USA 2020. Violence and the Technological Impasse. Part 4.
This is Part 4 of the discussion between Research Fellow Andreas Wilmes, PhD and PhD Researcher, Andrew Keltner. This piece deals with electoral fraud and the difference between political tactics between the republican and democratic parties of the USA.
Andreas Wilmes :
Last week, the Trump campaign released a 234 pages document of affidavits regarding voter fraud. Two days ago, thousands of pro-Trump supporters rallied the “Million MAGA March” in Washington DC. However, Democrats keep considering that the election is over. What are your thoughts on those current debates? Several political commentators drew comparisons between today’s elections and those in 2000. Does that seem relevant to you?
Andrew P. Keltner :
In general it seems that there is too much going on for me to understand what is really happening. I dug up three different sources about the issue and came to the following conclusion : there is fraud that happens, but it is on such a small scale that it is inconsequential, and even in some cases fraud by a ‘momentary lack of judgment’, for example, “ [In] Wisconsin, a task force charged 20 individuals with election crimes. The majority charged were individuals with prior criminal convictions, who are often caught up by confusing laws regarding restoration of their voting rights.”. This came from The Brennan Center For Justice, a ‘nonpartisan law and policy institute’ in New York City wrote that “[A] look at the facts makes clear fraud is rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to necessary to “rig” an election.” This report was done in 2017, after the 2016 elections but seems to make clear the idea that in the US there is little ability to have a type of election fraud that could change a whole election. However, after looking at the nonpartisan position I think it is good to see both what democratic and republican institutes had to say on the issue, and more up to date. The democratic view is obvious, that there was no voter fraud, but it is interesting that The Democratic National Committee has not put anything on their website about the issue. Finally, even The Heritage Foundation found that there have only been 1,302 cases of voter fraud. Finally, I will add that the New York Times published an article titled The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud. It seems that there is very very little chance that this occurred, at least from the institutions and their methodologies.
With that said, I will mention the report from the Brennan Center again, which was published in 2017, happened to mention the case in Florida 2000. Their report even included a study from the Washington Post that looked at elections from 2000-2014 that said “out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Even this tiny number is likely inflated, as the study’s author counted not just prosecutions or convictions, but any and all credible claims.” However, Cambridge published an article in which the author said, “overvoted ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida included more than 50,000 votes that were intended to go to either Bush or Gore but instead were discarded. This was primarily due to defective election administration in the state, especially the failure to use a system to warn each voter when too many marks were on a ballot and allow the voter to make corrections. If the best type of vote tabulation system used in Florida in 2000—precinct-tabulated optical scan ballots—had been used everywhere in the state, Gore would have won by more than 30,000 votes.” So it seems that we see that there are many conflicting issues on this. Some of them are coming from a more emotional and ‘sport-like’ mentality to sports in my opinion, but even expert opinions leave the question open to debate. For the relevance of this election to the 2000 election I think we should be wary to not conflate or oversimplify the two issues. However, finally I will add: anything MAGA to me seems like a fanatic mentality, the whole phenomena reminds me very much of sports.
A.W : May you expand on the comparison you just drew between sports and US politics?
A.P.K :
When it comes to republicans and democrats we see that many supporters are willing to take the side of their ‘favorite team’ rather than think critically about the state of the political atmosphere and their responsibility as a citizen. This is reminiscent of what I mentioned in the previous interview about the study that was done before elections, which stated the “study from the American Political Science Review in which they “found that only 3.5% of U.S. voters would cast ballots against their preferred candidates as punishment for undemocratic behavior, such as supporting gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, or press restrictions.””
I recently read about the Nika Riots of 532 CE in Constantinople, wherein, based on a political and sporting dispute, somewhere along the lines of 30,000 people died. This rioting is, and perhaps was, very difficult to manage for the common person. However, what I think can be taken from the account in history is that fanaticism and politics are often connected. We can take into consideration the idea of ‘under-dog’ teams winning versus more tenured institutions. This happens all the time in the world of sports, it is called ‘an upset’ in English. But these ideas show that being a part of a massive group, which is, probably too hard to comprehend, seems to give comfort to those individuals that are a part of it.
