Stockholm Syndrome on a societal scale
January 4, 2011
Review of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
IN The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the intrepid Greg Palast digs at length and at some cost into the successful attempts by Florida (run by Governor Jeb Bush) to “scrub” the voting registers of solidly Democrat voters, usually black, and thus allow his brother to win the state. George W. therefore won the presidential election by what was in the end a razor-thin margin backed by a partisan Supreme Court.
This is not only a story about political corruption. It is also about how the right wing, obsessed with competition, creative destruction and the survival of the fittest, always err on the side of the unscrupulous. putting the left at a perpetual disadvantage.
It is also about the compliant media environment that allows corruption to happen. Palast makes calls. He makes more calls. He maintains a dogged, forensic attention to detail in the face of complex documents and the abusive stonewalling of officials. How does he do it, especially as a freelancer? And when most reputable newspapers fail to offer the right environment for investigative reporting these days?
Time after time, Palast’s investigations were rebuffed and ignored and ridiculed by the likes of the Washington Post and the New York Times. By the time the posh papers got around to confirming Palast’s intricate but fully substantiated allegations, it was too late and George W. Bush had already locked himself and his cronies in the Oval Office.
The only backing that Palast received was from the BBC and the Guardian, both – tellingly – run by non-profit trusts. When the BBC and the Guardian actually published his discoveries, they were overwhelmed by abuse from loyal United States citizens, awash in false consciousness, urging the limeys to keep their nose out of things that don’t concern them.
The evidence presented by Palast makes uncomfortable reading. It shows you the dark side of the American state: a corrupt plutocracy in which high-born politicians like George and Jeb pursue power as if it is their personal birthright and don’t appear to care which rules or moral principles are bent or broken in the process, and certainly have no vision or sense of mission that might justify their behaviour, even to themselves. Entitlement is all.
And surrounding them is a motley association of unscrupulous businessmen who are quite entitled to think that they will get their money’s worth if they back the dullest, most docile horse in the race and nobble the rest of them – after all, it is the trough beyond the winning post that counts, not the victory itself.
It is healthier on the mind to believe that our politicians still have our best interests at heart. And it is still almost possible to believe that to be the case. Sure, they are supported by big business, but can it not be argued that what’s good for big business is good for society at large? Well, such a case is always being made, especially in the United States, even as the banks suck up the nation’s wealth and spit it out in ridiculous gambling sprees, even as the corporations eat up the vast majority of the state’s fiscal revenues while thousands die of preventable diseases, and even as the lobbyists pursue policies that no one in their right mind could possibly argue to be in the best interests of the country as a whole.
And so, it may be healthier on the mind to believe that politicians do serve our interests, but it doesn’t appear to be accurate.
What is the difference between Palast’s attempts to expose the brutal undercurrents of western democracy and the common-or-garden conspiracy theorist who sees the tentacles of the Military-Industrial Complex behind every newspaper report and behind every policy failure? Well, for one, Palast’s world is entirely plausible, and exists not through conscious design (by omnipotent outside agents) but by default. This is a coalescing of interests that are no longer properly scrutinised or held to account.
Wealthy and powerful people accumulate more wealth and power as a matter of course, and it takes a huge amount of effort – and the sort of energy that few people without power can actually muster – to break the cycle or even to jam a pointy stick in its spokes. And if you are being ripped off by your elected leaders, by big business, by your service providers, by your utilities and your banks and your food suppliers, it actually makes perfect sense to cover yourself in a big comforting veil of false consciousness and to populate your life with sports stats, royal weddings and celebrity scandals.
It also makes perfect sense for you to internalise the repression, to adjust your thinking to suit the interests of the ruling class and pretend to enjoy your role in what is, you prefer to believe, the natural order of things. After all, knowing the truth just causes pain. And if you fight against injustice, the unjust will fight back, and the injustice is multiplied.
Identifying with your oppressors in order to limit the extent of their oppression is a mode of behaviour based on sound psychological reasoning. This is, of course, Stockholm Syndrome on a grand, societal scale.
