The Weekly Screed (#698)

What's in it for me? 
by David Benjamin

“This is not the time to lay out an agenda.”
                        — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

MADISON, Wis. — Every election year, the New York Times sends reporters out to some depressed working-class community in flyover country — Ypsilanti, Michigan, Youngstown, Ohio, Heiferfart, Oklahoma, etc. The resulting report tends to evoke Margaret Mead among the Polynesians, filling notebooks while snapping grainy photos of the natives as they copulate in the shrubbery and pick fleas from one another’s hair. I picture Times readers on Central Park West or over in Park Slope reading in wonderment and saying, “My God, how can they live like that?”

These anthropological expeditions into the dark continent between TriBeCa and Marin County establish the bar for political discourse throughout the media, from NPR and Reverend Al to Fox News and Matt Drudge. All this hardnosed electoral journalism ends up leaning heavily toward affect rather than cognition. Reporters keep asking folks how they feel. They elicit gut reaction and personal grievance, and if they don’t get that — in quotable nuggets — they hit “Delete.”

This emphasis on raw intimacy is equally vital to the almost omnipotent polling cartel. Opinion research, and its handicapping wing, has become a sort of national maelstrom. As it spins, it churns description into prescription. By asking a largely complacent and ill-informed electorate how it feels — right now, this minute — about issues reduced for polling purposes to one- or two-word labels, the opinion industry teaches us all how we should feel.

Politicians follow the pollsters (who, in turn, follow the politicians). The serious candidate heeds surveys slavishly while giving wide berth to the relevant, pressing issues that alter people’s lives. As we observed on Tuesday, your typical Election Day is a mass festival of emotionally charged ignorance.

We all know how we feel about, say, Chris Christie’s temper or Joni Ernst’s hair, but we know only through a glass, darkly, what’s actually at stake in America. We’re as dumb as we are at this critical moment partly because the media have abrogated their duty as skeptics and forsaken entirely their role as educators. We’ve also been virtually lobotomized by an army of horseplayers disguised as opinion researchers, and by a barrage of 20-second slasher-flicks choreographed by the thought-police who run campaigns for both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Tip O’Neill’s insight that all politics is local was an understatement. As American civics has devolved, all politics is not just personal. It’s selfish. Our leaders in both parties, at all levels, assure voters that — in any given election — only one question matters: “What’s in it for me?”

This seductive question has a million pleasing answers.

They’re all lies. 

Of course, we know it’s a lie, but we’re also convinced that any alternative answer is also bullshit, thus rendering all politics a vicious fraud and plunging every conscientious voter into a sort of existential hell.

That isn’t how I grew up learning politics. My first mentors — if I think about it — were Jesus and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My examples of political efficacy were the New Deal and the International Brotherhood of Machinists.

In Jesus, I saw compassion for the unfortunate and a passion for equality. He was a peacemaker in a martial empire. He bespoke quiet resistance and fostered solidarity against the high and mighty. Best of all, even though he was smart, he kept things simple. From him, I learned that the first commandment of politics is the Golden Rule. Politically, said Jesus, ego is worse than irrelevant. It’s a sin.

FDR’s politics made similar sense to me because they were directed toward the greater good — as I figured Jesus would have it. My grandparents, Annie and Swede had been saved by the New Deal. Swede had barely gone to school, but FDR got him through the Depression, and then he prospered for another 30 years under the rugged loving care of the Machinists. My grandparents voted faithfully but never sought a tangible return from any election. They expected the men they elected to do right by everyone, as much as they could, even if some choices inconvenienced some voters. They knew you can’t please all the people all the time. They knew, above all, that you don’t vote for yourself. We’re in this together. You vote for everybody.

I developed all this childish idealism in parochial school, where I pictured Jesus feeding the hungry and protecting real, live children (not zygotes) from those who would impale them on swords or take away their lunch program. When I switched over to public — that’s public, for everybody — school, I had to pass exams about “unalienable rights” for all of us, “equally.” In both kinds of schools, I learned about the price free people had to pay — in civic engagement and paying taxes, in sweat, in blood, in the sacrifice of a million lives — to preserve those rights. In all the tests I took, “What’s in it for me?” never showed up.

We’ve just staged the costliest, most selfish election in our history, eclipsing the waste and narcissism of all our previous circuses. We weren’t asked to think — about anything — certainly not unalienable rights, the equality of man, the duties of citizenship, the nobility of sacrifice, or the fate of the poor, or the children, or God’s earth itself. Jesus got his name tossed around a lot, but only as either talking-point or expletive. The moneychangers weren’t just in the Temple. They own it now. FDR’s dead. The New Deal is a national embarrassment. Compassion is a sin.

And what was in it for me? Or you? Not a goddamn thing.

It was all lies.