Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.
The only other institution that comes to mind as also crossing over between two existential domains is religion where liturgically valid events, which are created by a religious community and carried out in the full knowledge that liturgies have a history and so are historical creations administered by human beings, cross over into becoming metaphysically real, having a significance that rebounds in heaven and for eternity, and not just in the culture in which these very particular practices take place. And so the Catholic Mass, which takes place all over the world in thousands of settings every moment of the day, is every time a miracle in which the incarnation of Jesus on Earth is not merely reenacted but again takes place. Similarly, the arrangements of the icons in a Greek Orthodox Church is taken to have a significant religious function, making the place sacred, when the particular arrangement is obviously a consequence of choices made historically a long time ago. Jews say on Passover that they should remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, which makes them reflect on very different meanings of slavery that have taken place in the subsequent three thousand years and which may not at all reflect the initial meaning of their slavery, which may have meant only that they were independent contractors who made bricks out of straw at a profit.
Before considering the case of politics in detail, consider all those other activities other than politics which are carried out in real time. Going on a camping trip or a hike occurs in real time. You climb to your destination point, set up camp, cook a meal, clean up, sleep under the stars, have breakfast, pack up, and make the return trip to your car in the parking lot. You can shorten the experience if the weather gets rough or if there is an emergency phone call, but it just takes as long as it takes. Similarly, if you just take a mile walk along city streets, you are going to have to walk back, even if you take a different route, unless you have planned ahead so that someone will pick you up in a car at the farthest point of your walk. Courtship is also like that. It takes as long as it takes, whether that means a whirlwind courtship or one that is quite extended, as happened with Elizabeth and Darcy, who go years after their first meeting before confessing their love for one another. All cases of courtship have to go through stages of initial attraction (or loathing) to getting to know one another, to heartfelt exchanges, to initial intimacies, to evaluating long term prospects, to feeling the pangs of wondering what it would be like to live without this person in your life, and the minidramas of brief breakups or spats and the meeting of potential in-laws. Dramatic renditions of courtship collapse these stages or arrange for them to overlap or make confrontations more terse, but real life ones do not have time limits, only time that passes by.
Even activities that are regulated by time are done in real time. That is true of factory work where people check in and check out by a clock, where the work is designed to be done in a certain amount of time and where the whole production line is time regulated so that the work is done more efficiently. You are there on the factory floor from nine to five, have time off for lunch and for breaks, and attend to business the rest of the time, however much you have an eye on the clock to see how near it is to lunch time or quitting time. That is also true of work which is governed by responsibilities rather than time. It takes as long as it takes to design a new software package or an advertising campaign, even as a boss may cajole you to do one or the other more quickly. There are just so many hours in the day that a Covid-19 nurse can deal with going from one very sick patient to another.
Very different is the world of drama. There, time is elided so that the story moves along quickly, the key events set in high relief, most events cast in the waste bin. Even Victorian novelists like Wilkie Collins who were prone to describe long walks taken by their characters summarized those walks in a paragraph or so of description rather than portray them to any fuller extent. The same is even more true of drama. There, the action is largely just stripped down to dialogue and even that is pared so that only important interchanges take place. Beckett and Mamet are known for making even slight alterations in that practice by expanding the time given to lapses into silence or pointless chatter or repetitious remarks. Well made plays by Odets and Hellman all have a high rhetorical sheen that makes every exchange meaningful and eloquent. Movies and novels cut out years of time and move from one highly polished setting or interior to another. What is important is to get on with the story, something important that has to be covered to get the story told, not what seems to be the extraneous matters that clutter up the story, that keep it from proceeding to its conclusion.
That makes the construction of a political drama particularly difficult because it requires the dramatist to find a way to give a sense that politics proceeds at its own pace while still respecting the need for drama to summarize the story or at least to elide most time from the story. William Shakespeare, of course, does this about as successfully as can be done in “Julius Caesar”. There, the audience is dropped into a political situation which is already well advanced. One demagogue, Julius Caesar, has replaced another demagogue, Pompey, as the favorite of the crowd and the Establishment is worrying about what it should do. And then, in fast succession and what seems real time, there are the conferences between the potential conspirators, the assassination, the funeral oration, and the choosing up of new sides. It is only then that there is a cut to the battlefield where Brutus, defeated, will take his own life, and so that section can properly be called “The Tragedy of Brutus”, which has all along been the true subject of the play. That wrench is not just intellectual. It is the intrusion of a time elision in a play that had seemed to be moving along in real time, the way politics does and tragedy does not.
