Perpetual Forgetting

The Depth and Cost of Political Amnesia

By Nicholas Goroff

“Didn’t they learn anything from the last eight years?”

A common refrain heard from those who follow politics, is that voters suffer from a form of political amnesia when it comes to voting. Every few years, when a general or midterm election crops up, voters head to the polls to choose between a handful of influence laden candidates who take office and quite often wind up doing very much the same thing as their predecessors, typically with only newly refined rhetoric and campaign marketing accompanying it for the purposes of presentation. And as this ‘out with the old, in with the new old’ cycle repeats itself every two to four years, the sparing and superficial changes of office and official, yielding little in the way of genuine reform, predictably renews outcry that voters simply never learn.

Now while these repeat performances from war hawks, corporate puppets, religious dominionists and neoliberal economics enthusiasts seem to dominate our elections and government, a longer and more sustained form of political amnesia seems just as present, albeit somewhat overshadowed by way of revisionist history.

Presently, the fight(s) over economic inequality exist largely as the beating heart of most true populist political movements. Short of the corporate owned “Tea Party,” which relies on establishment money so as to preserve the status quo by means of distracting attention onto more rhetorical issues like gun rights and bombastic nonsense, the economic oligarchy and gross inequality derived from its ceaseless crusade for industrial “growth” and “progress,” has served to galvanize the will of revolutionaries and radicals throughout the globe. While to many this may seem like a new development in terms of popular politics, it takes only a quick glance at human history to see that inequality and the fight for power and economic security between the masses and wealthy elites, has been at the very center of human politics since mankind first abandoned it’s hunter-gatherer roots in favor of an agrarian and ownership society.

That day long ago, when a fool drew a line in the dirt, proclaiming everything behind it to be his and all the other fools, more foolish than he believed him, marked the dawn of the fight over inequality. From that day sprung a long history of peasant revolts against  feudal nobility, the advent new systems of government designed to better cater to popular needs while preserving private power and eventually numerous socialistic revolutions rooted still in that old conflict between rich and poor. Yet despite the age old battles by the masses to rid themselves of subjugation at the hands of the elite, the struggle continues on, again and as always, painted as one that is still in it’s infancy.

But why then when we can measure the struggle for equality and shared benefit which ranges from refutation of claims of rule by divine right to the more modern battle cries of the ninety-nine-percent, is the matter still so regularly painted as one that is new to society?

The answer lies, as it so frequently does, within the tactical playbook of those who seek to preserve their rule. Division and distraction are commonly regarded as the two primary tools of political manipulation. If one of power wishes to avoid answering questions on a given issue, they need only to make enough noise about a different one to rally their loyalists against their detractors to distract from the conversation entirely. And yet beyond this common and deceptive tactic, the ability to count on general forgetfulness and the invocation of revisionist history plays a crucial role in maintaining the status quo.

Consider socialism in America. To most, the idea of Marxist or Engelian principles such as redistribution of wealth, robust state controlled public services and the general principle of collective good are believed to be modern ideas, all disproven and beaten down during the twentieth century and cold war. Yet it is by the cherry picking of historical writings and the selective exaltation of historical figures and ideas that this notion of newness to socialistic or populist thinking is perpetuated.

While legend and mythology permeates popular American history, such as Samuel Adams leading the Boston Tea Party, or George Washington and his cherry tree, countless numbers of revolutionary patriots and popular ideas have been lost to an intentional rewriting of our nation’s founding. At a cursory glance from the average text book, one might easily be led to believe that the “founding fathers” were all of a singular, capitalist mindset and supportive of ideas commonly regarded as conservative or libertarian. Yet upon a closer and more rigorous inspection, it does not take long at all to find calls for worker ownership of farms and businesses, state orchestrated redistributions of wealth, the establishment of public health care and legal-political systems have all been carried in the hearts and minds of leaders, radicals and revolutionaries since before we had even split from great Britain.

Doctor Thomas Young of Boston played a rather pivotal role in the nation’s founding and yet outside of local history, popular history has largely forgotten him. Could this be due to his radical notions about social equilibrium not fitting the desired mold the early American elites sought to preserve, or merely convenient oversight by post-revolution historians?

While the latter may seem convenient, the former seems far more likely. Doctor Young, a man who was run out of New York for being too secular in his politics, not only introduced the concept of open forum government meetings in America, but also called on a constitutional provision requiring wealth redistribution. And though it was Doctor Young himself who helped orchestrate the now well known Boston tea party, while being the only man participating who did not disguise himself as a Mohawk in the process, his contributions to our founding, his ideas, convictions and contributions to the cause of American independence, have all been lost to revisionist mythology.

In a more modern example, the promotion of the Democratic and Republican parties as the sole legitimate political institutions in our nation, is itself a thoroughly perpetuated lie, rooted largely in the twentieth century advent of commercialized political propaganda. In the era of Woordrow Wilson and the drum beat for military involvement in World War One, our modern divide and distract political circus was born. Through manipulation of media and public opinion, as well as what were in essence political purges of non-conforming political movements and parties throughout the country, the bipolar narrowing of afforded political thought took from the public the options for alternative policies and robbed them of historical remembrance of gains made by socialist workers parties throughout the nation.

As one gilded age gave way to the next, with only the rationalizations and public presentations of their systems being subject to change, the fight for equality between the masses and their ruling elites was routinely repainted by those in power as a new debate. Remanded to perpetual infancy, populist movements that were not hijacked or co-opted by oligarchic and plutocratic institutions were constantly being forced to start over, never reaching the critical mass needed to see real reform or revolution take place.

Much like repeating of history as seen through a retrospective analysis of election results and the policies which followed, this cultivated and well maintained amnesia which seeks to keep the age old questions of equality and egalitarianism at bay have taken such deep root in our current partisan paradigm, that such becomes cause for many Americans to stop and scratch their heads at the sight of massive rallies in places like Europe and South America. So well controlled is the true and long vested populist angst against the perpetuators of the status-quo, that whenever the struggle is spoken of, regardless of the age or era, it is regarded as a new and curious phenomenon.

In this, the advancement of what is arguably the central underlying social struggle that has waged since first the concepts of wealth and property were devised, is kept relegated to the twin statuses of underdeveloped social theory and utopian dreams of an ungrateful underclass. And though the masters of coin and influence no longer seek to justify their power by way of claiming divine right, the rationalizations offered in the forms of economic paternalism and neoliberal theories are but a half step away from the erroneous notions of being ordained by God.

Should this cyclical social and political amnesia persist, the struggles of the many to free themselves from the obligations set upon them by the few, will see little in the way of tangible and measurable change. Yet there is reason to be optimistic, in that by way of our advancements in information technology and communication, we have in effect recreated the type of communicative threats to power that were first afforded by the advent of the printed text. No longer able to firmly control the narratives in play, the modern strategy of burying truth beneath mountains of distracting hyperbole has become the latest play by the elite to keep the masses disorganized.

Yet even in this, the aggressive and consistent revolutionaries, no longer content to be marginalized, shouted down or have their voices buried beneath heaps of manufactured distraction, take greater steps than ever before in holding fast and true to their causes of class based equilibrium and an end to things such as plutocracy and economic imperialism. Stopping short of saying the brighter future lies just over the horizon, the very acknowledgement of the history to the struggle is grounds for cautious optimism. And as this, the cause of the “99%” continues to make gains in terms of public discussion, it remains imperative that understanding  in regards to the history of the cause be delivered hand in hand with the arguments themselves, lest we collectively find ourselves forced to yet again, start from zero as suffering amnesiacs who’ve forgotten all they’ve learned.