I’m thinking about the election as a lesson not in whatever’s unique this year but as what’s become utterly predictable: our precise and inflexible partisan divide.
The narrative being written about this election is almost entirely about those people who were extremely excited about Trump and showed up in much bigger numbers than usual. But I’m trying to understand another, quieter narrative that I think is just as important. Those Trump loyalists did tip the scales in the end—but only because they were added to the votes of at least thirty million people who actively didn’t like him, people who weren’t particularly driven by blue-collar anger or fear of globalism or xenophobia or the other bullet-points of most election postmortems.
We’re no longer the America of 1964 or 1972 where millions of members of one party would cross the line because of a candidate. We’re now so deeply wedded to our party affiliations, have made them so much a part of our social identities, that instead of adjusting our choice of party according to the candidates we adjust our perceptions of the candidates to support our party biases. “Undecided” voters are mostly undecided between voting for their party’s nominee or staying home. Even most “independent” voters have sympathies with one party or the other that rarely shift.
This isn't about conscious loyalty. Hardly anyone actively likes their party anymore—or at least the party’s leadership. More and more of us register as independents and feel like we’re constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils. But if you look at the county-by-county results of the past five elections (especially if you leave out the panic-year of 2008) they’re astonishingly similar. If you look at exit polls, the demographic breakdowns of who voted for which party in those counties is also astonishingly similar. And what difference there is can be mostly explained by relative turnout among different groups—not changes in people’s preferences.
There’s a disconnect between the feeling and the doing. I can say, in full sincerity, “I hate Starbucks.” But if you keep catching me in line at Starbucks and every time I say, “I do hate Starbucks, I just didn’t really have a choice this time because I was in a hurry and blah blah blah,” it’s still true that I feel hate for Starbucks—but it’s also true that I’m a regular Starbucks customer and they can probably count on me to keep giving them my money even while I bitch about them.
Obviously a lot of this reflects the fact that Democratic and Republican candidates are much more consistent than they used to be on their main issues. If Roe v. Wade is high on your agenda, you know which party is for and against it, election after election. But even when you get a candidate who rejects big pieces of the usual party agenda, I don’t see it making any real difference. How many Republicans or Democrats for whom global trade is a major concern actually voted the other way, even with Trump talking protectionism and Clinton’s background on globalism? Looking at the results, it almost seems like the only Republicans who defected were the big-name Neocons in the news.
A lot of political scientists have been saying lately, “Candidates don’t matter much.” If any election were ever going to disprove that, it was this one. Instead it bore it out. After all the talk about “realignment,” the only real surprise was the number of Rust Belt states Trump won—but there’s a reason they’re called “swing states.” Their swing wasn’t any big shift of allegiances, it was turnout. Kind of a mirror image of the increased black turnout and lower working-class white turnout in those same states last time. The only real significance of individual candidates now is how well they inspire some subset of the party’s loyalists to vote. It’s enough to tip the balance in a race, but not enough to break the duolith.
I see a deep cultural split manifested around political parties, a group-identity split that shapes not only our final choices but the lenses through which we see everything. We’ll say, “I hate my party for sticking me with this lousy candidate…but we have to stop That Monster.” And we prepare the monster role for the other party’s candidate before we know who it is.
This year has been so heated and bizarre that it’s hard even to talk about this, but when I look back four years I remember a lot of fairly reasonable people calling one centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical leftist or the other centrist, pro-Wall Street technocrat a radical rightist. And I can see the lenses in action this year. I know sensible Republicans who were appalled by Trump in the primaries but were actively supporting him in the end because they saw Hillary as a threat to everything that makes America what it is. From my side, I can’t conceive how anyone could possibly see a cautious, centrist wonk like Clinton as a threat to everything that makes America what it is (or at least any more of a threat than any Republican or Democratic candidate of the past forty years). But they had no doubt. On the other hand, they don’t understand how I can see Trump as a racist, fascist threat to everything that makes America what it is, where they see just an impulsive jerk who attracted some wing-nut supporters but is basically a pragmatist who will at least preserve most of those things that make America etc. Leaving aside any argument about who’s closer to the truth, there's a split in perceptions here that’s clearly in place long before we know what candidates we’ll be dealing with.
A lot of that is typical election-year rhetoric. In my research on this new book of mine I’ve found plenty of people who were equally apocalyptic about Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. I remember my parents getting in fights with relatives about whether Goldwater or Johnson was going to destroy the country. What’s different is the relatively tiny number of people who are inclined to look at the other party’s candidate outside the preset partisan lens. (And I include myself in the vast majority who aren’t. I can tell you right now that in 2020 I’m going to hate the Republican candidate and have lots of arguments as to why the Democrat isn’t nearly as bad as those right-wing liars claim.)