To go further into the analogy of sports and politics in the USA for contemporary times, both sides have colors, Republicans are red, Democrats are blue. Both do what they can to stifle the others' attempts to work for the ‘Union’ which they both say they are willing to work for. This, seemingly, was an extremely negative by-product of the anger ‘progressives’ felt against ‘conservatives’ for what happened in the Bush years considering the housing crisis, and more importantly the wars in Afghanistan — the Nation where Empires go to Die, or the Graveyard of Empires, as it is known through history — , and Iraq also known as the Tigris and Euphrates and/or Mesopotamia.
However, while the progressives were against war in that instance, the support and aid and planning of the overthrows in Libya, Honduras, the support of Saudi Arabia over Yemen, and the drone program under Obama, were not much contended in the media as it would have been under Bush. Food for thought.
This points again to ‘team based’ tactics, like in sports; and referencing again the good notes from the 3rd interview we did together wherein it was seen that : “if you took a random 20 people, you are marginally more likely to find not one person who is willing to base their decisions on having a functioning democracy.” — (given you take the definition of democracy in the original greek sense or the sense as it was analyzed 2000 years later by C. Douglas Lummis in his book Radical Democracy).
A.W: What is striking with the US is the political polarization regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. This polarization leaves no room for people who, for instance, may at the same time share concerns about police brutality while believing that the West overacted with respect to the virus or people who dislike BLM and cancel culture but take the threat posed by the virus very seriously. What are your thoughts on this?
A.P.K:
I think this is a pretty funny idea to bring up, actually. There are probably a lot of intersections of people who don’t fall into the binary system of republican/anti-mask and democrat/pro-mask people.
What happens then is that the way information and reality is conveyed become completely off kilter of what is real information and an understandable sense of reality. I am reminded of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard and their ideas of simulacra and simulacrum. Wherein what is presented as reality is a false projection of what reality really is. This harkens back to my previous mentionings of the forgetful memory of the US citizen, coming from Gore Vidal's piece on the United States of Amnesia. For there certainly seems that the US is an a perpetual understanding, in the media at least, of life under the system of 4 years. Other societies and political systems do things differently. I think in France it is every 5 years for major elections, while in some countries there is no sense of democracy. But, I digress, what I offer as a sense of political ‘timing’ is to only bring to light that looking at politics in a sense of time is absurd. Politics, a derivative of the Greek word, means something along the lines of ‘matters of the state’. While I appreciate and accept this definition what I find problematic is that the term ‘state’ has been conflated, take for example the United Nations. For while, there is the symbolic idea that Nauru and China are in the same category, or Lichtenstein and Brasil, or Libya and Papua New Guinea, we can see that there is a difference in all those countries. So, politics, in the sense I think is best understood as a state of being, wherein being is tied to experience and existential matters. Anyway, I digress.
What I think has not happened in the US for some time is this understanding of the state, as in a ‘state of affairs’ and further a ‘the things considered for the state of being of what is agreed upon’. Americans are typically good at knowing marginally trivial information about their own nation, but it does not extend upon that. If a person from the heartland of the Midwest (by the way, I implore anyone to tell me where the center of the heartland of the US is) and a person from Baltimore meet, they might be as dissimilar as a person from a Porto to a person from London.
What this thought brings me to is finally again, the idea of an urban right and and a rural right in the US. For, if things were more leftist, then certainly the ideas that came from the European left and Asian left would be more pervasive, but there is any easy answer to this. The Cold War and economic exclusionism.
However, to go back to the simulacrum of the United States, somehow there is a very good, and well-programmed, successful, form of creating a new nation out of nothing. I was recently reading The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Kempeler. Wherein the word ‘hero’ was thrown around to incite rather uneducated people into being a hero in the sense of a brute.
I think in the US there is an idea that ‘might equals right’ or ‘those who win are right’ is even a more popular idea, but when winning comes at the expense of others. What is shocking about this is that there is the development of a ‘hero’ but it is in a cultural bubble. So, in a nation that sees itself being torn apart, the people who want to act heroic are seeming to go towards violence, and completely out of tune with the idea of a hero who can communicate with others. What this means then for your question is that the people who have differing ideas from their standard ‘in-group’ are much less likely to communicate with others from an ‘out-group’.
