Indeed, after months of everyone saying, "it's all about jobs, jobs, jobs," the public seems to be turning to November 2012 with relish. After all, if you want to do something about jobs-jobs-jobs (and why is there only 3 'jobs'? Don't these tough times call for at least 5 or 6 'jobs,'?), you actually have to take some action, like spend money or actually push through more tax cuts for those oh-so-weary wealthy. But campaigning and stumping is much easier than making difficult choices. Puttin' the leg up on that ol' haybale and talkin' about the greatness of Amurrica is a lot more pleasant than number-crunching with staffers on benefit cuts for veterans and hungry toddlers. 

Public confidence in the federal government is at disturbingly-low levels, and yet we still can't wait to get back into that old familiar business of fiery speeches, overstuffed debates, daily tracking polls, and those infernal, touch-screen electoral-college maps. We can't get our elected officials to actually do anything of substance for us, but we're still eager to battle over the next batch of people who won't help us.

What's going on here? Why are we turning with such masochistic delight to a process that won't actually bring anything to fruition until January 2013, a full 15 months from now? Sure, sure -- we all know the script on pay-for-play politics. Fundraising is a year-round job; campaigns are through-the-roof expensive; the conflict-hungry media feeds the horse-race motif -- yadda yadda. But aren't we all complicit in this, by our tacit acceptance of campaign bullshit as the only acceptable form of political discourse? Sure, it feels good to blame those scoundrels and crooks in Washington for all of our socioeconomic ills. Everyone's an independent or an outsider now. But this faux-detachment allows the pure insider looting of our civilization to roll on with crushing efficiency. When we obsess on the electoral process itself to the detriment of an honest evaluation of reality, we're writing ourselves into the kabuki playbill that has become our national politics.

A bit more on this. The business of campaigning and fundraising has been tweaked, honed, upgraded, tightened, and commercialized to an unbelievably-high level. The overall effect is a double transformation of the federal governing structure, from simple to complex to simple again. First, the simple. The basic reality is straightforward: concentrated wealth consolidates and increases itself by purchasing the government. This is not a difficult concept. It happens everywhere in the history of civilizations: wealth purchases power, filtered through a layer of legitimizing cultural authority, either a state or a church, or a fusion of the two. 

In a large modern economy like the United States, this simple purchase of power by the wealthy has to be transformed into a bewildering set of bureaucratic processes, in order to actually operate. Corporate entities and the business world in general are extremely complex, so old-fashioned bribe and grift will not (always) work. Tax structures need to be crafted and continually refined, to follow the changing needs of business. Government contracts need to be created, justified, inflated, and then spread out across as many geographical districts as possible, to keep political representatives on board. Legal structures have to be tilted to favor the right kinds of property. Electoral laws need to be crafted in such a way that gerrymandering and pay-for-play are kneaded into more palatable layers of action (PACs, bundling, etc.). Chairmanships in Congress are sold openly to the biggest fundraisers, but are then sanitized by national political committees and other organizations. R&D can be expensive and inefficient for private companies to facilitate, so much of it is farmed out to the government and then later transferred back to the private sphere, when it comes time to reap the profits. 

All of this complexity is, frankly, boring. We know that this shit goes on, but there's now so much of it that we're all suffering from scandal fatigue. But we can't forget that this tedious, bureaucratic detail is one of the main mechanisms by which concentrated wealth accelerates its accumulation of the largest slice of the pie. Yes, of course corporations get a lot of their cash from actually being good at producing something of value. But the really big Playas use the federal government to enhance their standing by tilting the playing field to their advantage. How else would an industry like finance, which serves an important business function but is not itself inherently productive, come to comprise almost a third of our national economy? This was accomplished through purchase of government facilities and functions; i.e., deregulation and bailouts.

