I have recommended a couple of times in previous threads an article from the November edition of
Harper's called
Junk Politics: A Voter's Guide to the Post-Literate Election, by Benjamin DeMott. I think this article is important not because it necessarily gets everything right or solves the problems it describes, but because it attempts to address with unusual (unprecedented?) straightforwardness one of the most fundamental problems we, as democrats, face: the debasement of political discourse. It is our problem both because Republicans have taken very effective advantage of this trend and because that same taking-advantage is what we're seeing when we like our own Democratic leaders the least. The article is artfully, but not always clearly, written, and describes five basic trends in current political discourse:
- personalization - blunts understanding of impersonal injustice
- changelessness - disempowers by undermining seriousness of politics
- dramatization - oversimplifies by casting all human motives in a mythic drama
- miniaturization - diverts problem-solving efforts away from complex accuracy
- homogenization - obviates discourse and compromise by denying differences
I offer here a sort of precis of the article; I have condensed a long article fairly drastically so I advise readers that what they see is heavily filtered by my own take on DeMott's thoughts, and I encourage those interested in the subject to read the original.
The subtitle, "A Voter's Guide to the Post-Literate Election," is important, because the trends outlined are dependent upon electronic - particularly visual - media. Television approximates genuine social interaction sufficiently to engage all of our evolved behavioral equipment designed to strive for tribal status, the emotional arousal elicited by eye contact and body language that is, mercifully, abstracted out of sight in the print media that have informed democratic decision-making until recently. What does post-literate communication enable?
Personalization overvalues the personal story. This is not to say that the personal story isn't useful information to the voter, that character doesn't count, but rather that after a point, personalization is irrelevant. Knowing that John Edward's father was a mill worker tells you something about him, not everything. But we assume it tells us more than it does, and the overhang is distraction. In DeMott's words:
Heart tropes employ personal testimony to create an experience of intimacy... Quiet accents of candor bring a sense of closeness between speaker and audience. The impression strengthens that heart - heart alone, not records of accomplishments, not positions on issues, not argued-for priorities, not expressive, persuasive talents - must be the electorate's pivotal concern... By shedding a moral defect, by being the bouyantly admirable, minority-sensitve, elder- and cripple-cherishing people that we necessarily are, Americans can make problems disappear. But can Americans thereby reach basic terms of injustice - fundamental discontinuities between affirmed democratic values... and offically approved rules...? The voices rousing American colonists against the crown... had staying power less because they talked hardship than because they clarified rights and wrongs. The country's very foundations, indeed, lie in clearly defined understanding of injustices. Blunting such understanding is a major project of junk politics.
Changelessness devalues political seriousness and in doing so entrenches social, political, and economic advantages by disempowering the competition and neutering the desire for change. Changelessness requires that politics cannot be valued as a profession, as a topic of conversation, as an important differerence in belief systems. The very word must be prefixed by "just:" it's just politics, just partisan posturing. DeMott:
The president's contribution comes in part through unexplained reversals of position - issue-vaporizing veerings that signal the absence of coherence and depth in the thinking on which momentous opinions rested in the first place... speech rich in solecisms, truculently stubborn mispronunciations, non sequiturs, plain absurdities. By intent or otherwise, such speech reflects lack of anxiety about appearing stupid to colleagues or constituents and thereby disses the political calling. The American democratic ideal called for universal, informed participation in the public square: acquaintance with skills of argument, familiarity with standards of coherence. The embrace by those in high office of dim-bulb diffidence tropes... trashes that ideal...
Dramatization emphasizes the animal spirits over the human intellect. It re-renders complex stories as universal myths and personally motivated agents as heroic archetypes. Conflicting interests are reframed as good versus evil. Bravery is a fundamental quality of leaders, so political figures must find an enemy in order to defy to prove their courage, and defiance becomes its own highest value. And why is this a problem?
Had the stance of the country's Founding Fathers when addressing opponents in constitutional debates been that of crusaders struggling against the odds to conquer pure evil... had they, moreover, not strongly committed themselves to the belief that true politics consists in the giving and weighing of reasons - the United States of America wouldn't exist.
Miniaturization is an anodyne against the scope and complexity of domestic problems. It reduces our anxiety about what seems out of our control, and brings all problems into the range of our leaders' expertise. Miniaturization spares us the relentless inconclusion of science and affirms our faith in "good common sense solutions."
Republicans invented the most notable figure of speech in miniaturist jargon - "points of light." But John F. Kennedy was miniaturizing when he proposed to cure Africa with a Peace Crops, and so was estimable Jimmy Carter when he lent his weight to the volunteer Habitat for Humanity project (solving the huge national housing problem one sawhorse at a time)... [the problem miniaturization leaves is] how to animate the real-life consequences, for the majority, of political action purportedly coping with large problems.
Homogenization obscures real differences and tells us we are all the same. We are all folks who have the same values: American values. Where there are no differences, there are no rich and poor, no black and white, and so there are no compromises to be made between the interests of different groups.
And the glue holding together the sentimentalities and contradictions - the erratic overnight reversals of policies - was commitment to the abolition of awareness of difference and enthusiasm for wish-fulfilling fantasies of unity and sameness... Placed high on the list of officialdom's patriotic duties was that of recharging citizen faith in shared moral eminence (the president delivered paean after paean on our mutual characterological excellence the "goodness of the American people...")
Finally, frighteningly, DeMott sums up why we should give a shit:
In the ideal world the buried issue of the hour -- national infantilization: the babying of the electorate, spoiling of voter-age "children" with year-round upbeat Christmas tales, the creation of a swelled-head citizenry, morally vain and irremediably sentimental -- would have made its way in time into public discourse. [But] suppose distinctions vanish between foundational democratic principles and decorative pleasurable tropes. What happens then? Very little at first. The familiar apparatus of constitutional government and party organizations survives seemingly untouched. In time, though, the language of justice and injustice comes to strike ordinary ears as Latinate and archaic--due for interment--and attachment to old forms weakens.
In other words, the age-old strategy of commanding societal power by the polarization of wealth gives way to one of polarization of the ability to manipulate information. Instead of oligarchs seizing power by economic command of the political class, they take control of the rational process necessary for conducting democracy. I'd wager it's a much more effective strategy and that is why I'm afraid.