirds and unites ideas
as disparate as Boorstin’s theory of manufactured reality, Marshall
McLuhan’s doctrine of media determinism, the deconstructionist notion
that culture is actually a collectively scripted text, and so much of
the general perspective we call postmodernism.

Welcome to “the world of post-reality”: Life as the biggest, most
entertaining, most realistic, omni-ever-present movie of all. Politics
was, according to Gabler, among the very first arenas, after
journalism itself, to adopt “the stratagems of show business” — a
“Hollywoodization” marked by “commercialization … the disregard of
privacy, the trivialization of the serious … the erosion of the
boundaries between the real and the imagined, between fact and
fiction, and between news and entertainment.“

Both journalism and politics have modeled themselves on advertising
copy: very brief messages — visual images and sound bites — requiring
extremely low concentration spans; the use of words to form high-
impact images instead of arguments appealing to the intellect. As
Colin Crouch points out:

Advertising is not a form of rational dialogue. It does not build up a
case based on evidence, but associates its products with a particular
imagery. … Its aim is not to engage in discussion but to persuade to
buy. Adoption of its methods has helped politicians to cope with the
problem of communicating to a mass public; but it has not served the
cause of democracy itself.

The post-WWII-era politician has, according to Gabler, “simply become
another kind of star, the political process another form of show, and
television its best stage.” In the early 1960s, Norman Mailer
prophesied — with JFK in mind — that “America’s politics would now be
also America’s favorite movie.” Reagan compared his daily routine at
the White House with the routine of an actor: preparing at night for
the next day’s lines and scenes. Clinton was labeled the “Entertainer-
in-Chief.” Politics has been transformed into “politainment” —
presidentialized, “Hollywoodized,” “post-democratized.”

Silence is banished as media images and texts never fall silent:
"Images and messages must follow one upon the other without
interruption,” as Baudrillard points out. In order to “hit the
jackpot” in this entertainment-driven, celebrity-oriented climate,
Neal Gabler notes, it becomes vital to grab and hold the public’s
attention:

It is a society in which those things that do not conform — for
example, serious literature, serious political debate, serious ideas,
serious anything — are more likely to be compromised or marginalized
than ever before. It is a society in which celebrities become
paragons because they are the ones who have learned how to steal the
spotlight, no matter what they have done to steal it. … [i]t is a
society in which individuals have learned to prize social skills that
permit them, like actors, to assume whatever role the occasion demands
and to ‘perform’ their lives rather than just live them. The result is
that Homo sapiens is rapidly becoming Homo scaenicus — man the
entertainer.

Obama the entertainer is expected to be “a combination of scoutmaster,
Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen and father of the
multitudes.” Gene Healy has observed the unrealistic expectations
Americans have of their presidents, predicting that Obama will end up
as a failed president. Perhaps Healy’s conclusion is exaggerated –
according to Clotaire Rapaille, Americans see their president as a
kind of "movie character" whose primary function is to provide "cheap
entertainment" – but the decreasingly hagiographic media reports
largely seem to tell the same story, portraying an increasingly fading
icon elevated to the pinnacle of power by mediatized, elite-
orchestrated mass hysteria:

People scream and faint at [Obama’s] rallies. Some wear T-shirts
proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community
organiser.” An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country,
above the world; he’s sort of God.” … Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly
cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly
discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world,” to
“transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of
evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth.”

By the new politics of entertainment, “the presidency has become the
circus, the media are the ringmasters and we all sit in the bleachers
clapping, stamping and cheering for the show to go on.”



”Shipwrecked by the Laughter of the Gods”: The One-World Dream
Dismantled

Given the power of the media to transform reality into images and the
evidence that Black-Jewish power politics are in the background of the
Axelrod-Sorkin-designed presidency, the general issue of ethnic
conflicts of interest and resource competition played out in the media
becomes critical.

Ethnicity, tribalism and ethnic conflict are a continuing reality in
world affairs and ethnic conflict is at the heart of the construction
of culture in contemporary Western societies. Issues of
cosmopolitanism, tribalism, race and ethnicity can be said to have
been revived in the aftermath of the descent of the nation states in
the West. Global, reciprocally competing tribes — Jews, Occidental
Whites, East Asians etc. — are today’s quintessential cosmopolitans in
contrast to the narrow horizons and infighting passions of the
territorial-centred nations of modernity. As Joel Kotkin points out:

Born amidst optimism for the triumph of a rational and universal world
order, the twentieth century [ended] with an increased interest in the
power of race, ethnicity and religion rather than the long-predicted
universal age or the end of history. The quest for the memory and
spirit of the specific ethnic past has once again been renewed; the
results will shape the [21st] century.

The “social volcanoes” of racialized tribalism are reportedly
erupting: “The nation-state no longer has a dominant ideology to
supply a social glue for the modern world, so we are seeing … the
nation breaking-up into warring ethnic and racial groups.” The
fossilized nation-states of the West — dominated by elites still
clinging to a worn-out “Enlightenmentism” of by-gone days — have been
transformed into obscure “museums for freedom and the Rights of Man,”
reducing the political left to “a pure moral injunction,” in the words
of Baudrillard:

A morality of Truth, Rights and good conscience: the zero degree of
politics and probably the lowest point of a genealogy of morals as
well. This moralization of values was a historic defeat for the left
(and for thinking): that the historical truth of any event, the
aesthetic quality of any work, the scientific pertinence of any
hypothesis would necessarily have to be judged in terms of morals.

