Divisions
Jonathan Martin at Politico is now arguing something very similar to what I said almost two months ago. Martin wrote today:
An Obama vs McCain race could be one of the most divisive in our history. Race will be a major factor in the divide, of course, but so will age and culture.
Strangely, he titles his post ”the great unspoken,” but surely people have been talking about this and polling on this throughout the campaign, and the factor of race in this election has been discussed so often that it makes no sense to say that it is ”the unspeakable” to talk about voters who simply won’t accept Obama’s candidacy because of his race. It was so “unspeakable” that Obama was addressing it directly at the San Francisco fundraiser where he made his recent blunder. Usually this is dismissed as unfortunate but electorally irrelevant, on the rather precious grounds that these people would never vote for a Democrat anyway, when polling among Democrats seems to show this to be false.
Back in February, I said:
If the “healing” in question is more intangible and concerns a change in attitudes, I submit that Obama’s election could very easily have exactly the opposite effect. Race, like ethnicity, becomes especially divisive in a community when it is politicised (and it is as divisive as it is because it is frequently politicised), because the contestation for power takes on additional, charged connotations of the status of an entire group of people. The outcome of the election takes on added importance: one outcome represents a breakthrough and an elevation of status, and another represents repudiation. When that is combined with ideological baggage that draws in larger national debates on policy, either outcome can be even more explosive. To draw on a recent example, the charge of a stolen election in Kenya became an occasion for ethnic violence because the election was contested by members of the two major ethnic groups. To crudely oversimplify, the Luos perceived the (rigged) election loss as one more in a long line of injustices they had suffered, and the Kikuyus saw the possibility of a Luo coming to power as a threat to their status. Democracy is inherently identitarian, and elections are contestations over which groups will hold more power than others in practice, so particularly in countries with strong racial or ethnic group identities the notion that a country is going to promote reconciliation through the election of someone identified with a minority group is probably mistaken. So I think we underestimate the potential for this year’s election to be an unusually divisive contest, and its aftermath may be even more so regardless of the outcome.
Some people got hung up on my use of Kenya as an example of what I was talking about, and that example is, of course, not strictly comparable to our situation, but the principle is the same. I think this will be compounded by the intensely biographical and personality-centered nature of the general election contest, which is perhaps even more true for Obama than for McCain, so that Obama’s personal victory or defeat will have become so freighted with other meanings that the election campaign and its aftermath could be much more contentious than any we have seen in decades. It might have one salutary effect, which is that it will make clear just how many people engage in identity politics and that it is a more or less inescapable part of mass democracy. It might even cause people to take a more skeptical or critical view of the virtues of mass democracy, and that’s always a welcome development. However, the bitterness the campaign may engender in the process may be quite damaging to political debate in the future.
The French premiership of Léon Blum didn’t cure French society of antisemitism.
Interesting, Daniel.
The reason that I’m not all that concerned about this– though your Kenya analysis makes sense– is that the Obama-McCain matchup will be significantly less biography-based than the Obama-Clinton matchup has been. Clinton and Obama are pretty close on most policy issues. Obama and McCain are not.
The essential critique of the media from left-leaning folks like me is that they need to talk about policy every now and again between stories about flag pins. You’re right, though, that the fact-averse media could combine with the GOP politics of personality (lord knows they aren’t going to win on policy) deeply to divide the country.
I take your point that policy could become salient when there are real policy differences, but then it occurs to me that the people who vote for McCain seem literally not to care what his policies are (for the most part, he doesn’t care, either). They vote for him because he is a “good man” or because he is a veteran or (allegedly) a speaker of truth. It’s not clear to me that these voters can be peeled away by making cogent criticisms of failed policies that McCain endorses. If currently undecided voters make all the difference, which they probably will, they tend to make their decisions based on character and personality traits and not on issues, so it will come down to which one they are more “comfortable” with. Goodness knows, I find this sort of thing horrifying, but that is how it seems to work.
Well, that’s plausible and terrifying.
I can only hope that pressure from Media Matters and the like push political reporters to note occasionally the implications of the candidates’ policy proposals. Only George Soros can save the world.
“Democracy is inherently identitarian, and elections are contestations [sic] over which groups will hold more power than others in practice.”
Where as this evidenced in American history? Unless you define groups so generally as to be meaningless, or are using race/ethnicity as the equivalent, groupwise, of political affiliation, when has American democracy ever been identitarian (if that’s even a word)? Identity politics as defined today has never been a part of our national politics. It is now and forever will be, and that will accrue to our great disadvantage. But let’s not pretend that it’s just business as usual,
Well, yes, identitarian is a word. Identity does not always need to be ethnic or racial for the statement about democratic politics to be true. You vote for those whom you want to have representing you, and typically this means voting for people like you, people who share your identity. If that is overly broad and meaningless, so be it, but I think it is useful to remember. The identity in question might not necessarily be ethnic or racial. It could be religious, or it could have other dimensions entirely.
When has it ever been identitarian? Try any national election since at least 1868. For that matter, any antebellum election that involved sectional differences had some identity component to it. You want to tell me that the 1928 election didn’t have a strong element of ethnic and religious identity politics? What about 1960? Obviously explicitly race and gender identity politics were recent arrivals on the scene for the most part, but let’s not pretend that elections haven’t turned on identity for a long time before the revolutions of the ’60s and ’70s. Identity politics in democratic elections is more muted in communities that are less diverse, because there are fewer differences that can be politicised. As America has become more diverse, it has become more of an explicit element in our elections, beginning at least as long ago as the rise of the American Party in the 1850s.