It is easy enough to describe politics as a spectator sport. That means that the public is in the position of an audience to a drama. They have access to the characters in the drama, the issues that are the subject of discussion, and the spectacle of conventions and rallies and television ads, mostly vicariously, maybe lucky enough, if you live in New Hampshire, to see any number of candidates any number of times in the coffee shops in your small town. And, like a theatre audience, the voter is the final arbiter of who puts on the best performance. You decide if the play on Broadway was any good and you decide who to vote for.
But that would be to misread the situation. Sometimes a focus group of audience members can be invoked to make changes in the play but mostly it is out of the audience’s hands, while an election is in the hands of the voters. An election is also more consequential than the price of a ticket-- so consequential, in fact, that it is illegal to purchase a vote though it is a staple of Broadway that a play rides on how many bottoms fill the seats. So the object of candidates and their staff is to keep the voters interested in the campaign as well as to vote for them for whatever reasons they may and the candidates are clear that the reasons voters may have may be disparate or contradictory or simply foolish or wrongheaded or ones that lead them not to vote rather than to vote in favor of their candidate. So elections are not sports, performances put on for the purpose of selling tickets and building a following, and providing some pleasure and meaning for a person’s life, but have real life consequences, which is control of the government. The whole theory of democratic government is that the voter is not just a spectator but that the vote is an act of participation in the political system. The voter is an actor rather than an observer.
Self conscious and much commented upon are the ways in which politicians try to make the political process more dramatic even though it eventuates in real time. Richard Nixon said that campaigns had ebbs and flows and that it was important to time when a campaign would peak and so provide the most support for a candidate. John Kennedy took the opposite view. He thought that every campaign should be run all out from start to finish. Both parties, however, indulge in such dramatic maneuvering as exposing the opposition research that reveals that an opponent has many skeletons in the closet, or else will aim at an October Surprise which will upend an opponent’s campaign just before people settle into their final opinions. You insert a Willy Horton ad just at the right time in your campaign against Michael Dukakis so as to discredit him. You run your daisy petal ad against Barry Goldwater just once but that is enough to do the damage in that news people will cite it for the rest of the campaign. So some politicians or their handlers think that an election is like a basketball game where what counts is what happens in the last five minutes, while some others think that an election is like a moneyball approach to baseball: runs scored in the late innings are no more important than runs scored in the early innings and so don’t waste so much money on relief pitchers.
External events such as hurricanes or the memory of them can intrude into a campaign, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina, while other events that seem external, such as wars, can be intruded into a campaign to make patriotism a partisan issue. Margaret Thatcher stifled her Democratic Liberal opposition by getting into the Falklands War in 1982 and Richard Nixon promised the South Vietnam regime that they would get a better deal if they held out until he was elected. Jimmy Carter could not overcome ABC’s “Nightline” reporting every night on how many days it had been since Iran had taken American hostages out of the American Embassy in Tehran. Sometimes it is not at all clear how to play an intruding event. McCain said he wanted to suspend the campaign in 2008 so as to get back to Washington to deal with the imploding economy, while Obama insisted on campaigning as usual, claiming that a President has to be able to do two things at once. If the Twin Towers had been brought down a year earlier, it might have shifted the electorate to a presidential candidate with more federal experience.
When does a new election cycle begin? In Great Britain, that is a matter of objective procedure: it is six weeks from the time the election is called. In the United States, it begins whenever a candidate attracts the public spotlight as a contender. Everybody knew that Dwight Eisenhower could have the nomination on either ticket but for the asking, though Thomas E. Dewey was correct in saying that Ike would have to fight for the Republican nomination and Ike was successful at doing that. Barack Obama was a contender from the time he made his keynote speech at the Democratic national convention that nominated John Kerry in 2004. He just had to play his cards right, which he did, sensing if he didn’t get the nomination the first time around it would not be the same even if he got it on the second or third time around. The ex-Governor of New Jersey and the Governor of Maryland have already cast their hats into the ring for the 2024 Republican nomination, seeing themselves as the voices of what would inevitably be a reconstituted Republican Party: Christie in the belligerent mode of Trump, but much more intelligent and thoughtful, while Larry Hogan would rebuild the Republican party in the mold of Liberal Republicanism, a species of Republicanism that had died out with Nelson Rockefeller.
Less commented upon than the ways politicians try to frame and run their campaigns is the opposite case: the procedures for carrying out the political process rather than the interventions into them. That is because such matters are considered sacrosanct in that they are matters of constitutional writ rather than matters of political choice, which is the case with dramatization. This became clear recently when Trump opined that he might want to delay the election. That was dismissed out of hand by important supporters as well as media gurus because it was playing fast and loose with the Constitution when, in fact, politicians do that regularly, as when Mitch McConnell discovered a loophole by which he could just not bring the Merrick Garland nomination to the Supreme Court to the attention of the Senate rather than bring it to a vote, which had previously been supposed to be required by the Constitution.
