The Seeds of Postmodern Politics
Living Make-Belief, Chapter 11
I’m spending a few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.
We’re in the home stretch! Chapter 11 gives the genealogy of dream society precursors in the American political tradition. Dator points out the structural elements driving our particular form of this — the winner-take-all districts create stability for a two-party system, incentivizing dehumanization of the other side and overall gross politics1. Some politicians resist this impulse, many are seduced by it, but a few have had a real, dramatic talent for it.
He highlights a strain of performative, pugilistic populist politicians from the American South2 dating back over a century. These men were associated with a distinct enemy group - either the economic elite, or Southern Blacks and Northerners seeking greater equality for them. None of them were ever elected president, but some came pretty close. This idea of creating a brand based on opposition to a shared enemy isn’t just a political strategy — for example, much of Taylor Swift’s personal brand is as an avatar of grievance and/or resilience from the bullies and haters, and her fans experience her success as their own3.
The chapter’s main example of someone who “got it” is Newt Gingrich. This section is made more interesting by the fact that Dator and Gingrich spent time together as futurists, brought together by Alvin Toffler. As a good futurist, Gingrich embraced ridiculous ideas about the structure of reality and future implications. He viewed U.S. policy power not through the lens of the Constitution but through the “iron triangles” of interest groups, Congressional committee members incubating bills, and department/agency bureaucracy implementing rules.
Based on this observation, he foresaw that a highly disciplined party, aligned within its caucus and with ideologically aligned think tanks and single-issue groups, could achieve a lot by discarding decorum and making incendiary remarks in Congress. This is, to harken back to my favorite article in this series, due to changes in communication technology: cable TV meant everything was televised, and TV news, needing 24 hours of content daily, was desperate for spicy video they could react to. So C-SPAN did technically bring Newt and his cadre into every home, but his main audience was journalists who would repackage the pithiest sound bites for mass consumption. The twisted genius of this approach is that, as long as you’re defined against the old establishment, even people talking bad about you are reinforcing and publicly validating your worldview4. Note these changes happened without major structural changes to Congress or the parties, which Dator acknowledges is a vote against his view of structure as a primary determinant of system behavior.
The chapter concludes with the story of the Tea Party movement as the logical next step for the Web 2.0 age: decentralized, more based on vibes than any specific demands, coordinated via social media, largely driven by performance, and most effective at the local level. The Tea Party’s destabilization of the Republican Party, of course, brings us to the current wave of change, the subject of Chapter 12.
Briefly, because negative emotion is easier to trigger than positive, and every vote against your opponent is one for you.
Is the Southern connection related to the way honor culture, tightly connected to what Andy Hines would call Traditional values, has a firmer grip on the region? That would lend credence to the cyclical ideas of both Rolf Jensen and Spiral Dynamics.
Is this true? This excellent essay argues it’s the same meta-idea as MAGA but I’m not familiar enough with either world to be sure.