POST-MORTEM

The 2004 election has been the same thing it has been since 1980:
sold-out Democrat runs against thuggish Republican, third parties
with no hope or organization, Democrats lose. The '92 and '96
elections were anomalous in appearance only -- Republicanism won
even when it looked like the Democrats were gaining the top office.
24 years of continuity -- so much for the promise of anything new.
Oh sure, everyone ran a campaign, demonstrating once again the
vitality of democratic vigor -- the demographic picture of
manufactured consent looks the same as it ever did. Democrats in
the upper Midwest, northeast, and West Coast, Republicans everywhere
else.

American voting patterns don't change because Americans don't
change. American politics is about manipulation, and the result is
that, for most Americans, politics doesn't matter. (This has been
observed about American politics since 1964: see Murray Edelman's
book "The Symbolic Uses of Politics" for more.) What matters to
Americans is finance, and their entrapment in a world of money.
Things like gay marriage matter to Americans, too -- but let's keep
in mind that the culture industry/ religious complex that
incorporates American culture today is America's consolation-prize
for its entrapment in lifetimes spent worrying about finance. Hope
for change appears as an illusion under bourgeois democracy.
Electing new people to the offices of the Guardianship of Capital
doesn't matter. If we can't offer any concrete escape from that, we
can't offer anything.