The Two-Party System, Part IV

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4423
Date Written:  2015-05-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2015
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20956

"Progressive" institutions, organizations, and ideologues have clung tenaciously to the faith that the two-party system remains an eternal, ultimately unchallengeable reality.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

The realities of electoral politics changed radically in the 20 years since Reagan's deregulation of the media. The same corporate media transformed itself into what observers called a public affairs entertainment programming. Not only did cable television became endemic, but the growth of the internet has also helped provide new citizen-consumers with the power to choose the most comforting bits and pieces to structure their own sense of reality.

This made politics increasingly a conflict of hallucinations. In lieu of a debate over issues or even substantive values -- matters of war and peace or global warming -- "news" highlights what maximizes viewership (and advertising revenues).

With the presidency little more than a communicator, the mouthpiece for the real power remained in the large, unelected layers of what Eisenhower had quaintly called the Military-Industrial Complex, sustained by armies of lobbyists. Ironically, with politics increasingly reduced to the presidency, the presidency itself became increasingly an issue of celebrity.