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Citizens, Not Subjects
My response was, "Yes I can see how this wins elections. But where does it leave us? How is this not a form of manipulation no better than the kind the Republicans are always indulging in? And how does this sinking down to the same level of ferocity as the Republicans improve the public discourse? And if we just escalate, what will the Republicans do next in order to ratchet up the conflict even more?"
His response? That we have to see the world as it is and act accordingly. We live in a media saturated culture in which people have no time or interest in politics. It's peripheral to their concerns, and we have to make the short, quick, powerful emotional appeal if we're going to get through to them. In other words, "oh well."
I've been mulling over that argument ever since, as well as my recent commitment to not go too far in my competitive desire to defeat Republicans. Kos isn't alone in his position. I've made similar arguments in the past. Paul Waldman has also done so, saying that politics is not about issues, but about identity. Republicans win because they say "I'm one of one and he's not" and that Democrats have to learn to press the same kinds of emotional buttons.
I have serious reservations about this line of thought. On the one hand, I think it's myopic. If you look at the nature of political debates in the past, there was a heck of a lot more substance. Look at the Kennedy-Nixon debates (which were on TV, I might add), or discussion about all kinds of policies in the 1960's and 1970's. They were fundamentally substantive. I'm not exactly talking about ancient history here. It wasn't really until Reagan came along that politics became just a bunch of symbols.
On the other hand, this kind of politics is so very effective precisely because it plays to the worst elements of human psychology. It's demagogy, plain and simple: using emotion to get groups of people to do what you want them to do, to control them. It's as profoundly anti-democratic a kind of debate as you can imagine. It turns the citizens not into partners in the democratic experiment, but into objects of control. It's no coincidence that modern campaigns so resemble commercials for goods & services. They are selling people rather than things , but it's the same basic approach: "Buy our stuff! Believe us! Be bacteria responding to unconscious stimuli!" Hence Waldman's statement "it's about who you are, not what you're for."
In democracies, the people are supposed to rule themselves. They do that through a form of public discourse, in which emotion is used not just to get people to act, but to get them to think. As Democrats, we need to engage the best parts of our natures - compassion, duty, responsibility, tolerance - rather than the worst.
Right now the Republicans have been successful because they have inculcated a sense of fear in people - fear of gays, of terrorists, of atheists, of cities, of minorites. I could go on for hours. The Democrats are beginning to respond in kind, and with increasing effectiveness. Not by tapping into fear, but anger: anger at big corporations, at corruption, and being lied to, at senseless death, at high gas prices, whatever.
This might win us a few elections. But will it really make us better off? Will it heal the stark divisions in our nation's polity? I don't think so. I think that it will be just one more step in the real road to serfdom.
In the end, the only way to defeat the insanity and corruption of modern conservatism is to expose it for what it is: a philosophy for cowards, motivated by ruthless ambition and the spirit of domination. Their aim (unconscious or otherwise) is to divide the country between masters and slaves. But what is insidious is that their means for doing so steadily transform self-governing citizens into subjects of control accustomed to direction.
Let's not play their silly little game.
10 Comments:
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"...we have to see the world as it is and act accordingly. We live in a media saturated culture in which people have no time or interest in politics. It's peripheral to their concerns, and we have to make the short, quick, powerful emotional appeal if we're going to get through to them."
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I agree with this wholeheartedly. But Publius, I don't think this necessarily constitutes "oh well".
Because, I diagree that it has to all be about values. I think it has to be short and concise about the issues, as well. And not too many of them.
I think I've used Clinton as an example before, but he admits that he won because he got the formula exactly right. First, he identified which issue was most important to the voting public: the economy. Second, he realized that he had to stick with that subject and not get drawn into areas which would dilute his message. Because, every time he did, his numbers would go down. That is why he kept a sign to remind him: It's the economy, stupid.
The voting public has an extremely short attention span. This is partly because there are so many more distractions than when the Kennedy-Nixon debates took place. So the best strategy is to pick a topic - maaaybe this could be stretched to two, and develop an argument compelling enough to convince voters that you can deliver on giving them the resolution they want on that issue.
