I am always anticipating that something big is going to happen just around the corner. Maybe it is because I lived through the Sixties and I would turn on the tv as soon as I got home to see if someone important had been assassinated. But, as you may note, there has been no big assassination attempt in the United States since Ronald Reagan, which is forty years ago. Maybe the fad for doing so is past and so we might hope that campus killings are also a thing of the past but I am not sure, just the result of a more efficient Secret Service monitoring where a President can go. More likely that my anxiety for new events is more the result of my sense that politics is an unfinished and unedited drama even though the whole point of experiencing politics is that it stumbles along in real time, full of longueurs and distractions, while "Julius Caesar" is crisp, James Mason superb as Brutus and Marlon Brando also as such as Marc Antony. So I want to see some action by the Justice Department and the other people hounding trump. They move so slowly. But the ninety day rule, which says the Justice Department will not announce anything that impinges on an election (not that Comey abided by it and so did Hillary in) means that nothing will happen on that front until the New Year or so. There is enough nail biting to keep me busy, however, because the November election seems to me momentous (though i think that is the case in all elections). In retrospect, the next day after the election, we will look at the decisions as monumental: whether Trump has been vanquished or revived depending on whether the Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin and Georgia Republican Senatorial nominees prevail or not. Either gloom and doom or a sigh of relief. Too much anxiety for an old man.
Literature foreshortens time. It takes out or elides the dull parts when nothing happens and highlights the events in a drama that if important go quickly apace even if it requires coincidence to allow people to act so quickly after an important unfolding, as when Noah builds his ark but does not spend a lot of time describing the building of it even if pointing out, because it is important, just how big it is. Wilkie Collins, in “No Name”, gets rid of the father by declaring a railroad accident rather than describing how he died because Collins wants to go on with the story, which is what happens to a girl who has no inheritance. People just declare they have gone on long walks rather than describe just how long it is unless they are writing travelogs so as to conjure up just a little bit of how long a trek will be. But politics reveals itself in real time. It takes months since the primaries to have the general election and so the reporters and commentators will repeat how close the election is coming, trying to coax out some more information about the candidates and their events until the election happens. It takes forever for an indictment to take place because it takes real time for the prosecution to get its case together, what with witnesses and documents. It may be that over time the memory of a prior event that galvanized the public may fade, as seems to be happening with the Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, but time is time and there is no foreshortening of that even if campaign managers would like to have magical powers and, as in literature, can make an election right after the event they might want the electorate to have in mind. All they can do is remind them. That is why time drags and so many things can happen between then and now.
The unity of time is one of the elements of drama described by Aristotle that I have suggested makes literature radically different from politics, but that is not true for some of the other elements. For one, both of them use settings. Familiar from movies are the backdrops of the New York City skyscrapers and Central Park, or the Hollywood sign on the hills, though, for some reason, the spectacular Chicago Lake Shore Drive is not frequently used. Places make moods, whether in “Casablanca” or “The Cherry Orchard”. The same is so in politics. We fare familiar with the White House and the chambers of Congress . We are used to seeing important figures standing behind the President when he addresses a podium.And Aristotle mentions music, which is all but inevitable in films and, of course, musical comedy. Everyone is familiar with the “Hail To the Chief”. But there Is another way in which one of the elements of drama named by Aristotle are radically different in literature and in politics even though politics is like literature in that it is a series of episodes that yield vicariously experienced stories. Full of tension, development and meaning. Think of the story of Bill, Hillary and Monica. That is melodrama brought low by flawed impulses. Or the hugger mugger of Dick Chaney advising George W. Bush on who to pick as his vice presidential nominee and deciding it would be himself , as if that did not foretell that he would be the prince behind the throne.
The difference of the two is between depth of character .Unlike in Shakespeare, where the politicians are deep and driven, complicated and at least self-absorbed if not introspective, like Richard III or Antony or Macbeth, though not Coriolanus, who does not seem to get what is going on, most actual politicians are straightforward simple sorts, filled with cliches and good feeling and festering hate as a device for achieving power rather than being malignant themselves. Mitch McConnell just wants to have power and has little agenda otherwise. Perhaps the most complex of Presidents was Richard Nixon who had a bad streak that made him think it not malicious to cite the Democrats rather than particular ones as having fostered twenty years of treason, a trait of meanness that led him down what had been a successful presidency. Nixon’s five o'clock shadow plagued him just as the scoliosis of Richard III.
Sure, there are politicians, particularly Presidents, who have distinctive and impressive personalities. The two Roosevelts and Lincoln easily come to mind, but for the most part, people who become Senators and even Presidents are rather ordinary people who whether by fortune or drive have dedicated themselves to the political road and so are obsessed with the mechanics of politics rather than deep thoughts, always required to offer up some platitude to cover up their various kinds of ignorance. FDR said he probably knew the name of every Democratic Party chairman across the country but I doubt if he mastered the details of the legislation his New Deal accomplished. He knew his overall viewpoint though. And FDR was embarrassed to talk about religion even if Churchill made sure that the psalms said on the Sunday Service when FDR and Churchill met in Newfoundland to proclaim the Atlantic Charter included those used when FDR had gone to school at Groton. Jefferson was not embarrassed to talk about religion, but the Founding Fathers were extraordinary people. Most politicians don’t know about arts and literature and so have little purchase on the significance of the times in which they find themselves and so evade issues not to their advantage. Harry Truman was the rare bird who knew how to put on the mantle of the Presidency because he had read many volumes on past Presidents.The rest avoid being part of history as much as possible. That explains why most Republicans, both among the public and in office, shunt aside the Insurrection of January 6th as no big deal. Just getting reelected is more important than that historic and momentous occasion.
