The media have turned politics into pure contest: reporters interpret every aspect of presidential campaigns by asking who’s ahead and by what strategies they got there. This is in distinct contrast to what voters ask whenever they get a chance to quiz a candidate in a town meeting or other uncontrolled venue. The press wants to know how the candidate is going to get ahead or stay ahead. The public wants to know how the candidate is going to solve their problems—disappearing jobs, excessive medical costs, or drugs in the streets.
In his cleverly argued Atlantic Monthly cover story in April of this year, U.S. News editor James Fallows concluded that this disparity of interest is one of the major reasons Americans hate the media.
But the current picture is not so simple: It is not merely a case of the press turning the campaign into a contest (for politics has, at least since Machiavelli, been that) while the public and the candidates are interested in solving serious social challenges. No. If August’s made-for-TV conventions taught us anything, it was that politics has been Oprahcized; it has been tuned to our national love of courage in the face of tragedy. The parade of plucky overcomers and valiant disease-of-the-week victims was the stuff of daytime talk television and made-for-TV movies. The message was compassion and courage. But the experience was vicarious. No demand was made that we tighten our belts, volunteer in service of country or humanity, or even stiffen our upper lips. It was highly refined and processed emotion—Cheez Whiz for the psyche politic.
TO MARKET, TO MARKET What this media-culture campaign says about the American political process is really a comment on the American marketplace. In the summer 1996, Wilson Quarterly, University of Florida English professor James Twitchell argues that advertising is our way of giving meaning and significance to products that are functionally interchangeable. Thanks to industrial standardization, most products today exhibit no clear superiority over their competition; they are essentially alike, and advertising, says Twitchell, is our way of trying to give significance to what is literally run-of-the-mill. (Why, for example, does a designer’s name on my blue jeans make me feel better about wearing them than if they simply said Wrangler? Whatever it is, our denim decisions have little to do with quality and much to do about nothing.)
One wonders, in the current campaign, to what extent the candidates are true choices rather than mere echoes, to what extent they are, as Twitchell likes to say, fungible. As both candidates have driven for the hard center, leaving their more idealistic constituencies on the Left and the Right, image and emotion have become, if not the stuff of politics, at least the preferred mode of discourse. If we continue on this course, it will be a national disaster.
It will be a disaster, first, because when candidates cannot be distinguished, voters become skeptical about the political process and apathetic—not just on election day, but year round. Achieving cultural change requires enthusiasm from people at the edges in order to arouse those at the satisfied center. It requires hard work and persuasive argument from those with a clear vision of a better, more just society. But when the two giant political engines run along the same track, voters who might find such vision appealing are likely to stay home.
It will be a disaster, second, because it creates confusion. Immediately following the Chicago Democratic convention, Christian pollster George Barna released a surprising study:
- Among the born-again (43 percent of registered voters), President Clinton led Citizen Dole by 1 percentage point (39 to 38).
- Among those who identified with the Religious Right (about one-quarter of registered voters), the President led his challenger, again, by 1 point(41 to 40).
- Voters who are religious fundamentalists favored the President by 11 points (44 to 33).
- Only one group, Barna’s “evangelical” category (which he defines by a matrix of six theological criteria), favored Dole over Clinton; and their numbers, he pointed out, were not sufficient to give Dole the needed lift.
We are not arguing here that anyone who is a born-again evangelical should ipso facto vote Republican. But we offer Barna’s numbers to show that what seemed before the conventions like an inevitable alliance between moral conservatives and the Republican party was subject to a sea change. The “big tent” strategy may work in the short run, but when Republican higher-ups thumbed their noses at the issues these voters cared most about, they alienated a significant, though small, idealistic constituency. Perhaps it is only a matter of time until a clever third-party spoiler captures their attention and mounts a successful challenge, as the Republicans did to the Whigs in 1860. When the parties are as interchangeable as Chrysler and General Motors, voters with vision start looking elsewhere.
Finally, this absence of genuine political choice will be a disaster because it elevates image over action. This is the consumerizing of politics, in which we Spackle the cracks in our walls when it is actually the foundations of our house divided that are sinking. The foundations of families and communities who take responsibility for their members, and of belief in divinely ordained natural law that dictates equality, justice, and liberty—these are the foundations that have shifted or disappeared.
Image (which is everything in our contemporary advertising culture) is used to define meaning and significance, says Twitchell. But biblical faith has a fundamental distrust of image: Jesus warns us against those who wash only the outside of the cup. Biblical faith also knows the value of foundations: Jesus told of the foolish man who failed to build his house on a rock. Moral conservatives—despite the historical distortions of some who seek a Christian America and a nuclear family that never (or rarely) was, and despite a sometimes too-narrow vision of what the good society entails—know that we are fighting a battle about foundations.
When voters are apathetic, cynical, and confused, and when they allow image to triumph over substance, they are easy marks for a demagogue, for the rhetoric of scapegoating, and eventually for tyranny. Adcult, Twitchell’s term for the culture of advertising, elevates the value of choice (which serves our atomized consumerist culture well) by creating the illusion of choice, even when brands of ketchup or compact cars may be virtually indistinguishable. When choice is elevated, what foundation is left?
All of these potential results are important to thoughtful Christians. While there may be arguments for Christian withdrawal from the world, there is no case for inaction in response to its problems. While there is cause for skepticism, there is no case to be made for apathy. While there is cause for confusion, knowing and testing the truth is a vital safeguard against demagoguery. While there is a semblance of significance, it is the repair of our nation that counts. How we heal the nation depends on a series of prudential judgments. Give us a reasoned choice, not the illusion of choice, or we perish.
RESTORING HIGH-TOUGH AMERICA Where can we relearn the skills we need to restore reasoned political discourse? Such discourse requires community, and the church is one of the last vestiges of community in America.
In “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s much-noticed 1995 article in the Journal of Democracy, the Harvard political scientist decried the decline of social capital in America. By social capital, Putnam meant the kinds of organizations and social opportunities in which we practice neighborliness and hone our citizenship skills. Americans are, indeed, bowling more than ever, Poston noted, but with the membership decline in the kinds of organizations that once sponsored bowling leagues, we are alone on the lanes. Lodges, the Jaycees, the League of Women Voters, farm cooperatives, and PTAs are all in decline. And these are the organizations in which Americans traditionally learned to live together. Now we are generally without their shoulder-rubbing, back-slapping, high-touch experience. Instead, we are identifying with groups long-distance: Americans continue to join, but we join advocacy groups such as the American Association of Retired Persons. No matter how effective these groups are as lobbies, the most interaction they can offer us comes in the form of a personalized direct-mail solicitation.
The church, on the other hand, is different: it is still healthy. Most churches are relatively small and encourage interaction and involvement. Larger churches that value such interaction have elaborately structured small-group ministries. Indeed, as Charles Trueheart pointed out in “Welcome to the Next Church” (Atlantic Monthly, August 1996), the new market-sensitive forms of church “can be the clearest approximation of community that a whole generation is likely to have known or likely to find anywhere in an impersonal transient nation.”
While the church’s raison d’être is above and apart from politics, by its very existence, it creates the resources for restoring good citizenship.
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