I also don't think that this simple identification has to be with the opponent. I think it needs to be with the candidate first but, if you can manage to do both, then so much the better.
Also, let me remind you that even during the Kennedy-Nixon debates, much was made of the fact that Nixon looked like a shifty character compared to John F. Kennedy. He was swarthy and had a five o'clock shadow. Even then, image played an extremely important role in an election. And that role has been expanding ever since.
So, yes, I do think politics has evolved almost completely into a competition of image and sound bites. And, since I don't see that changing any time soon, it would probably be best to accept it and work around it. Whoever can do it the best, wins.
Rebecca, at 1:04 PM
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I don't disagree with much of what you're saying. I don't have a very clear mind on this stuff yet. But what Kos and others have communicated isn't that we have to communicate issues in a comprehensible way, but that they ultimately don't really matter. More importantly, they're not talking about doing anything to change the nature of public discourse - which is about activation, not persuasion - but simply playing the game better.
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Sure, there were a lot of people who voted for Kennedy because he looked better on TV. But what I was trying to focus on was that the debates themselves had content.
I guess I'm just saying that yes, Kos has actually described what is. But as liberals, aren't supposed to be about making things better than they are now? Arbitrista, at 1:33 PM
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Publius, you should get the book "Building Red America", which makes a couple of compelling arguments that may help you clarify your thinking. (1) Matthew Dowd discovered that there is no center (persuadable people) left in American politics. True moderates who can be convinced to vote either way have dwindled from 25% of voters to 6%. (2) Anger is more powerful than anything else in getting people to vote, and this anger can be sustained in many ways (vitriolic books, advertising, talk radio, cable television, blogs, etc.) The anger stems from perspective of Christian conservatives that they are being persecuted on all levels by secular and atheistic liberals who are trying to destroy the country. The anger of the Christian right causes the secular left to be angry in return, and so we get two dominant trends. First, there is a self-selection process in which voters see politics as part of a chosen lifestyle that involves conforming to specific brands and purchases. Second, all the people in the middle who get turned off by the anger simply drop out of the political process and give up on the public sphere. Hence, politics is reduced to increasing the size of your base and getting them out to vote.
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In the end, therefore, the argument is all about sequence. Should democrats try to (a) win elections with anger and then change the tone into substantive discussion once they are in power, or (b) use intelligent and substantive discussion to try to win elections in the first place, even if they lose a few elections? If the "ends justify the means", then we may simply see a resulting political culture that cannot transcend anger-driven politics (a sort of political "tragedy of the commons"). If, on the other hand, we adopt the principled, substantive approach and lose elections, then politics is left to those who always use anger to win.
The only way to decide which way to go is to recognize that Christian Republicans and secular leftists are extremely angry at each other because they are using politics and culture to fight a war for America's identity. Everything else is determined by this war, and so you either have to figure out which side you are on, or give up on trying to create a more substantive politics. Marriah, at 4:25 PM
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The other thing to realize is that, as much as we want politics to be about consciousness-raising, that only works when there is a community of a cross-section of people who communicate with each other. Those communities don't exist anymore, as a result of suburbanization and ex-urbanization. We have entered an era of consciousness-reinforcing, where people segragate themselves in separate realities and political cultures. In order to restore consciousness-raising politics, we need to restore community, which means we need to take back Main Street from Wall Street.
By Marriah, at 4:32 PM
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...just my two cents in the debate, but I tend to agree with the other commenters here.
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"But as liberals, aren't supposed to be about making things better than they are now?"
You know I agree with this, but you have to win elections first. Look at how bad things had to get, how much we lost, before most of America saw what they had done, and the gang of thieves that they put into power. Why? Because neo-cons had the meme, and we didn't. Now we see a reaction, but as liberals, we aren't always going to have the luxury of opposing a group that is so massively out of line with peoples' interests. We need to find a simple message - one that isn't merely a reaction to their message - and communicate it simply.