It’s temping to take this as proof that we’re ready for a third party, but the truth is the opposite. This is precisely the situation, when warring camps have divided the field in half, that breaking ranks is hardest. It would be like trying to start a peace movement in the trenches of World War I: the knowledge that stepping back from the battle even for a moment will allow the enemy to advance is too terrible. Even with two candidates deeply unpopular with huge swaths of their own parties and endless talk about how broken the party system is, Johnson and Stein barely broke 4% between them—and less in the swing states.
Until we can change this, we’ll be stuck in this quadrennial rehash of anger, lies, and prophecies of armageddon, ending with some thin slice of the electorate making the choice for the rest of us. And we’ll be wrestling with the same frustrating challenge we have now: how to make our parties relevant to our beliefs and needs while also targeting them at subgroups of voters in a few counties in Florida and Ohio. But how do we change it? Massive demographic shifts may do it someday, or new generations with very different ideas. I don’t think I can believe that a candidate or strategy or set of policies can do it anymore.
In the meantime, maybe we can at least look at our nominating systems and see if we can bring more sanity to our choice of the “two for the see-saw.”
Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Monday, November 14, 2016
Friday, November 11, 2016
That's Why They Call It the Future
One helpful slap in the face I got from this election: the pointlessness of my obsession with poll forecasts and horserace-style news. I’m great at paying lip service to not “future tripping,” not being attached to outcomes, not thinking that I can ever settle my anxiety in the present by imagining that I know what’s coming. But in practice, at election time, I become consumed by polls and analyses and odds and trends and turning points and gaffes and scandals and everything else that I want to believe will either determine or predict a result.
This year, everything I read and clung to was wrong. As of Tuesday night all the time and energy I gave to 538 and RCP and TPM and HuffPo felt like a total waste. The truth is, though, that even if the predictions had been right, it still would have been a waste. It would have felt better, but it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. Political information is useful when it helps me make up my mind or persuade someone else or take some other effective action. When I’m trying to use it to see the future, it’s worse than useless. It’s a distraction from whatever would actually be worth doing. I need to do whatever I believe is the next right thing and let the universe take care of the results.
As a writer and a political being, there’s value for me in understanding what happened based on what we actually know. But if I’m trying to convince myself that the future isn’t in fact utterly unknowable and beyond my control, forget it. From here on I may have to let Nate Silver go it without me.
This year, everything I read and clung to was wrong. As of Tuesday night all the time and energy I gave to 538 and RCP and TPM and HuffPo felt like a total waste. The truth is, though, that even if the predictions had been right, it still would have been a waste. It would have felt better, but it wouldn’t have amounted to anything. Political information is useful when it helps me make up my mind or persuade someone else or take some other effective action. When I’m trying to use it to see the future, it’s worse than useless. It’s a distraction from whatever would actually be worth doing. I need to do whatever I believe is the next right thing and let the universe take care of the results.
As a writer and a political being, there’s value for me in understanding what happened based on what we actually know. But if I’m trying to convince myself that the future isn’t in fact utterly unknowable and beyond my control, forget it. From here on I may have to let Nate Silver go it without me.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Bookends of History
All year I’ve been forcing myself not to blog about the election. It’s not easy: I’ve been a passionate election-watcher since 1976, and I’ve never seen one as weird and gruesomely fascinating as this one. But I have a book to revise, a big book, and my publisher has now set a publication date, in October of next year. Which means I can’t take my brain off it unless I want to cause some real trouble.
I have, though, persuaded myself that I’m allowed to write a little bit about the election when I can put in the framework of my book. In my last post I compared the current lunacy to the election of 1828. This time I thought I should tie that up. Because the election of 1828 was the beginning of a vast narrative arc in American history, and I think now we’re arriving at the end of that same arc: the age of the white working class.
I have, though, persuaded myself that I’m allowed to write a little bit about the election when I can put in the framework of my book. In my last post I compared the current lunacy to the election of 1828. This time I thought I should tie that up. Because the election of 1828 was the beginning of a vast narrative arc in American history, and I think now we’re arriving at the end of that same arc: the age of the white working class.
For the first few decades of our republic, voting rights were restricted nearly everywhere to men with property and money. Then, starting mostly in the 1820s, a wave of democratic sentiment pushed state governments to extend the suffrage to nearly all adult white men. Barely over 100,000 Americans voted for presidential candidates or electors in 1820. About 360,000 voted four years later. Over 1.1 million voted in 1828.
That changed everything. An elite electorate had chosen a series of Founding Fathers for president, then the aristocratic son of a Founding Father. The voters of 1828 threw out John Quincy Adams and overwhelmingly chose Andrew Jackson, a war hero, a Westerner, and a populist. Ever since, the most powerful group in every American election has been working-class whites. If either political party could win the hearts of most of those voters, it could dominate the nation.
