(Dis)Empowering the People

In “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” Leo Strauss explores Carl Schmitt’s opposition to a world devoid of the state.  Strauss highlights Schmitt’s defining of the political as the “only guarantee against the world’s becoming a world of entertainment” [emphasis in original] (116).  While the state and entertainment are not mutually exclusive, Schmitt offers an adversarial relationship between the political and entertainment, for a threat to the political is a “threat to the seriousness of human life” (Strauss, 117).  In this analysis, Schmitt overlooks the inherent seriousness of entertainment, namely the gravity of entertainment’s role in subverting political participation through the pontification of ruling party ideology and distraction propaganda to encourage political apathy when socialization fails. 
     
While Schmitt may not be concerned solely with the electoral form of the political, the prevalence of democratic societies throughout the world demands an analysis of  “friend-enemy deciders” in such political structures.  In democracies, sovereignty is theoretically assigned to the people, thus citizens as a collective  body possess Schmitt’s decisive ability.  Ironically, this decisive ability shifts in representative democracy by the act of voting; the electorate’s decisive ability is not one of friend-enemy distinction, but of representatives who possess the true decisive ability.  As political theorist Sheldon Wolin explains, “[Voting] allows the citizenry to ‘participate,’ not in power but in the rituals and festivals of power” (qtd. in Williams, 641). Thus, elected officials comprise the electoral political. It is important to note here that the non-voting alternative does not offer empowerment as suffrage is the pinnacle of citizenry empowerment in contemporary democratic understanding; rather, non-voting is a “principled political act… a silent vote of approval” [emphasis in original] (DeLuca, 80). The concept of vote-disempowerment can be characterized as a gradient: informed, unbiased voting as low disempowerment; informed, media-biased voting as moderate disempowerment; cue-voting as high disempowerment; and non-voting or silent voting as absolute disempowerment. As stated previously, the representative structure of electoral democracy compromises the absolute empowerment (no disempowerment) found in the friend-enemy distinction. As such, entertainment’s role in strengthening the inherent disempowerment in the voting mechanism, whether explicit or implicit, transforms Schmitt’s original statement into, “The world of entertainment guarantees the preservation of the (electoral) political.”
     
The connection between the political and entertainment begins with an analysis of mass media.  In News: The Politics of Illusion, W. Lance Bennett of the University of Washington suggests that news becomes a form of entertainment through four media biases: personalization, dramatization, fragmentation, and normalization. The biases in reporting political events blur Schmitt’s line between the seriousness of politics and the triviality of entertainment.  Personalization glosses over political significance to focus on the humanity of individual political actors (26), while dramatization offers a “semblance of insight to individual motives,” thus engendering in the news-viewer a “misguided sense of understanding” (43).  Fragmentation, by isolating news events (48), and normalization, by rapidly inundating viewers with traditional ideological symbols, induce psychological chaos in the voting public (60).  Together, these four media biases create a world of political myth and fantasy, thereby transforming news into a mild form of entertainment. 
     
The implications of these biases extend beyond defining news as entertainment; these biases compromise the independent critical thinking processes of voters.  News reports on crime, economic instability, and threats of war encourage mortality salience, the acute human awareness of danger or death.  According to New York University psychologist John Jost, mortality salience “awaken[s] a deep desire to see the world as fair and just… and to accept the existing social order as valid rather than in need of change” (Dixit, 83).  Having been bombarded by the normalization of political events, the mortality-salient viewer naturally espouses the familiar values presented by the ruling party through news media.  In his study on the effects of mortality salience in elections, psychologist Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore postulates, “Without 9/11 we would have a different president.  I would even say that the Osama bin Laden tape that was released the Thursday before the election was sufficient to swing the election. It was basically a giant mortality salience induction” (Dixit, 84). Mortality salience, then, exacerbates the confusion incited by the puzzle of sensationalized political events and repeated ideological images. 
   
Mortality salience goes beyond mere political party distinction and identification, particularly when considering the illusion of choice.  In The Culture Industry, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno transpose the conformity of mass culture into conformity among political leaders:

      The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics… That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties.  What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice (73).
     
