Unlike most of the purported "conventional wisdom" offered by the Beltway punditocracy, these critiques seem undeniably true. Yet what is odd about this general disgust with modern campaign methods is how little it stems from any larger commentary on cultural trends as a whole. From the shouting matches of the McLaughlin Group to the urbane exchanges on the pages of Harper's, pundits on the left and the right treat the degeneration of American political discourse as an isolated phenomenon. Yet this degradation is nothing more than an extension of wider cultural trends long apparent in popular entertainment.
Congressional Quarterly recently reported that both the number of campaign volunteers and the use of print media by candidates have dropped dramatically over the past ten years. Candidates instead reach voters almost solely through television advertising. This shift in emphasis has not only spawned enormously high campaign costs, but has also made revolutionary qualitative changes in political discourse.
As a means of delivering commodified entertainment to mass audiences, television makes fundamental demands on the programs it provides. They must be simple, direct, and exciting; they must engage the audience as passive receptors instead of active appropriators of sensory data. This is not because of any innate ignorance in audience members, but rather because of the technology of the medium itself: it cannot foster either the dialogic engagement or the reasoned evaluation which makes active appropriation possible. Passive receptivity means that television must create an emotional engagement with viewers--an evocation of sentiment which is self-contained and easily encouraged. Fear, lust, laughter, sympathy--all have their place.
Yet these diverse emotional appeals coexist uneasily. The "sexiness" of immediate gratification is always in tension with aspirations to security based on propriety. The historic American oscillation between Puritanism and prurience, between fear of and indulgence in the violent, has reached a fever pitch in the media as we enter the mid-1990s. Congressional hearings denounce sex and violence in programming, responding to viewers who supposedly deplore the "filth" on television. Yet consumers consistently reward those willing to push the envelope, turning our most popular soaps into carnivals of objectification, and "newsmagazines" into purveyors of non-stop titillation. These contradictory desires are merely perplexing or risible when confined to the world of popular entertainment; we can all enjoy a certain irony when America's lust for the lurid and over-inflated moralism collide (remember Jim Bakker?).
But when political discourse enters this realm of contradictory and base appeals, dangerous distortions occur. Primarily because politicians must approach the mass audience as advertisers, salesmen of particular ideological wares, they cannot maintain their intellectual integrity. Ads are notorious for making the most absurd attempts to connect the purchase of their products to some libidinal sensation--witness the Swedish Bikini Team--and political ads are no exception.
Take this year's Virginia senatorial election. UVA philosophy professor Richard Rorty recently offered a fascinating explanation of the psychological dynamics behind Ollie North's appeal to that state's voters. To Rorty, repressed Virginians were willing to prioritize Chuck Robb's liaisons as a political issue to the point that they would scarcely consider substantive policies. Confirming Linda Grant's diagnosis of Americans' postmodern obsession with voyeurism, at least forty-three percent of the state's voters viewed Senator Robb's private affairs as more important than North's public deceit. Ollie's disgraceful record of lying to Congress cannot be "imaged," while Robb's private parties have been described in titillating detail.
Although the North campaign's reliance on family values and diversionary negative campaigning was not ultimately effective, conservative ideologues have generally found success in adopting new campaigning methods. Spooked by the substantive social reform and business regulation inaugurated in the 1960s and 70s, Republicans have used media politics to shift public attention away from what E.J. Dionne has called a "traditional politics of remedy." Such a progressive social agenda attempts to grapple with difficult policy making in areas such as environmental protection, racial justice, and health care provision. Issues like these are of vital importance but have no easy answers. By concentrating on the public welfare, the politics of remedy provides opportunities for political dialogue to address inequalities in class and race and work toward resolving their negative effects.
In lieu of this constructive approach to American public life, conservatives have moved aggressively to insert such divisive social issues as crime, abortion, and "family values." The vague appeals to Republican propriety made in the early 80s have crystallized into stereotyped attacks on "deviant" groups whom candidates can pillory for immediate emotional impact. New Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe ran on a platform of "God, guns, and gays," stirring up vigilantism in the hinterlands while manipulating some of the baser prejudices of the "booboosie." From Pennsylvania to California, fundamentalist candidates have captured Republican primaries by emphasizing just how far they will go in order to inject religious standards into the public sphere.
Many commentators have claimed that perhaps the most pathetic aspect of the recent Virginia spectacle was the willingness of "respectable Republican leaders" to pander to fanatical right-wingers who formed the core of the former colonel's support. However, those more attuned to the manipulative style of modern campaigning would estimate that these "Christian Soldiers" were the ones actually being duped. As a recent New York Times Magazine series on "Anti-Politics" reports, leaders of the Christian Right are skillfully crafting an economic platform that appeals to the same middle- and upper-class selfishness which drove the "Reagan Revolution." Such developments delight the big donors who dominate conservative policymaking circles. Yet the "groin issues" with which the Christian Coalition rouses its fundamentalist campaign workers bear strikingly little relation to the corporate interests which lie at the heart of the Republican agenda.
