Politics in the passive voice

All the world's a stage and the meta-narrative has become our God. Long live the new flesh.

In one scene from the 1993 documentary film The War Room, Bill Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos races from a suite where he and his fellow operatives have been viewing one of Clinton’s debates with George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot to an adjacent venue where the media has assembled to hear post debate spin. Beforehand, Stephanopoulos dispenses instructions to those around him: “Keep repeating Bush was on the defensive! Bush was on the defensive all night!” Moments later, he offers a version of the same line to reporters: “Another great night for Bill Clinton. Three debates, three wins. Bush was on the defensive all night long.”

As a behind-the-curtains look at the Machiavellian world of the campaign backroom, the film gazes on all of this with wide-eyed wonder. While Stephanopoulos and James Carville pour over numbers quantifying viewer reactions and tailor their spin accordingly, we glimpse their Republican rivals doing the very same. The debate itself, at least on a substantive level, is just window-dressing. What really matters to the filmmakers’ camera is the transparently smarmy business of political spin —something rendered with the cinéma vérité swagger you’d expect from a documentary about rockstars.

This scene is a paradigmatic example of how thoroughly the machinery of modern politics has eroded whatever membrane once existed to separate spectacle from reality. There is no longer, so it seems, any fourth wall to be had, and a film like The War Room quite openly invites us to celebrate this fact.

All hail the meta-narrative

Politics has always involved competing narratives — a truism no less applicable before the advent of television, radio, and mass communications. Today, however, we are confronted with something radically different when it comes to political narratives of every kind: a world in which their status as narratives has been absorbed into the consensus reality of politics itself.

Collectively, we now overwhelmingly discuss all things political in the abstract register of “optics” and perceptions. Alongside credentialed members of the media, the politically-engaged citizen is encouraged to think like a pundit who assigns Nate Silveresque abstractions like “electability” to politicians and pours over poll numbers to determine their own preferences.

This, I think, has largely come from the top. For decades, political TV has been dominated by panel shows in which pundits offer something roughly analogous to sports commentary.¹ Quite often, the guests themselves are paid spin doctors, consultants, communications professionals, or some nebulous combination of all three.² As people whose job is essentially the political version of marketing (and who sometimes quite literally work for private sector clients as well) their task is to watch the likes of speeches, press conferences, or debates and tell us who “sounded” the best. Notwithstanding whatever partisan allegiance they might officially have, if they evince clear beliefs outside the realm of style and optics, it can sometimes feel almost incidental.

I have never forgotten a broadcast I saw on the first day of one Canadian federal election, in which a major network devoted an entire segment to interviews with former campaign staffers who were asked to talk about the major parties’ campaign launches and rate their effectiveness. The discussion wasn’t about the content of what had been said at all, but rather the logistical machinations of campaign launches and how well these ones had worked as political setpieces. “What goes into planning an event like this?”, I remember the host inquiring at one point, later asking the panelists to rate each launch the same way you’d ask a panel of marketing professionals to rate different brands’ advertising campaigns for competing versions of the same product. Did Party X convey a message on the economy that will resonate with the middle class? Will Party Y’s launch effectively allay concerns it can be trusted with the public purse? Just how good are these political leaders as salespeople?

The cadence of programming like this is basically post-ideological — it being self-evident that leaders and political candidates are all actors and that all of this is principally theatre. The main question before us is who puts on the most convincing performance.

Partly for professional reasons, the superficiality of this style of political analysis has been a longstanding irritation of mine. In media interviews of various kinds, I sometimes find myself being asked to appraise politicians, pieces of rhetoric, or campaign strategies in a view-from-nowhere fashion that’s purely cosmetic. As someone who is fascinated by politics and writes about them for a living, I can’t pretend to be totally above pondering these kinds of things. As an ideologically committed person, however, I’ve long despised the fact that this has become the default register of political conversation in the media and beyond.

The machinery of bullshit

I am similarly irked by the ubiquity of opinion polls, both in election coverage and everyday political discourse. Back when I was a political staffer myself, I saw up close how much the work of campaigns now has to do with creating the impression of momentum as opposed to building the genuine thing. A favourable poll is now, in one sense at least, less valuable because of the support it might be registering than because it’s an effective weapon in the broader metanarrative battle that has so heavily come to shape campaigns. Polls used to be something confined to media reporting. Today, they are regularly cited or invoked by parties with a view to shaping voter behaviour, and in turn by voters themselves.

In obvious ways, this has the effect of pulling campaigns and politics as a whole away from real questions of policy and ideology. When the role of operatives is more to shape and contest the public metanarrative than to persuade people about the merits of a platform or policy, politics becomes much less substantive by definition.

Ultimately, however, the issue I’m concerned with here extends well beyond the likes of shallow panel shows, polling mania, or a culture that celebrates the smarmy maneuverings of backroom operatives.

George Gallup on the cover of Time Magazine — May 3, 1948

One of the central ironies and paradoxes of modern politics is that the vast machinery of quantification that has come to pervade more or less everything — the analyses of pundits, the calculations of politicians and political parties themselves, the preferences of voters — has increasingly achieved the opposite of what it was supposed to do. From opinion polls and focus groups to elaborate studies of voter behaviour and voter psychology, to social media analytics and metrics, every facet of modern politics has gradually been suffused with technologies of objective measurement that ostensibly enable us to understand what we collectively want, think, and feel.

