“They just don’t get it.”

We said this kind of thing a lot during the election. It marked the moment when we despaired at the sheer wrong-headedness of the opposition.

“They just don’t get it” was sometimes followed by grand declarations:

“I’m moving to Canada.”

[or]

“I’m moving to a gated suburb.”

Moving to Canada? Dude! You’re that alienated? Moving to a suburb? You must be joking. This is how bad you think it is?

This is separatism. This is exit. This is what happens when we feel there’s no hope of getting our point across. Republicans are from Mars. Democrats from Venus. Let’s call the whole thing off.

But what if this is a symptom of a larger problem: the new reality of culture and politics?

We are more multiple than we used to be. The ideological spectrum has stretched in both directions. The Right is further right. The Left is further left. And both camps are more heterogeneous. The absolute ideological space has expanded extensively and intensively.

We have a systematic problem on our hands. If there is more ideological space, it is inevitable that we should find ourselves dealing with people “who just don’t get it.” How could it be otherwise? They live on one coast. We live on the other. What are the chances we’re going to share assumptions? This is the nature of the new political beast.

It is time to rewrite the rules of discourage. As it stands, we make our arguments with the blithe assurance that they will carry the day by their own their own inherent plausibility. If we engage the opposition, it is to snipe and cavil. (I have done my share of this, as readers have noted.)

It is better to know the enemy, master their assumptions, and address these assumptions explicitly. In the case of the argument for Gay marriage, this means saying things like, “I understand that this proposition threatens your idea of the family. Here’s why [in a very detailed way] I believe Gay marriage would not put the idea or the reality of the family in jeopardy.” On the Right this means saying things like, “I understand that you believe the marketplace stands at odds with social justice. Here’s hwy [in a very detailed way] I believe the marketplace actually serves the goals of social justice.”

Clearly, some differences are non negotiable. Some on the Right will say “but the Bible says.” Some on the Left will say, “only a perfectly equal distribution of resources is acceptable.” Fine, we have got to rock bottom differences. But sometimes some people on the Right and Left are going to say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let me think on that.”

And certainly, they are going to think, “I still believe you are deeply mistaken, but thanks for making the effort.” If nothing else, a detailed engagement with the opponent’s terms does them the courtesy of saying, “I get that you are sincere. I get that you have an idea. And I have done by best to respect this idea in my response.”

The problem is that we are now responding to the great gaps between us by shouting our positions across the chasm. And all this does is create the impression that there is no middle ground…when there might be a little.

And a little is a lot. It begins to rebuild the center. It begins to resupply our now almost exhausted stocks of mutual respect. This is the right thing to do, the Millian thing to do.

But it is also the strategic thing to do. This is the way to split the monolith. A few people on the other side will say, “Oh, interesting.” And that begins the process of separating the lunatics from the party of thoughtfulness, the doctrinaire from those who are truly interested in “building bridges.”

In sum, there is a way to rebuild the center but it depends upon a new mutual interest, a kind of anthropological investigation (forgive me if I see this in parochial terms) of who the other is. It could be that we will come away from this with the grim understanding that mutuality is impossible. But if we continue in our present fashion, we may be quite certain that we will make this so.

Acknowledgements:

Ennis. 2004. Several posts on this blog (for forcing me to think about the real challenges of “discourse”)

Last note:

Another way to begin to close the ideological gap is to see if we can’t fashion a peace treaty for the culture wars. “They just don’t get it” comes in part from the fact that we are unacquainted with the founding ideas and documents of the other party. The problem is not so much that they just don’t get it, as that we don’t get them.

One way to do this is to propose the 20 cultural documents that one side should master in order to “get” what the other side is saying.

A first candidate for those on the Right who would understand the Left is DVD just released by Universal that contains 5 Marx brothers movies: Duck Soup, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.

This will seems an odd choice, but consider this quote from Duck Soup:

A minister of cabinet of Freedonia: I give all my time and energy to my duties and what do I get?

Groucho: Well, you get awfully tiresome after a while.”

The Marx Brothers were one of the founts of my transformation as an adolescent. It was one of the documents that encouraged me to scorn authority. They were in fact architects of the 1960s and its anti-establishment point of few. Some people on the Right believe that this is the time to restore our respect for authority, and they will find this films not the least bit funny. But others will begin to see that even a deeply conservative soul can take pleasure in ludic play. While we are building bridges, this is one place to start.

