Defining the Right Thing
Every once in a while, when my friends and I are drunk, we get into heated discussions about meaningless bullshit. Subjects like whether the Monkees should be considered a “bubblegum band”, if the Simpsons has jumped the shark, or whether Steven Spielberg respects his audience [1]By the way, the answers to all three questions is “no”. have all aroused a rousing disagreement that people who don’t know us well would confuse for anger. Invariably, these booze-fueled (and wife/girlfriend annoying) discussions end when everyone shuts up and listens long enough to realize that we already agree on about 99% of what we’re discussing.
Which is just a long way of saying that Democrats need to shut the hell up and realize that we’re already agree with each other. We already know what we don’t stand for and mostly agree on what we do stand for, so why are people so obsessed with wasting time on stupid semantic arguments. Ezra’s got a good takedown of this “We need a message” malarkey :
Can someone please explain to me why a major political party in the world’s most powerful country should be able to define it’s message in ten words? That last sentence took 27 words, and yet Democrats are supposed to condense their positions on an intractable conflict in the Middle East, global warming, the disintegration of the corporate welfare state, the globalized economy, health care, the deficit, and everything else into ten?That both Democrats and the media seem to have judged this a crucial skill is, to me, by far the most bizarre and inexplicable obsession in contemporary politics. Any political party that can sum themselves up in fewer words than have elapsed since my last punctuation mark simply hasn’t thought about the issues enough to warrant my support.
This fixation on finding a way to bumpersticker-ize your ideals is really pathetic, yet this same mastubatory conversation has been going on for years now without any resolution. Having worked in the corporate world, more or less, for the past seven years, I’ve been through a million mid-level management meetings that you’d swear were out of the movie Office Space. For those who “manage”, the search for a mission statement, the need for efficiency and cost-cutting, and the goal of articulating a coherent management “philosophy” are guiding forces, yet after enduring another meeting run by a guy who just wants to lecture you on how he’s going to do his job, you just wanna yell “Can we all just stop talking and start getting some work done?!” It’s kinda like that Royal Bank of Scotland commercial that they play on CNN all the time:
The commercial, airing in American markets including Cincinnati, shows a group of business people dining at a restaurant. One begins to choke, and the others in the group discuss the Heimlich Maneuver in matter-of-fact terms as the choking victim continues to struggle. The dining companions detail how the maneuver works and even begin to demonstrate it without ever actually using it to rescue the man. Finally, a diner at a nearby table steps in, uses the maneuver and dislodges the obstruction. A voiceover says, “Less talk,” as the words “Make It Happen” flash on the screen.
The same forces are work right now in the Democratic party. The status quo is so concerned about discussing and boiling down their message to a core, they almost seem to forget that there are elections every two years that they should probably try to win. Besides, Democrats mostly agree on the basics, just chalk up any controversies and stragglers to the Democrats having a “big tent” (it works for the GOP).
So when it comes to the silly discussions over how to define something as broad as your entire political worldview into a few simple words, my advice to Democrats everywhere is to shut the hell up and get back to work. You’ve got an election to win.
And speaking of that election, while I should probably just make this a separate post, I want to address this historical argument posted over at Talking Points Memo :
’74 was the Watergate election, a mid-term which brought in a big crop of reformist Democrats, more than a few of whom are still around thirty years later. In retrospect, the ’74 midterm looks quite different than it must have at the time. It recemented the Democratic hold on Congress that would endure for two more decades. And it anticipated Democrat Jimmy Carter’s win two years later.Judged from the perspective of thirty years on, however, ’74 and ’76 were more like speed bumps or momentary retrenchments in the conservative realignment of American politics which started at least as far back as 1966. It picked up steam again in 1978. Ronald Reagan was elected president two years later, etc.
Max says “Watergate ushered in a generation of Democratic politicians with little in the way of ideological commitment other than honesty. Not long after Watergate we got the Reagan revolution.”
Josh makes the argument that Watergate was just a speedbump in the electorate’s shift toward the right, which makes sense to me. Now let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the Democrats win big in November and regain control of at least one house of Congress. If that’s the case, it would likely be due more the GOP imploding than any big shift in public opinion towards the Democratic Party. If you want to build a strong Democratic majority, it not enough to stand aside while the Republicans blow an election, but to give voters a reason to stick around with the Democrats.
NO, that doesn’t mean patronizing the American people by dumbed-down version of your platform, it means being the kind of public servant that makes people proud. Damn the polls. Speak your mind, take tough stances, and most importantly, always do the right thing. Even if it could hurt your career, be willing to make that risk in order to do what’s best for the American people. In the long run, people will respect you for it. It’s a lot easier to turn respect into votes than it is bumper stickers.
