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In those European countries with a democratic form of government there is a political right and a political left. Thanks to proportional representation, the left, meaning various communist and socialist parties, actually has a voice in government and seats in Parliament. Such countries usually have higher voter turnout than the U.S. because more people can find somebody on the ballot who will represent their interests and actually has a chance of being elected. You'll have to scroll down to find us because we're 139th in voter turnout globally.In the United States we do not have an opposition party or anyone in government to represent popular rather than corporate interests. By Mussolini's definition, the merger of government with business, both major parties in the U.S. represent the right. Since we do not have proportional representation, more than half of Americans have no representation in government whatsoever and therefore don't bother to vote.
In his great classic book on U.S. politics, Indispensable Enemies, the late Walter Karp explained how the two major parties keep an iron lock on U.S. politics. The function of the Republican Party, Karp wrote, is to represent the interests of the far right, and the function of the Democratic Party is to co-opt the left so that there cannot be any effective opposition to the far right. That's why one poll showed that Congressional Democrats had only an 11% approval rating among Democratic voters in the U.S. -- it does not function as an opposition party so those who wish to oppose the Republicans are continuously disappointed by the Democratic Party's failure to do so.
The Progressive Democrats claim that they would like to move their party towards the left, but they are not in any way an opposition to the Democratic Party leadership. Their votes can be taken for granted because, no matter how much they claim they may disapprove or have to hold their noses, they will vote for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee on the basis of lesser evilism. Third party, independent, and non-voting Americans will not accept a choice between a greater and a lesser evil, and feel that they have the right to hold out for something good. So we get very strange phenomena such as a "progressive" who claims to care about human rights, calling anyone who doesn't vote for one of the candidates committed to continuing wars that we know were based on lies, "psychotic." The implication is that someone who opposes these unpopular wars but votes for candidates committed to continuing the wars, is sane.
As part of the two-party lock on U.S. politics, the Republicans control the mainstream media and the Democrats control the so-called alternative media. That's why people who are actually on the political left, refer to the large alternative media outlets as "left gatekeepers," because they are hostile towards anyone or anything to the left of the Democratic Party. Yet most Europeans would not consider the Democratic party to be politically on the left, so there is very little freedom of speech possible for leftists in the U.S. Left gatekeeper sites exemplify what Karp explained was the function of the Democratic Party in co-opting the left to prevent any effective opposition to the far right.
This close to an election, leftists are notably absent from the alternative media. We are reduced to tiny forums and mailing lists, the equivalent of samizdat in the old Soviet Union, or the forbidden messages called kites smuggled from one prisoner to another in U.S. jails. Once the sham election is over and it becomes obvious that the new boss has the same agenda as the old boss, the gatekeeper sites will once again allow more human rights stories until the subsequent election nears. Until then, at least 90% of the "news" on gatekeeper sites will continue to be campaign "hit" and "puff" pieces by political party operatives.
In a country like the U.S., where two right-wing parties have an iron lock on politics and the media, what's left, pussycat?
