Political Fictions

 

POLITICAL FICTIONS by Joan Didion begins with the campaigns of  Dukakis and Bush.  There are long sections about the role of the insiders creating a political message that captured the public response without considering the issues of the people at all.  She awoke to this well after the Kennedy-Nixon campaign that emphasized media promotion on TV.   She does not consider the Reagan campaigns though she was a strong opponent of what that administration did in central America.  Later she discusses the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and seems to support Starr's condemnation of Clinton, one of the great producers of "political fiction".  The Clinton era is disappointing, but there is little exploration of the dis-ingenuous Clintons.  The last part of the book describes the rise of the Religious Right and she paints a broad negative picture, and fails to explore the effectiveness of their rise to power.  In this last section, she misses a fundamental point, about which the PBS special on the 60s is instructive. The "baby boomer" generation has a clear split:  those who smoked dope, had "free love", and believe that the world should tolerate personal gratification, and those who studied and stayed home, and believe that their self denial and discipline is essential for a good society. While the narrator of the video seems to value the 60s rebellion as the seeds of social change in various countries, Bork, Meese, and Buchanan narrate the events as the failure to respect authority, and self indulgence without any social value. This is the fundamental conflict of the 60s, which is embedded in the political world of the 90s and beyond.   It is fundamentally about values and reflects a failure to maintain a consensus in the culture about "appropriate" social choice. 

The “rebel” agenda appears to be about relaxation of social constraints:  pro-abortion,  decriminalizing marijuana, social rights for gays,  more social and economic recognition for women,  and (to a limited extent) racial equality.  Characterized by opponents as “self indulgent” and creating moral chaos,  the position is largely responding to the social reality:  women were getting too many illegal abortions, MJ is freely used,  gays became a major minority in the population and needed care for AIDS,  and women make up an important component of the economy as labor moves away from physically demanding or aggressive jobs. African-Americans also have significant advances in the economy.  The country is becoming this reality, but expressing these values over the years from 1960-1990 had little power to enable the changes.

Clinton was the archetypal “rebel”:  he was a self indulgent, brilliant, self motivated person, willing to take whatever position necessary to gain his personal power.  It seemed  in office his goal was to lead an “inclusive” and caring government,  but was often the opposite:  It favored the grow of wealth in the super-rich.  It grew the economy with limited benefit to labor. “Welfare to work” was no boon to the welfare mothers.  It encouraged minority groups to a very limited symbolic extent.  And it had limited success in international policy.  The administration did not make any long range contribution to American society, neither upsetting the status quo nor advancing it. 

The “Conservative” agenda (cf “moral majority”, “Religious Right”, “compassionate conservative”) is just that:  an attempt to return to a value system that rejects most of the social changes that have been experienced in the country since the 60s.   On the face of it, this seems to be extremely naïve:  there is no evidence that a political system can enact laws, policies or whatever to counteract the prevailing social mores of a society.  (The most that will happen is a major conflict of legitimacy within the society,  at worse, a turn at totalitarianism, and then a collapse of the regime.   Will we go through a cycle of south American politics to learn this?)  Perhaps this position is simply a counterbalance to slow social change and allow it to be assimilated more easily.  This group has mobilized political support from “church ladies” and channeled that support effectively into political power more than in the past (though the Temperance movement temporarily created a nationwide change in behavior!).  It is frequently accused of being anti-democratic but is able to mobilize support in key campaigns, so this is incorrect.  

The Reagan administration was viewed both during and afterward as a high point in the “conservative” vision.   Though Reagan himself is given credit for this, it is increasingly clear that he “took direction” and “followed the script” from everyone around him,  because he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.   Events like the “invasion” of Grenada, and the Marine debacle in Lebanon, were examples of a poorly worked out foreign policy which later “took credit” for the “collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism”(which began long before their administration and to which they made almost no contribution).  They failed to take American Foreign policy in new directions as the “sole superpower” except for major disruptions of governments in central America.  They created tax cuts for the wealthy and excessive spending that drove the country into its worse deficits in history, despite prior Republican demands for reduced government and fiscal conservatism.  Didion’s portrayal of the Reagan administration as a sort of movie script in the Iran-Contra mess is not far fetched,  and expresses the underlying wish for a macho, morally black-and-white outcome, the product of years of watching Hollywood “oaters”.

The script writers and media fabricators (“Wag the Dog”) of contemporary political discourse assume a public with very limited capacity for ambiguity and discrimination.  This public requires simple adolescent style heroes, and cannot tolerate moral complexity or compromising competing interests.  The voter is encouraged to ignore physical and economic needs, in favor of social values. When this leads to losing jobs, someone must be found to blame for this loss, or magic policies created (the mortgage fiasco) to avoid recession.   In such a discourse, the leader becomes the cowboy hero despite the myriad failures and impotence of his administration.  The fifties are idealized as a high point in American moral culture despite the betrayal of personal liberty by HUAC and McCarthy (which ultimately had to be stopped by the US Army!), the ineffectiveness of an FBI led by a (closeted homosexual/transsexual?) leader blackmailed by organized crime.  JFK is a bold new visionary cut down before his prime accomplishments, despite his inability to move civil rights in the congress,  his initiation of a dangerous course in Vietnam,  the failure in the Bay of Pigs,  and his drug addiction and sexual distractions.  And the murders of Kennedy, his brother, and King were "allowed".

Didion's book came before internet politics,  before "Citizens United", and before voters were willing to express acceptance of views that are counter to any method of validation (lies). Two party politics seems to support the ability to maintain balanced consensus in the general society (where parliamentary government supports several competing positions that must find a way to compromise).  

The current "political myth makers" have a no compromise view of reality, only on who has political control.  This interferes with the broader tasks of government. In this "political fiction", the nuances of reality are so collapsed that no adult, interest balancing approach to governing society is possible.  It is no wonder that with increasing frequency we are selecting leaders for the country who portray themselves in fundamentally adolescent terms (and often behave that way).  The public is encouraged to believe that the country is weakening because of its failure to fulfill its adolescent dreams (either “rebel” or “conservative”) instead of recognizing that an adult world is never so clearly defined and requires complex compromises.  How did the country fail to educate its citizens in the reality of being adults?  Who created the "fictions" on which the current social fantasies are built?