Elections 2000
by Noam Chomsky
The most striking fact about the November 2000 elections is that they were a
statistical tie (for Congress as well, virtually). The most interesting
question is what this shows, if anything, about the state of functioning
democracy. For many commentators, the fact that the presidency "is hinging
on a few hundred votes" reveals the extraordinary health and vigor of
American democracy (former State Department spokesperson James Rubin). An
alternative interpretation is that it confirms the conclusion that there was
no election in any sense that takes the concept of democracy seriously.
Under what conditions would we expect 100 million votes to divide 50-50,
with variations that fall well within expected margins of error of 1-2%?
There is a very simple model that would yield such expectations: people were
voting at random. If tens of millions of votes were cast for X vs. Y as
president of Mars, such results would be expected. To the extent that the
simplest model is valid, the ele!
ctions did not take place. Of course, more complex models can be
constructed, and we know that the simplest one is not strictly valid. Voting
blocs can be identified, and sometimes the reasons for choices can be
discerned. It's understandable that financial services should overwhelmingly
support Bush, whose announced plans included huge gifts of public resources
to the industry and even more commitment than his opponent to the demolition
of quasi-democratic institutions (Social Security in particular). And it is
no surprise that affluent white voters favored Bush while union members,
Latinos and African-Americans strongly opposed him ("supported Gore," in
conventional terminology). But blocs are not always easy to explain in terms
of interest-based voting, and it is well to remember that voting is often
consciously against interest. For example, in 1984 Reagan ran as a "real
conservative," winning what was called a "landslide victory" (with under 30%
of the electoral vote); a !
large majority of voters opposed his legislative program, a!
nd 4% of his supporters identified themselves as "real conservatives." Such
outcomes are not too surprising when over 80% of the population feel that
the government is "run for the benefit of the few and the special interests,
not the people," up from about half in earlier years. And when similar
numbers feel that the economic system is "inherently unfair" and working
people have too little say, and that "there is too much power concentrated
in the hands of large companies for the good of the nation." Under such
circumstances, people may tend to vote (if at all) on grounds that are
irrelevant to policy choices over which they feel they have little
influence. Such tendencies are strengthened by intense media/advertising
concentration on style, personality, and other irrelevancies (in the
presidential debates, will Bush remember where Canada is?; will Gore remind
people of some unpleasant know-it-all in 4th grade?). Public opinion studies
lend further credibility to the simplest!
model. Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project has been monitoring attitudes
through the presidential campaign. Its director, Thomas Patterson, reports
that "Americans' feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high,"
with 53% responding "only a little" or "none" to the question: "How much
influence do you think people like you have on what government does?" The
previous peak, 30 years ago, was 41%. During the campaign, over 60% of
regular voters regarded politics in America as "generally pretty
disgusting." In each weekly survey, more people found the campaign boring
than exciting, by a margin of 48% to 28% in the final week. Three-fourths of
the population regarded the whole process as largely a game played by large
contributors (overwhelmingly corporations), party leaders, and the PR
industry, which crafted candidates to say "almost anything to get themselves
elected," so that one could believe little that they said even when their
stand on issues was intelligible. On alm!
ost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of t!
he candidates -- not because they are stupid or not trying. It is, then, not
unreasonable to suppose that the simplest model is a pretty fair first
approximation to the truth about the election, and that the country is being
driven even more than before towards the condition described by former
President Alfonso Lopez Michaelsen of Colombia, referring to his own
country: a political system of power sharing by parties that are "two horses
with the same owner." Furthermore, that seems to be general popular
understanding. On the side, perhaps the similarities help us understand
Clinton's great admiration and praise for Colombian democracy, and for the
grotesque social and economic system kept in place by violence. And the fact
that after a decade in which Colombia was the leading recipient of US arms
and military training in the hemisphere -- and the leading human rights
violator, in conformity with a well-established correlation -- it attained
first place worldwide in 1999, with!