A.W:
What do we exactly know about US citizens who, like you, are tired of the Two-party system? Further, do you believe there are enough points of agreement between most of them to consider, at least in abstracto, a third way?
A.P.K:
I absolutely do. This is most obvious in Bernie Sanders, who showed that a good amount of people on both sides of left and right liked Bernie in both 2016 and 2020, where even Trump stated that his biggest opponent was Bernie. The LA Times quoted Michael Caputo in 2016: ““The only thing better for Trump than Bernie Sanders getting screwed out of the nomination is if Bernie Sanders wins the nomination,” said Michael Caputo, who worked on the 2016 campaign and remains in touch with Trump’s advisors. “It’s a win-win situation.”” Which came from Michael Caputo who worked for Trump since 2015 as a communications specialist. As well, we see that Trump was scared of Bernie, seemingly due to that fact that he was attacking Bernie as much as Biden. We also see that the polls at the end of February showed that Bernie was projected to beat Trump. Biden did not start his campaign until the end of April. If I am to make a conjecture from this, it would be that the Democratic National Convention once again went against Bernie. This is based on the election of 2016 wherein the DNC, Hillary Clinton, and Debbie Wusserman Schultz actively did almost everything in their power to not let Bernie win the election. What I think might have happened is that once Bernie was leading in the polls again, the democrats saw that the people running could not beat Bernie, so that managed to get Biden to run to swing Democratic voters back towards the more centrist political ideal that the DNC seems to favor. If this were true it means that the DNC would more favourably lose to Trump than change to a political schema more on the left. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez also seems to think that the DNC could have done more to have a better campaign. We also know she was a big supporter of Bernie. It will be interesting to see how her relationship with the DNC and more centrist politicians works out. Anyway, at this point I am uncertain, but the ability to imagine it to the point to need evidence (that a citizen probably does not have access to) leaves enough room to be highly skeptical of the DNC and suspicious of their future.
As for creating a third-way political system among citizens I am not sure the resources are there. Unfortunately I think the two party system, two sides of the same coin, will be the standard in US politics. The only way to change the system would then be from the inside, and this applies to both Democratic and Republican future politicians. So perhaps in a couple decades it will be more common to have leftists, libertarians, etc. in politics, I still think we have some time ahead where the US political identity is based on center-right, and centrist politics, with some room, possibly, for the occasional social program.
A.W :
In his 1961 farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a warning against the military industrial complex. He also stated that Americans must “be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” One can hardly imagine Joe Biden making such an interesting and powerful speech… What are your thoughts on this?
A.P.K:
I’ve always thought this was a great speech and listen to it at least 5 times a year since I heard it first. Funnily enough the first time I heard it was from a song by the musical band Ministry who were quite staunch opponents to the Bush administration’s activities in the Middle East. Which if people forget, was illegal. The journal Social Justice wrote a paper in 2005 stating: “we will establish the validity of the following claims: 1) The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies was a violation of international law. 2) Insofar as the invasion and occupation of Iraq took place under the auspices of state authority, they are state crimes. 3) The state officials responsible for the violations of law pursuant to the invasion and occupation of Iraq are guilty of war crimes.” As well, this was published in 2005, at which time it was estimated between 20,000 and 100,000 innocent people had died. The more recent estimation by Iraq Body Count, which, according to MIT , when it comes to “ attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known.” Even Kofi Annan, said, in 2004, that “"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."”
But going back to your point, I think that this speech is largely forgotten and should be understood by every American citizen. When we think of who this speech was given by — Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military man, a general in the army — we can certainly be in shock that the words were not heeded.
And going back to my opinion on whether or not Biden would say things that would make such an interesting and powerful speech in concern with technology. I think that at this point technology, the military, and the economy are so intricately woven that making a critique of one is as well a critique of the others.
