You work hard, you deserve to have your candidate elected

At least our politicians aren’t assaulting each other, like they are in Greece, but the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen here sometime soon. The Scott Walker recall circus is finally behind us, but that’s not going to end the divisive politics, not as long as enough people are disconnected from reality enough to believe the president was born in Kenya. 

So why is this happening? How has the political system gotten so completely gummed up? Plenty of explanations have been floated, some of them crazy some of them convincingly coherent (here’s a recent one that’s very much on the coherent side). 

But it seems like so many attempts to explain how we got to this point come from some ideological source and presume some kind of nefarious plot committed by people of the other ideology. I don’t normally go in for plots to begin with, especially one of this vast scale, because eventually someone would spill the beans. Besides, many of these explanations come off more as an attempt at self-deception, finding excuses  for why voters would vote for a candidate or a party the writer doesn’t like because I suspect the writer has too fragile a psyche to accept the fact that good, reasonable people can make informed, rational decisions that disagree with their own. 

So here’s an explanation that has nothing to do with ideology, though it might be just as crazy as what the conspiracists come up with. It seems to me that the rise in the divisiveness of our politics parallels at least in part the rise of the consumer culture. Go back to the 1970s, when consumerism was really starting to take hold in the country. What you bought became an increasingly important part of your identity, and it was no longer Mr. Moneybags buying the Cadillac and the Armani suit to send the message that he was rich and better than you. Now it was the kind of gum you chewed or lip balm you used or shoes you wore. 

Bubble Yum or Bubblicious? The choice said a lot about you (or so we thought). I was cursed with wearing Toughskins jeans because my mom worked at Sears and she could buy them with her employee discount, consigning me to dweeb status for years because cool kids wore Levi’s and only total dweebs wore Toughskins (Sears was clearly already starting to have branding issues even then).

The 1970s was also The Me Decade, when narcissism and self-obsession became not just acceptable, but expected. Looking out for Number One, the book told us, and we should accept nothing but the best because nothing’s too good for us. Marketing and advertising followed along, insisting that the best way to get what we want was to wear the right shoes or the right perfume/cologne, or shave our legs with the right flesh-burning chemical. Even schools got in on the narcissism act, telling kids that if we can dream it, then we can live it and nothing can hold us back. It’s all about YOU, you good lookin’ hunk of a person. If you want it, you deserve it, you’re entitled to it, and nothing, NOTHING should stop you from getting it.

This rampant consumerism has only exploded in the decades since, with out of control branding reaching into every nook and cranny and crack and crevice of our lives. Advertisements are everywhere, sponsorships are omnipotent. Hip hop and hipsterism are both based on living your life with the right brands. Companies try to figure out how to build brand awareness in toddlers. You can’t even escape it going into a bathroom anymore (or the men’s room, at least) because so many stores sell advertising space above the urinals to reach an extremely captive audience.

What all this has done is to train us to expect to get what we want, and to accept nothing less because it’s all about YOU. You can custom order just about anything, from cars to computers to furniture. You can build your own burger or bear. Getting a blue shower curtain isn’t enough anymore, it has to be falling water blue but because just plain old blue doesn’t go with the remodeled bathroom like falling water blue. Any restaurant that puts “no substitutions” on its menu is not going to stay in business long.

It’s gotten to the point that this is considered a part of our birthright as Americans, to buy what we want, to get what we want, and nobody better try to stop us.  

And all the time this has happened, our political discourse has become increasingly harsh and the battles more rhetorically violent (yes, I know that our political system was torn up during the 1960s and 1970s, too, in many ways even more so than today, but those conflicts were of a different nature, with protestors objecting to the political system in general, not one side or the other. For the most part, the people inside the political system still got along). Liberals loathed Reagan in the 1980s and his pro-defense, anti-union policies, but the toxicity hadn’t progressed to the point that he couldn’t toss back a few drinks with Tip O’Neill and find common ground. In the 1990s, conservatives’ obsession with Bill Clinton caused them to ratchet it up a notch, working to stop any legislative action on his agenda. When his political skills proved superior to theirs, they impeached him and tried to remove him from office.

The election of George W. Bush brought a few months of peace, when Democrats and Republicans got together and actually passed a few bills (unfortunately, one of them was No Child Left Behind, but that’s another matter), but September 11 brought that to an end and soon liberals were complaining and accusing, and the parties went back to plotting each other’s destruction. 

Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s just ridiculous, with the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans refusing to go along with even routine bills if it means Obama could claim a victory and making up stupid stories about his citizenship.

And as noted before, it’s not just at the federal level. California Republicans pitched a fit and had Gray Davis removed as governor, and now we have liberals crying about Walker in Wisconsin.

But what’s the link between these two?  The connection is that sometime in the 1980s, we started applying the consumer ethos to our politics—that is, I want what I want, and I’m entitled to it. At some level, we think we have the right to get what we want not only in a hardware store or at Amazon.com, but in government, too. If I want Candidate A elected president/senator/governor, well, damn it, Candidate A had better be elected because if he’s not, somebody is robbing me of my right to have what I want.

Unfortunately, in politics, you can’t go somewhere else to find what you want. If Lowe’s doesn’t have a falling water blue shower curtain, then we’ll go to Home Depot, or Overstock.com. In politics, if Candidate B wins an election, then Candidate B wins the election. But marketing and consumerism have so thoroughly trained us not to accept anything less than what we want that we can’t accept it if Candidate A doesn’t win. Even worse, there’s no recourse—it’s not like we can demand to see the manager because Barack Obama or Scott Walker won an election.  

And so we get angry and frustrated and pitch hissy fits and when Walker does things that his opponents don’t like (things that he promised he would do during the campaign, by the way, and which a majority of voters evidently approved of by voting for him), they have sit-ins and chant silly slogans and try to oust him in a recall election. When Barack Obama wins the presidency, instead of accepting the fact that a black man won the presidency, his opponents do everything they can to stop him politically and make up absurd stories about his birthplace. 

All the while, we justify this silliness by accusing opponents of trying to destroy the country and the constitution and we must stop them from robbing our rights and liberties, disguising our self-obsession as national security.

Which is why I don’t think the gridlock or the harshness or the nastiness or the stupidity will end anytime soon. Marketing has done too good a job convincing us that we’re entitled and deserving, so that now, losing an election no longer means losing an election, it just means adopting different strategies to get what you want.