1 : By the way, the answers to all three questions is “no”. The Monkees predated the bubblegum phenomenon by a couple years and more closely related (musically speaking) to British bands like Herman’s Hermits. The Simpsons, though not as good as it was in its prime, has never been bad. So I’d argue that they’ve never really jumped the shark, they just steered around the tank. And finally, Steven Spielberg is one of the most talented filmmakers alive today, but he doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body. The endings to every one of his movies are so blunt and obvious, I can’t help but wonder if he thinks his audience is too stupid to understand and enjoy his movies without, say, the modern-day bookends on Saving Private Ryan or the sacharrine reunion at the end of War of the Worlds. I haven’t seen Munich yet, though…
13 comments
Copy link for RSS feed for comments on this post
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
“Damn the polls. Speak your mind, take tough stances, and most importantly, always do the right thing. Even if it could hurt your career, be willing to make that risk in order to do what’s best for the American people.”
This probably too simplistic but I think choosing Howard Dean in 2004 could have been a step in this direction. John Kerry is a decent man but he seems like such a compromising fellow. Most Kerry supporters I talked to during the Iowa caucuses thought this was a good thing. (sigh) Will the Democrats (meaning the regular Joes who vote in primaries) ever get it right?
Comment by austropithicus — January 4, 2006 @ 7:37 am
– “Can someone please explain to me why a major political party in the world’s most powerful country should be able to define it’s message in ten words?” –
Okay, I’m finally going to say something important in the replies here (rather than humor or irony).
The answer to this question is in the book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140094385/
(Quoting )
“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. … It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business. … It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the model for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.”
Everybody who hasn’t read this short book yet should do so immediately — I think it’s one of the most important for understanding contemporary “culture”.
Comment by anonymous — January 4, 2006 @ 7:46 am
I think your “ten-word mission statement” is a bit of a straw man. I mean, the Democrats aren’t really looking for such a thing, are they? It is true, though, that the party has been a contentious mess since the inclusive McGovern campaign. The Big Tent looks like a circus, with no ringmaster.
The Republicans, on the other hand, have for decades been using sermons, think tanks, grass roots organizing and mass media (OK, Fox) to stake out elaborate philosophical positions (like their insane vendetta against gays), and then distilling those down to bumper sticker length (Save Marriage).
You could argue that their words mask their true agenda, or that they are appealing in code to the nastiest and stupidest instincts of the electorate, or even that the populace is fully aware of the code and going along with it. But sound bites and simplification do seem to be working in today’s electoral politics.
Comment by Larry Jones — January 4, 2006 @ 8:20 am
The Simpsons never jumped the shark? You did watch season ten, right?
Comment by ChrisV82 — January 4, 2006 @ 8:54 am
“Munich” is the best-ended Spielberg film in nearly a decade.
Comment by Kyle — January 4, 2006 @ 8:59 am
It coulda been “War of the Worlds” if he’d taken my idea and ended the movie with a dying E.T. falling out of the tripod.
Comment by greg — January 4, 2006 @ 9:06 am
one thing that I’ve noticed with this whole “Democrats don’t stand for anything” nonsense, and it’s correlary “Democrats don’t have a plan,” is that it’s really not true. The Democrats do NOT have a problem defining themselves and defining goals. In the last election, I saw John Edwards make a speech where he had a slogan “Help/Hope is on the way” and laid out details for health care, economic plans, the alleviation of poverty, etc. and referred listeners to a web site with more details. Immediately afterwords the talking heads said “Yeah, but, he didn’t really lay out a plan.” When he JUST HAD!
It’s a standard way of talking about Democrats – If a guy makes a great, visionary speech – Like Barak Obama, then “he doesn’t have a plan”. If a guy lays out a plan “he doesn’t have a vision” or, still, remarkably “doesn’t have a plan.”
Just like any Democrat is “way out of the mainstream liberal” even when they are WAAY too middle-of-the-road already.
Also, when a Republican takes a stand on something, he’s “standing on principle”, but when a Democrat does, he’s “positioning himself”.
Comment by Dave — January 4, 2006 @ 10:27 am
ChrisV82′s season 10 is a good guess. In my humble opinion, it’s probably the first time the Simpsons sucked as consistently as it once was wonderful, something the show has done ever since, but to my mind Season 7 is the shark jumping moment.