If, then, for the most part, politicians are ordinary people put into positions of considerable power, where they can affect the fate of nations, they nevertheless cling to just furthering their own interests, which is to get reelected, and will do so by supporting their financial donors and offering up the platitudes and sentiments that will appeal to their constituents, taking mind to trim positions when public sentiment wavers, as when staunch anti abortionists are scurrying about to claim they are in favor of a moderate rather than an extreme stance, then politics is predictable and a useful occupation for people to pursue, neither brilliantly insightful or malicious but just getting the job done of representing the state of mind of the populace. Don’t expect anything more of them until when there is a major crisis and then the nation hopes that it has in office politicians arise to the occasion, becoming statesmen rather than just politicians.
But nowadays and for a generation now, I am confused. I don’t recognize contemporary politicians who as their forebearers always claim to doing the right thing for the best of reasons. Even Richard Nixon claimed to have lapsed into doing a bad thing, while Donald Trump glorifies or offuscates doing things that were outrageous. Why does he not trumpet that the Insurrection was a good thing because the election had been stolen? But no one or few own the Insurrection. I am particularly struck by Gov. Ron de Santis of Florida for his stunt to send Venezualians crossing into Texas to Martha’s Vineyard without bothering to inform Massachusett authorities that they were coming. He doesn’t cover up this political stunt but says that there will be more of them so that Liberals have to take some of the brunt for helping these escapes from Communism even though it was Republicans who insisted that refugees from Cuba were immediately allowed into the United States. But this is a different time. Even Joe MacCarthy was told “Have you no shame/’ by Joseph Welch when MacCarthy slandered an aide. But no shamefaced look this time. De Santis is running for President by being mean to migrants, just as Trump had done. Very perplexing and I don’t understand the electorate that will decide who gets elected in November given that issues and ideology are no longer the issues on the table.
Roland Wulbert suggests as a general principle that if you don’t understand what other people are doing, look inside yourself as to what presumption you have that has misled you and I have tried that bit of wisdom. I usually presume that people are motivated in politics by their economic interests and their ideologies. So people like those pollsters in Five Eighty think that support for Biden tracks with whether gas prices are up or down and Democrats are hoping that the moral issue of abortion, one way or the other, will overtake economic issues, Philosophers and academics may say that you can’t compare apples and oranges but the voter does find a wa to decide whow to weigh a moral claim against an economic one. They have to because real choices about marriage or career or politics inevitably require comparing non-commensurable values. So let me try to put my usual assumptions about voting behavior aside and try something new.
Most politicians appeal to their better angels even if what they think better other people will think worse. Strom Thurmond believed in segregation now and forever because it was a better way to organize society even if he was a hypocrite because he had a child with a black woman. As the expression goes, hypocrisy is a sign of respect for morality. But what if a number of people are nowadays deciding to prefer the dark side, extolling meanness and craftiness for its own sake rather than a lamentable means to an end? That is the crux and turmoil of this decade and this moment: to express meanness as an end to itself because that is how politicians are supposed to be, preferring leaders who are mean rather than even feigning to be compassionate even if they do not think themselves mean only needing their leaders to be so. There is no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, not even a position paper produced by some conservative think tank, but a lot of Republicans think it was and so I infer that they prefer to think the election was rigged rather than admit their preferred candidate lost. That is a devastating admission because it overturns the apple cart of democracy, which is that the nation can abide losing the Presidency. Why have the people or so many of them subverted the American order? I don’t know. The economy isn’t doing that badly and cultural issues are for the most part just the usual conflicts between Blacks and whites that have lasted for four hundred years and are, by and large, on the wane, and the sixty yer old fight about abortion. The United States is in a good time, not a bad one, and yet people are able to overthrow it. I hope this is just a cultural fad.
There is a problem, a paradox and a mystery about voting that is as deep as is the case in a religion. Everyone says, logically, that you cannot compare apples and oranges. They are different kinds of things and so incommensurable. And yet voters have to do that about candidates, comparing their characters, one as phlegmatic but consistent with another who is flashy but rhetorical. More so is the comparison voters are to make about issues. In the present campaign, voters have to decide whether inflation is a bigger threat to America than abortion or voting rights. How to evaluate those in comparison to one another? Somehow, they do so, deciding which issues are distractions or just moptional while others are serious and basic to the fundamental structures of democracy. I can rank my issues in my own constellation of issues and the collection of voters decide their priorities and that, eureka, constitutes the will of all, and, we hope, the general will, which is the wisdom of the collectivity rather than the surplus of the voters. I am less and less sure that the electorate is wise, but that is all we have to keep America a democracy.