Politics is a unicorn #2: The public
Yesterday we talked about unicorns, and at some length. We also talked about politics, and how it was kind of imaginary but kind of real. Maybe I convinced you? Probably not, but that’s OK, because we forge ahead today by talking about the public, or “the people,” or citizens, or whatever you want to call them. (“Those idiots!”) They matter because when I say “politics” I mostly mean “democracy,” and one of the interesting questions about democracy is: who controls things? Some think democracy is all an illusion and citizens have no control over anything, but I tend to be skeptical of that sort of easy cynicism. It seems clear that, even if the public doesn’t have direct control over how decisions get made (thankfully!), what the public thinks – or what we think the public thinks, anyway – has a definite effect on politics. The perception that the public doesn’t support, say, mass public panda executions (or, more complexly, wouldn’t support ‘em, but let’s put that aside until tomorrow) might make it much harder to get that policy passed, and of course public opinion in the form of voting actually does decide who gets elected (sorta kinda within certain parameters etc.).
This is to say that public opinion represents a kind of truth: it has a force, is accepted as valid, and even without any rationale or context can be used as a counterargument. But what kind of truth is it, exactly? What does public opinion represent? How do people form their opinions, how do they think about their opinions, and how should they do both the former and the latter? Public opinion is a clear unicorn here, only real insofar as we all agree what it is. But at the same time, it doesn’t have to be, since people think things and those things could be determined if we had enough time and money. So what’s actually going on here? What does the unicorn look like, and what does the mutant goat it was made from – i.e. actual public opinion – look like?
The game perspective on politics tends to not worry about the latter bit so much. Public opinion is like traffic: it can be planned for and directed to a certain extent, but ultimately, when it goes wrong, you don’t care why. It’s just something you have to deal with, and either find a way around it or remain stuck. Public opinion is one more variable to worry about, but not a source of authority, and not something that makes sense in any way. It just is, that’s all, and while there’s a real tendency to confuse “what the media thinks” with “what the public thinks” (this is for Thursday), it’s not worrisome if what the public thinks doesn’t really make sense. In fact, thinking that the citizenry doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about becomes a kind of comfort. If the public is irrational, then elites should do whatever they want, more-or-less sorta (*handwaves furiously*).
Now, though I think admitting that politics is a game (and that this is good) is essential for understanding how politics works, the preceding seems like a too-shallow way of understanding public opinion, something that is, for better or worse, pretty important in a democracy. But I’m not sure I agree with the most prominent critique of this idea, either. When most critics talk about how we should talk about politics, they generally express a desire for this talking to be rational, using facts and careful analysis in pursuit of some sort of objective understanding of the common good. (“Objective” being how white dudes say “like what I think,” but let’s leave that aside for now.) This is a potent critique because research has almost uniformly found that the public has never conducted its political activities in a rational way. We operate impulsively, with a wandering eye for what’s interesting at any given moment and a tendency toward tribal alliances. These critics would apparently like the public to come to some sort of calculation of their self-interest and express their opinions accordingly. It’s like polls are the great suggestion box of democracy, where the purpose of expressing your political preferences is to build support for the policies that would benefit you the most. If you believe democracy means the government doing exactly what the people want, then this seems like the short way to knowing what those things are. And maybe it sounds nice to you. But it doesn’t get around the fact that, despite having the most advanced media system in the history of the world and a staggering amount of government information online, most people’s opinions are (still!) so shallowly informed and so strongly influenced by partisanship that it’s pretty much impossible to call them rational. That’s just not how we talk about politics. And at a certain point, I feel like we have to say that, you know, it would be nice if we had unicorns, but if we’re interested in what these things we call unicorns actually look like, maybe we should talk about goats instead.
So how do we talk about politics, and – maybe more importantly – why do we talk about politics, if we don’t actually know what the hell we’re talking about? Who knows, but my increasing sense is that it’s for more or less the same reasons we watch TV shows together, or gossip about co-workers, or argue about music: to be friendly, basically. To be social. It’s a cultural orientation to politics that’s very different from the suggestion box model. Our political beliefs aren’t rational, because they’re not supposed to be rational. They’re just supposed to give us something to talk about. But – and here’s what’s interesting – it’s a kind of talk with real and important consequences, that produces a collective truth. Politics is meaningful and consequential, and as I say above, public opinion does matter, even (maybe especially) among people who think it’s stupid. It’s like we’re talking about Lost, but then millions of people get thrown off welfare!
This sounds awful, I know. (Because we don’t understand how we talk about culture either, but that’s for another time.) But there’s just a heck of a lot of evidence that it’s true. For one thing, the strongest predictor of your political beliefs is the political beliefs of your parent or guardian. That doesn’t seem very rational. We also know that what minimal information you have about politics is pretty much only stuff that agrees with what you already think is true. But why even have that knowledge in the first place? Anthony Down’s 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy pointed out that citizens have no rational reason to invest the time and energy necessary to acquire political news, since there is so little chance that their individual opinion will have any effect on an election. The fact that we nevertheless do so (well, some of us, anyway), and that we do so in such a one-sided way, indicates that the true audience for such knowledge is not the larger political system, but our peers. Since we tend to talk about politics primarily with people who already agree with us (Diana Mutz, holla!), we only need to pay attention to information that will help us have those conversations. While this is generally painted as a bad thing, that’s only true if we expect public opinion to work in that suggestion box way. But if talking about politics is a social activity, then this way of getting and using information does exactly what it needs to. Once we know enough about the events of the day and how we’re supposed to think about them to converse about politics at roughly the same level as our peers, then we can move on to more urgent matters like working and eating and having real human relationships and the like. “How dare you care more about spending time with your children than fiscal policy toward Uganda!” – except of course fiscal policy toward Uganda can result in people going hungry and dying, and this is the moral imperfection we must constantly ignore in order to continue on with our lives.
