Sleight of hand. posted by Richard Seymour

I do, admittedly, like to try out the odd 'magic' trick. This doesn't involve me in any particularly dextrous activity, because a) I don't have the time for it, and b) my hands are spectacularly inflexible. However, as you must know, it isn't even necessary to fuck around with too much fancy stuff. To achieve the desired effect, it is sufficient to distract the mark with some irrelevant behaviour that appears to be central to the trick, yet is not. For instance, while palming a card you might have the mark count or inspect a portion of the deck. You might also keep up an ongoing spiel, a superficially relevant barrage of meaningless data that is supposed to overload the brain so that otherwise trickery on your part goes unnoticed. I think, reader, you detect a parable already. Lenin's Tomb does not suddenly suspend political perspicuity for a foray into gimcrack mentalism.

Quite right. The latest buzz from the liberal left in the United States is that Molly Ivins - hallowed be her name - is not going to support Hillary Clinton for President in 2008. She says it: I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President. I am glad to hear it, and I too pledge not to support this lachrymose ambulance chaser, or any other member of the pampered US bourgeoisie. This is seen as a radical challenge to the Democrats. But what's Ivins so worked up about? Well, apparently there's too much triangulation, equivocation, "clever straddling" etc. Aside from the fact that this misses the point of triangulation, which is not the same thing as "equivocation" (see Hitchens' No One Left To Lie To, one of his earliest ta-ras to the American Left and perhaps his last bout of full sanity), I wonder what exactly it is that Hillary prevaricates about? Ah: "Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq" Except when she does (she's all for it). Oh, and also: "Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo". Well, what could she say? "This woman's brain has liquefied, and all her biological lines are flat - put her on the payroll"? Hillary 'panders' on issues such as "flag-burning". And how does this come to be a surprise? Does not the infantile American Left like its politics diapered in the stars n stripes? Has Hillary not always been a mountebank for capital, willingly purloining the medicine of the reactionary right? Did she not also advocate teenage abstinence, when she was doing her "soccer mom Democrat" thing? Didn't she applaud the bombing of Afghanistan? Isn't she a repellent supporter of Zionism? Didn't she hypocritically support her husband's tax cuts for the rich, before finding herself opposed to Bush's extension of the same logic?

Of course, the former First Lady has started her campaign already, resurrecting her terminal healthcare programme, which in fact involved a costly and complex scheme that would benefit large HMOs where a single-payer system would have been more advantageous and fiscally conservative to boot. She has already been branded "formidable" by President Bush (and how she must bask in that judgement). So perhaps it is important to get these things out of the way, and declare up front that one will not be that much of a sap. As Ivins points out, there is a majority in America that could easily be coalesced around a reformist platform - healthcare, the minimum wage, taxes, the environment, Iraq - so why fuck around with snake oil? Still, if you've read the Ivins article now (difficult as it is to negotiate away from my compelling prose) and still don't see the ruse for which she has fallen, I shall explain: the entire article is advice offered to the Democratic Party and its leadership, as if they were the proper audience for a reformist address. As if, in fact, they were not themselves parties to the ongoing crime. As if one of the leading profiteers from the destruction, military take-over and ethnic cleansing of New Orleans was not Louisiana Democratic Party chairman and Shaw Group CEO Jim Bernhard. As if the Democrats were not themselves thoroughly imbricated and implicated in the Abramoff scandal (like Dick Gephardt, Tom Daschle, or Harry Reid - whom Ivins regards as a liberal). As if most Democrats had not voted for war, and for giving Bush the extraordinary powers that he now wields. As if they had even properly formulated an objection to Bush's conservative supreme court nominations. As if they did not represent a section of the US ruling class that is itself moving sharply to the right, as it has been for some decades. As if the Democrats had not criminalised hundreds of thousands of black men, thus - not at all ironically - leading to their electoral weakness. As if, perhaps, an Al Gore presidency would have been less concerned with such matters as oil extraction and more impressed by environmentalist arguments (whereas in fact Gore owned $1 million of shares in the Occidental Petroleum Company when he recommended as Vice-President that the Elk Hills in California be sold to the same company).

The perplexity in the article at the Democrats' putative spinelessness, purblindness, failure to spot an opportunity when it presents itself, is ubiquitous on the articulate American Left. How do they come to miss every opportunity, the proud blue-staters wonder? Is it really because of Joe Lieberman and the DLC? Is it because of corporate pressure and the right-wing noise machine? Is it because of God and his earthly affiliates? Maybe, some liberal voices venture, gays were too truculent with their demands for gay rights? You really have to be living in denial to miss the fact that this is not political timidity but outright aggression against the Left, the peaceniks, the gays, the blacks, the working class, the disenfranchised etc. The Democrats rely on the support of all these groups, but do not mean them anything but harm, and do not want anything but silence from them.