A “renaissance of particularisms” is occurring; as central governments
have begun to wither, “regional and tribal identities are being
revived”. “Enlightenmentism” is gradually outranked by a cosmopolitan
variant of tribalistic particularism. Under these circumstances, those
who play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules of individual isolation
”can be easily defeated by collective ethnic and tribal cooperation”:

[E]conomic libertarianism is blind to the realities of race, religion
and ethnicity, and will fail for this reason. Natural selection in
the economic sphere will destroy those who follow the way of economic
libertarianism, where others do not. … The unit of human survival is
the tribe, rather than the isolated individual … It is the only
remaining possibility for human survival against the coming ecological
and economic tsunami.

Samuel E. Heilman describes the way, “following on the heels of a
renascent black consciousness, a celebration of ethnicity emerged at
the end of the sixties as a response to the decline of the WASP
establishment, which the revolutionary atmosphere of the decade had
ensured.” The resulting re-emergence of tribalism can be observed in
numerous signs of the times, as in the paradoxically race-charged,
iconic status and tribal aura of Black leaders such as Nelson Mandela
and Barack Obama. There are traces of tribal identities in Obama’s
memory of his grandfather’s experiences with British racism in Kenya
and in the self-proclaimed “fortification” of Obama’s racial identity
during his time in Chicago. As Grant Farred confirms,

what is salient about Obama’s politics is its specifically South
African roots. Obama traces his political awakening to the divestment
movement [….] Obama locates himself within a radical African-American
tradition of internationalist thinking that connects him intimately to
black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Panthers, both of
whom forged links with African anti-colonial or liberation movements.

Ama Mazama argues that “it is evident that race, even when, or
especially when its significance is minimized on the surface, remains
at the forefront of any meaningful understanding of the Barack Obama
phenomenon.” Obama (as well as the hard core of his entourage) seems
to personify a post- or late-modern amalgamation of racialized
tribalism and cosmopolitanism. In a global age, ethnic or tribal
interests are played out on a global scale, transcending the linear
borders of the decaying nation states.

The failure of the United Nations — intended to be “an embodiment of
Enlightenment rationality” — is also the failure of the one-world
dream. Processes of globalization and re-tribalization, “in breaking
down the social cohesiveness of the nation-state, will also break down
the social cohesiveness of any sort of one-world community based
around the United Nations.” The dysfunctional asymmetries of
contemporary “Enlightenmentism” are too obvious to derail whites from
eventually taking part in the same ballgame being played by hegemonic
minorities with victimological claims to moral superiority.

Implosion and Exhaustion: The Twilight of Western Civilization?

As demonstrated in The Culture of Critique, aggressive minority
activism can have a destabilizing and even transformational effect on
a civilization's oligarchic nucleus (its elites), gradually being
transmitted by mimesis into mainstream culture. With growing degrees
of coherence, structural complexity and heterogeneity, even minuscule
causes and self-catalyzing reactions can sometimes have fatal, long-
term effects.

As Gregory G. Brunk points out, the greater the level of complexity,
the closer a system (e.g., a civilization) is to a completely critical
state. As societal structures become so inter-connected and sensitive
that failure in one important subsystem affects all others, the whole
hierarchy sometimes comes crashing down like a house of cards, as
demonstrated by the financial collapse of 2008.

Under the instability of the system, orchestrating social control
becomes crucial in order to keep the centrifugal forces at bay. Post-
democratized states in the West address the control issue by imploding
into “risk-avoidance organizations,” in which security displaces
freedom and equality in the hierarchies of values and priorities. The
quest for security occurs in a heated atmosphere of constant stress
characterized by apocalypticism, alarm, excessive media spin,
dialectical extremes of heaven and hell, epidemic hysteria and moral
panics:

Idioms of risk, trauma, threat, catastrophe, conspiracy,
victimization, surveillance; social, moral, and environmental
degradation; recovery, redemption, the New Age, and the New World
Order permeate the airwaves.

Under such extreme conditions, radical surveillance and risk-
management strategies are in great demand and good supply —
facilitating, as Clive Norris observes, “the power of the watchers
over the watched not only by enabling swift intervention to displays
of non-conformity but also through the promotion of habituated
anticipatory conformity.”

Accelerating surveillance becomes “fluid” and omnipresent — even
merging with show-business in the form of “Big Brother”-style reality
TV, a radical transmutation of Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare. As
Daniel Boorstin observed: “Acting like a cultural Ebola virus,
entertainment has even invaded organisms no one would ever have
imagined could provide amusement.” Indeed, the “liquid” stage of late
modernity is characterized by a “spinning vortex of events,” “gigantic
circumvolution” and circular flow: Politics and government retreat
into bureaucratized risk-management and omniscient surveillance.
Surveillance penetrates everyday existence and entertainment. Showbiz
flows and soaks into politics (“politainment”). And democracy
dissolves into diffuse post-democracy as Western civilization
undergoes a process of obscuration, gradually losing its distinctive
features. The wheel has turned full circle."

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...n-SignsII.html