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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

They Are The Champions

Deep down, political contests are about picking symbolic champions. ~Steve Sailer Precisely right.  The idea of having a symbolic champion is powerful and can overwhelm pretty much everyone.  Even though Ron Paul supporters were, are, drawn to the man largely on the basis of his policy views there is no doubt that many of us also see […]

Deep down, political contests are about picking symbolic champions. ~Steve Sailer

Precisely right.  The idea of having a symbolic champion is powerful and can overwhelm pretty much everyone.  Even though Ron Paul supporters were, are, drawn to the man largely on the basis of his policy views there is no doubt that many of us also see in him an embodiment of the decent Middle America whose interests we think he also champions.  What I find so troubling about symbolic champions among the major party nominees is that the desire to identify with them simply overrides critical thought.  Voters stop asking whether or not a certain candidate actually represents their interests and settle instead for someone whom they regard as coming from them.  This is usually defined by the expression, “He shares my values.” 

These “values”-sharing candidates are granted a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of what their voters will allow them to do because of the trust engendered by these common “values.”  More often than not, the “values”-sharing politicians in the GOP do not deliver on any of the social and cultural issues that matter most to their voters, and the clever thing about this racket is that they never need to deliver.  “Values”-sharing is not something that can be quantified, so it is difficult to fall short.  So long as these politicians continue to recite the right lines and occasionally take highly symbolic public stands to prove themselves worthy, no substantive changes in law or policy are ever expected and failure to bring them about becomes more or less irrelevant. 

This is one reason why social conservatives, who seem to be more inclined to vote on the basis of shared “values” than other conservatives, are such a large constituency that gets so little in exchange for their support.  Economic and national security conservative demands are much more concrete and specific, and failure to meet them is punished accordingly.  Even on judicial appointments, the area where voters can at least see some kind of real action, social conservatives must be satisfied with appointments that have marginally higher probabilities of yielding the desired results at some undetermined, future time.  Should they not yield the right results, the relevant rulings are usually years after appointment and are virtually cost-free for the politicians who made and confirmed the appointments.  Despite the complete unreliability of “values”-sharing politicians on this score, social conservatives routinely line up behind them every cycle with the stubbornness of compulsive gamblers.

This does make it more or less useless to argue with committed supporters of such a champion, with whom they have identified and bonded, on the basis of that person’s record, and it also significantly raises expectations about what that champion will be able to do for you and yours.  This inevitably sets up the supporters for disillusionment when the champion “betrays” them by doing things they dislike, even though the candidate may have made it very clear that he was going to do these things during the campaign.  At the time of the election, the agenda did not matter–the feeling of “sharing values” mattered.  By the time the specific parts of the agenda are enacted, which may very well directly harm their interests, these voters have no recourse but to sulk and look for another symbolic champion who will really be one of them. 

I don’t know how many times in the last week or two I have seen quotes from voters to the effect that Palin “gets” what ordinary (or is that exceptional?) people experience or that her background is just like theirs.  The implication is that it means something that she “gets” their experience and shares a similar background, as if it will have some effect on how she functions once in office.  Of course, there is no necessary connection between her passion for hunting big game, fishing. going to an evangelical church or living in a small town and her political agenda.  Peter Suderman writes at C11 on these cultural cues:

Though these preferences correlate to some extent to one’s political beliefs, they don’t actually determine them.  So it’s pretty silly to carry out debates about ideology by proxy. If we’re going to have these debates, let’s have them about the issues, not the signals.

It is doubly silly to take the signals or cues as the definitive evidence that a politician will represent your interests in the absence of knowing anything about his (or, in this case, her) record.  However, if there is one thing that this election has reminded us, it is that democracy is very, very silly.

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