An examination of the 2008 Presidential candidates’ health policies highlights this political semblance. Senator Barack Obama admits, “Ninety-five percent of [his and Senator Clinton’s] plans are similar” (“Health Care”).  Indeed, both plans include government subsidies for the poor and the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, but the five percent difference is the base of the “individual mandate”: Clinton will require every citizen to purchase health insurance, while Obama limits the mandate only to children (Andrews).  The stark difference of McCain’s market-based alternative dwindles to mere nuance upon exploring the ideological origins of the three health policy plans; the two practically identical Democratic plans borrow heavily from Republican Governor Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts Plan (Andrews).  This brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank (Bodenheimer and Grumbach, 180), shares the consumer-driven health market ideology found in Republican Senator McCain’s plan, which would offer tax credits to individuals to encourage competition in the private health sector (“Health Care”).  While each of these plans differs subtly from the others, all are essentially modifications of free market health care policy. The American two-party system dictates media’s magnification of partisan differences but also requires the media to exclude input from more deviant groups. Bennett explains, “True, the media gate swings both ways for the Republicans and the Democrats.  This is what gives the impression that the system is fair” (14).  With choices narrowed to two established vestiges of power, the pressure of mortality salience bids voters to maintain Jost’s “existing social order,” namely the political insiders—Republicans and Democrats.
     
Arguably, the amplification of the four biases results from reliance on television for political news.  As Neil Postman explains in Amusing Ourselves to Death, forms of media are “metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality” (10).  Essentially, Postman suggests that media determines social and, by extension, political discourse. Designating “entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience” (87), television offers viewers the entertainment schema, in which, according to Bennett, images are more powerful than reason (Governing Crisis, 21).  Viewing the political through the rose-colored glasses of the entertainment schema reduces political discourse to spin-doctored sound bites to ensure ambiguity (Bennett, Governing Crisis, 24).  Indeed, a New York Times/CBS poll of prospective issue-voters in the 1988 Presidential election revealed that 54 percent of voters believed neither Bush nor Dukakis discussed policy issues enough.  Later analysis suggests the personality-based policy caricatures (i.e. “naïve” in foreign policy) coaxed a paltry 50 percent of the voting population to the polls in 1988  (Bennett, Governing Crisis, 25).  Because these informed votes are shaded by the entertainment schema, the viewer-voter experiences, albeit unknowingly, moderate disempowerment.
     
If the new anti-intellectual tele-rhetoric does not induce mortality salience or doctrinal inculcation in voters, electoral McPolitics disaffects them. “The frustration of going through too many lukewarm elections against the backdrop of so many hot social problems” (Bennett, Governing Crisis, 16) may explain 1988’s other 50 percent, the apathetic experiencing absolute disempowerment.∗ While political apathy appears to be a negative outcome in ideological pontification, its role is critical in today’s televised world; “political marketing maxim number one: the fewer people voting, the easier it is to sell the candidate” (Bennett, Governing Crisis, 16).  Political theorist Carole Pateman suggests that apathy “play[s] a valuable role in maintaining the stability of the system as a whole,” maintaining that poor voter turnout is “just about the amount that is required for a stable system of democracy” (qtd. in DeLuca, 79).  Pateman fails to realize that rampant non-participation can arguably create a pseudo-democracy.  According to the 2004 Federal Elections Commission report, the voter turnout of the 2004 Presidential election was 56.7%, of which 50.73% voted for President George W. Bush (11).  Therefore, only 28.76% of the American voting public secured victory for President Bush.  Strictly speaking, less than 30% can hardly be considered an electoral mandate according to democratic theory in which majorities typically rule.  Pateman’s stable democracy is stable because it is not a democracy.

(*Although the trend of not voting because one is “too busy” is growing (U.S. Census Bureau), Census data remain silent on what incorporates “No time off/too busy.”  Conflicting schedules could include family events and other social functions.  The confounding factor here is the subjectivity of the voter’s definition of “too busy.”  People make time for important events (i.e. taking time off work, canceling appointments, etc.) for important things, and if voting is not important to the voter, he will not make time for it.  Perhaps these voters experience “latent apathy,” an apathy even the voter himself cannot detect.)     