I’m open to all suggestions for other seminal documents, a kind of briefing compendium for the Left and the Right.

Forget Jon Stewart. Take Michael Moore.

Step 1: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of Mr. Moore’s “propositions.”

Step 2: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of his rhetorical style.

Step 3: do a careful, dispassionate, analysis of how Mr. Moore plays in the red states.

Step 4: do a careful, dispassionate, cost-benefit analysis of Mr. Moore’s contribution to the Democratic effort.

The results are clear:

The benefit: as a swash buckling satirist, Mr. Moore made Democrats feel good about themselves.

The cost: Mr. Moore made the rest of the country look at the Democrats with horror. “This guy is your hero? And you want my vote? You have just got to be kidding.”

I don’t care whether Moore is a good satirist or a bad one. And I am not saying that there is no place for satirists. (And I am distinctly not saying that the Republican party does not have loose cannons of its own.) I am saying that Democrats paid dearly for this satirist.

How dearly? Run the election results again on the “scenario” machine. Remove Mr. Moore from the equation. He could have been the difference between victory and loss. That’s how much the red states hate him. That’s how expensive he was.

As many of us did, I watched Monday Night Football last night, and Indiana’s victory over Minnesota. It was an astonishing game between two great quarterbacks. But some of the best shots were of Tony Dungy and Mike Tice, coaches on either side line, working out the options, ruthlessly swapping in and out the right personnel, playing the game as ferociously in their heads as their players were playing it on the field.

This is the way the Republicans conduct themselves. Michael Moore is heartening. He’s funny. And he’s a liability. Time for the Democrats to get in the game.

I have it from a reliable source that the team at Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show is despondent. Stewart and his team thought their satire, most of it directed against the Republicans, would help encourage large numbers of young voters to support the Democrats. In fact, their youthful demographic failed to make an impressive showing at the polls.

This is a puzzle. The Daily Show is almost certainly the wittiest thing on television. But it was also, in the weeks before the election, a platform for mockery. Night after night, Stewart held up Republicans to ridicule. This should have made the show a formidable platform for recruiting the Democratic vote from a constituency that a) does not vote enough and b) could have tipped the balance in this very close election.

So what happened? There is one dark possibility. It is that Stewart actually succeeded in driving his viewers away from the voting booth, not towards it. It may be that this nightly ridicule had the effect not of discrediting the Republicans but the idea that Washington can serve the people’s will. In short, Stewart’s show may have discredited the office as much as did the incumbent.

Don’t get me wrong. Satire is a good and noble thing. No democracy can survive without it. (And we must worry that a newly sanctimonious Right might move against it.) But here’s the thing that Democrats do not seem always to get: that their absolute presumption of certainty that the other is self serving and corrupt makes the electoral system look like a school for scoundrels. There’s a problem here. The absolute refusal to accept that the political other might sometimes have a point, that the Republicans might have ideas, that the opposition sometimes deserves a thoughtful response…all of this begins to corrode politics itself. (Post post insert, with a hat tip to Ennis: I do not mean to suggest that Republicans and other on the Right have not done a good deal of corruding of their own. They have. And no one does certainty and self congratulation quite like the Right.)

It’s an irony to match the one noted Friday. When you act as if the opposition is completely corrupt and craven, you create a little piece of cognitive dissonance. You leave the viewer-voter, to ask “If you’re so right, how can it be you are not in office? There must be something wrong with the office.” In sum, the Democrats’ politics of smugness and certitude may end up demolishing the credibility of the very institution they wish to run.

I’m not sure this is true. I’m just saying.

References

Wikipedia entry for Jon Stewart here

I intend to post “Advice for Democrats III and IV” on Monday and Tuesday respectively. But the weekend is for happier things.

A note of praise for Robert Andrew Powell’s “No Yelling, No Cheering. Shhhhh! It’s Silent Saturday.”

It’s hard to say how good “No yelling” is. It’s an account of what Powell calls a “low level national trend;” the practice of insisting that parents remain silent while watching their children play organized soccer.

There is no shouting, no yelling, no threatening the officials or swearing at fathers from the opposing team. With the sidelines silenced, there is no pressure. The children are free to have fun. At least that’s the idea.

