This weekend I traveled to visit my parents, and ended up having a very frustrating political conversation with my mother. Yeah, sure, everyone has those, but this one really crystallized for me how effective the GOP advertising has been, and how little reality matters to the political message that people embrace.
This is a very hard conclusion to admit, as I've always considered myself a fairly radical democrat (small "d" as in, highly in favor of the most inclusive democratic participation by the citizenry). I remember having a political science professor who described the opinion (not his exact words) that low voter turnout was probably a good thing, because most people are idiots making poor choices anyway, so we probably weren't losing any representation by them not voting, i.e. sure, if people actually voted for what they wanted, it would be a loss, but since they don't, it isn't. This opinion always seemed excessively cynical and elitist to me.
However I was confronted with a case of cognitive dissonance in my own (ok, my parents' own) home. My folks are elderly, have high prescription drug costs and complicated interactions with insurance companies and hospitals, are concerned about friends' grandkids in the military, are living a modestly well-off but comfortable retirement from being a white collar professional (dad) and full-time mom, have been married for over 50 years, and go to church on Sundays. No, their names aren't Ward and June, but close enough. In most things, I would say that they are moderates, having been "Reagan democrats" but not caring all that much for one party or the other, and certainly not the type to employ or encourage extreme partisan rhetoric. If I had to describe them in general terms, especially my mom, I would say they were law-abiding, fair, and community-minded. You know, the neighbors you leave the keys with and know they will not only keep on eye on your place, but they won't take a look around inside either because that would be none of their business and wrong.
Because of this, the conversation I had with my mom was all the more confounding, as she discussed several personal situations and preferences that seemed fairly to entirely consistent with an anti-Bush position, then proceeded (some 30 minutes later) to regurgitate almost verbatim the Bush/Cheney party line, and say she would support them on November 2nd because "we can't afford to change things right now because of the times". Two examples:
1. Our neighbor - who is like an aunt because our families have been friends for so long- has a grandson who has been deployed to Iraq. By all accounts he worked very hard to get into the military, and sees it as a career decision. In Iraq, he was wounded in his unarmored vehicle by shrapnel which hit him in his chest which was unprotected by suitable armor. So, he is one of the entry level, on the ground guys suffering from the lack of support and supplies that has been decried by military supporters on both sides of the political aisle. In addition, he recently witnessed the deaths of several of his friends at once, and had to place their remains in body bags. In telling me the story, my mother talked about how worried she was that these kids are over there, and aren't adequately protected, and how terrible it is that a young kid from a small town in rural USA has been forced to "grow up" in such a sudden, traumatic, and terrible way, as well as that it doesn't seem very clear exactly what we're doing over there.
2. Because of chronic health care issues, my parents interact on a regular basis with other seniors (and non-seniors) struggling with similar long term problems. They have an acqaintance who, months from retirement after working 40-odd years for one manufacturing plant in the rural south, was laid off and thus lost all pension benefits and health care, at a point in life where getting a new job would be extremely difficult and also complicated by debilitating diabetes. My mother expressed her concern for this woman, and also the desire that she contact a lawyer, because it didn't seem fair or legal that she should lose all her pension. My mother also said that she thought the woman ought to "go on disability" so that she could get medical treatment for her condition, and start getting social security since it wasn't likely she could get another job in the area given her age and health.
As I said, a half hour later, in a discussion of other neighbors' political signs in their yards, my mother said that the neighbor with the grandson in Iraq was supporting Bush, as would my mother, because we have to support the troops. I asked her (really, I was calm) if it didn't seem wrong to support the candidate who sent them there (for, as we had discussed, at the minimum not totally clear reasons) without proper equipment, which put their lives at greater risk. She essentialy said no, you can't support the troops and vote against the President. Next, my mom started talking about the flu vaccine, and how the problem was all the "trial lawyers" (I still can't believe my mother used the words "trial lawyers") and that they were to blame (which is not only logically counterintuitive but that the fact checking orgs and news media out there have shown to be false). She went on to talk about how those lawyers ("ambulance chasers on TV") down in Florida are in cahoots with welfare cheats who are living the high life on - you guessed it - disability. I asked her what the difference was between those people (which, I hate to admit, probably means "foreigners/illegal aliens/etc" especially in the fear spin) and her acquaintance with diabetes, and got the response that it was different because all those people in Florida really weren't disabled.