Alright, granted, sometimes the conduct of the Democrats does puzzle. Why, for instance, did they not challenge the spate of bizarre results in the 2004 election, never mind the manifestly rigged 2000 election? In 2000, the National Opinion Research Centre checked the votes and found conclusively that no matter what way they were recounted - even excluding the question of illegally disenfranchised voters who could not get into the polling station - Gore won the Florida election, and hence his absolute majority of the votes would transmute into a majority of the electoral college votes. So why did Gore 'graciously' concede, and why didn't the Democrats fight it? In 2004, in Florida, there were 237,522 more presidential votes cast than the actual turnout - and this doesn't suggest fraud? In the same year, Clinton Curtis - a registered Republican - signed an affidavit saying that he had been asked during his employment at Yang Enterprises Inc to devise voting software that would allow votes to be stolen without trace - by future Republican congressman Tom Feeney. No worries here, then. During the 2004 election, the exit polls were more wrong than is mathematically probable: The odds of the exit polls being as far out as they were in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida are 250 million to 1. So, some glib explanations were offered: perhaps Bush voters had been overly reticent in talking to exit pollsters (not a credible thesis say statisticians); or maybe the moral majority had spoken. Talk of the morals and values governing the election outcome was shortly ubiquitous despite the fact that, as the Economist pointed out, substantially fewer voters had identified their reasons for their vote choice as moral ones than in previous elections.

Now, it is quite possible that even without substantial fraud going on, Bush would still have won it - because the Democrats did not care to even pretend to offer a serious alternative, because they failed in their endeavour to fetishise the flag more ardently than their Republican opponents, because they couldn't bash gays and criminalise blacks more completely than the theocrats in the White House. However, the fact that the Democrats didn't even ask too many questions suggests that they perceived that their interests lay more closely with allowing the electorate to be ripped off than in stirring up dissent from potentially implacable and ungovernable constituencies. This points not to the 'cowardice' of the Democrats, however, but to the parlous state of democracy and political culture in the US: if the Democrats are happily raking in a fortune on Wall Street, taking bribes from Jack Abramoff, lying through their teeth, weeding out and trampling on the would-be insurgents within, back-stabbing, selling out, jacking up the value of their shares and attacking the poor, then who are they to complain of a little electoral fraud or worry about disenfranchised voters? It's all just tough competition, a plutocratic catfight in which the lower orders are either potential saps or employees.

Back to Ivins' celebrated piece, I note that it doesn't even mention Katrina, murderous neglect, racism, expropriation for the real estate kings, military occupation of the city etc. It extemporises on how to handle the charge of insufficient patriotism (dress up as Captain America would seem to be the answer), but doesn't level the more appropriate charges of murderous imperialism, racism, theft and so on. In fact, it is astonishing to note just how obedient the commentariat have been on this issue. The media treats New Orleans as if the crisis were over, and 'recovery' beginning - and so, it just slips out of the Bush-haters' eyeline. The 'liberal' press, for its part, has found the correct, capital-friendly critique of Bush: the administration, having solicited a plan that would disregard the wishes of residents and allow the destruction of large areas of the city, now refuses to use the plan devised by Nagin and his cohorts. No one, mark you, will dare during an election campaign to step outside the parameters of that 'debate'.

If the herbivorous gaggle of eunuchs on the US left - at least the articulate left, the ones who pleaded with Nader not to stand last time round, the ones who are in such awe of the flag-n-foetus right, the Todd Gitlins who insist tying the left to 'patriotism' (read unabashed American nationalism), the MoveOn cocktail party activists - cannot get beyond worrying about which Democrat will piss on them less, the road to future defeat is mapped out: they shall submissively defer their political engagement to the next electoral pantomime; allow the capitalist media to set the terms of debate; insist on settling for whatever cheap, lousy scumbag the Democrats offer up; furiously impute all manner of hidden radical stances to their candidate (which will in turn be energetically denied by the candidate's agents); lose the election again. And all of this will have happened because instead of supporting the unions, instead of joining the New Orleans residents marching for their right to life and property, instead of trying to forge an organisation that unites the various bases of the left, they were obediently hearkening to the noise and displacement activity and tasks set by capital and its political advocates.