Here’s a glimpse of how completely innovative American culture can be. What is more utterly American than cheering at a sporting event? How many movies have we seen in which the last scene shows everyone in the stands cheering wildly as the victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat? (About 3,500. Yes, I’ve run the numbers.) Cheering takes the “spectator” out of spectator sports and puts the stands in play. Thus do sports become participatory. This is how joy comes to the world…for many Americans every Saturday morning…and Sunday afternoon…and Monday Night…

But America is reflexive as almost no culture has ever been. Suddenly, someone asks “is cheering (and swearing, groaning, booing) a good thing? Perhaps it puts too much pressure on the kids.” (I can’t remember ever hearing anything from the sidelines when playing football and baseball as a kid. But never mind.) So Americans, bless them, create Silent Saturday. They change one of the fundamental rules by which their culture is organized.

Now the frustrating thing from an anthropological point of view is that the attending journalists and social scientists can be relied up to join in noisy judgment of cultural practice. Their vaunted reflexivity turns out to be not very reflexive. It ends almost always in the same criticism: existing practice is bad. Silent Saturday is good. In point of fact, journalists and social scientists will never agree to a Silent Saturday of their own. They will stand on the sidelines of American culture and keep up a noisy barrage of criticism.

In most hands, “No Yelling. No Cheering” would have toed this line. It would have been a sternly approving of the innovation, with a good deal of hand ringing about how viciously competitive kid sports have become. Cue Bill Moyers. Roll the documentary. “America has always been a culture that cares about competition. But are our children paying too high a price? Tonight, we will go to a little town in Texas where…”

And we can some of this from Mr. Powell, no cheerleader he. He gives us several glimpses how terrifying it must be for a six year old to hear his parent scream at umpires and what a relief it must be to left to their own devices on the field. We can’t read this article without admiring the motives and the accomplishments of Silent Saturday.

But Mr. Powell forgoes glib criticism and pat reflexivity for the real effects of the innovation. He shows why cheering is so, well, cheering. He shows how sincere and probably well advised are the innovators. And then, bless him, he gives us the contradictions that must ensue when a culture is prepared to change this dramatically without ever sweeping up after itself.

No Yelling, No Cheering documents what it is to live in a culture that creates innovations without ever quite letting go of the past. Powell gives us soccer moms and dads stretched between the good in the new idea and the good in the old one. This is American culture, something caught, more often than not, between the “x” of tradition and the “not x” of innovation with the “culture bearers” spread out, and sometimes, stretched tight in between.

As Faulkner might have said, in America, the past is not dead, it is not past. Everything is in play. For every cultural precept there is its opposite. For every clarity, a contradiction. This is no place for platitudes, for vapid social science and journalism. This is a job for someone with a feeling for what it’s like to live in a culture that can reinvent itself continually while taking all the old ideas with it as it goes. A few writers have risen to this challenge. If this piece is anything to judge by, Robert Andrew Powell is a writer who might some day join the pantheon.

There are the grace notes, as when Powell says, “When the ball is blown into play, the players on both teams follow it around as iron filings would trail a magnet.” Come on. Big points on the rhetorical score board for this one. And the crowd goes wild.

I haven’t done the article justice. Have a look for yourself. And we must encourage Mr. Powell to liberate this piece from the “subscription required” clutches of the New York Times, that we may all gather in wonder, a crowd now silent with admiration.

References

Powell, Robert Andrew. 2004. No Yelling, No Cheering, Shhhhh! It’s Silent Saturday. New York Times. November 5, 2004. subscription required here.

Democrats must understand several things about Republicans to beat them in 2008. (I am your devoted anthropological servant, without regard to party.)

First, Republicans (and the people who vote for them) must be understood to hold a moral and intellectual position. They are not, as some Democrats insist, “asleep,” “ignorant,” or developmentally challenged (as noted in yesterday’s post). They are not selfish. They are not mistaken. They are not 4 years away from “seeing the light.”

Republicans and TPWVFT have an idea of what the body politic is. That this is not the Liberal Left and the Democratic Party idea does not mean it is not an idea. It may not be dismissed as cavalier, craven, or some species of false consciousness. Ad hominem attacks feel good, but, as Melinda pointed a couple of days ago, they don’t get the political job done.

The idea: every tub its own bottom

Republicans and TPWVFT believe every tub is its own bottom: every creature must make its own way in the world. It will be rewarded for its successes and punished for its failures. This is the Republican idea of justice and fairness. No, it doesn’t conform to the Liberal Left notion of justice and fairness, but it is wrong to insist that it is a cover for selfishness, moral indifference, or a demonstration that Republicans and TPWVFT “just don’t get it.”