a huge further increase now in progress (Israel-Egypt are a separate
category). When an election is a largely meaningless statistical tie, and a
victor has to be selected somehow, the rational procedure would be some
arbitrary choice; say, flipping a coin. But that is unacceptable. It is
necessary to invest the process of selecting our leader with appropriate
majesty, an effort conducted for five weeks of intense elite dedication to
the task, with limited success, it appears. The five weeks of passionate
effort were not a complete waste. They did contribute to exposing racist
bias in practices in Florida and elsewhere -- which probably have a
considerable element of class bias, concealed by the standard refusal in US
commentary to admit that class structure exists, and the race-class
correlations. There was also at least some slight attention to a numerically
far more significant factor than the ugly harassment of black voters and
electoral chicanery: disenfranchisement throu!
gh incarceration. The day after the election, Human Rights !
Watch issued a (barely-noted) study reporting that the "decisive" element in
the Florida election was the exclusion of 31% of African-American men,
either in prison or among the more than 400,000 "ex-offenders" permanently
disenfranchised. HRW estimates than "more than 200,000 potential black
voters [were] excluded from the polls." Since they overwhelmingly vote
Democratic, that "decisively" changed the outcome. The numbers overwhelm
those debated in the intense scrutiny over marginal technical issues
(dimpled chads, etc.). The same was true of other swing states. In seven
states, HRW reported, "one in four black men is permanently barred" from
voting; "almost every state in the U.S. denies prisoners the right to vote"
and "fourteen states bar criminal offenders from voting even after they have
finished their sentences," permanently disenfranchising "over one million
ex-offenders." These are African-American and Latino out of any relation to
proportion of the population, or ev!
en to what is called "crime." "More than 13% of black men (some 1.4 million
nationwide) are disenfranchised for many years, sometimes for life, a result
of felony convictions, many for passing the same drugs that Al Gore smoked
and George W. snorted in years gone by," U. of New Mexico Law Professor Tim
Canova writes. The few reports in the mainstream U.S. press noted that the
political implications are highly significant, drawing votes away from
Democratic candidates. The numbers are large. In Alabama and Florida, over
6% of potential voters were excluded because of felony records; "for blacks
in Alabama, the rate is 12.4 percent and in Florida 13.8 percent"; "In five
other states -- Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, Virginia and Wyoming --
felony disenfranchisement laws affected one in four black men" (NY Times,
Nov. 3, citing human rights and academic studies). The academic researchers,
sociologists Jeff Manza (Northwestern) and Christopher Uggen (Minnesota),
conclude that "wer!
e it not for disenfranchised felons, the Democrats would st!
ill have control of the U.S. Senate." "If the Bush-Gore election turns out
to be as close as the Kennedy-Nixon election, and Bush squeaks through, we
may be able to attribute that to felon disenfranchisement." Re-examining
close Senate elections since 1978, they conclude further that "the felon
vote could have reversed Republican victories in Virginia, Texas, Georgia,
Kentucky, Florida and Wyoming, and prevented the Republican takeover" (Los
Angeles Times, Sept. 8). Citing the same studies, the Santa Fe New Mexican
(Nov. 19) pointed out that 5.5% of potential voters in New Mexico -- where
the election was also a statistical tie -- were disenfranchised by felony
convictions. "As many as 45 percent of black males in the state can't
vote -- the highest ratio in the country," though the total figures are not
as dramatic as Florida. Figures were not available for Hispanics, who
constitute 60% of the state's prisoners (and about 40% of the estimated
population), but the conclusions !
are expected to be comparable. "Neither party seems interested in addressing
the issue, Manza said. Republicans feel they have little to gain because
these voters are thought to be overwhelmingly Democratic. And, he added,
`Democrats are sufficiently concerned about not appearing to be weak on
crime that I'm sure they would not be jumping up and down on this'." The
last comment directs attention to a critically important matter, discussed
prominently abroad (see Duncan Campbell, Guardian, Nov. 14; Serge Halimi and
Loic Wacquant, Le Monde diplomatique, Dec. 2000; also Earl Ofari Hutchinson,
Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 14). For the past eight years, Clinton and
Gore disenfranchised a major voting bloc that would have easily swung the
election to Gore. During their tenure in office, the prison population
swelled from 1.4 to 2 million, removing an enormous number of potential
Democratic voters from the lists, thanks to the harsh sentencing laws.