To their greatest enthusiasts and advocates, technologies like polling are invariably thought to be democratic and populist in implication. Consider the following passage by George Gallup — the legendary American pioneer of modern survey techniques — about how polling was going to revolutionize the political landscape, put power back into the hands of the people, and transform the nation itself into a giant community meeting perpetually forging together the General Will:

“This means the nation is literally one great room. The newspapers and the radio conduct the debate on national issues, presenting information and argument on both sides, just as the townsfolk did in person in the old town meeting. And finally, through the process of the sampling referendum, the people, having heard the debate on both sides of every issue, can express their will. After one hundred and fifty years as a nation we return to the town meeting. This time the whole nation is within the doors.”

In his own book on polling, the midcentury political scientist Lindsay Rogers raised an important issue with Gallup’s rather effusive metaphor — pointing out that whoever holds the gavel at our proverbial town meeting has much more power to shape its deliberations and outcome than any of the participants.

Which is to say: it’s pollsters themselves who choose, write, and frame all of the structuring questions, and they sometimes do so with the explicit goal of achieving a particular result. In an old essay on Bill Clinton, polling, and the 1992 US presidential election (from which the title of this one is partly borrowed)³ Christopher Hitchens made the related observation that “opinion polling was born out of a struggle not to discover the public mind but to master it.”

Polling, quite simply, is not value-free or axiologically neutral — even if the sample size is sufficiently large and the underlying methodology sufficiently scientific. The deeper irony, however, is how much its effectiveness has been blunted by its ubiquity. If polling was supposed to help politicians, operatives, and advertisers master the public mind, its real achievement has been to dull the public’s senses by smoothing and flattening everything to the point of near texturelessness. Every industry must standardize things in order to be efficient, but in this case the process of standardization itself militates quite directly against the stated purpose of the whole enterprise.

In theory, the vast machinery of specialists and consultants exist to make politicians more relatable, governments more responsive to the will of the electorate, and so on. Instead, its main achievement has been to make politics less honest, less substantive, less authentic, and more distant from the experience of the average person. As politicians have become more Relatable® they have also become much less real. Whole swathes of voters and demographics, meanwhile, are conceived like consumers neatly sortable into market niches, whose attributes can be discerned with predictive models, and whose preferences and behaviour are akin to shopping.⁴

The effect of standardization here is not to render the endlessly plural views and attitudes of thousands or millions living in complex societies but to distill them into the broadest images, slogans, and signifiers possible. In this way, strategists and consultants have steadily homogenized political speech and language to the brink of ideological illegibility. Consider the following excerpt from Barack Obama’s closing remarks at one of the 2012 presidential election’s debates:

I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world's ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that's how our economy is grown. That's how we built the world's greatest middle class.

This is pure drivel, so whittled down to the base preferences of an imagined median voter you need to read it with a giant magnifying glass to find any difference from what was said by Obama’s opponent. As Gawker’s Tom Scocca observed in his classic essay On Smarm:

The lone identifiable point of ideological distinction between the president and his opponent, in that passage, is the word "but." Everything else is a generic cross-partisan recitation of the indisputable: Free enterprise ... prosperity ... self-reliance ... initiative ... a fair shot ... the world's greatest middle class. Certainly the middle class. Always the middle class. "I will keep America strong," Mitt Romney said in one of the debates, offering his competing political vision, "and get America's middle class working again."

Several decades ago, presumably with the aid of sophisticated empirical studies of people’s brains, operatives figured out you can sometimes do more with less, and thus began to iron out even the faintest traces of ideological specificity or commitment from political speech. By way of example, Justin Trudeau — another card-carrying fan of “the middle class and those working hard to join it” — once outlined the Liberal Party of Canada’s economic philosophy like this:

Too much government is an enemy of freedom and opportunity, but so too is too little. Government can’t do everything, nor should they try. But the things it does, it must do well.

Save overt totalitarianism, there is no political ideology or tendency in the democratic age not at least abstractly represented here. The state is neither the ally of freedom and opportunity nor its strict enemy. It is both, and also neither, because the qualities of “too much” and “too little” are left to us to delineate. The final flourish then ties the whole thing together with a perfunctory nod to “doing things well” which seems to be gesturing at something like bureaucratic efficiency or administrative competence but could also in isolation refer to virtually anything we citizen-consumers want it to.

Gallup’s metaphor of the town hall might still be apt here. But, if it is, we’re now dealing with a giant community meeting whose attendees are all watching themselves onscreen while being inundated with an endless stream of data about how the broad mass of them is responding to the proceedings. While the townsfolk listen to those onstage interpret the numbers, they talk amongst themselves and do much the same. The longer these deliberations go on, the less anyone can remember what they were supposed to be about.

Long live the new flesh.

1. There are certainly exceptions to this. I regularly watch the CBC’s Power and Politics, whose host David Cochrane is a genuinely gifted interviewer and whose producers do allocate some real time to more substantive discussions. A YouTube show like Breaking Points is also a good example of how something resembling a traditional pundit panel format can be put to use in interesting ways.

2. One of the greatest present-day offenders in this regard is the wildly popular Pod Save America, which among other things recently hosted an hours’-long debrief on Harris 2024’s defeat that seemed to confine itself entirely to questions of messaging and aesthetics.

3. See: Voting In The Passive Voice, from the Hitchens collection For The Sake of Argument.

4. One exploration of this that comes to mind is journalist Susan Delacourt’s book Shopping for Votes (on which, many years ago, I worked as a researcher).