At this point I imagine a collective eyeroll out there from the gentle readers of Bloodless Coup, either along the "parents/grandmas/generation gap" lines or "as if we didn't know that this was happening?" lines. It was really shocking to see, however, how effective the GOP rhetoric has been in 2004. I can't say I always agree with my mom's choices, but they've always been fairly consistent both in logic (e.g. Jimmy Carter is a good Christian and deserves my vote) and over time (e.g. support for centrists with a pro-incumbent bent, but crossing party lines fairly regularly especially at the state level). The kicker is that while the above discussion didn't take place in our home town, we are from (drumroll, please) Palm Beach County. None of the uproar of the 2000 elections seems to have registered at all. Not foreign policy, not election 2000, not health care, not anything really critically challenges the message that "we need to support our president" even when the overall judgement (talking about mom again) is that the country is in trouble, probably getting worse, and the Bush administration is probably responsible.
I still believe in inclusion. I definitely want my mom to keep voting, not least because she was the one who took me behind the red-white-and-blue curtain to show me how to pull the levers and that it was not only my right but my democratic responsibility to participate in politics. It just makes me frustrated that people are so susceptible to the message that they can contradict their own expressed preferences, that the parties so cynically exploit the tendency, and that no one really seems to care.
Posted by binky at October 19, 2004 01:07 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politicsi can relate (i imagine many of us can). the other night, my father and i started talking politics, both of us understanding at the outset that we both will vote for kerry, and both also suspecting based on long experience that, notwithstanding the initial cordiality and concord of our discussion, before long we'd find a basis on which to scream at each other.
we were not disappointed; although it took longer than it usually does, eventually we found ourselves disagreeing ever more vehemently. on what basis, you ask? well, my father is of the opinion that bush has made tremendous missteps, has proven himself unduly aggressive and stubborn, and is tone deaf to domestic concerns and the ramifications of his steely determination to toe the line his neo-cons drew for him notwithstanding that the adverse consequences of his actions are raining fire on his legacy. naturally, on this we agree.
where my father resists, and has for a long time, is when it comes to imputing malevolence or knowing wrong-doing to any public official. in essence, he feels that anyone who ends up in such a prominent position of national leadership does it out of some egalitarian impulse, and no matter how misguided his or her decisions and policies may prove, it simply defies comprehension that such a person would consciously do something he thought would harm the country he went to such extraordinary lengths to serve in the first place.
and he's raised me in his image, in the sense that i tend to agree with him. just as, controlling for the occasional instance of dumb luck (preemptive pun intended), he has convinced me that most successful entertainers have something on the twenty people behind them who are very bit as beautiful and talented but end up waiting tables in some SoHo cafe instead of appearing on the cover of the Star -- call it moxie, or charisma, or marketing, it's not all coincidence.
nevertheless, this imputation of egalitarian impulses, which i find generally plausible, bristles with me in the gray areas where, for example, an administration flouts basic principles of constitutional law and the separation of powers in ways that can't be lost on the circle of advisors helping to develop and argue for these dubious policies. i'm content to recognize a certain amount of bumbling and bad judgment as merely that, and i think national leaders no more immune to it than the rest of us working sclubs (although one likes to think world leaders have substantially more resilient safety nets consisting of a lot of really smart people whose job it is to anticipate everything bad that might derive from a given decision). but at some point, shouldn't we draw a line?
evidently not. as the conversation degenerated, i came up with my last tack -- an attempt to wind down our disagreement by identifying some common ground (whether what follows was truly diplomatic is surely subject to debate, but this is after i yelled at my father, "just shut up for a goddamned second!" which usually marks a point far past the boundary of rational discourse)).
[the following is paraphrasing only, and omits the considerable amount of what transcripts call "crosstalk" that was going on more or less incessantly by now]
ME: Dad -- Dad -- Dad -- Dad -- DAD!!! . . . just let's start over, and let me just ask you a question, and then we can be done no matter what, okay?
DAD: [Okay (what he said sounded neither so brief nor so agreeable as "okay," hence the brackets).]
ME: So like Nixon, right? Do you think Nixon was an okay guy in the sense that you've been talking about?
DAD: Yes.
ME: Even though he plainly played an active role in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the electorate and undermine the democratic process.
DAD: Just because he got caught, doesn't mean everybody else didn't do the same shit. It's what people do in our system. Look at Kennedy and Clinton and their philandering --
ME: Are you seriously comparing active attempts to pervert the democratic process with allegations of adultery?
DAD: I'm not going to say that anyone wants to harm the country.