"Working class" is a messy and poorly defined term, of course, and making too much of it can distort things. Most political scientists these days base the definition on formal education. Income is an unreliable measure, mostly because of the way issues of age throw it off (an Ivy League law student can earn a lot less than a union industrial worker of his own age), so "high school only" vs. "college educated" becomes the easiest way to attempt to isolate most of the things we mean by "class." Those voters aren’t necessary industrial workers; in fact, through most of our history, they were overwhelmingly farmers, and now more of them are in service jobs than industry. A better name might be that phrase popular in Jackson's era: the "common man."
Whatever we call them, before World War II they accounted for about 85% of the American electorate. Over the next few decades, two things changed: first, more white people started attending college, leading to changes in occupations, social allegiances, and political agendas; next, the non-white population soared. The proportion of those "working-class" whites had sunk to 65% of voters by 1980. It plummeted to 48%, no longer a majority, only twelve years later. In 2012, it had slid to 37%.
The Democratic dominance of American politics from 1932 to 1968 was based on those voters. When the Democrats began to lose that demographic in the wake of the Civil Rights years, the Republicans rose, triumphing with the emergence of the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats." It was Bill Clinton’s ability to pull most of them back away from the Republicans that enabled him to win in 1992. When George Bush won them back again, the Republicans took back the White House.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama won only 40% of no-college white voters but still easily won the election. Four years later he was reelected with only 36%. He still had to fight for those voters: he would have lost some key states, including Ohio, if he hadn't run much better among them there than he had nationally. Still, for the first time, a candidate could lose that constituency and not lose the election.
This year, what had formerly been one of a whole constellation of demographic, numerical phenomena has become the center of the narrative. Donald Trump has targeted those voters ("I love the poorly educated!") like no candidate since the Great Depression. He’s virtually turned the election into a battle between them and everyone else. And he’s succeeding with them, usually polling close to 70%.
The kind of dominance Trump has among working-class whites would have brought on a landslide victory in the mid-20th century, and even just a few elections ago would have guaranteed a victory. But now he's decidedly trailing in the polls. It looks as though Hillary Clinton is going to be rejected overwhelmingly by the white "common man," and more narrowly by the white "common woman," and yet still become president.
I’ve seen Trump compared to Andrew Jackson many times this past year. I even did it myself, in my last blog post. I think, though, that they aren't so much parallel as complementary. They’re bookends. One stands at the beginning of a story, the other at the end.
Of course, it’s still conceivable that Trump could win. This could turn out to be a late rally by the white working class before the rising generation of non-white Americans swamps them, a demographic Battle of the Bulge, made possible by the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. But it’s more likely that we’re watching a grand pageant, a sort of vast, improvisational theater production, about the end of an era.
So right now I’m simultaneously revising a book about the beginning of the long dominance of Jackson’s "common people" and watching the end of that arc played out dramatically. The election is still distracting as hell when I’m supposed to be working on the book. But it's interesting and moving to see it as a summation of so much of what I’m writing about. (And, anyway, that makes for a great pretext to write political blogs.)
That changed everything. An elite electorate had chosen a series of Founding Fathers for president, then the aristocratic son of a Founding Father. The voters of 1828 threw out John Quincy Adams and overwhelmingly chose Andrew Jackson, a war hero, a Westerner, and a populist. Ever since, the most powerful group in every American election has been working-class whites. If either political party could win the hearts of most of those voters, it could dominate the nation.
"Working class" is a messy and poorly defined term, of course, and making too much of it can distort things. Most political scientists these days base the definition on formal education. Income is an unreliable measure, mostly because of the way issues of age throw it off (an Ivy League law student can earn a lot less than a union industrial worker of his own age), so "high school only" vs. "college educated" becomes the easiest way to attempt to isolate most of the things we mean by "class." Those voters aren’t necessary industrial workers; in fact, through most of our history, they were overwhelmingly farmers, and now more of them are in service jobs than industry. A better name might be that phrase popular in Jackson's era: the "common man."
Whatever we call them, before World War II they accounted for about 85% of the American electorate. Over the next few decades, two things changed: first, more white people started attending college, leading to changes in occupations, social allegiances, and political agendas; next, the non-white population soared. The proportion of those "working-class" whites had sunk to 65% of voters by 1980. It plummeted to 48%, no longer a majority, only twelve years later. In 2012, it had slid to 37%.
The Democratic dominance of American politics from 1932 to 1968 was based on those voters. When the Democrats began to lose that demographic in the wake of the Civil Rights years, the Republicans rose, triumphing with the emergence of the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats." It was Bill Clinton’s ability to pull most of them back away from the Republicans that enabled him to win in 1992. When George Bush won them back again, the Republicans took back the White House.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama won only 40% of no-college white voters but still easily won the election. Four years later he was reelected with only 36%. He still had to fight for those voters: he would have lost some key states, including Ohio, if he hadn't run much better among them there than he had nationally. Still, for the first time, a candidate could lose that constituency and not lose the election.
This year, what had formerly been one of a whole constellation of demographic, numerical phenomena has become the center of the narrative. Donald Trump has targeted those voters ("I love the poorly educated!") like no candidate since the Great Depression. He’s virtually turned the election into a battle between them and everyone else. And he’s succeeding with them, usually polling close to 70%.