Emphasis on the "crime issue" is also essential to conservative deployment of the diversionary discourse of sex and violence. This tendency was particularly egregious in 1994 Massachusetts campaigns. In their second debate, Mitt Romney spent a full tenth of his time berating Senator Kennedy for voting against a marginal increase in a mandatory sentencing law. Meanwhile, our enlightened Governor Bill Weld used much of his 43-1 monetary advantage over Mark Roosevelt to saturate the airwaves with images of teary-eyed families of murder victims offering emotional endorsements of the crime-fighting carrothead.
The 1968 Nixon message of "law and order" is a staple of Republican campaigns this year. Some particularly innovative Southern pols commissioned ads with darkened electric chairs featured prominently in the background. Yet what seemed particularly striking about "law and order" issues in Campaign ï94 was their tendency to become completely divorced from substantive policy advocacy. Tennessee's new Republican Senator/surgeon Bill Frist claimed that his treatment of gunshot victims in a Memphis hospital gave him a perspective on crime which "out of touch liberal incumbent" Jim Cooper just couldn't muster.
Except perhaps for recently deceased Republican operative Lee Atwater, no one has professed to enjoy our savage campaigns. Yet their style indisputably produces votes. The exigencies of political competition have demonstrated a version of Gresham's Law in politics; bad campaigning drives out good. As a result, conservatives' successful manipulation of the discourse of sex and violence has led many Democrats to sink to their level.
For the most part, issues connected with the "politics of remedy" have become lost in the shuffle. Of all the Democratic candidates for Senate this year, only Senator Kennedy's campaign ads committed him to working on health care reform next year. Judging from the campaign, this year's Democratic program consists largely of references to crime, welfare, and government inefficiency. Yet these "issues" for the most part elicit a broad level of bipartisan consensus. Political reform, the economy, foreign policy, the deficit, and health care were barely mentioned in any campaign.
The "non-issues" raised in their place seem straight out of the Republican playbook. House Speaker Tom Foley, narrowly defeated in the recent election, abandoned mentioning his distinguished legislative record and took to advocating the death penalty and hunters' rights instead. The third-highest official of the nation's titular liberal party concluded a last-minute ad blitz with the reminder that "Today, we need to put demands for justice ahead of social justice." Following Foley's lead, Senator Dianne Feinstein posed with assault rifles in California, while Jim Cooper in Tennessee staged his own version of Fox TV's Cops by traveling in an on-duty Memphis squad car. Although no one replicated Michael Dukakis' tank fiasco of 1988, worries over Republican attacks forced many Democrats into a pattern of wholly inauthentic campaigning.
Certainly there are some substantive issues in public discourse on sex and violence which need address. Both the left (through the choice and sexual liberation movements) and the right (through advocacy of abstinence and traditional values) have raised key issues of public morality. Yet as a diverse community with varying moral conceptions, America has made little progress toward settling these issues. And so long as America remains a deeply "churched" yet fundamentally individualistic culture, we have little chance of resolving them in the future.
Observations of such a low level of consensus on these issues need not imply that Americans embrace the status quo or reject dialogue. If issues of sexual ethics or criminal violence were treated in a rational manner, with substantive public discourse, perhaps Americans could create valuable opportunities for mutual understanding in our culture. Our political campaigns do not merely reflect public sentiment; they shape it.
Politics based on emotional arousal rather than rational dialogue is inherently conservative. It is infinitely easier to arouse viscerally negative reactions to issues of crime, welfare dependency, and "the decline of family values" than it is to promote gut-level support for complex policy proposals. In a panicked desire for electoral success, too many Democrats participated in this corrupting brand of conservative advocacy. Even those who did manage to win victory will probably see their policy goals suffer accordingly. President Clinton's approach to health care reform demonstrated just how warped liberal policy initiatives can become in the midst of the new politics. Instead of trying to rally the nation around an attack on the status quo and serious consideration of a single-payer plan, the administration attempted to coordinate a cumbersome coalition of insurers, businessmen, and other interest groups. Excessive concern for proper marketing of the resultant plan kept Democrats from initiating public discussion of our ethical commitments to social responsibility and fair play.
Although the new political discourse at first only contaminated the process of policy making, it now taints its substance as well. If liberals continue to cooperate with conservative efforts to simplify discourse through incessant use of "sexy" candidacies with gut-level appeal, we threaten to help create a detached and dysfunctional electorate. As Larissa MacFarquhar observed in Lingua Franca, "Language is not a vehicle of communication for conveying a preexisting thought--it determines the thought we can think in the first place." Similarly, campaigns do not merely express public desires, but fundamentally shape these desires. Democrats who continue to stress publicly only the libertarian and crime-fighting aspects of their agenda, while ignoring issues of social obligation and public welfare, can only aspire to Pyrrhic victories in upcoming campaigns. Power will ultimately shift to well-financed and telegenic candidates who can best serve as "icons" of easily signified collective desires, such as more rewarding family life or punishment of criminals. And if these Michael Huffingtons and Ollie Norths do eventually prevail, no aspect of humane liberalism will be safe.