Further, it is not uncommon that critique of the military in the US is met with derision and being seen as an outsider. And while I do understand that the military, like anything else, cannot be entirely good or bad, it should be common to be able to critique and compliment pieces of the military. For, while those do exist, it is such a lazy and simple manner, that nothing is really ever discussed. For example, the ability to say that one thing is good, one thing is bad, etc. While this is simplistic, the rhetoric in the US is very much either for, or against, or no comment on matters of the military. And referring to issues in the US about political conversations and polarization from the previous question, it typically seems that those who are quiet about their opinion might be the most adept at understanding the issues, but the US is a very competitive culture and people seem to like to stick with their own more than not.
But all this is rather secondary to the issue that politicians do not really have a very public or vocal opinion about the military. Of course, there are those who do, but they are typically seen as outsiders. This is in part due to education, for example, I believe most people think that the US won World War II, but know nothing about the USSR’s involvement and death count, nor about the US in Latin America. What is sad about this platform is that most who read this probably know these things. Exemplary of a divide between education, media, and common knowledge. But I would say that if any person who believes themselves to be a patriot and believes in the military then they should understand what Eisenhower said and how it relates to today's world.
A.W :
What do you think about social and mainstream media censorship regarding Donald J. Trump's speeches or statements? Doesn't it exacerbate polarization?
A.P.K:
This is a difficult subject to discuss. On one hand we understand that every private enterprise, whether it be a bodega in New York City, or the cake shop in Indianapolis that denied gay customers, Twitter with censoring President Trump, or Facebook and the Cambridge Analytical work with Trump, legally in the US there is the right to accord your own business to those who you want to sell to.
With that knowledge, we see that legally ‘free speech’ is somehow intact. However, it comes with a price, for, ‘free speech’ when it was conceived for the initiative/project/experiment of the United States as a sovereign country apart from England, there was probably never the idea that social media, or media as it exists today would exist. Simply, the imagination of the best politicians, scientists, and thinkers at that time could, most most likely not predict what their words might have meant.
However, let us take play with the idea that they, the authors of the Constitution — mainly James Madison — were premonitious or even so forward-looking to all conditions in the US that their ideas match with the modern state of the US. Antonin Scalia would like this approach as a literalist of the US Constitution, however disputed his tenure as a member of the Supreme court was. However, with that teologic view, one in which history proves itself, we have to ask if what is happening in the US, currently, is bad or good. For, if the US is to have true free speech, then the economic foundation of it is to have it as well. Which means that social progression, aside from contemporary issues are to be contended at all times. It would be the rights of anyone to say and promote any idea. From this we see in one sense that while there are social and even ethical absurdities in the US, like not letting blacks into certain businesses in the 1960s, some of the same rights that phobic people use are the same rights that allow other peoples and political ideas to flourish.
With that being said, it seems to me that it is completely within the right of a business to say what it wants, under the US Constitution. After the Civil Rights movement this changed, thankfully for the benefit of minority populations. However, what we miss as ethical beings is that it took so long for those rights for minority groups to come along. I am not sure if we can consider this problem as a paradox or contradiction. For, while I feel no one should be silenced, it is inevitable that it will happen. But further, the notion of the citizen should not be to be concerned with who is being silenced but with who is doing the silencing. For, if you are an institution that has the power to silence, then you are an institution that needs to be understood. In the case of the media going against human decency, then people should live and fight (internationally) against institutions that rescind their own responsibility to be decent.
However, what I am speaking of is a bit too idealistic. There are many layers of who should be able to say what-should-be and not say what-should-be. As well, obviously there will always be the difference, argument, and even total rejection of what the other says. However, this should not keep us from understanding something quite simple, which is: politics has a flux just as abstract and unpredictable as any other human interaction. What is important to remember is that anytime you take a side, on any matter, if you are not knowing the proper knowledge of the matter, you are not doing due diligence and therefore cannot speak as an authority. To admit shortcomings is a necessary form of communication.
Finally, I do think that censorship exacerbates polarization. However, we have to consider the battle between censorship and freedom of speech and as well the types of censorship that happen. Unfortunately, at this time I do not think we can understand the whole role that social media, and media in general, will play into the future. Of course, at this point, aside from my traditional scepticism of the media in general, it is important to understand how history can develop aside from the ideology in the mediums of media.