ME: Well, on your reasoning Hitler was a good guy who just made some bad decisions then, if all leaders have the good of their polities held ever front and center. [I don't really talk like that -- at least not entirely.]
DAD: He was obviously a f*&cked up guy.
ME: [Laughing] Yuh-huh. But hold on -- if it turns out that Bush has been as involved in widespread voter deception, and in other crimes literal and conceptual, against our system of government, if he turns out to look in hindsight no better than Nixon as I believe he will, would you then concede he was a bad guy?
In so many words, the answer was no, evidently on the basis that this is simply the nature of democracy -- "Move along move along, nothing to see here."
I'm just happy the good guys have his vote, but sheesh!, if after all that's come to light you can honestly deny that Bush has been, shall we say, a bit shady about some things, I'm thinking I want you on my jury when I'm brought up on charges.
Ah, parents. Can't live with 'em, can't tie 'em in a burlap sack and throw 'em off an interstate overpass.
Posted by: joshua at October 19, 2004 03:51 PM | PERMALINKYeah, but that's not quite the same thing, I don't think. It seems like your dad has been extending the same benefit of the doubt to many politicians for a long time, however wrongheaded you might think it is. I'm talking a shift in behavior.
Posted by: binky at October 21, 2004 04:21 PM | PERMALINKsomehow, i don't get that he viewed nixon as an okay guy back in '68. now, however, he drives a toyota sequioa, following a ford expedition, following a toyota 4runner . . .
i think his increasing generosity, or rather his more generalized cynicism toward public officials, which evidently precludes him from viewing any one candidate or officer more critically than another, has something to do with his move from poverty to prosperity, activism (for even dropping out is a form of activism) to acceptance, and so on.
i mean, things have changed rather radically since i was knee-high to a grasshopper, and that was ten years after he and mom lived first very near haight and ashbury, and then on a commune in the south.
i'm only complaining insofar as it's hard to accept any moderate or liberal apologizing for, or in any way excusing, nixon's abuses -- which i think augured changes that led directly to our present sorry pass (runaway partisanship for its own sake, skullduggery in contravention of basic democratic principles, the ascendance of special interests and the concomitant alienation of the people, etc.).
if nixon wasn't a bad guy, than was bush?
Posted by: joshua at October 21, 2004 04:49 PM | PERMALINK"if nixon wasn't a bad guy, than was bush?"
Well, I would be more willing to say that Nixon was a smart fucker (if waaay of the charts on the paranoid scale). I would not say that about BUsh (though I also would not say that Bush is a complete dumbass, as he is terribly canny in some respects).
I still think I am drawing a more direct line between a certain type of political strategy and my mom's behavior, where yours is a more general evolution. But, you now, potayto, potahto. :)
Posted by: binky at October 21, 2004 05:03 PM | PERMALINKall right, then, i think this raises an interesting question one of you is surely more qualified than i am to answer:
is a response engendered indirectly by propaganda different than a response directly elicited by propaganda?
i mean, if i understand the distinction you're drawing, binky, it's that your mother, like all too many others, has been convinced by inane and utterly deniable campaign rhetoric. my father, on the other hand, rather than be caught up in the rhetoric, simply rejects it all out of hand, and thus manifests a supreme cynicism. the result, however, is the same, whether it be a mis-informed citizen who votes unintelligibly or an apathetic citizen who doesn't vote at all (my dad surely will vote, but i'm trying to open up the discussion a bit).
i would submit that both are responding to a misleading and unaccountably rancorous trend in political speech in ways that differ far more on the surface than they do in effect.
Posted by: joshua at October 21, 2004 05:16 PM | PERMALINKi shoudld add, by way of reconciling the above with my dad's disinclination to identify one politician as more dishonest than another, that it's this cynicism that led my dad to defend nixon: it wasn't that he denied nixon misbehaved, he just felt that it was poor nixon who got caught, while most of the others skated.
granted, the fairly steady diet of congresspeople and state officials whose conduct proves to be less than exemplary to some extent supports such a conclusion, but not to the extent it lets nixon off the hook as "just one of the guys."
Posted by: joshua at October 21, 2004 05:22 PM | PERMALINKThat clears is up for me, indeed. I am not naive enough to suggest that I think everyone can be an "issue voter." The research shows that people just aren't all like that. But for those who are - or who have had the potential to be - the shift is scary. As for alientating the intelligent (your dad, one assumes) into not voting and leaving the game to others, clearly it's a strategy that works, but is terribly sad.
Posted by: binky at October 21, 2004 05:59 PM | PERMALINK