Step back and think about why it is that politics is so distinctive an institution. The answer to that question is that politics is a story that goes on forever while most stories end. Politics is like a soap opera. New characters are introduced or are written out while others remain a very long time, sometimes even for the length of an actor’s career, the character evolving from a young stud to a wizened and wise old man. There are reintroductions of variations on standard plot elements such as romances and job tensions and the relation between parents and children, but it is always slightly different in that the elements of the story are slightly altered, either because these are different actors, or the dialogue is more or less taut, or because the town has moved on from one crisis to another one. There is no need to end the story because, as in real social life and in politics in particular, there is always some subsequent event that takes place: a new campaign; a new administration; a new set of problems or the return in altered guise of an old set of problems. In America, at the moment, we are reliving race problems for yet another generation, are revisiting epidemic politics for the first time in a hundred years, and wondering how to balance out the division of the United States into its contending regions, a problem that has never gone away since the time when Virginia and Massachusetts Bay were initially settled at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century.
That is different from what happens with other social entities. A person, which is a social entity if there ever were such a thing, dies. A novel, even “War and Peace”, ends. A sexual experience is over. And, despite Durkheim, communities also come to an end even if Durkheim thought they were transindividual in that they survive the death of any one of their members. Well, maybe for a while, but not for all that long. Rust Belt cities go into decline and only some of them recover to be recognizable as what they were. There are any number of gold rush towns or railroad watering depot towns that cease to exist entirely. There are rural communities put out of business by an interstate or left as only a general store because people go down the highway to a Walmart a few miles away. There is no end to the showings of “The Last Picture Show”. And nations and empires end. The Roman Empire lasted no more than six hundred years and the British and Spanish Empires for far shorter times than that. The American Empire is barely into its third century, if you measure that from the time when settlers pushed beyond the Alleghenies. But politics, as I say, goes on endlessly, one event preceding another back to caveman times when people first ceded their liberty to other people so as to keep the social peace. There were always tribal elders.
Politics predates other institutions. Stratification systems set in only when the division of labor began and so the power of some over others was enhanced because of the positions held by lord and peasant, farmer and farm worker. The military as a distinct institution begins in the barracks like life of fraternities of young people taking up service to the state, as is illustrated by both the Spartans and the Zulus. Politics, for its part, controls who can give legitimate orders to others and it is hard to imagine a human society in which that does not happen. Perhaps the chimps were pre-political.
James Coleman, in his magisterial “Foundations of Social Theory” tried a different tack. He wanted to reduce social life to economic life. That is where the idea of trading personal liberty for something else first took place. But that is to disregard the distinctions provided by John Locke who thought that there were any number of unfavorable economic contracts into which people could enter. A man might trade his labor for poor wages or a farmer might sell his wheat for less than it cost him to produce it. Such economic contracts were different from the social contract, which referred to agreements where one’s life was at stake. So people, according to Locke, couldn’t sell themselves into slavery and they entered into a social contract to protect their basic liberties even though it seems, under Locke, that suspending a social contract is no big deal because people will soon enough fall into another one. If the English King doesn’t suit you, you can bring in a different King who will abide by a different set of rules for how a government operates. Economic contracts are matters of relative interests dealt with fairly or unfairly or with some degree of fairness while the social contract is political because the power of the state, so long as a particular social contract is in force, is absolute. It covers the life and death of its subjects and the well being of the commonwealth as a whole in that it supplies a stable currency and a fair administration of the laws.
What are the consequences of recognizing the fundamental nature of politics as the never ending story of the succession to and the use of political power? My hypothesis does not lend itself to predictions so much as adages of what an observer should be on the lookout for. Always expect new things to happen, whether they come out of left field, like a pandemic, however much that had been predicted, or are reversals of what had come before, like Liberals talking about states rights in the face of Trump claiming to have executive powers he does not have. Also, expect the same set of characters: the demagogue, the Vice President out of central casting, the opposition leader looking for new ways to castigate the incumbent, as if those had not by this time been used up, the candidate either a man of the people, like Joe Biden, or even Donald Trump, a man of the people only because he sounds as crude as common people are supposed to, or just the opposite of that, like FDR and JFK, patricians born and bred. And, most of all, expect the relentlessness with which Election Day approaches, waiting neither on pandemics to settle, or candidates to show their weaknesses in time for the electorate to wake up to those, and the ballot boxes to be opened, whether the next day or a week or two later, to reveal what existential choice has been made by the American people. It is awe inspiring, the secular equivalent of an event on earth that binds history, if not eternity.