Junk Politics
No I’m still here, I haven’t run off with the minstrels. It’s just that there’s this deadline for TPM (The Philosophers’ Mag, you know) and I’ve been taken up with that. But I was reading an old Harper’s the other day, from November 2003, and found a lively article by Benjamin DeMott on ‘Junk Politics’ (excerpted from an eponymous book published a couple of months later). It’s not online, unfortunately, so I’ll give you an extract or two.
The case is that both the essential planks and the elaborating tropes of today’s junk politics are troublingly underexamined, yet they’ve been functioning for some time as major agents of public confusion…Junk politics introduces new qualifications for high political office…It tilts courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains.
Check, check, check, check.
Quiet accents of candor bring a sense of closeness between speaker and audience…The impression strengthens that heart – heart alone, not records of accomplishment, not positions on issues, not argued-for priorities, not expressive, persuasive talents – must be the electorate’s pivotal concern…Leaders need prove only that they can feel…[DeMott’s elipse] a child’s or parent’s or stranger’s pain. Problems aren’t as difficult as Phi Bete wonks claim.
Check.
And…there’s the diffidence-show implicit in leaders’ own mucker-posing speech, rich in solecisms, truculently stubborn mispronunciations [Eye-rack, anyone? OB], 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 skill of argument, familiarity with standards of coherence, brains. The embrace by those in high office of dim-bulb diffidence tropes – macho brandishings of ignorance – trashes that ideal and draws down added contempt on political vocation.
Check. Bad, bad, very bad.
B DeMott: “mucker-posing speech, rich in solecisms, truculently stubborn mispronunciations [Eye-rack, anyone? OB], non sequiturs, plain absurdities…”
Certainly sounds like GWB. I’ve been trying to figure out for years how much of this stuff is an act he’s become a past master at. I’m beginning to settle on about 2/3 of it, but my fear is that he’s a genuine idiot. I’m not sure which is worse.
Might I offer the suggestion that most politics, most of the time, is “junk politics”? The average voter does not, after all, possess a finely honed critical intellect, which DeMott seems to be asking for. And it is the average voter that politicians, necessarily, seek to win votes from.
This condemnation of the common voter is as old as Thucydides. The best defense of democracy as a political system is that the alternatives are much worse.
We are currently suffering through an especially dismal period in the history of democratic politics. There are some signs that matters are slowly improving, and I think that if we can squeak through the next (U.S.) election with any luck, the pace of improvement may pick up.
All aimed at the W, of course. Don’t you think the political and media culture as a whole is the issue rather than the one artful exponent of the ‘Gosh, durn’ school of public relations?
Off thread, but about time OB ! I’ve just had a thoroughly depressing few days over at Talk is Cheap. More Bunting ahoy today. “The catholic Church is failing – yet again – to deal with the challenge of modernity.” As opposed to ‘slam…
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/madeleine_bunting/2006/09/post_393.html
I know the descriptions are aimed at GWB but they are alarmingly applicable to our own dear leader as well. Still he’ll be gone before long, although I’m not sure his replacement will be much better…
No, I don’t think the article is aimed at GWB, it’s aimed at US politics in general. GWB is an exaggeration of the vices in question, but he is far from being the only example of them.
Obviously the average voter doesn’t have a ‘finely honed critical intellect’ but that doesn’t mean that the only possible alternative is a state of complete ignorance and credulity. The average voter isn’t born thinking people should vote for the candidate they would most like to spend an afternoon cutting brush with; they’re trained to think that; they could be trained to think something more sensible, such as that people should vote for the candidate whose actual stated policies have most in common with their own. That doesn’t amount to expecting all voters to be geniuses.
“they could be trained to think something more sensible, “
To quote The Tony, “Education, education, education.”
If only.
Yeh, if only. I’m not holding my breath or anything – but it’s not inherently impossible, as JonJ’s comment implied. It’s not some starry-eyed dream. This business of playing dumb and pretending politics is all about who has the coziest family snapshots is a choice, not a force of nature.
I don’t want to seem all Pollyanna-ish but it seems to me that the tie-less, call me Dave/Tony, chummy facade is playing less and less well – at least in the UK.
Blair has shot his bolt on that and Cameron’s plain bloke schtick elicits more sneers than cheers. I think the electorate, as a whole, is actually fairly discerning and sceptical of spin. Brown is still by a long way the public’s choice of next PM, and his persona is distinctly clever, dour and un-blokey.
Yes, education, but what kind of education? What education are the voters not getting now that they should be getting? Better civics classes? Or economics classes?
I think the reason we are seeing such bad politics lately is primarily emotional — they are apparently depressed over the economic stresses piling up on their backs, as well as fearful of more 9/11s. Few politicians are available who have sensible things to say about these issues; the Democrats are themselves fearful of getting too far out of step with the fearful citizens. Hence a rather vicious circle. But here and there one can see signs that more political courage is on the horizon. But it will be a long slow climb out of the present depths.
I know this is of vanishingly small interest to most of your audience Ophelia, but I must query Don’s assertion about Gordon. The most recent poll I saw shows that even Labour voters are less inclined to vote for him than for Tone, never mind the rest of the country.
My prediction is that Charles Kennedy will stand as an independent and sweep the country…