Total spending in the 2024 US election cycle is expected to exceed a record $20 billion, plus unknowable billions in untraceable “dark money.” Officially reported campaign spending in 2020 was a then record $14 billion, with more that 14 million ads run, 80% via traditional TV.
Are we getting our money’s worth, or does this orgy of spending have an inverse relationship to the health of US democracy?
You be the judge. Links follow for two early 2024 ad samples, one each from the Biden and Trump campaigns.
2024 BIDEN AD
2024 TRUMP AD
As Reason Magazine notes, it is now standard for partisans to claim that every presidential election is “the most important of our lifetimes.”
With the Uniparty’s desperate quest to hold onto power increasingly untethered not just from reality, but from the wellsprings of civilized human life, apocalyptic campaign marketing is becoming a reality not just in national politics, but in global affairs. In the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy, doomsday campaigns have metastasized into doomsday governance with potentially lethal consequences for humanity.
The U.S. is currently in hot or cold wars with three nuclear armed adversaries – Russia, Iran and China. Nearly 70% of U.S. citizens believe there is a chance of global nuclear war within the next 10 years.
DAISIES vs. POLITICAL CHANEL
Many campaign historians trace the start of modern eschatological political advertising to Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 Daisy campaign ad. It ran only once, but is frequently credited with effectively ending Republican opponent Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid.
With the enervating 2024 campaign of ubiquitous multimedia fear mongering already ramping up at the hands of a coterie of poisonous political consultants, French luxury brand Chanel recently hired two New York City filmmakers to produce a 60 second ad promoting their presence at the 2024-25 Ready to Wear Show at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris.
The U.S. produced ad debuted this week. For comparison’s sake, take a look.
If the Uniparty is going to bludgeon every voting age person in US swing states with TV ads for the remainder of 2024, ads which quickly go national because of social media, is it too much to ask that they at least make them entertaining and aspirational rather than blatantly, reductively insulting?
This, of course, will not happen because aspirational politics, in which it is felt that voters need to be convinced, are over. The goal is to harden the die hard base and destroy the opposition, in spite of the fact that only 27% of likely voters identify with either branch of the Uniparty, and a historic high 60% of independent voters think neither Trump nor Biden should be president.
Gallup reports that “political independents continue to constitute the largest political bloc in the U.S., with 43% of U.S. adults identifying this way in 2023, tying the record high from 2014.”
Demand for alternatives is high, but against an onslaught of legal resistance by the Democratic National Committee, independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has qualified for the ballot in only Utah as of March. Although he is poised to qualify in six more states, including three key battlegrounds, independent candidates walk a stony path.
Meanwhile, a toxic cocktail of end times thinking continues to infect not just national politics, but real world governance. From doomsday climate alarmism to manipulated global pandemics to loose presidential talk (At a fundraiser!) of nuclear Armageddon, the dark, debilitating imagery of perpetual crisis has become the principal weapon for turning empowered citizens into fearful, dispirited subjects.
CHANGING COURSE
“What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.” Bob Dylan
Although nearly everyone has a least worst preference in these bombastic quadrennial end times election spectacles, their lethal dysfunction is leading the world into a nuclear dead end.
The U.S. has the planet’s most powerful and modern nuclear arms inventory, yet US presidents are often de facto lame ducks within 15 to 18 months of taking office. There is no stable citizens’ regime of control and oversight because power has been ceded to the permanent government in Washington, DC.
The first question one should ask in the current existential political void is, “What are engaged citizens doing?” This should be asked because the democratic spirit is the volunteer spirit. Self-organized citizen activism outside of the corrupt Uniparty system and/or the captive government in the nation’s capital is still the best hope of maintaining even a semblance of democratic self-governance.
Given the manifest failures of so called representative democracy, which is neither representative nor democratic in 2024, reviving equitable power distribution at state and local levels and maintaining meaningful citizen oversight requires some form of direct democracy.
A tiny and wavering sliver of democratic light continues to shine because even after the transnational power grab of the Covid pandemic, there is still enormous citizen driven political innovation happening outside of parties and government.
I continue documenting this organic flowering of civic and political creativity because I believe it offers the best hope for a renaissance of citizens’ democracy.
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