Politics in the Era of Marketing

by Will Wilkinson on November 19, 2008

Here’s how to think about American party politics, from IOZ:

To believe [that evangelicals are what ails the GOP coalition], you have to conceptualize the Democrats as being historically something like the party of labor interests, the Republicans as being historically something like the party of business interests, and the crazy minority ID-politics types and the oogedy-boogedy faith-healing millenarian types being respectively the infestations that ruined them. Whereas in reality you have two corporate imperialist factions who differ on how best to keep hoi polloi in line, with the Democrats dangling the carrot of redistributive economic justice and the Republicans offering the illusion of social and moral harmony. Republicans never actually deliver a fag-free, abortionless, desexualized, post-Hollywood culture, and Democrats never do much for the downtrodden, but we live in an era of marketing, whatever, forever and ever, shantih, amen. 

Amen.

Viewing 10 Comments

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    It's always seemed a little facile to me to say political parties are just about corporate "imperialism" or corporate aid.

    Health care reform (granted, it hasn't happened yet) would be a real change that could make ordinary people's lives different (potentially better, I can't say).

    Skimming off the top to redistribute additional wealth to the bottom is a real policy, with real implications.

    Whether or not we go to war in Iraq, or stay there, or start a new war with Iran, is a real policy question that hinges on who we elect.

    Passing a cap-and-trade system would probably not be ideal to the corporate world, but it has the chance to be passed in the reasonably near future, and it is a real policy question.

    Basically, yeah it's true that corporate ties are a big part of the picture, but I think the standard pessimistic public choice picture tries to explain too much from one admittedly important explanatory variable.

    Politicians must successfully navigate and interpolate between a variety of forces in order to get elected and be successful. These include the popular will, other politicians, their own policy preferences, and rich/powerful donors.

    I'm sure there are plenty of principle-free politicians whose whole orientation is based on serving corporate masters + marketing. But in general there are many important forces, and though people can be duped, their capacity for being duped is not infinite, so that their policy preferences are not just about marketing, and their impact on the political process is not negligible.
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    (On the other hand, if these statements are intended to be an exaggeration to get attention and get people to think deeper about these issues, that's fine. But on the face of it, I think people are being too monocausal when they say these things.)
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    "...their capacity for being duped is not infinite..."

    Too large to be accurately measured, but not infinite.

    "...their impact on the political process is not negligible."

    Too small to be accurately measured, but not negligible.
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    I'd second mk's first sentence, with the addendum that whenever someone starts out by saying "corporate" (in the sense used here, equally "corporatist") or "imperialist", it's been a very accurate heuristic to simply assume they're completely full of dung.

    (Corporate masters? If we take "corporate masters" as being simply "they care about there being jobs and production", then it's ridiculous [indeed, harmful] to expect or want anything else.

    If we take it as meaning, rather, "beholden to protect some specific company for some reason", then I'd like more evidence as to who and by what means, because I don't think it stands up to much scrutiny. Certainly it has failed to any of the previous times I've seen it asserted and asked for evidence.)

    Alan: I submit that something too small to measure (or to measure the effect of) is in fact "negligible". It just isn't zero.
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    By now it should be obvious that both parties have more in common with each other than they will ever let on. The amount of money spent on the recent campaigns by both parties, despite claims to the contrary, indicates that there are special and uber-special interests to be served. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that "the people" have spoken.
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    > Whereas in reality you have two corporate imperialist factions who differ on how best to keep hoi polloi in line...

    If the Republicans were offering "competency at governance at the Presidential level" on the menu in 2008, they kept it well hidden from corporate donors. That is why Obama could turn down public financing.

    Christ, re-animate Nixon's corpse! "Tickle-down", deficits, and Neo-Conservatism are all hardly Conservative policies. Give businesspeople a Republican governor they can vote for, without the guilt of handing down to their own children a more abused United States. The loudness and frequency of Bible-Thumping hardly enters into it.
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    Actually "tickle-down economics" sounds like a lot of fun.
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    There was a time when many Democrats did try to help the poor. They weren't good at it, though, and it has been decades since they've even talked about it much. Now it's "the middle class," which, if it's lucky, wont have as much done to it as the poor did in the 60s.
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    Yeah okay, but he does stipulate to a concrete distinction:

    The Democrats are offering an actual carrot while the Republicans proffer an illusion.
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    Because voting for the Democrats has worked so well for inner cities over the past several decades?

    Big-government policies that empirically make their recipients poorer are an "actual carrot" only under a very odd definition.

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