In a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Stewart described what he sees as the nature of the U.S. political system within the Congress today:
This county is held together by hundreds of really talented legislative aides. Their bosses . . . many
times . . . are wind-up dolls. It’s held together by these legislative aides who are relentlessly trying to
do the right thing, and by the thousands of grassroot activists that are trying to get access. And they’re
blocked by a moat of lobbyists and monied interests that prevent the people in that building from doing
the work that best benefits all the people outside that building.
Sigh. Nope, Jon, that’s not it. And really, he’s not even close, because in Stewart’s description the Congress is the equivalent of a teenager in a large, empty house in the middle of the night who is being terrorized by phone calls from a killer: the monied interests. Like the standard horror film trope, however, Stewart doesn’t realize that the killer is already inside the house!
In my own analogy, one I have used before and will continue to use until something changes, Senators and Representatives are little more than employees of the oligarchy. They work directly for the monied interests. The U.S. Capitol is their place of business and, like most businesses in America, customers never really interact with the owner. The oligarchy directs their employees to write laws that benefit them and disenfranchise the rest of the population. To do this they provide legislative cut-and-paste tools like ALEC for the wind-up doll employees, and let other tools like Rick Scott float radical policies just to see how it plays with the electorate. But all the time they are busy working in the back rooms with their employees to do two things: eliminate all taxes and regulations on corporations and the wealthy, while at the same time pushing the rest of the citizenry toward poverty. And Stewart’s description comes apart further when this analogy is examined closer. Congressional politicians are really middle management. The aides are only there to do their bidding, not to direct policy. Lobbyists like the ones comprising Stewart’s fictional moat are only a distraction, a visible representation that voters can vent their anger on, while the corporate oligarchy stays insulated from suspicion. And even supposing grassroots workers make it past the lobbyists, the Congressmen and -woman inside are no different, just another layer of distraction, avatars that merely represent but are not, in fact, the controlling force of this country.
It’s not an accident that things have evolved in this way. The Constitution from its very inception was a document that was designed by and for the moneyed interests of the new nation. And those interests have spent the intervening centuries attempting to erode the democratic portions in order to eventually control the country from the inside, to the detriment of the vast majority of the population. Professor Henry A. Giroux—who moved to Canada because things are so bad in the U.S.—comes as close to expressing the true nature of corporate control of American society when it comes to education:
There is nothing serendipitous about the cultivation and celebration of ignorance and civic literacy
as the organizing principles of much of the corporate media and the discourse of corporate and
ruling elites . . . A host of financial and corporate elites have a common interest in destroying public
education, imposing a pedagogy of repression, replacing public schools with charter schools,
destroying teachers’ unions, and privatizing the education system. They are petrified of public
schools that might promote critical thinking, unsettle the commonplace assumptions that students
rely on, and encourage students to become active and engaged citizens. Such a pedagogy is
considered both dangerous and a threat to those right-wing antireformers who want to turn schools
into high-tech training centers while producing students who revel in conformity and obedience,
and conveniently refuse to hold power accountable.
Written in 2015, Giroux’s description came before the utter debacle of the previous presidential administration and the attendant fascist lurch to the right of a significant portion of uneducated right-wing voters. Things are demonstrably worse today. Though the corporate controlled government is nearly undisguised, they have enough of a tradition of hiding in the shadows that the public still doesn’t understand what they are truly seeing. People are still distracted by a corporate media that focuses all their attention on politics, a theater of the absurd in which those purporting to wield power are little more than minions doing the anti-democratic work of their corporate employers. The media, including Stewart, will never be able to trace legislative proposals back to their true originators because the oligarchy is so adept at keeping themselves hidden. That is the real challenge in fighting against the corporate-fascist takeover of the country.
The one glimmer of hope in the interview was when Zakaria asked Stewart about the Republican emphasis on culture war issues, which Stewart rightly described as the desperate ploy of a party utterly bereft of ideas about governance or the ability to solve the real problems the nation is facing. In his response, Stewart identifies the reason that the culture war is even an issue in the first place. “All these diversity initiatives, critical race theory, and all those other things, are only there because we refuse to actually fix the real problem . . . we won’t actually dismantle the vestiges of systemic racism, all the systemic classism, all the systemic gender issues.” Because the country as a whole—particularly those in government—refuse to even acknowledge the genuine defects in our cultural history, nothing gets solved, and so the oligarchy can then use these as wedge issues to keep people fighting with each other rather than addressing what actually caused those problems in the first place. And it’s here that Stewart, almost inadvertently, demonstrates the way to understand every single issue facing the nation:
I’ll explain it, like, the NFL, right? You know the Rooney Rule? The Rooney Rule in the NFL is
because there are so few African-American coaches, you have to at least interview, like, one of
them. So that’s the rule now. It’s the thing you put in place instead of looking at the owner’s box
and realizing, oh, right, that’s just the legacy of the economic segregation that’s been in our country
since its founding.
This is exactly right. All of the issues facing this country can be traced back to economic inequality, the corporate control of government, and the wage slavery that has been a perpetual part of our lives because of it. Oh, right, blacks aren’t just segregated racially, but economically. Oh, right, the middle class hasn’t just evaporated on its own, it’s been forced out of existence economically. Oh, right, gender discrimination isn’t just a social issue, it’s an economic one. This is how everyone—including Stewart—needs to be thinking if we’re going to make any headway at all in combating corporate fascism.
Another important point that Stewart makes is something I’ve written about before, and that is the war on government itself. The monied elite must make sure that government doesn’t work, so that they can continue to undercut any idea of socialism. Government is the problem, they rail, and therefore it needs to be eliminated, not given greater economic power. Never mind that the largest government handouts by far go to corporations and the wealthy. They need to make sure the average citizen views the government with suspicion so that citizens can’t use it as a vehicle for making their lives better. “If you didn’t know how to govern a country of this magnitude, a country of this diversity, you basically are running on government is broken. And then when you get in office you have to be terrible to prove the original premise . . . ‘This government doesn’t work, and by me not funding it, and breaking it, see? See what I told you? Keep me in power.’” The final thing Stewart said in his interview that rang true, about the moral arc of the nation, is something that needs to be a warning to all of us: “They always talk about arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But it doesn’t bend toward justice by gravity. You have to bend it. And there’s a bunch of people trying to bend it back.” So until we really understand precisely who it is that’s working against us, and what they’re ultimately after, we will always be pushing back in the wrong place.
