Winning the Zombie Vote

Nowadays we are battered constantly by political content in print, on the air, and online – never mind the stream on social media of ridiculously misleading memes created by professional propagandists. Even disregarding the silly stuff, there is so much content that I rarely feel the need to seek out more in bookstores, whether of the brick-and-mortar or the online kind: not of the of-the-moment “this politician is _______ [wonderful/awful/visionary/loony/transformative/criminal/or what-have-you]” variety anyway. (In elections I pick my own poisons for my own reasons.) I prefer the books I buy to be more elevating – or, just as satisfactory, more decadent. I sometimes do buy books with more generalized political content, however, and the two that occupied my night table last week were Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea from Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller and the idiosyncratic The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism by Peter Biskind. Both of them share a sense of unease that modern democracies in general and our republic in particular are becoming ungovernable.

Professor of politics and liberal studies James Miller is a former SDS member and recent Occupy Wall Street marcher, though age and experience have tempered some of his idealism. In his book, which will appeal especially to armchair historians, he takes the long historical view of democracy. He starts with a detailed account of ancient Athens, fast-forwards to the Enlightenment ideas and philosophers culminating in the French Revolution, continues through the 19^th century trends, evolutions, and uprisings (including the short lived Paris Commune), gives an overview of Wilsonian progressivism and the Russian revolution, and finally tries to relate all that to the populism of the present day. He doesn’t really have an answer for the question he asks in the title, though he does say democracy always relies on widespread public faith in its basic tenets. This is pretty hit-and-miss over time and around the world. Most governments give at least a passing nod to the word democracy either informally or right there in their names (e.g. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) but a nod might be all it gets.

The problem, Miller notes, always has been that democracy does not equal liberal democracy – the latter defined as including the protection of individual rights not revocable by any majority. Most often it doesn’t. Liberalism in the sense of limitations on government (democratic or otherwise) didn’t even arise as a philosophy until the 18^th century and isn’t on firm footing now. Historically, majorities have been quite willing to vote away the liberties of disliked individuals and minorities; they sometimes vote away their own liberties in pursuit of some other ends. This shakes the faith in democracy by those who might be on the losing side of that vote to an extent that undermines the system itself: “Whether democracy in America, or anyplace else, can flourish, either as a historically conditioned set of political institutions or as a moral vision, must remain, by the very logic of democracy, an open question.” He ends nonetheless on a guardedly optimistic note.

Disquiet about the future of democracy long predates Miller, of course. In fact, for most of history there was outright hostility to democracy, especially (unsurprisingly) in intellectual circles. Witness Aristotle, who tells us that there are three “true” or good forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and a republic. He follows with a description of three “perversions” of these: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. The true forms, he says, are perverted into their evil twins when those in power pursue primarily their own or narrow interests instead of the common interests – which is to say including the interests of their opponents. The U.S. Founders were avid classicists and they took Aristotle to heart. They thereby deliberately tried to craft a constitutional republic that limited the power of the majority. The very word “democracy” didn’t fully lose its negative Aristotelian connotation on these shores until the era of Andrew Jackson.

A number of internet memes attribute false quotes (what a shock) on democracy to various Founders, but these actually turn up in their writings:

Alexander Hamilton: “Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy.”

James Madison: "Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure."

John Adams: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Benjamin Rush: "A simple democracy is the devil's own government."

Elbridge Gerry (the “Gerry” in “gerrymander” btw): "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots."

Events in the first half of the 20^th century should give pause if nothing else does. The rise of fascism and communism – with ultimately shocking results – was immensely popular once the regimes took power. There were several plebiscites with 90% majorities. Fabian socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1936 took note of this and wrote, “Parliaments are supposed to have their fingers always on the people's pulse and to respond to its slightest throb. Mussolini proved that parliaments have not the slightest notion of how the people are feeling, and that he, being a good psychologist and a man of the people himself to boot, was a true organ of democracy. I, being a bit of a psychologist myself, also understood the situation, and was immediately denounced by the refugees and their champions as an anti-democrat, a hero worshipper of tyrants, and all the rest of it.” Regrettably, he had a point. So did those refugees and their champions.

Peter Biskind, best known as an arts and movie reviewer, approaches the subject from a completely different direction. As a cultural commentator, he argues that movies and TV shows with extremist subtexts (or sometimes just plain texts) of both left (Avatar) and the right (24) variety push the public away from consensus and toward the extremes. He is writing about the USA, but notes that Hollywood’s global reach influences publics elsewhere, too. In The Sky is Falling he writes, “After the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, the government fell into the hands of a bipartisan coalition of center-right liberals and center-left conservatives, that is, Cold War Democrats and East Coast Republicans whose visions of postwar America were similar enough that they could see eye-to-eye on basic principles.” Wall Street accommodating Democrats and social program tolerant Republicans didn’t especially like all aspects of each other’s policies, but they could accept enough of them to get along. Extremists by contrast consider even centrists on the other side to be beyond the pale; so, when extremists dominate the results are rancorous, divisive, and obstructionist in a manner with which we are all too familiar in the 21^st century.

Biskind is at his best when discussing films and TV shows of the last several decades and whether they uphold (Game of Thrones) or subvert (The Dark Knight) mainstream consensus values – especially but not exclusively in the apocalyptic scenarios in which so much modern entertainment is set. Whether of the right or the left, extremist heroes ignore normal civilized conventions. As for the superheroes, 1950s TV Superman was very much of the mainstream. The X-Men are on the left. Biskind calls Deadpool the first alt-right superhero. It should be noted that the underlying direction of the films is often very different from the avowed politics of the director; the internal logic of certain movies just takes them in a particular direction regardless.

His remarks on film are worth reading simply for themselves, but is Biskind’s broader point right? Do our favorite TV shows and movies really “inflame our emotions” so that (as someone once wrote in an even more divided time) Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold? Maybe. But I suspect they reflect rather than lead the Zeitgeist. If a new consensus ever forms, so will films celebrating it. For the immediate future, our movies (and protagonists) are likely to be as immoderate as our elections.

Jack Teagarden - I Swung the Election (1939)