If this is indeed the way public opinion works, though, it still leaves open the question I asked at the beginning: who controls things? If public opinion isn’t meant to inform policy, but is only supposed to be social talk, then what the hell should determine things? Well, right now everyone’s answer seems to be “me.” There’s this odd idea out there right now that democracy is not being properly served unless my opinions are taken SERIOUSLY, because democracy is all about valuing individuals, isn’t it? Well, maybe yes, maybe no: it depends upon what we mean by “democracy” at a given historical moment. (Right now it seems to mean “unicorns,” a magic perfect thing that can never be wrong, which is why I’m going more with “politics” here.) In our particular historical moment, having this cultural orientation toward politics makes us think our individual political opinions are important and correct, because our political opinions seem indistinguishable from our opinions about other things. Political beliefs become like taste, and like with taste, we want (and need, maybe) to believe that our particular constellation of opinions is unique, and therefore important. Neither is generally true. Clusters of political beliefs tend to fall into fairly predictable groupings, and the individual shadings don’t actually differ all that much. And while there are a small handful of people in the world whose particular tastes/opinions matter, everyone else (including, again, me!) is a follower. And that’s OK! But it would be nice, and not hurt our ability to use political beliefs in social ways, to recognize that it’s what we’re doing.
Because Downs is right: our individual opinions don’t matter. Nor should they! Democracy is about protecting individual rights, but it is fundamentally opposed to the idea that one person’s opinions (say, a king’s) are uniquely important. Opinions are only important when there are a lot of them, together, and they all say roughly the same thing. Whether expressed in a vote or a poll, a mass of similar opinions is something the political system has to take notice of, and is sometimes forced to take notice of, as in elections. Saying to someone that their opinion doesn’t matter seems insulting, because it implies that they are worth less as a citizen, but really it means that they’re worth exactly as much as a citizen as everyone else – which is to say, not very much. Your rights are vigorously protected, but your beliefs only need to be attended to if they’re shared by a lot of other people. We’re resistant to this idea, in America at least (and other places too, probably!), because despite our love of democracy, we nevertheless have a cultural suspicion of anything smacking of collectivism. We’ve managed to convince ourselves that democracy is an individualistic business. The solitary act of voting, a nearly sacred ritual in our culture, makes it seem like an individual act. But of course it’s not. It wouldn’t matter if you went into a church basement on a Thursday in April and threw a ballot you filled out at some old person. That’s individualistic voting, and it doesn’t make any sense. We all vote together, at the same time, for a reason: it’s a collective process. It’s democracy! And “demos” means “the people,” not “the person, specifically Daryl Fletcher of Martinsburg, WV.” It’s rule by all of us, or most of us, and certainly not one of us.
The point here goes back to that weird place political opinions occupy. In everyday practice, they’re indistinguishable from far less weighty beliefs, and work in essentially the same way. But in the aggregate, they have a real force and impact. Public opinion that contradicts the official narrative (see “Clinton, Bill, impeachment of”) can have an enormous effect on actual events. If we could manage to shape this aggregate in a more beneficial way – to make it effectively like a suggestion box – then it would be a great way of getting some shit done. That’s almost impossible to accomplish, though, as long as we misunderstand what our opinions mean in the context of other opinions, and how all that works. Opinions are indeed like assholes: individually, they can’t get much done, but all together, they can make one hell of a stink. This is the miracle of aggregation, an indispensible process in modern society. But if we insist upon our opinions being understood in all their unique complexity, then there’s no way to aggregate that. It’s confusing: we’re happy to boycott products, a process by which our different reasons for boycotting get reduced to the same action, which can be interpreted by the company in whatever way it pleases. But when it comes to politics, we want our microslant to be the one that wins, or we’re not interested in playing. If a politician differs from us on a single issue, it’s unjust that we have to vote for them; if an elected official doesn’t do things exactly as we please, it’s a betrayal; if a policy differs from what we vaguely understand to be perfection, we can’t support it, even if it does a lot of good. Aside from being unrealistic (and reinforcing elites’ view of public opinion as fundamentally nonsensical), it makes it nearly impossible to transform those individual beliefs into something consequential. Holding opinions strategically frees up options that might otherwise find too little support, ticket-split to death. And even if it’s not perfect, that’s OK, right?
What’s especially important though, at least for me, is that admitting our political beliefs are social creations might make us willing to take politics is a little less seriously. Politics is supremely meaningful, but our contribution to it is negligible, and so we might as well enjoy it rather than treating it like a religious debate. Why not embrace those social aspects and be more sporting about it? I don’t know if it would do much good for politics – though it might! – but it certainly wouldn’t do any harm, and it would mean that me and Rachel wouldn’t be the only people having State of the Union parties. Unicorns are there for our enjoyment, after all; treating them as sacred cows is no fun at all.