A.W: What are your thoughts on the obvious and quite radical differences in media treatment about the current question of voter fraud?
A.P.K: Sports-esque again. A question of who plays for what team. For example, Steve Bannon, the original star player in the 2016 Trump Campaign was found recently of Misinformation Pages on Facebook and was published by Gizmodo, who were writing on a piece from Avaaz and their monitoring of how facebook treated Bannon. The article from Gizmodo has the following information about Bannon’s activity on facebook:
“Avaaz said that it alerted Facebook to the pages on Friday night. By that time, in aggregate, Avaaz says the top seven pages—Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War—had collectively gained over 2.45 million followers. In some cases, Bannon and Brian Kolfage, co-conspirator in the “We Build the Wall, Inc.” fundraiser/alleged scam, were co-admins.”
And further stated from Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran, that:
“We’re a small team run with small donations,[...]”
And ;
2. “If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them.”
The Gizmodo piece finally states that: “The group didn’t need an army of 35,000 moderators to figure this out, and yet Facebook consistently fails to spot the troublemakers that journalists and researchers with less funding and staff seem to keep spotting.”
From my intuition, we need to think about how all these online presences are corresponding to each other. For, while it seems there is a good and a bad side to how these matters are dealt with, we do not completely understand the ethics, beliefs, and further — facts — of the matter. I, personally, think Bannon is a top propagandist and exploiter of the ‘know-nots’ and the ‘those-in-power’ — meaning, I do not think he is an altruistic person. So, we cannot take what he does, says, or creates, as being for the common good.
The Democrats, and not so much considering, right now, the last four years, operated with Obama’s campaigns and facebook. However, we see that Obama and facebook were also working in their own schema.
For all intents and purposes, I would say that, simply, that social media is not understood completely in the timeframe of how they manage their legalities and those legal correspondences to political movements. We know that personal data is an important thing to be understood by all citizens. Zuckerberg for instance recently said:
““We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely,” Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday. “While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line.””
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO who told staffers Bannon had not violated enough policies to justify ban when he called for beheading of Anthony Fauci.
But social media does this. Let us not forget of the social media issue of Twitter and ISIL issue. A study by the Brookings Institution and the Brookings Institution on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, in the Executive Summary concluded that:
“Social media companies and the U.S government must work together to devise appropriate responses to extremism on social media. Although discussions of this issue often frame government intervention as an infringement on free speech, in reality, social media companies currently regulate speech on their platforms without oversight or disclosures of how suspensions are applied (section 4.4). Approaches to the problem of extremist use of social media are most likely to succeed when they are mainstreamed into wider dialogues among the wide range of community, private, and public stakeholders.”
— which was the last statement, however, in the second to last statement it was written that,
“Further study is required to evaluate the unintended consequences of suspension campaigns and their attendant trade-offs. Fundamentally, tampering with social networks is a form of social engineering, and acknowledging this fact raises many new, difficult questions”.
Further, the
“Three crucial questions surround the debate over suspension of terrorist social media accounts in general, and ISIS accounts in particular.
• Is it ethical to suppress political speech, even when such speech is repugnant?
• Do suspensions destroy valuable sources of intelligence?
• Do suspensions have a detrimental effect on targeted networks?”
This comes down to a further problem I wish to understand more, which is basically advertising and marketing. Which seems to be the largest and most misunderstood cross-section of business and public education ever; meaning that: marketing and advertising are headed in the future even more towards being online and in social media — which are the biggest resources for news and information.
Aside, these tactics are propaganda nonetheless, and are tied to marketing and advertising, and eventually the more traditional form of media. One big figure in the US, Europe, and rather globally is Edward Bernays, who has been shown to demonstrate how Psychoanalysis shapes consumer culture.
These practices in advertising, marketing, politics, media, and together used as propaganda could be looked at as a difference of urban right politics and rural right-wing politics. Formerly as I mentioned as centrist and right-wing politics, but will now be considered differently as: Secular-right politics and Christian-right politics.