Secondly, I'm not sure I see the difference between playing to fear and playing to anger. Either one can create a mob. La Blonde Parisienne, at 5:34 PM
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Marriah: Undemocratic means will never accomplish democratic ends. I don't see how you can campaign using one form of argument, and then govern using another.
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La Blonde: As for your first point, I am NOT saying that we don't need a simple and persuasive message. What I am saying is that said message can't just be designed to manipulate people's emotions. On your second, that sounds like the very point I'm making.
In short, by campaigning principally on anger - by doing what they do - we may win a couple of elections. But those elections will be fruitless because they will be based on nothing. There will be no mandate, no agenda, and no way to conduct the substantive discussion we want once we have power. Unless we have the courage to change the nature of the political debate - combining symbol AND substance, emotion AND reason, then we're never going to the ability to change anything. Arbitrista, at 7:55 PM
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"I'm not sure I see the difference between playing to fear and playing to anger. Either one can create a mob."
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A "mob" is a pejorative term for a group of fearful people who use their collective power to destroy instead of create. Fear is a general anxiety directed at the unknown. In contrast, anger, especially righteous anger, is usually directed at a specific phenomenon, and then it disappears once the phenomenon is eliminated. Thus, anger CAN be constructive. People who vote out of anger can be appealed to with reason once the anger dissipates. This is one reason why Clinton won the 1996 election after anger against him produced the 1994 midterm election result of the Republican Congress.
"Undemocratic means will never accomplish democratic ends. I don't see how you can campaign using one form of argument, and then govern using another."
This happens all the time. It's why we think politicians are scum: they campaign making specific promises, and then they break those promises once in office in order to "compromise". The difference now is that the Republicans have refused to compromise and break promises to their base, while Democrats have shown a greater willingness to compromise in order to appeal to a phantom moderate voter.
All Kos is saying is that if the Republicans are no longer willing to compromise, the Democrats shouldn't compromise either. If the Republicans realize that moderate voters no longer exist, and thus appeal directly to their base instead of running from it, the Democrats should learn the same lesson: don't run from your base, embrace it, and one of the tools to use in embracing the base can be anger. Marriah, at 8:52 PM
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Yes, that is what I really mean. It's because we don't have any other choice. If the other side has Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol, and so many others acting like Darth Vader, the Democrats can't act like Pollyanna, no matter how much we want to implement that vision. We are the good guys because the consequence of the other side's policies is to turn the country into a theofascist dictatorship. They have an army threatening our republic and democracy. If we don't respond with our own army to defend everything we cherish, their army will destroy it. It's just common sense. We can't "turn the other cheek". Once their army loses power, we can demobilize. But not until then.
By Marriah, at 2:08 AM
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Marriah, I think that you're mischaracterizing my position. I am NOT saying that we "turn the other cheek" and ignore the negative politics of the Republicans, or that we ignore the threat they present. All that I'm saying is that when we are crafting a message, let's not view the voters - and treat the voters - as tools to be manipulated. Let's not get as dirty as they do. This is not a binary position of a) boring substance & passive campaigning vs. b) ferocious negative attacks using micro-targetting. That's a pretty simplistic way to look at things.
By Arbitrista, at 9:37 AM
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Publius, I am saying that treating voters as tools to be manipulated is one way of campaigning that the Democratic Party must embrace. It is not the only way.
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What I am challenging is your view of politics as a sacrosanct arena that is somehow separate from other arenas. The public sphere of politics has already merged with the commercial sphere of advertising because it works - Bill Clinton used these techniques just as much as his Republican opponents. Voters can and should be manipulated if that is what it takes to win. If there are still voters who have loftier ideals, then we can appeal to their reason. We must be as inclusive as possible in our techniques - vicious, nasty and mean in one district or state, virtuous and nice in another district or state. If anger and fear works for one voter while reason works for another voter, we use both. But this means we have to get much more personal in our approach to politics, actually going door-to-door to find out what makes every voter tick. If Amazon.Com and Google can tailor advertising to specific individuals, so can the Republicans and Democrats. Marriah, at 12:43 PM
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