The kind of dominance Trump has among working-class whites would have brought on a landslide victory in the mid-20th century, and even just a few elections ago would have guaranteed a victory. But now he's decidedly trailing in the polls. It looks as though Hillary Clinton is going to be rejected overwhelmingly by the white "common man," and more narrowly by the white "common woman," and yet still become president.
I’ve seen Trump compared to Andrew Jackson many times this past year. I even did it myself, in my last blog post. I think, though, that they aren't so much parallel as complementary. They’re bookends. One stands at the beginning of a story, the other at the end.
Of course, it’s still conceivable that Trump could win. This could turn out to be a late rally by the white working class before the rising generation of non-white Americans swamps them, a demographic Battle of the Bulge, made possible by the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. But it’s more likely that we’re watching a grand pageant, a sort of vast, improvisational theater production, about the end of an era.
So right now I’m simultaneously revising a book about the beginning of the long dominance of Jackson’s "common people" and watching the end of that arc played out dramatically. The election is still distracting as hell when I’m supposed to be working on the book. But it's interesting and moving to see it as a summation of so much of what I’m writing about. (And, anyway, that makes for a great pretext to write political blogs.)
Saturday, October 1, 2016
Has there ever been an election like this before?
My work on the book this week compels me to write about the presidential election. A national turning point, pitting a steady but boring representative of the dominant elite who liked to talk about economic plans and infrastructures against an unpredictable populist running on his questionable achievements outside politics, dodging clear policy statements and harping on the corruption of the system. The ugliest campaign ever, all about mutual character assassination—one candidate called a secretive quasi-aristocrat with ties to the banks who rose to power through family connections and corrupt bargains, the other a hateful, adulterous sleazeball in it for nothing but personal glory—and almost nothing about the issues. Old sex scandals trotted out by the press. And both sides wailing with apocalyptic predictions of national doom: They're going to keep selling the people out to the international banking establishment until we've lost control of our country! He's going to usher in mob rule, violence, and chaos!
At least in the election I'm writing about there's no suspense to endure—we've known the ending for a long time. The poor old establishment voters really thought they had a chance to win, convinced that the American people would never be stupid enough to give the country to that hot-headed egomaniac with the big, silly-looking hair. But of course it was the candidate with the huge rallies and insanely enthusiastic followers who won in a landslide, thanks mostly to working-class men who'd never voted before. When the returns came in from Ohio and Pennsylvania, the incumbents knew they were finished.
Welcome to 1828.
At least in the election I'm writing about there's no suspense to endure—we've known the ending for a long time. The poor old establishment voters really thought they had a chance to win, convinced that the American people would never be stupid enough to give the country to that hot-headed egomaniac with the big, silly-looking hair. But of course it was the candidate with the huge rallies and insanely enthusiastic followers who won in a landslide, thanks mostly to working-class men who'd never voted before. When the returns came in from Ohio and Pennsylvania, the incumbents knew they were finished.
Welcome to 1828.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Election Predictions
Just so I can look back a year from now and link to this post in pride...or quietly delete it...here’s my latest visit to the crystal ball:
The Carson and Trump campaigns will sag as the real voting starts, and both of those candidates will drop out fairly early—Trump because his vanity is being bruised, Carson because he really doesn’t want to do this at all. Marco Rubio will be the clear Republican choice before the convention. With Rubio holding the party together surprisingly well, and carrying Florida to boot, November will be nerve-wrackingly close—i.e., Ohio will choose our next president. Assuming a generally promising economy, I see Clinton taking it by a slim margin. The Democrats will also capture just enough Senate races (I’m not going to predict which ones) to come out with 50 seats, making Vice President Castro the tie-breaker.
The great unknown, of course, is the economy. Because most American swing voters base their last-minute decisions on how the economy (especially the unemployment rate) looks in the near future—even though it’s been pretty obvious for a long time that no president can really do much about that—an economic stall in summer or early fall will probably mean a Republican White House, and most likely a Republican Senate, too. Which means it really isn’t up to Ohio after all. It’s up to China.
P. S.: If I really have to guess which Castro, my first pick is Joaquín. My last is Raúl.
The Carson and Trump campaigns will sag as the real voting starts, and both of those candidates will drop out fairly early—Trump because his vanity is being bruised, Carson because he really doesn’t want to do this at all. Marco Rubio will be the clear Republican choice before the convention. With Rubio holding the party together surprisingly well, and carrying Florida to boot, November will be nerve-wrackingly close—i.e., Ohio will choose our next president. Assuming a generally promising economy, I see Clinton taking it by a slim margin. The Democrats will also capture just enough Senate races (I’m not going to predict which ones) to come out with 50 seats, making Vice President Castro the tie-breaker.