Nicholas Kristof

Thus when Nicholas Kristof refers to ‘the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates,” he fails to see that these people vote Republican because they believe this party thinks as they do: that it stands for individual effort and accomplishment. To insist that the voter is just too dumb to understand his/her own interests is a simple anthropological failure to see how Republicans & TPWVFT chose to define these interests. It is no good scorning these people because they do not agree with you. This is the moment to do the right thing anthropologically, and grasp the very points of difference that make the Democratic message unappealing or unintelligible.

A cocktail party

Have you had this ethnographic moment? You are standing at a cocktail party wondering how you might beat your way to the bar for another glass of red wine, and someone from the Liberal Left engages you in a recitation of the things they believe in. For some reason people always take me for a fellow traveler (I think its my haircut), and the song is always the same. “Here are the issues I care about,” says the someone. “And, behold, look how deeply I care,” is the larger message. “Sharing and caring,” this is the thing the someone wants you to know about them…as if there were some doubt about their liberal credentials, their moral character, or their capacity for fellow feeling.

There’s always a pause here. The “someone” is waiting for me to sing my own song of liberal generosity—the ritual reciprocity of cocktail chatter, apparently. I say nothing. But here’s what I would say, if I weren’t so darn Canadian:

“I don’t doubt your liberal credentials. But I do wonder if you have talked to a farmer or a waitress lately. The ones who voted Republican did so because they suppose this party is more likely to create a country in which their individual effort and accomplishment will be rewarded. This means, among other things, that they would prefer to keep their tax dollars to fund their own enterprise in the world than surrender it to a more collective approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Oh, well,” says the Democratic someone, ‘then you’re just a selfish, uncaring, so and so. You don’t get it. You don’t understand that we’re all in this tub together.” I get this. I really do. I live in a province, Quebec, in which I pay the highest marginal tax rate in the G8. I am happy to do so. (Believe me, I pay a tax bill so staggeringly high it would turn most Democrats into Republicans instantaneously.) But not everyone feels this way. Some people actually resent when the state puts its hand in their pocket. Especially when they believe they can with their own modest gifts and philanthropy fund the common good more effectively than a government that is, well, famously inefficient. (Have Democrats thought through the implications of American philanthropy?)

To say the waitress does not understand her self interest…well, isn’t this what people mean when they say Democrats are a little arrogant and elitist? If I may hazard another ethnographically undocumented guess, isn’t this the sort of thing that makes some waitresses want to reach for a pot of hot coffee.

“Let me decide how to deploy the value I create in the world,” I think the waitress might say. To which she would add, “While you are accusing me of not understanding my self interest, what shall we say about a NYT columnist who helps promote the position that keeps Democrats out of the Whitehouse?”

It comes down to this: the waitress who believes she is entitled to decide what her interests are and how she wishes to deploy her wealth in the world versus the NYT columnist who presumes to know better and, insult upon insult, to scold her for her choices.

I don’t know. Maybe the Democratic Party is the right party to run the country. But you can’t absent yourself from the mainstream, and then be surprised when the country does not put you in the White House. You can’t scorn the voter and then expect her to slap her forehead and say, “yes, here’s my vote!” You can’t refuse an anthropological understanding the voter, and then expect to lead the country.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the general will should be decided by a columnist at the New York Times. And I think it’s up to Mr. Kristol to explain this to the farmers, factory workers and waitresses of America.

The Democratic Party, bless it, has defined itself as the party that takes America somewhere. This is its strength, its noble calling. But Kristof, dude, you have to get out more. Republicans & TPWVFT are not wrong, ignorant, asleep, selfish or insufficiently self interested. They have an idea. This would be a good time to find out what the idea is. I am starting the count down now. You have four years.

References

Kristof, Nicholas. 2004. Living Poor, Voting Rich. New York Times. November 3, 2004. subscription required here

“It just made me cry,” Terry Mitchell, 54, an audiologist in Oakland, said of Mr. Bush’s re-election. “I am sad that America is asleep at the wheel.”

“I am depressed, but I am also just really angry at the rest of the country’s ignorance,” [Jennifer] Sloan said.

Mr. Rubin had been convinced that after four years of the Bush presidency, the country would come around and see things as he and other[‘s do].

In the immortal metaphor supplied by Gary Cruse on this blog this summer, the blogging world today wears a potato down the back of its swim trunks, instead of the front.

Yesterday, we believed the exit poll data. Mind you, so did both parties, with gloom at the Republican headquarters and premature joy in Boston.