The second step in the double transformation of politics is to turn the complexities mentioned above back into a simple message for the people. This is where we get the creation of political theater and the apotheosis of ideology. This is the magical stage where message masters, speech crafters, and power pollsters roll out their explanations for, and solutions to, the widespread corruption that we all know is lurking on the banks of the Potomac. For Republicans, the theme is simple: Government bad, business good. This wasn't always their tack. Eisenhower-types and other old-guard establishment pachyderms used to see government as a necessary support-structure for respectable American society. They didn't call for far-flung government expansion, but the possibility of noble government existed -- it just needed vigilance. But as the last four decades cratered the prospects of those of us who are not fortunate enough to be in the job-creating 1% (remember that median household income is basically what is was in the mid-70s for most families, and that's with extra breadwinners in the mix), it became increasingly necessary for our main political parties to explain what went wrong (see this piece on theodicy, with a couple links to other relevant posts). So the GOP shifted to a culture war, anti-elite strategy, equating Big Gub'mint with pointy-headed, liberal, PC, baby-killing Somdomites of all stripes. The badness of government was just one part of an overall civilizational collapse perpetrated by leftists. The only solution was to sweep out the nefarious social engineers, shrink down the government, and put in some honest, John Galatians folks to rescue the federal government from itself. 

Great tactic -- very successful at raising a lot of cash and winning elections. Sure, the GOP may lose a few, like the Obama year, 2008. But continued recession guarantees that the theodicy motif will always be important, and the story that the Republicans tell is very compelling. Of course, it's utterly divorced from political reality. But that's beside the point, when we remember that our two main political parties are essentially functioning as cultural money launderers, transforming the raw purchase of power described above into simple just-so stories for the unwashed masses. 

As covered many times before in this blog, the Democrats also have a theodicy narrative by which they launder the money-into-power process. The Dems' story is a bit more connected to reality, and it has preserved the lofty notion that government can be a force for good. But with the decline of old-guard labor Democrats and the ascension of the triangulating Clintonistas, the Blue Mule fairy-tale has become a huge horse-pill of status quo garbage. So with the Dems, we're always within a fingertip's grasp of 'recovery,' if we can just get that stimulus pump-prime going. Government is good, but by golly, business is also good. A great society goes hand-in-hand with an expanding economy, awesome green jobs, innovative and competitive education, and healthy dollops of social justice. If those obstructionist Republicans would just stop f'in around and chip in with some concessions on taxing the rich, then we could get all of our social insurance programs back on track and reignite 90s-era growth.

Again, nice story, but still healthily divorced from the raw disparities in wealth and power. But just as with the GOP, that's not really the point. The national Democratic narrative is a laundering facility, a nice explanation for why decades of economic growth and pro-business policies have accrued to almost nothing for regular people.

OK, that's enough on that for now. You get the idea. But let's just consider one last thing. Even beyond the laundry facilities described above, I think that deep down, we all know that part of the whole political dance is the depressing fact that rationalizations for failure are already baked into the pie. For example, let's say that Mitt Romney sweeps into office next year, and brings with him veto-proof supermajorities in Congress. The GOP then puts in their full plan: repeal Obamacare, roll back regulation, cut the corporate tax rate, cut the tax rate for the wealthy, scale back the social insurance programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps), and other large cuts to discretionary spending (except the military, which always has a blank check). Will we really have an awesome economic rejuvenation? Almost certainly not. Deregulation and other pro-business policies have been on the books for decades, and we've had economic growth all along. Has all that growth resulted in trickle-down awesomeness for regular folks? Not at all. People who are unemployed and broke and overleveraged and foreclosed are not going to suddenly become credit-worthy entrepreneurs. Banks are not going to suddenly say, "Hey, now that we have so much confidence in this fantastic GOP tax and regulatory structure, let's start opening the coffers and loaning money to millions of people with negative net worth." It's just not going to happen. Massive inequalities in wealth and power are not going to be redressed by increasing the ability of the biggest players to make even more money. It just defies credulity. But I think we all know that the rationalizations for this failure are already worked out ahead of time. Obama will be blamed, just like Dubya was blamed, and that will provide enough cover and time to get to the -- gulp -- next election cycle, and the dance will start all over again. 

Should the unlikely happen and the Dems preserve some semblance of power -- well, we've already seen that script. The Republicans are (rightly) blamed for obstruction. But remember, Obama had a Senate supermajority in his first couple years, and he still didn't push through anything that big business would consider even remotely unpalatable. I can't see a re-elected Obama being bold enough to stray far from the laundromat.