The great unknown, of course, is the economy. Because most American swing voters base their last-minute decisions on how the economy (especially the unemployment rate) looks in the near future—even though it’s been pretty obvious for a long time that no president can really do much about that—an economic stall in summer or early fall will probably mean a Republican White House, and most likely a Republican Senate, too. Which means it really isn’t up to Ohio after all. It’s up to China.
P. S.: If I really have to guess which Castro, my first pick is Joaquín. My last is Raúl.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Grand Old Fantasies
There's been a lot to analyze and think about in the results of our recent election, but what I'm finding most fascinating right now is the astounding wrongness of Republican predictions on the eve of the vote—or, to be more precise, the stubborn adherence to wrongness by a whole lot of smart people in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Without exception (as far as I know), prominent Republicans predicted a Mitt Romney victory while nearly every nonpartisan analysis of the polls put the probability of an Obama victory at 80 or 90 percent. And this wasn't just let's-predict-victory-to-keep-our-spirits-up cheerleading. These were serious prognostications. Some expected a Romney landslide, when even the most Republican-leaning state polls showed him trailing in nearly all the swing states he needed to win.
Nor were these just the usual Fox News gasbags like Dick Morris. They included seasoned observers like George F. Will (who a few months before had written a sober and sensible analysis of why Obama was going to be very hard to unseat), strategists like Karl Rove (whose credibility would seem to require a realistic grasp of the facts), and, worst of all, the very people who should have been most realistic about what was going on with the electorate, the pollsters working for the Romney campaign.
I heard three main arguments from these people as to why all the nonpartisan analyses were wrong. The first was that the polls were "skewed," especially that they were "oversampling Democrats." Even though 38% of voters identified as Democrats and only 32% as Republicans, several pundits insisted that voters from the two parties should be sampled equally, even hinting (at least on Fox News) that the greater number of Democrats was the result of the pollsters' own political biases. This seemed to spring, on the one hand, from a certain paranoia—why on earth would pollsters and odds makers whose livelihoods depend on accuracy intentionally publicize inaccurate information to express a political sentiment?—and on the other from the juvenile but deep-seated resentment that we hear so much of from the right wing lately, that the world is unfairly ranged against them. Republicans should be sampled the same as Democrats, damn it. Otherwise it's just no fair!
The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.
The most reality-based of the arguments was the one that held that while the polls' projections of turnout among young and nonwhite voters were based on 2008 results, the truth would surely be that those groups would only turn out at 2004 levels; in others words, 2008 was a fluke because a mad passion for Barack Obama made black people and twenty-somethings behave in a way they never would again. There was actually some evidence to support that one: pro-Romney voters expressed distinctly higher levels of interest and intensity than pro-Obama voters. Still, interest levels have always been an unreliable measure; organized get-out-the-vote operations have proven to matter more, and no one doubted that the Democratics had that part down. The non-partisan poll analysts had the same basic information and didn't bother much about the "intensity gap."
The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?
This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.
In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.
The second argument was that Romney was riding a wave of momentum that had started with the first debate, so that he just had to pull close enough by the final weekend of the campaign that his momentum could carry him over the finish line. That ran against all the evidence of the public polls, which showed that his momentum had stalled out at least two weeks before the election and that the incumbent was actually pulling further ahead by the end. (The GOP apparently produced a few polls on the final weekend showing Romney gaining again, but everyone in that business knows not to trust weekend polling.) In the face of that, members of the campaign talked about the excitement of the crowds wherever they went, a feeling of momentum that couldn't be denied. That one was just wishful thinking.
The New Republic ran an article a couple of days ago breaking down the Romney camp's internal polling and dissecting just how this delusional group-think evolved. But it doesn't answer the other question: why? Why were so many experienced analysts and strategists willing to fly so boldly in the face of so much contradictory evidence, to assert so confidently that they alone had the "real polls" (to quote Dick Morris), to imagine that they had exclusive possession of reality?
This was a triumph of mutual self-deception, a vast collaboration on a shared fantasy. Not the sort of thinking one expects from a lot of smart grown-ups with decades of experience in the real world. I'm sure a lot of elements came together to make that happen, but I think the biggest one is also the simplest: We don't like pain and fear, and when they're intense enough we'll do almost anything to squirm away from them. As organisms, we may be able to think in the long term, but we feel in the short term. It's how we evolved: pain and fear are so hard to bear that we bring all our resources to escaping them. And if we can't escape the situation that inspires them, we bring those resources to adjusting our own thinking so the feelings diminish.
Usually, group wisdom keeps us grounded in reality even in those situations. But when the group is united by an especially agonizing anxiety, then the members may start encouraging each other not to an uncomfortable acceptance of reality but to a mutual soothing of the pain. When the group feels cut off from other people and is already inclined to distrust what it hears from outside, then those strategies of reassurance can zoom like a welcome virus through the mass conversation. Think of the Nazi high command believing that the war could still be turned until there were Russian tanks in Berlin. When we give each other a veiled choice between amplifying our anxiety together and creating hope together, we're primed to choose the latter.