In fact, I think I can point out the exact moment – The Simpson’s Spinoff Showcase episode. It’s one of the funniest of all simpson’s episodes, but it ended the last season containing consistently funny episodes, and preceded the first season when, rather than the biting satire they previously exhibited, they instead spent more time either putting the simpsons in wacky situations, or just jiggering about with the established cannon for lack of better ideas.
(See Mrs Crabapple and Principle Skinner romance, Apu marrying, etc for more info).
You could even argue that everything since that episode has literally been a fullfillment of what they “promised” in that episode, only without ironic, knowing intent. (And sadly, without ever revisiting Chief Wiggam, P.I.)Certainly, the next three seasons occasionally had a good episode or two, but the show has been consistently terrible during the entire 2000s. Even the treehouse of horror episodes suck now.
Of course, word up, way up, to everything else you said. Even if you are blindingly stupid about the Simpsons*
*BURN! How ya like me now, G?
Comment by Ross A Lincoln — January 4, 2006 @ 2:17 pm
Blindingly stupid? I was wondering why you haven’t written anything in almost two months and now we have the answer. Because you were saving all of your energies for the most biting and witty insult in the history of the English language. Bravo, my friend. I stand humbled in the presence of your superior vocabulary.
Even a “bad” episode of the Simpsons is still funny and watchable. With the exception of the occasionally preachy Lisa episodes, I’d be hard pressed to use the word “sucked” to describe any episode of the Simpsons.
Comment by greg — January 4, 2006 @ 2:27 pm
Oh yeah?!?!? OH YEAH?
A) My vocab is strong. As steel, but with ice cold blood running through its veins.
B) I forgot to mention that the shark jumping is actually an extended mid-air pause. The Simpsons began the jump during Who Shot Mr Burns. The Jump was completed with the Spinoff Showcase. Just thought I’d resurrect that old chestnut for you.
C) You wound me sir. But then, your utter wrongness about the Simpsons has caused you to lash out, ahem, blindly. I’ll choke back my tears of sadness, and I’ll be back.
D) Did I say “blindingly stupid”? I meant “Entirely evil, subsisting on the souls of the damned”, and also, “pederastic”.
E) But seriously, The Bible Stories episode, the global warming episode, the trip to England, the carney episode, the episode where milhouses’ parents reunited, the episode with Tony Hawk where bart gets emancipated. And end scene.
F) You have me at “haven’t written anything.”
Comment by Ross A Lincoln — January 4, 2006 @ 2:43 pm
Well, I’m going to comment using my experience as a scientist in the corporate world. It’s all very nice to show to other scientists all your hard work, your hypotheses and how you tested them, your conclusions with all their caveats. Management isn’t interested in that. All they want is yes or no. It’s really all about marketing. Yes, it’s silly to have to say in “ten words or less” what Democrats stand for, but it is absolutely necessary. Most people aren’t going to read policy papers, read blogs or watch the Sunday talkers. They need a short way to get the message. This is why people continue to believe that Republicans believe in small government, even if it’s obvious they don’t.
Comment by Unstable Isotope — January 4, 2006 @ 5:57 pm
For the Democrats to regain momentum, they’re going to have to jettison all the cultural crap like abortion that only turn off working-class voters between the coasts, in states where the electoral vote is growing, and instead focus on economics and the rising gap between rich and poor. Use political allegories, such as how weakened federal mine regulation may have led to the Sago tragedy.
Perception is reality, and right now Dems are perceived as slaves to the cultural elite from Harvard, Hollywood and Manhattan. The party needs to go in a different, more egalitarian direction — even if it means nominating a candidate in 2008 who isn’t Ivy-educated (shudder!). But do the party honchos have the cojones to try it, or are they worried it will cost them campaign contributions from the techno-elite?
Comment by Vincent — January 4, 2006 @ 6:30 pm
Dood, no way were the Monkees in the same vein as Herman’s Hermits. The latter were a real working band that tirelessly (from what Peter Noone says) played the same rough club circuit as the Dakotas, the Pacemakers, and all the other Liverpudlian bands to get big in the Beatles’ wake. The Monkees were four guys put together by Don Kirshner, dressed J.C. Penney’s outfits, and made to sing over music written by Brill Building ringers for a TV show. True, the Monkees had two VERY talented songwriters in Mike and Peter, and evolved to become something of a “real” band later with songs that far surpass the Hermits in beauty, wit, and experimentation. But in the beginning, they were basically the Banana Splits with pretty faces, working for the EXACT same people that would soon bring us the Archies. If they weren’t bubblegum, they were proto-bubblegum for sure. But I love love love my gum, so don’t think I’m trying to cast shame on the Monkees’ awesomeness.
Comment by dAnimal — January 9, 2006 @ 12:43 am