But back to the question of voter fraud, I think the Biden campaign most likely won fair-and-square, for sure. Anyway, we will not know by looking at the traditional manners of voter fraud, but should look, nonetheless, and for the future, towards how elections are frauded by legal, but misunderstood, untested, forms of communication.
Personally, I prefer to think that this is the world we were given and to go from there. Not to take these things as seriously as we would like because they make us feel comfortable. But, because they simply do not help us, nurture us, or teach us — therefore, it seems that in a sense the media has become obsolete and left to the citizens to perform their will how they wish.
A.W :
It seems to me that, in general, the left and the right have different epistemologies when it comes to analyzing current news. The left is more or less into “verificationism.” Everything is about fact-checking. The right is more into “consilience” (in a much broader sense than what Whewell meant by this concept). Everything is about connecting the dots. On the one hand, fact-checking can be incredibly poor (e.g., there is no fraud because expert/official Mr. x said so) and its scope is quite limited. On the other hand, consilience is of little consequence if it is not based on relevant facts or inductions (as you mentioned, some claims about fraud have been proven to be misinformed). Now, according to me, rather than trying to understand their opponent’s epistemology, both left and right merely focus on the most conspicuous shortcomings of their opponent's reasoning. Would you concur with this (all too brief) analysis?
A.P.K :
This reminds me of several things I mentioned before: 1) one team against another — so while truth gets abandoned, there is still a competition to see whose rhetoric, or propaganda is the best; 2) this then transforms into ‘might equals right’ problems — wherein if you win the debate then that is good enough, critique of the method is not important; and finally 3) I think these two manners of political dialogue demonstrate somewhat of larger problem in the US and that is that even truth is second to freedom.
While this seems like a really large problem, in the US, from afar, it seems that radical freedom beats the need to know the truth. From both sides. And if we take my sporting analogy to an even further extent, the game being played is whether or not the more urban-secular-center-right (democratic party) or the Christian-rurual-right-wing (republican party) can beat the other in a veritable high school debate.
So, I would say that your analysis is good, however I would use the word epistemology less and more likely just say rhetoric.
A.W :
I see some differences between US politics and sports. According to Norbert Elias, the history of sports cannot be separated from the civilizing process. On the one hand, sports leave room to the cathartic effects of violence (to simplify a lot, it pacifies social relations by allowing people to let off steam in a specific context). On the other hand, this catharsis is framed by rules and constraints which, throughout history, gradually tend to become more and more demanding (this even applies to combat sports). There is a ritualized dimension here that is not found in US politics. What would be your answer to this?
A.P.K:
The simple answer would be not against Norbert Elias with this idea that sports is part of the civilizing process. This is perhaps the better notion to agree with. We look at the importance of major sporting events and global affairs, for example in the Olympics or even further into the World Cup, etc. With all political affairs aside from the disgruntled and rightly-to-be criticism of these sporting events there is a seemingly lack of ritualization in politics as if it were to be compared to sports.
However, I contend that attitudes and beliefs and behaviors can be transposed from one dimension of life to another. For this example between sports and politics I think the transposition is simple. Again, it is an us versus them mentality. Of course there are many problems with this comparison.
With this in mind I suggest we look only at the difficulties of interpreting the political and technological atmosphere in the US. Of course, I will make some slight comparisons to sports along the way, but fully recognize that this is an analogical method that is in lack.
For me now, what is the most interesting thing about the political process in the United States with regard to the voter fraud thing is that people seem to, without effort, simply suppose their own side. The simple fact seems to be that keeping up with all the information around the voter fraud issue is that while there are people really trying to know what is happening without having a position on the final conclusion, we actually do not hear from them. We, from the US, seem to only hear that it is this way or that way. Personally, from my own rationalization, I think Biden and Harris won the election. However, I make this claim from my ‘arm-chair’ philosophy. Because I am not an expert on these issues I have to reserve the position that I am almost just as much at a loss for what is really happening with the affidavits, testimonies, etc.
What I find even more interesting however, is that while this position is rational, however the media shows us that people, depending on their side of the dyadic political spectrum that exists in the US (which again, I think can be best summarized as a center-right-urban party and a right-wing-rural party), are not willing to think critically about the lawful political process in such a case. This seems as well supported by the reports from the American Political Science Review wherein it can be concluded that “96.5% of people are not willing to change their opinions”.