Republicans had spent years working each other into the terror that an Obama reelection was the worst thing that could happen to them. Then they spent months encouraging each other to believe that that fate could be averted. And, of course, all along the way they continued to reinforce in each other the conviction that the liberal media was ranged against them and couldn't be trusted. When the evidence kept stripping them of their hopes and leaving them naked against their fears, they did the human thing: they came to one another's emotional defense.
In times like those, no matter how experienced we are and no matter how complex are our mental gymnastics, we're all like kids again: doing whatever we can to comfort ourselves through the night, but leaving ourselves vulnerable to an ugly reality in the morning.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
I stopped following the news a few weeks ago. It was the election that did it—but I didn't stop so I could get away from politics, I did it so I could focus better on politics.
Not the media version of politics, that Frankenstein of sports reportage and fabricated hysteria, but the politics where I can actually do something useful: phone banking, door knocking, whatever. The news industry depends not only on keeping us seat-belted onto the roller coaster of anxiety but also on keeping us transfixed on details, on poll numbers, momentum, and supposed turning points, on graphs and gaffes, like a chicken on a snake. No, not a snake. Snakes pose active problems to chickens that require responses. Most election news is just a finger-drawn line in the dirt that the poor dumb bird—and I—only think is a snake.
The one newsy website I've allowed myself periodic visits to, when I want a soft-spoken overview that calms me down instead of churns me up, is Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. As Silver points out, his statistics-based, algorithm-driven forecasts for the winners in the presidential election for every one of the fifty states are exactly the same now, on November 1, as they were when he rolled out this year's model on June 7. We won't know for a few days if those forecasts are right, but it suggests how little all the blips in the news cycle and squiggles on the poll graphs have amounted to.
When I let myself worry about those blips and squiggles, when I start following the hyperlinks like bread crumbs endlessly into the tangled woods of information, I become less effective. Maybe I slack off because I think I know the future or maybe I freeze up because I think it's too much for me to handle, but more likely I just fall under the spell of the Need to Know. No matter how much I learn, I become convinced that if I read that one more op-ed or one more poll analysis I'll capture that last piece of information I need to make sense of it all.
Which isn't innately a bad thing. Except that the time I spend reading or watching or listening to the news is time I'm not spending making a phone call or offering a carless voter a ride to the polls. And, although I may sometimes fool myself into believing the contrary, that information isn't going to inspire me to new action or tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do. News geekery is just geekery, and geekery is for when there's time to kill.
I got some vindication for this when a friend of mine who's been helping with big fundraisers asked one of the campaign's main finance people how he stayed so cool and upbeat in the midst of all the post-first-debate hysteria about tumbling poll numbers and shifting momentum, and he said, "I just don't pay attention to it."
I've decided that there are three reasons to learn a thing. One, because it helps me do something I want to do. Two, because it enables me to have conversations I want to have. And three, because it's just fun to know.
But following the news cycles doesn't help me do anything but follow more news cycles. And I'm sick of the conversational cycles that cycle around the news cycles—after a couple of weeks there's nowhere they can go but hand wringing, impotent fuming, and sighs of despair. And I finally caught on that the roller coaster of information was only making me anxious. Which is a problem, and not just for selfish reasons: I'm a lot less effective at everything, but especially at encouraging other people, when I'm anxious than when I'm upbeat, energized, and focused on what matters.
It would be different if something I learned from the news might change my mind about the big issues, but I don't have to go searching for that. I mean, if anything happens that's big enough to make me want to see a different party in the White House and Senate (I don't know what that could be, but if), I'll hear about it without clicking on Google News six times a day. What I need to know is what my job is right now, and for that the news won't help me at all.
So I guess if I'm going to spin out a life lesson from the last few weeks, it would be this: It's good to know the big stuff that shapes your goals and the little stuff that tells you what to do next. It's the in-between stuff that'll kill you.
Not the media version of politics, that Frankenstein of sports reportage and fabricated hysteria, but the politics where I can actually do something useful: phone banking, door knocking, whatever. The news industry depends not only on keeping us seat-belted onto the roller coaster of anxiety but also on keeping us transfixed on details, on poll numbers, momentum, and supposed turning points, on graphs and gaffes, like a chicken on a snake. No, not a snake. Snakes pose active problems to chickens that require responses. Most election news is just a finger-drawn line in the dirt that the poor dumb bird—and I—only think is a snake.
Which isn't innately a bad thing. Except that the time I spend reading or watching or listening to the news is time I'm not spending making a phone call or offering a carless voter a ride to the polls. And, although I may sometimes fool myself into believing the contrary, that information isn't going to inspire me to new action or tell me what I need to do. I know what I need to do. News geekery is just geekery, and geekery is for when there's time to kill.
I got some vindication for this when a friend of mine who's been helping with big fundraisers asked one of the campaign's main finance people how he stayed so cool and upbeat in the midst of all the post-first-debate hysteria about tumbling poll numbers and shifting momentum, and he said, "I just don't pay attention to it."
