Black Widow Politics.
I noticed something while working on an in-depth piece about politics and political parties. It was a pattern, something I hadn’t expected to see emerging out of the crazy tribalism that’s infected our political system. It might be useful.
We’re electing leaders, then abruptly turning on them. It doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum they come from, only that they rarely come from the center anymore. We elect them, then we eat them alive. In a sense, this is the electorate acting like the Black Widow spider. For the non-arachnologists out there, that’s the one that chooses a mate following whatever passions run through the brain of a venomous spider, then devours him.
It’s not an easy pattern to notice. We get so caught up in the 24-hour newsfeed and polarized spin machines it’s hard to notice anything beyond the sheer tidal surge of chaos.
But if you poke your head above all that and use a more dispassionate lens, there it is. Barrack Obama came into office full of hope and goodwill. Then hit an immediate brick wall of opposition to his two big projects of reforming a broken healthcare system and saving a dangerously imploding global economy. Donald Trump barely got through his Inauguration speech before huge hunks of the citizenry were looking for a way to show him the door. British Prime Minister Theresa May was indestructible after last summer’s Brexit election. Now she’s hanging onto the job by her fingernails.
Sure, there are a thousand different explanations for the way things played out for each of these democratically elected leaders. Obama’s insistence on tackling healthcare at the same time as he was trying to deal with a looming second Great Depression gave the opposition an easy opportunity to get organized. Trump came into office woefully unprepared for the job of governing and has a strange emotional disorder. May’s insistence on calling an election so soon after assuming power was pure hubris. For that matter, so was the insistence of her predecessor David Cameron on calling a Brexit vote in the first place.
It doesn’t take long for all these explanations to lead us right back into the political weeds and the tribal narratives. So for the moment at least, let’s not go there. The bigger pattern is interesting.
I think what it tells us is that the electoral process has become unhinged from the governing process.
Elections are all about emotion. The hotter it burns the better things work for the sort of politician that understands how to ride the firestorm. But these same inflammatory political instincts are the opposite of what’s needed for governing, and that’s been getting lost on our newly elected leaders. It’s like the plot for a Greek tragedy. They bring about their own demise because they’re unable to switch out of campaign mode, playing only to the fired-up base and forgetting there’s a whole nation out here waiting for them to govern. Studies by the Pew Research Center and others show we’re more divided than ever. But I think most of us still expect the passions to cool once an electoral decision gets made. When we hear, for example, something like the incendiary Inauguration speech delivered by Donald Trump it sounds like pure insanity.
So maybe what’s really happening here is the soft center is unconsciously coalescing into a third tribe. The WTF tribe. The “Hell No” tribe. The Black Widow Syndrome. Call it what you want. But it feels defensive. Like a big flywheel spinning in the opposite direction of everything a politician that doesn’t understand how to track back to the center wants to accomplish. It’s making it harder and harder for them to govern.
Is this a good thing, or just more dysfunction? I’m not even sure it is a thing, yet. But it’s worth watching. I do like the idea that we might not be as aligned along the political divide as everyone thinks. And then there is France, which just handed power to a vocally centrist government. Things will get interesting if the center finally finds its voice.
