Screeds
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
And The Beat Goes On
September 14, 2003
Your Curmudgeon is not a partisan. He tried that, back when, and found the results unsatisfactory. Partisans must support their party, regardless of whether their party and its candidates deserve support. It's more rational to pick and choose, according to one's own standards for integrity, quality, and rationality.
Of course, the major parties don't like that attitude. (Neither do the minor ones, though it works more often against them than for them.) They want loyalty. Loyalty from their adherents would free them of the always irritating, often distressing need to do what they've pledged themselves to do.
How does a party pursue the grail of loyalty? Alternately: How does party X prevent its current adherents, once they've noticed that its behavior in power varies dramatically from its principles and pledges, from switching to party Y as a preferable alternative?
The question almost answers itself, doesn't it? Party X must somehow foreclose all preferable alternatives. The most popular technique is demonizing the major opposition parties, so that party X adherents will not consider them seriously. Party X must make party Y look as if it is:
- Evil, or:
- Stupid, or:
- Terminally incompetent in power.
Of course, combinations of the three are also welcome.
The politically engaged can be usefully partitioned into drummers, public figures who attempt to shape public opinion on political subjects, and marchers, private citizens whose opinions are substantially formed by some drummer or group thereof. This is a simplification, of course; there are persons that neither attempt to mold the opinions of others nor look to others to have their opinions molded. But for large-scale political analysis, the partition serves very well.
Most drummers are print columnists, radio personalities, or television talking heads. A healthy fraction have been involved directly in either electoral politics or the actual wielding of political authority. From this we've gotten the much-discussed phenomenon of the "revolving door" between government and journalism.
The behavior of drummers these past few years has moved unabashedly away from the promotion of their preferred positions and toward the foreclosure of alternatives. Thus we have among the highest-profile drummers persons such as Ann Coulter, who takes the soundness of conservative thought for granted and spends her time deriding liberalism and high-profile liberals, and liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, whose diatribes against conservatism and the Bush Administration have become so vitriolic that even her fans are beginning to desert her.
If challenged, probably neither of these women would admit to being an uncritical partisan of any party. Indeed, Ann Coulter tried to challenge incumbent Republican Christopher Shays for his Congressional seat a few years back, something a true partisan would never do. But in their print and broadcast emissions, these and their fellow drummers have consistently focused on diminishing the stature of the opposition, rather than on the reasons why their preferred parties and candidates ought to be preferred by others.
Three questions attach to this style of drumming:
- Is it fair?
- Is it effective?
- What undesirable side effects might it have?
The first question can only be answered by each of us individually. It depends entirely on your attitude toward politicians and what their behavior ought to earn them from the punditocracy. Most of us have some threshold for demonstrated cluelessness, venality, and ineptitude that, if violated, would justify condemnation of the violator.
The second question is answered case by case in the political trenches, by the results of elections and the responses of elected officials. Though it could not prevent either his election or his landslide re-election, there's little question that the campaign of vilification directed at Richard Nixon was in large measure responsible for his behavior in office -- and for his precipitous departure from it. But a comparable campaign against Ronald Reagan seems to have had no effect at all, either electorally or on his decisions as President.
The third question is the one that most concerns your Curmudgeon today.
The universe is ruled by equilibrium. No force can go forever unopposed; no tendency can mount to irresistible heights. Or, as Baron Philippe de Rothschild put it in discussing investing, "Trees do not grow to the sky."
A man barraged by denunciation will either develop an immunity to it, or will leave public life to be replaced by someone less susceptible. If the less susceptible politician is met by a still greater volume of demonization, enough to force him from politics as well, his replacement will be still more heavily calloused against it. Or, as Jim Bouton put it in Ball Four, "if you keep throwing 'em the curve ball, eventually they'll learn how to hit it."
(These folksy comparisons are your Curmudgeon's gesture toward not appearing to be a completely hyperintellectual twit. If you like them, send $10 to get him to continue. If you don't, send $10 to get him to cease and desist.)
While the drummers persist in pounding out their negative tunes, the marchers cannot help but note their invariance, their uniformly high intensity. For negative drumming seldom admits of gradations of evil, stupidity, or incompetence. The intelligent marcher must eventually react to the sameness of the thing:
- By tuning it out, or:
- By investigating its claims objectively, or:
- By disengaging from politics altogether, the most pronounced effect.
Every two years, drummers publicly lament the thinness of Americans' participation in the electoral process, which has hovered near 50% for some time. Few reflect on whether their negative proclivities in the intervening period might have anything to do with it. If there are any for whom this is a desired outcome, they're keeping very quiet...apart from their drumming, of course.
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