But following the news cycles doesn't help me do anything but follow more news cycles. And I'm sick of the conversational cycles that cycle around the news cycles—after a couple of weeks there's nowhere they can go but hand wringing, impotent fuming, and sighs of despair. And I finally caught on that the roller coaster of information was only making me anxious. Which is a problem, and not just for selfish reasons: I'm a lot less effective at everything, but especially at encouraging other people, when I'm anxious than when I'm upbeat, energized, and focused on what matters.
It would be different if something I learned from the news might change my mind about the big issues, but I don't have to go searching for that. I mean, if anything happens that's big enough to make me want to see a different party in the White House and Senate (I don't know what that could be, but if), I'll hear about it without clicking on Google News six times a day. What I need to know is what my job is right now, and for that the news won't help me at all.
So I guess if I'm going to spin out a life lesson from the last few weeks, it would be this: It's good to know the big stuff that shapes your goals and the little stuff that tells you what to do next. It's the in-between stuff that'll kill you.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Puer Aeternus
I've just come back from volunteering at the Democratic National Convention. I was in the formatting squad of the Press Distribution team, so most of the time my job was to take speeches scripted for the teleprompter (odd punctuation, stage directions, no paragraphs) and format them to look like written English. When there was no formatting work I shifted to the "running" team, which involved getting the hard copies of those speeches to journalists scattered all over the Time-Warner Cable Arena.
There's a lot I could say about the work itself (one tidbit: Bill Clinton originally planned to say "math" but changed it to "arithmetic" on the podium). I could also say some things about the politics of it all (I now know a great deal about moving forward by growing an economy that lasts, from the middle out, not the top down), about the strange culture of that world-within-a-world, and about my brief love affair with Charlotte, North Carolina. But what I'm thinking about right now is the unexpected joy of being a novice again.
In my professional life I usually manage to come off as something of an authority. It's true that I've chosen to take on new skills a few times in my career: At 30, after starting as a humorist and pop-culture commentator I tackled the odd media of comics and screenplays, then at 40 started teaching myself to write some fairly serious nonfiction about psychology and cultural history, and around 50 started teaching writing classes. Even with those changes, though, I still always managed to be the guy who knew a lot about writing, who got his name on his books and classes, who ran his own show and got to pick his own learning curves.
The convention was a different story. There I just had to show up and do what I was told. And if I didn't know how, I had to learn. Not that I was a novice at the art of punctuation or knowing where to break a run-on sentence; but because we were formatting for journalists, we had to match the AP Style Guide, which I didn't know. My supervisors also had special protocols they needed followed. And I had no idea in hell how to use Word for PC.
So I had to be a rookie, a very green rookie, for the first time in a long time. I had to learn to ask for help, to get through the embarrassment of making the most elementary mistakes (sometimes twice on the same mistake), and to know I was the one who was holding the whole show up because I had to go back and redo everything I'd gotten wrong. I even had to suffer my comma-placement decisions being overridden by an 18-year-old intern.
There was no glamor in it, either. I always like being the bright light in the room: my name on the book, running the class, tossing out references to my publishers and producers. But we worked in a narrow, dark, cyclone-fence-and-garbage-bag cage in the basement, next to the forklift ramp. In small talk we team members found out all the interesting careers and impressive accomplishments we brought in from the outside world, but none of it mattered when the work came in. We were all of us interchangeable and anonymous. My boss kept calling me "Jeffrey."
I did begin to find my way in formatting as the days went on. There was a value to my decent knowledge of grammar and that experience dicing and splicing sentences that the obsessive writer will develop. But whatever special glow I thought I was building up within my team was instantly snuffed when I shifted to the running team. Suddenly it didn't matter in the least what I knew about the English language. All that mattered was how fast I could get my 55-year-old ass up four flights of stairs and find the right room. I had to learn to be a good delivery boy. Granted, I was a special sort of delivery boy. There is something more glamorous about bursting through a door and saying, "I have the Clinton speech," than bursting through a door and saying, "Did you order the pepperoni and mushroom?" But that didn't change the fact that nothing I'd ever learned as a writer meant squat.
But the thing is...I liked it. I felt more fulfilled than I ever thought I would. What had sounded like a sacrifice to make for a greater cause turned out to be a reward. I'm already looking forward to 2016, and I find myself returning with a noticeable resistance and resentment to my ordinary life of autonomy, expertise, and distinction.
One gift of it all was feeling that I belonged to the group. When I was younger I never felt I belonged to much of anything, so to compensate I took up a career that I hoped would make me stand out as something unique and exceptional. But of course that becomes a loop, because being exceptional can be a big barrier to belonging. Being inept freed me up to seek camaraderie instead of admiration, to let myself become truly part of a body whose overall success mattered far more than my own.
