Do We Expect Too Much From Politics?
Culture change is more fundamental
I follow political news as obsessively as anyone I know, and root for politicians who represent my views and hopes as fervently as I do for my beloved Michigan State Spartans (and am just as disappointed when they lose, which is frustratingly often). It matters who is in office, especially when the choice is between candidates who are rational, morally decent and respectful of democracy and human rights, and those who are not.
Yet I wonder whether it ultimately matters who is elected as much as the quality of the culture that is choosing them. The old adage that “in a democracy we get the government we deserve” is essentially correct and should focus our attention on the nature of we, the people, more than on our specific representatives.
There is a great deal of moaning and hand-wringing over the choice Americans will have in this year’s presidential election. According to many accounts in the media, voters are hugely disappointed about having to choose between Trump and Biden, and wonder why a nation of 330 million people can’t find more confidence-inspiring leaders. The pathological character of the former speaks for itself, but I think that much of the dissatisfaction with President Biden reflects Americans’ online consumer mentality that demands we get exactly what we want, at a discount price, nicely packaged and in short time.
There is no way that any president can satisfy the shifting, conflicting, and often irrational demands of this complex and sprawling nation. Like a university president but with vastly higher stakes, everything that an American president does is subjected to criticism from one quarter or another. They simply can’t get anything right. Even our greatest and most beloved presidents had bitter enemies, who, in the most extreme cases, actually murdered them.
The question for a reasonable citizen should not be “Is this president an ideal embodiment of my personal political vision?” but “Is this person, though flawed like any human being (and maybe older than we’d like), making a good faith effort to balance the many opposing forces that surge through modern society to find some sensible and responsible path forward?” Projecting our hopes and ideals onto a national leader sets them up for failure and ourselves for disappointment.
Our most successful presidents were not those who carried a flaming torch on behalf of one faction or another, but those who sought out some common ground that reflected the lives and expectations of the largest and most representative sample of the citizenry. One Lincoln biographer, David S. Reynolds, explains in great detail how his politics were deeply rooted in American culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Historian (and Kennedy adviser) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. similarly argued that JFK’s popularity stemmed from the deliberate moderation of his policies. Of course, both presidents pissed off fanatics, and both paid with their lives. As I said, a president can never get it just right.
So we should not look to presidents or other politicians to solve the daunting problems that beset the world. Forces much larger than their political power created those problems.
Our economic system and the habits of competition, consumption and money worship that it breeds, the development and heedless adoption of disruptive technologies, the crassness and inanity of popular entertainment, deep-seated sociological facts, widespread psychological trauma and stress, and basic human fallibility and illness (e.g. alcoholism and other addictions) combine to distort the culture as a whole. Politicians are products of that culture and must, in order to succeed at all, cater to it.
In this light, Trump is not merely an amoral grifter and demagogue with a mysterious hold on one third of the population; he is both a product and an agent of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century culture. He would not succeed as he has done if the swirling currents of modernity had not pummeled our sensibilities and values as they have done. He will certainly do additional damage if installed in the White House again, but keeping him out, as the nation barely managed to accomplish in 2020, is not enough to heal the multiple cultural faults that make his demagoguery effective.
We — non-MAGA Americans — look for some charismatic, visionary, politically skilled leader who can assuage our fears and embody our hopes, as Trump has done for his minions. But who could possibly succeed in pushing back the tide of cultural decline that is drowning us?
Barack Obama couldn’t. What about Gavin Newsom? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? Even the talented governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who I know (since she is a fellow Spartan) would be an awesome president, cannot turn back the tide. We are looking for a King Canute, but he couldn’t do it either.
Lincoln’s nineteenth-century society, like the political culture in which the founding generation did its magnificent work, featured a number of civic values and practices that the distractions and absurdities of modernity have nearly wiped out. Although very far from perfect, premodern society enabled levels of deliberation and engagement that we can only dream of.
For example, the public would attend hours-long exercises in political oratory laced with classical, philosophical and Biblical allusions. Debates, such as those between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, addressed consequential ideas and serious choices of policy, in contrast to the playground name-calling and soundbite mining that we call “debate” today. Instead of watching pro wrestling on TV, citizens turned out for lectures by public intellectuals of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s caliber.
Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville so carefully documented in Democracy in America, this earlier society nurtured what he called “habits of the heart” that built community, distributed charity, and worked for social improvement. Organized voluntary efforts sought to expand educational opportunities and build colleges, to temper the ravages of alcoholism and humanize the treatment of the mentally ill, to abolish slavery and promote women’s rights, and to experiment with utopian communities. These were moral crusades led by passionate citizens, not by political leaders.
In the much more complex and professionalized world of today, formal government has taken over many of these functions. Voluntary, community efforts often take the form of “nonprofits” (to distinguish them from self-interested but similarly professional corporate organizations) and “NGOs” (non-governmental organizations, a needed reminder that there is still a sphere of society not managed by the state).
These organizations do a great amount of necessary and important work, but for most citizens, our involvement is usually limited to writing checks or clicking on “donate” buttons to keep the professionals in business. Our political involvement is usually limited to clicking other buttons to sign on to some petition or letter to a policymaker. Having dutifully submitted our clicks, we go back to shopping, scrolling, gaming or watching television. Such meager efforts are no way to change a culture.
There are still remnants of the civically-engaged culture that once gave this nation such promise. Efforts to rejuvenate local communities and nature refuges, to reinvent economic enterprise in more cooperative and locally rooted ways, to bring citizens together to discuss their political differences respectfully as neighbors, to support kids and elders and the food insecure, to sit on a restorative justice panel fostering reconciliation, to forge interdenominational campaigns to bring a moral voice to pressing issues, and so much more — efforts such as these are the only hope we have to refashion a decent and healthy civic culture.
In an earlier essay, I acknowledged that changing a culture — i.e. shifting the worldview that underlies all the elements of a culture — is an enormously difficult endeavor. Considering what forces and trends and habits we are up against, it is heartbreakingly hard to imagine how small groups of neighbors rolling up their sleeves might succeed in reversing the decay and destruction that are consuming our society. Maybe it is hopeless; maybe we are too far gone. But nothing else, and no one else, not even the best possible president, will save us. If it is even still possible, we will have to save ourselves.
