Solve the Problems, Play by the Rules, Trust the Voters
At the end of the sometimes contentious hearings on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, a Democratic senator gave the Republican chair of the committee a hug and said kind words about his handling of the hearings. It was a gesture that reflected traditional senatorial comity. The contest was over. The Republicans had the votes. With her eye on the future, she expressed hope that there is “perhaps some good bipartisan legislation we can put together to make this great country even better.”
Calls for her replacement began immediately from those who see politics as a continual struggle between good and evil in which there is only one winner.
That vision of politics dominates today. Activists are more ideological, more unforgiving of differences. It is a contest between you and them. Whatever the opponent does must be countered. If the other party steals a court seat, it is time to pack the court. If the opponent breaks the rules, you have to also. You are two gladiators in a ring and only one will survive.
There is a more useful metaphor when thinking about politics. The contest is between two plays and you play to the audience. Your opponent is just another actor. The audience is the audience. And the audience decides. The play that resonates with the audience, that has the more believable characters and a compelling story, wins.
Within that metaphor, what is important is the audience’s reaction to what is being said and done. Your response to what the opposition says or does, particularly any attack, should be directed to the audience’s reaction rather than to the initial attack. If the audience has no reaction, there is no reason to respond. It is always tempting to hit back at your opponent. It makes you feel good, but you want to do so only if hitting back fits into the play that you are acting out for the audience.
The Biden campaign this year has a multimillion dollar “Malarky Project” designed specifically to monitor information spreading on social media, evaluate its impact on specific audiences, and counter its effects, if any, with targeted responses.
“The real dilemma of misinformation, from a campaign perspective, is that in the vast majority of cases, the correct tactical thing to do is nothing,” the New York Times quoted Matthew Hindman, an associate professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a study on misinformation during the 2018 midterms. “There is a very real risk that you will take a nothing story that nobody has heard of and raise its prominence and give it oxygen.”
In the heat of a campaign, however, it is difficult to keep from hitting back. Particularly when your strongest supporters, who pay attention to everything said and done, become anxious.
Most people, however, don’t pay attention to the political back and forth, tit for tat, that consumes so much time, because so little of it affects their lives.
In an op ed piece this week in the Times, two political science professors from Stony Brook University argued that the real divide in American politics is between “political junkies and everyone else”. Some 85 percent of Americans follow politics only slightly or not at all and their interests are different. Casual observers are more likely to cite tangible issues as important to them; active partisans are more likely to reward ideological victories.
That tangible issues are what is important to most voters is not a new phenomenon. Graham Wallas who as a politician paid attention to his audience, wrote the early 1900s, “The candidate is made aware at every point of the enormously greater solidity … of the work-a-day world which they see for themselves, as compared with the world of inference and secondary ideas which they see through the newspapers.”
Or, as one person trying to figure out how to pay the rent told a reporter last year, “You have to have a lot less problems to worry about politics.”
Partisan fights don’t interest most people. They see themselves as spectators watching a squabbling match over issues that don’t concern them. Many are actively turned off.
Two things, however, have been important enough to bring people into the streets in variety of countries around the world this year. Failure of the government to deliver basic necessities for living. Threats to democratic norms.
The message from the people in the audience is simple. Enough of the squabbles. Solve problems. Play by the rules. On the issues that matter in their daily lives they pay attention. They make distinctions.
In Bolivia this year there were two elections. In the first, the President was ousted after changing the law to allow him to run beyond the traditional number of terms. In the second, his Party was returned to power under a new leader as voters recognized the social and economic progress made in the past decade.
Voters have a memory. When I was a teenager living in Rhode Island, before I paid any attention to politics, the Democratic governor used some loophole in the law to give himself the victory in a very close election. Two years later he was defeated in a landslide that began a series of elections won by Republicans.
For all of us who are actively engaged in politics it is far too easy to get caught up in tactics and controversies of the day. Social media, talk radio and 24-hour TV news and commentary keep us fixated on our foes. We need to take a deep breath and go back to the basics. Fix the problems. Play by the rules. Trust the voters.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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