Then there was freedom—that paradoxical freedom that comes from knowing exactly what we have to do and having to suffer no anxieties of choice. Kind of a heavily diluted version of that radical spiritual freedom Dostoevsky writes about in Karamazov: The more free I was from prioritizing, anticipating, managing, and second guessing, and the more free I was from caring about credit or blame or staking out my personal turf, the more free I could be just to show up for what I was living.
But another gift of being a novice was feeling, as the etymology implies, new again. I've spent so much of my adult life trying not to feel the uncomfortable emotions of the young novice—insecurity, embarrassment, helplessness, panic, humility—that I forget how vivid those emotions are, how much I learn about myself in wrestling with them, and how generously they set me up to feel so much triumph for the smallest improvements. Every day I walked to the arena, I knew I was going to come out knowing vastly more by the time I staggered back out. Every time I was handed a new job, I knew it would scare me and beat me up and laugh at me but then, in the end, leave me changed for the better.
When we talk about wanting to be young again, we usually mean being free of back pain or filled with more energy or blissfully ignorant of the workings of a 401K. But this felt like the real thing: all my fears and triumphs tumbling over each other in a forward rush, mastery and maturity always ahead of me and not ringed like a fortress around me. A beginner again, cracked wide open and taking nothing for granted. All the way in the present, for better and worse, in a way I'd nearly forgotten.
There's a lot I could say about the work itself (one tidbit: Bill Clinton originally planned to say "math" but changed it to "arithmetic" on the podium). I could also say some things about the politics of it all (I now know a great deal about moving forward by growing an economy that lasts, from the middle out, not the top down), about the strange culture of that world-within-a-world, and about my brief love affair with Charlotte, North Carolina. But what I'm thinking about right now is the unexpected joy of being a novice again.
In my professional life I usually manage to come off as something of an authority. It's true that I've chosen to take on new skills a few times in my career: At 30, after starting as a humorist and pop-culture commentator I tackled the odd media of comics and screenplays, then at 40 started teaching myself to write some fairly serious nonfiction about psychology and cultural history, and around 50 started teaching writing classes. Even with those changes, though, I still always managed to be the guy who knew a lot about writing, who got his name on his books and classes, who ran his own show and got to pick his own learning curves.The convention was a different story. There I just had to show up and do what I was told. And if I didn't know how, I had to learn. Not that I was a novice at the art of punctuation or knowing where to break a run-on sentence; but because we were formatting for journalists, we had to match the AP Style Guide, which I didn't know. My supervisors also had special protocols they needed followed. And I had no idea in hell how to use Word for PC.
So I had to be a rookie, a very green rookie, for the first time in a long time. I had to learn to ask for help, to get through the embarrassment of making the most elementary mistakes (sometimes twice on the same mistake), and to know I was the one who was holding the whole show up because I had to go back and redo everything I'd gotten wrong. I even had to suffer my comma-placement decisions being overridden by an 18-year-old intern.
There was no glamor in it, either. I always like being the bright light in the room: my name on the book, running the class, tossing out references to my publishers and producers. But we worked in a narrow, dark, cyclone-fence-and-garbage-bag cage in the basement, next to the forklift ramp. In small talk we team members found out all the interesting careers and impressive accomplishments we brought in from the outside world, but none of it mattered when the work came in. We were all of us interchangeable and anonymous. My boss kept calling me "Jeffrey."
But the thing is...I liked it. I felt more fulfilled than I ever thought I would. What had sounded like a sacrifice to make for a greater cause turned out to be a reward. I'm already looking forward to 2016, and I find myself returning with a noticeable resistance and resentment to my ordinary life of autonomy, expertise, and distinction.
One gift of it all was feeling that I belonged to the group. When I was younger I never felt I belonged to much of anything, so to compensate I took up a career that I hoped would make me stand out as something unique and exceptional. But of course that becomes a loop, because being exceptional can be a big barrier to belonging. Being inept freed me up to seek camaraderie instead of admiration, to let myself become truly part of a body whose overall success mattered far more than my own.
But another gift of being a novice was feeling, as the etymology implies, new again. I've spent so much of my adult life trying not to feel the uncomfortable emotions of the young novice—insecurity, embarrassment, helplessness, panic, humility—that I forget how vivid those emotions are, how much I learn about myself in wrestling with them, and how generously they set me up to feel so much triumph for the smallest improvements. Every day I walked to the arena, I knew I was going to come out knowing vastly more by the time I staggered back out. Every time I was handed a new job, I knew it would scare me and beat me up and laugh at me but then, in the end, leave me changed for the better.
When we talk about wanting to be young again, we usually mean being free of back pain or filled with more energy or blissfully ignorant of the workings of a 401K. But this felt like the real thing: all my fears and triumphs tumbling over each other in a forward rush, mastery and maturity always ahead of me and not ringed like a fortress around me. A beginner again, cracked wide open and taking nothing for granted. All the way in the present, for better and worse, in a way I'd nearly forgotten.
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