So, with this information and how the media portrays the people of the USA, it seems that things are functioning very much like with a sports mentality. Let’s think of some comparisons in the sporting world. A fan of French football would never become a fan of Italy, nor support them, less of course perhaps Italy and Germany are in a final of the World Cup. However, French football fans might rightly support Cote’d’Ivore if they were to play against Italy or Germany. A Chicago Bears fan might never support the Detroit Lions, lest it be against the Green Bay Packers. Perhaps even in Cricket there are predilections over what commonwealth nation supports other commonwealth nations, for example, India and Bangladesh having a common support of each other when one of them is facing either New Zealand or Australia, who would as well, be more likely to support each other.
So, if we take this knowledge, it can be seen that people will tend to side with those that are more similar rather than different. For me, this is apparent in US politics. Of course, the ritualization that sports has versus the ritualization in politics is different. However, in US politics I refer back to Gore Vidal and the United States of Amnesia.
A simple question is: when Kamala Harris said she supported all of Biden’s sexual misconduct accusers, why did she then become his running mate? Of course, we can say: “this is politics per usual”, however that is lazy. We really should be concerned with not treating politicians as community members. For, if I went to any public location where I am granted access and saw this type of behavior I wouldn’t want to participate in that atmosphere, however for politics we accept it. So, we see that people are more willing to judge each other in small circumstances, but in large ones we act as if the rules of human reason cease to apply. Which seems to me counterproductive. I would imagine better a world where the common folk treat strangers as they treat politicians now, and treat politicians as strangers. However, it does not work like this.
We see people cite politicians from the moment, in the week, from the news, as if what they say is without repose, but we do not see people with different opinions consult each other to discuss if what was said by politicians. Interesting form of political discourse indeed.
For me at this point, I do not know how or why this us versus them mentality arrived in politics, but I certainly think it exists.
Conclusion by Andreas Wilmes
Covid-19, police brutality, cancel culture, voter fraud: to me, all these topics show that US politics have been surpassed by technological issues. Consequently, there is no longer anything cathartic about political conflicts. Violence is and will always be the blind spot of the technological system. I would even go as far as to say that violence is almost to technological societies what the unconscious is to consciousness. Or, otherwise put, the more we adjust to the technological apparatus, the more violence tends to be pushed outside the boundaries of our consciousness. Cancel culture is activism in the name of non-violence. However, this phenomenon especially shows that our digital age only allows room for continuous and barren sacrificial rituals. The fight against police brutality, as I have shown previously, implies panopticon-like fantasies as well as the utopia of the medicalization of violence — which would ultimately, and at least in theory, lead to a world where the very idea of violence would become meaningless. Regardless of peoples’ take on the current debates on voter fraud, it seems obvious to me that social media and the numerous issues pertaining to voting machines are the prime factors of polarization (politicization here is a way to compensate for what has been left unthought by the technological apparatuses). Finally, technocrats currently see the pandemic as a window of opportunity for new innovations which, as I shall show in an upcoming research paper, may have a quite terrible impact on the way we relate to the issue of violence.
What I just wrote is certainly all too brief and somewhat programmatic. In any event, it certainly shows that I concur with parts of Andrew's critique of political polarization in the US. I believe we may better define our disagreement now. While I see little potential in conservatives to address some of the above-mentioned issues, I see zero potential to do so in the American left (whether alternative left or democrats). In the very way it thinks of the issue of violence, the left is deeply complicit to the technological system. Passion for equality, “inclusivity,” “systemic racism,” Cancel culture... those ways of thinking are nothing else than ideological by-products of the technological society. Constantly, the issue of violence is only dealt with through derealizing it. To be sure, I would still have to substantiate such a bold contention, and this conclusion is not the right place for doing so. Are my views exaggerated or uncharitable? I am sure Andrew has some thoughts on this.Will he be able to make me see things in a different light?Are there further paths for the future of the american left? Our points of agreement and disagreement are getting clearer. But our discussion is certainly far from over…
Photo Credit to Jason Blackeye