The 2024 Election was Decadent and Depraved Part I

We Were Always Playing with a Loaded Deck

This is the first in a four part series about the 2024 election focusing on political parties as brands. Parts II and III will focus on the Democrats and Republicans specifically and Part IV will outline how this limits our political horizon and why nothing changes.

You may find yourself thinking “The election was a month ago. You’re late to the post-mortem party and no one cares that you’ve read Foucault.” You’d be right, but writing and role playing as an intellectual are vices I have trouble kicking. Old habits die hard.

Rambo II has the clumsiest product placement I’ve ever seen.

While some would call what occurred in November of 2024 an election, a much more accurate description would be the Cola Wars of the 1980s. Our two political parties are first and foremost brands, with literal billions of dollars spent creating, popularizing, and maintaining them. They are also functionally equivalent to Pepsi and Coke in most of the ways that matter. Any honest discussion of politics in 2024 has to start with the parties as brands.

In the same way that a product you purchase may satiate a need you have, political parties may enact legislation and bring about political changes their voters wish for. This all is a very distant second in importance from the party as a brand. Soft drinks famously make you more thirsty when you drink them, and political parties will often act directly contrary to the reasons you voted for them. Many people may feel a genuine need to vote and influence political events, elections may or may not affect the personal lives of these voters directly, but in trying to get these needs met they are only able to choose from the two products on the shelf. The Democrats and Republicans have a virtual monopoly on the political marketplace in the US, and they have segmented the marketplace of potential voters and target them with surgical precision.

Class is not a useful framework for understanding the two party system in the US. This is not intended as a jab at Marx, class consciousness, or anything of the sort, just a remark on its relevance. The Democrats and Republicans were not founded on a class basis, do not operate on a class basis, and their political ideology isn’t class based. Debates about which way the working class did and didn’t vote in an effort to retrofit that narrative into support for the Democrats or Republicans provides little insight. If either party succeeds in appealing to more or less of the working class in a given election, this is by virtue of something other than their status as workers. This is doubly true when talking about “elites.”. “Elites” is a nebulous and poorly defined term. No one agrees on what it means and it’s only thrown around to signify “people who think they’re better than me.” It doesn’t even have the benefit of the intellectual tradition of socialism to back it up.

You can love or hate Foucault, but he was absolutely right about how knowledge is produced. The ideas and concepts you use to think, your very understanding of yourself and the world around you, are produced by institutions and given to you. You no more created the ideas of “liberal,” “alt-right,” “democratic socialism,” “conservative” etc than you did the shoes on your feet, and just like the shoes on your feet these things were made by organizations for reasons which have nothing to do with why you bought them, much less have any control over.

Americans are forced to understand politics under the broad categories of “liberal” and “conservative.” These categories are mass produced through a large constellation of institutions such as think tanks, pundits, media outlets, political parties, and universities. This is also inherent in how language and concepts work. Communication requires shared words and concepts to function, and we are all subject to these powerful forces over which we have no control. After a while it runs on inertia and the language takes on a life of its own.

You may have put great effort into understanding politics. You may be able to cite a hundred different political philosophers, weave them together into an intricate tapestry of an argument. You may have a graduate degree you toiled relentlessly over. Insofar as you participate in electoral politics, you are forced to use the existing concepts associated with them in order to do so. There is no escape. We were always playing with a loaded deck. Your silly degree is no match for a billion dollar marketing blitz. The haughtiest intellectual and supremely ignorant are united in this farce. To put it bluntly, people who don’t follow politics at least have a better alibi, since they put in no effort and ended up in the same place.

If you’ve ever read Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, you’ll know the biggest mistake lies in thinking you can read and educate yourself out of this predicament. You can’t. Ellul correctly understood that propaganda is more effective on people who read and view it than it is on those who don’t care. He even made a compelling case that the primary reason literacy is important for political regimes is so that people could read and understand their propaganda. One has to accept that power exists and that it structures the entire way we experience the world. Propaganda is not crude lies and manipulation but a bedrock part of the technology transmitting knowledge throughout society. Furthermore, the overwhelming power of this technology has rendered much of political ideology irrelevant.

Needs, political and otherwise, do not belong to us as individuals either. A large part of marketing involves creating and fostering needs in people, making them want things they didn’t know they wanted. To think realistically about politics one has to accept that what we do or don’t want from the government was produced and sold to us as well. While some of these needs may feel deeply personal, may be directly informed by harm we as individuals have experienced, real or imagined, this in no way makes these political views authentic to us. Power structures these views as much as anything else. To rethink things in a really radical way, to get at the core of why we have gone so far off the rails, we need to get at why these needs are structured the way that they are, how and why we have been taught to want the things we do.

Stay tuned for part II addressing the Democrats. I hope to post that within the next couple of weeks.