Tuesday’s election results are being consistently characterized as the result of "anti-DC, anti-establishment" anger. Two winners from opposite political parties, Joe Sestak and Rand Paul, were on TV Wednesday morning talking about the need for accountability from politicians and that voters are tired of being ignored.
I think the candidates and pundits have got it wrong, and they’re either willing believers or calculating promoters of a myth that bodes ill for the very voters they claim to treasure.
Steampunk Social Media
Political parties aren’t mentioned in any of America’s founding documents; rather, they emerged once the government had been formed and it had become clear that there needed to be ways to find, inspire, connect, and reward voters. In this sense political parties were the social media of their time because they gave people ways to participate in the ongoing conversation about governing. Forget technology and you can see the parallels between an online chat room and a conversation in a coffeehouse, or a list of principles written in quill pen with a posting typed on a Facebook page.
What the parties soon realized was that the substance of this ongoing social media conversation they provided had to be about things larger and more abstract than the technicalities of governing because, like the corporate brands that followed, people were more comfortable engaging with broad, easy-to-understand themes. Federalists are monarchists. The Whigs want to shred the Constitution. So political parties become myth machines that continuously teed-up the artificial context in which their members could participate. There was a reality behind it, of course — patronage jobs, funds for pet projects, and implicit guarantees of lifetime employment for the party faithful — which strengthened and helped preserve the machines.
The Myth of No Accountability
Politicians have been always held accountable to two sometimes opposing constituencies: first, the party machines needing their minions to stay true to the themes they promoted and, both secondarily and as an outcome, voters really didn’t want their elected officials to do much of anything and certainly not tell them the truths about the complexities of government and their social contract:
- Don’t actually fix Social Security if it’ll impact the benefits I receive or touch health insurance if my payments will change
- Go fight wars as long as I don’t have to hear about them and make sure my children aren’t drafted
- I’d prefer incessant bickering about energy as long as the price I pay for gas stays as low as possible
- Tell somebody else they need to act differently or pay more for the problems I see around me, or
- Don’t do anything because doing things just makes things worse.
Politicians have been far more than accountable to these conflicting party and individual voter demands. They’ve been complete slaves. To suggest otherwise (as some of this week’s winners have done) is to buy into a boldfaced lie. Americans have been "values voters" since we read postings by candlelight.
New Myth, Same Myth
I think Tuesday’s election results reveal two primary themes that are far more complex than anti-Washington rage:
- First, that the political social media machines of the past are breaking down as a combination of technology and cultural triggers threaten to sever voters from the old mechanisms of networking (local party establishments feeding up to a national entity, supported by other real-world organized interests, whether union or corporate). The myths of party identification feel archaic.
- Second, voters seem willing to embrace instead a more fluid, more esoteric myth that is even further divorced from reality or the truths of what it takes to govern. It’s broadly thematic like the old party promises but it’s far more absolute, allowing for not even the slightest violations represented by compromise or sometimes reason itself. The new myth is the old myth only divorced from reality.
Democrats are socialists bent on government takeover of the economy. Republicans are corporate shills committed to managing our personal lives. Each party is responsible for the difficulty and fear in our lives, and never the twain shall meet…certainly not in the actuality of governing. There’ll be no tough choices made on immigration, energy, jobs, or wars. The message to the victorious politicians this week is that they must stay true to the new myth. Speak the truth or take action and you will be held accountable.
Virtual Democracy
Human beings have rich internal lives that infuse their experience of the external world with meaning. This has always been true, however realized, and it applies to our families as it does to economics. Our participation in politics has always been somewhat imaginary in that we imagine who our politicians are, what they stand for, and what it all means. William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley duked it out in the late 1800s based as much on perception as on the reality of the issues, if not more so. Political parties have always been the mechanism that kept such battles grounded; political operators knew that there’d be some consequence to even the highest flights of rhetorical imagination.
Those connections — and that responsibility — are being severed and lost today. Voters are embracing new social tools and activities.
The folks behind MoveOn.org and Tea Party meetings aren’t themselves going to be held accountable for the platforms they vociferously promote. The "voters" who they (and the media) continually reference is nothing more than a convenient rhetorical term and not a group of people who are willing to hold themselves accountable to understanding nuanced, complicated subjects, any more than they’re organized to do anything other than rail against their officials if they dare speak about such subjects with any nuance or acknowledgment of complexity.
The fundamental link between cause and effect — i.e. telling the government to do nothing means you can’t complain when something you depended on doesn’t happen or, conversely, enabling it to do things means you have to understand the risks — is not encouraged or supported by posting on Facebook pages or yelling in YouTube videos. In fact, we get just the opposite: politicians who are beholden to myths without consequences. Virtual democracy, not a real one.
If anything, this week’s elections show us that we need to be really, really careful about what we vote for. I wish more media types and pundits were talking about it in these terms.
(Image: The Lebanon Club, New York Workingmen’s Coffeehouse; Harper’s Weekly, January 24, 1880; via Southern Labor Archives, www.library.gsu.edu)
Original Post: http://www.dimbulb.net/my_weblog/2010/05/political-parties-are-archaic-social-media-platforms.html
