The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture. To such an extent that there exists today a seamless web between our political, economic, media and consumer cultures wherein the modes and values of one are completely integrated and compatible with the others...
In such a setting our political choices like our consumer choices, regardless of the product, are primarily about what makes us more fulfilled and feel better about ourselves.
Senator Obama's campaign understood much better the impact of these changes on our electoral system than any of his opponents' campaigns. In the post political world, the campaign that is less political and less issue-based but is savvier in using new modes of communication technology will be the campaign to win the greatest market share of the electorate. The candidate in this case,
Obama, was not a political entity but, in essence a product, an ornament that made his supporters feel better about themselves...John Edwards campaign on the other hand was dead on arrival. His theme and emphasis was America's ever widening class differences, a platform as truthful as it was irrelevant.
The use of the word "class" will end any political career in America. That truth violates the primary narrative that our elite use to justify their legitimacy, which is the supposed meritocratic nature of America society.
The post political constituencies have absolutely no interest in class, whose very acknowledgment are the bases of all real politics and whose acknowledgement would only lead to an existential crisis in its ranks. In the post political period the only differences allowed can be in style and modes of consumption.- Joe Bageant,
"Life In the Post Political Age"http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/16042/I read this article, and found nothing to disagree with. It is merely a restatement of what Thomas Frank covered in the 1990s in a brilliant series of essays, collected by Lewis Lapham , with titles like "Commodify Your Dissent", and "The Rebel Consumer".
All that remained was for the political operatives to turn Mr. Frank's insight into their SOP. That's been done. All the candidates are, more than ever, packaged and sold like energy drink. When Nixon did it, he came across phony. Today, its all an entire generation has ever seen. The new generation think politics was always about nothing more than personalities and gotcha. That media wasn't always nothing but pro-GOP spin and anti-Dem slander. They have no experience to the contrary.
I would love to believe that the majority of people vote because they understand the issues. But, based on what I have seen at DU, people vote, as the author says, for "what makes us more fulfilled and feel better about ourselves". They vote for celebrity images, not issues.
Even if Bush hadn't bludgeoned democracy to death from above, the corporatization of politics and media has poisoned it from below.
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This meaningless, but extremely well-delivered, speech in Berlin just convinces me that people have no clue what democracy is about. If they did, they would be spending their precious time screaming for Nancy Pelosi's head on a platter for appointing Porter (pal of Felix Rodriguez) Goss as ETHICS chair of the House, instead of yammering on about yet another vague, but uplifting, speech.
I'm not against Obama. I'm voting for him. No contest. I just have a different set of priorities. Namely saving meaningful popular democracy in this corporate-ruled hellhole of a country.
Goss is one more big shovel full of dirt onto the corpse of our democracy. (Why is the Democratic leadership APPOINTING known CIA/neocon operatives??? An "ethics" appointment for this slimeball is a slap in the face to every honest politician.) Obama's speech is merely a media event that changes nothing about Obama's policies. (And we already know his policies; so what's the news? The news is that he is "popular".)
Judge our priorities by the amount of coverage these two events get.
Then, tell me we are still a democracy, in the political sense of the word.
arendt