These polls showed Kerry beating Bush by two to three percentage points in the popular vote and they showed him taking Pennsylvania and Ohio. Two of three surveys in Florida showed Kerry winning there, too.

In the words of the Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, the exit polls invited us to believe that “Kerry [was] on the verge of winning the three states most pundits believed could sway the election.”

Now the question is this: why was the data unreliable? Maybe it’s a methodological problem: the pollers put the wrong questions, to the wrong people, in the wrong way, or something. We will hear lots on this possibility in the next few days.

I want to raise the issue I cribbed from Diane Francis a couple of days ago: that, in the pre-election surveys, many voters who were claiming to be undecided were in fact concealing their intention to vote Republican. It looks as if the same thing may have been happening at the exit polls. People who had just voted Republican were claiming to have voted Democrat.

Diane Francis suggested that in the case of pre-election surveys, Republicans had been shamed or brow beaten into lying. This is possible, but not compelling.

But alternate suggestions are not forthcoming. Could this have been a difference between what the voter wanted to do and what the voter felt he or she had to do? “I wanted to vote Democrat but I felt obliged to vote Republican.” Did they claim to have voted Democrat because this was the better, the more winning, the more becoming choice? Did they claim a Democrat vote as a fashion accessory?

None of the alternatives to Francis’ suggestion is very plausible. But clearly something very odd happened here, and we may have to resort to a very odd explanation to make sense of it. Why did people lie?

References.

The earlier post, The Bush Victory: you read it here second, may be found here

Diane Francis’ post from the National Post may be found here

I want two (more) things from my technology:

1) Full access to everything everyone knows.

2) Better access to everyone I know.

1) Full access to everything everyone knows.

Google already gives me a pretty good facsimile of this first condition. A few well chosen key words and it’s all there (somewhere…sorting that’s another problem). Eventually, when we have everything on line and Google is more and more tunable as a search engine, we will have access to everything.

But the next step here is wireless connection to the internet and voice control. So that I can perform a Google search anywhere by voice. To be still more demanding, I want the result to play on the surface of my choice. I point a little camera at a wall or a desk top to see the search results. Or my glasses supply the screen.

Now the technology has simulated what I like to think of as the “Victor Li experience.” Victor is a Burmese Canadian I met at Cambridge who can recall virtually everything he has ever read. That’s what I want from my technology. The simulation of perfect recall. But forget Victor Lee. Now we are a little like a God. We can summon all knowledge, anywhere, by voice. Well, perhaps not like a God, but certainly like an angel.

The Renaissance distinction said God was knowledge while angels had knowledge without the need of mediating senses. Humans of course can only know effortfully. This is what the tech. does for us. It moves us up a notch in the great chain of being. And this is why the William Gibson, Bruce (merely) Sterling notion of “jacking in” is mistaken. The technology is about disintermediation, not reintermediation. Ubiquity means the technology comes to us and gets steadily better at doing so…so we don’t have to jack in!

2) Better access to everyone I know.

When I was in Korea earlier this year, I saw kids using 3G technology to build and maintain social networks much larger and more interactive than was possible for their parent’s generation. They were using web-enabled cell phone cameras to take and send pictures to everyone in their net as a way of “pinging the hive.” Now, they were communicating smaller bits of information more often to more people. They had found a way of maintaining a larger social network with roughly the same investment of time required by the old fashioned face to face networks. Phone to phone networks cost the same as face to face networks, but they are larger and the connections are strangely more intimate and less mediated by social convention. One Korea teen sees what is happening to another Korean teen more directly.

The new P2P telephone technology called Skype gives us a glimpse of this. Pam and I used it all weekend. I was using a headset and my PC in Montreal. She was using the microphone and speakers built into her Ibook in Connecticut. Voice quality was very, very good. I got to be the voice issuing from her laptop. This meant that Molly, the kitten, could listen and, once or twice, pipe up.

Skype is weird. You are “just speaking.” And your voice is emerging somewhere else, gratis the elaborate voice box provided by the PC, ISP and P2P telephony from Skype. And you have very ready access to everyone on your list. And this is weird too. I had no idea how much I resented hunting and pecking the tiny buttons on my cell phone. Skype is all point and click. It’s a pretty glorious way of disintermediating the technology, so that less and less stands between us and the task, and more and more people are readily accessible to us when we do so.

Not quite Gods. But a lot like angels.