Clinton-Gore were particularly !
devoted to draconian Reagan-Bush laws, Hutchinson points ou!
t. The core of these practices is drug laws that have little to do with
drugs but a lot to do with social control: removing superfluous people and
frightening the rest. When the latest phase of the "war on drugs" was
designed in the 1980s, it was recognized at once that "we are choosing to
have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities" (Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, one of the few Senators who paid attention to social statistics).
"The war's planners knew exactly what they were doing," criminologist
Michael Tonry wrote, reviewing the racist and class-based procedures that
run through the system from arrest to sentencing -- and that continue a long
and disgraceful tradition (see Randall Shelden, _Controlling the Dangerous
Classes: A Critical Introduction to the History of Criminal Justice_).
Twenty years ago, the US was similar to other industrial countries in rate
of incarceration. By now, it is off the spectrum, the world's leader among
countries that have meaningful!
statistics. The escalation was unrelated to crime rates, which were not
unlike other industrial countries then and have remained stable or declined.
But they are a natural component of the domestic programs instituted from
the late Carter years, a variant of the "neoliberal reforms" that have had a
devastating effect in much of the third world. These "reforms" have been
accompanied by a notable deterioration in conventional measures of "economic
health" worldwide, but have had a much more dramatic impact on standard
social indicators: measures of "quality of life." In the US, these tracked
economic growth until the "reforms" were instituted, and have declined
since, now to about the level of 40 years ago, in what the Fordham
University research institute that has done the major studies of the topic
calls a "social recession" (Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, _The Social
Health of the Nation_; see Paul Street, Z magazine, November 2000). Economic
rewards are highly concentrate!
d, and much of the population becomes superfluous for profi!
t and power. Marginalization of the superfluous population takes many forms.
Some of these were the topic of a recent Business Week cover story entitled
"Why Service Stinks" (Oct. 23). It reviewed refinements in implementing the
80-20 rule taught in business schools: 20% of your customers provide 80% of
the profits, and you may be better off without the rest. The "new consumer
apartheid" relies on modern information technology (in large measure a gift
from an unwitting public) to allow corporations to provide grand services to
profitable customers, and to deliberately offer skimpy services to the rest,
whose inquiries or complaints can be safely ignored. The experience is
familiar, and carries severe costs -- how great when distributed over a
large population, we don't know, because they are not included among the
highly ideological measures of economic performance. Incarceration might be
regarded as an extreme version, for the least worthy. Incarceration has
other functions. !
It is a form of interference in labor markets, removing working-age males,
increasingly women as well, from the labor force. Calculating real
unemployment when this labor force is included, the authors of an
informative academic study find the US to be well within the European range,
contrary to conventional claims (Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, Am. J.
of Sociology, Jan. 1999; also Prison Legal News, Oct. 2000). They conclude
that what is at issue is not labor market interference, but the kind that is
chosen: job training, unemployment insurance, and so on, on the social
democratic model; or throwing superfluous people into jail. In pursuing
these policies, the US has separated itself from other industrial countries.
Europe abandoned voting restrictions for criminals decades ago; in 1999, the
Constitutional Court of South Africa gave inmates the right to vote, saying
that the "vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and
personhood." Prior to the "neoliberal!
reforms" and their "drug war" concomitant, the US was head!
ing in the same direction, the National Law Journal (Oct. 30) comments: "The
American Bar Association Standards on Civil Disabilities of a Convicted
Person, approved in 1980, state flatly that `[persons] convicted of any
offense should not be deprived of the right to vote' and that laws
subjecting convicts to collateral civil disabilities `should be repealed'."
Without continuing, the Clinton-Gore programs of disenfranchising their own
voters should be understood as a natural component of their overall
socioeconomic conceptions. And the elections themselves illustrate the
related conception of the political system of two horses with the same
corporate owner. None of this is new, of course. There is no "golden age"
that has been lost, and this is not the first period of concentrated attack
on democracy and human rights. Insofar as the November 2000 elections are
worth discussing, they should, I think, be seen primarily from these
perspectives.
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