Schmitt’s political-entertainment demarcation blurs further with the growing popularity of “infotainment,” namely harlequin political discourse found on late-night talk shows and mock newscasts (Baumgartner and Morris, 342). Some research does indicate that the typically politically inattentive glean some political knowledge from infotainment, but the pace of image delivery in television requires impression-driven or on-line processing, in which the viewer “integrates new information into a ‘running tally’ of one’s current impression.”  After the impression has been created, cognitive economy requires the viewer to forget the information that formed the impression, thus a viewer-voter could state candidate preference but be unable to explain it (Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh, 401).  Essentially, impression-driven processing results in cue-voting, not issue voting, and cue-voting denotes high voter disempowerment.
     
Infotainment does not always encourage voting; “soft news,” such as The Daily Show may engender voter disillusionment, particularly in young voters.  Soft news augments the aforementioned media biases to create political humor.  As a result, these programs are often cynical about not only candidates but also the voting mechanism itself.  While the possibility of not transmitting such cynicism to viewer-voters exists, research suggests that humorous messages are “persuasive and memorable” (Baumgartner and Morris, 345).  The democratic implication of  broadcasting these messages becomes grave when one considers that a full 25% of soft news viewers reported that soft news was their only news source, especially since “high levels of cynicism and distrust detract from democratic discourse and overall public interaction” (Baumgartner and Morris, 344, 346).  Reduced public interaction means less voting. Although the 2008 primary season has yielded record voter turnout, the average voter turnout rate of 2008 primaries and caucuses to date hovers around 22%, with a range of 0.1% to 41.7% (McDonald). Absolute disempowerment characterizes the disenchanted non-voter, as his friend-enemy decisive ability is no longer even indirectly exercised through representatives of his choice.
     
Entertainment in the purest sense, namely the regular fare of contemporary television, ensures the propagation of apathy, or passive acceptance of the existing social order.  Noam Chomsky explains:
         
      [Pure entertainment serves] to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the        basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of    greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered.  It’s unnecessary to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world.  In fact, it’s undesirable—if they see too much of reality, they may set themselves to change it (95).

Further, television voting dramas, such as American Idol, add a surreptitious twist to Chomsky’s distraction propaganda; they provide the bewildered herd a profane method of “acting out some of the constitutive dilemmas of democratic subjectivity—dilemmas ordinarily repressed in the public discourse of official politics” (Williams, 638).  In a troubled democracy, perhaps resulting partly from morality salience induction, helpless voters engage in electoral displacement, democratic expression through a burlesque political parallel universe.  Indeed, the 2000 presidential election attracted fewer voters than American Idol did viewers (Williams, 637). Chomsky’s herd is no longer bewildered but pacified and absolutely disempowered.
         
Yet, entertainment, both pure and news-based, is not the marionette of an Orwellian Big Brother.  Instead, Chomsky suggests that direct government control is unnecessary because the normalization bias in the entertainment schema effectively saturates not only the public but also the culture industry itself (Bennett, News, 60).  Essentially, the bastions of entertainment complacently disseminate political fantasies and parallel universes because the captains of culture believe those fantasies are truth.  Moreover, the adversarial free media is a myth, for if the media continually discredits government institutions, the media discredits itself; “official acknowledgements” would no longer be credible.  Rather, the adversarial nature of entertainment is a “dramatized posture” (Bennett, News, 125).  Debatably, this posture also results from normalization.  The captains of culture are unwitting peddlers of mere verisimilitude.
         
A cursory analysis of America’s contemporary electoral democracy reveals not Schmitt’s war of the political and entertainment but a political-media interaction to preserve the electoral political.  As Bennett memorably remarks, “If maintaining power and privilege while limiting popular participation were the goal, news should be given the award for ‘best supporting role’ in the daily dramatic series ‘Maintaining the Status Quo’” (“The News Puzzle,” xiii). Media biases and morality salience characterize the entertainment schema conveyed through television, thus relegating political news coverage to storytelling.  Largely visual and highly ideological, dramatized images, from either hard or soft news, assault the unsuspecting television viewer and preclude critical introspection while pure entertainment fills in doctrinal gaps or offers a mollifying voting burlesque through distraction propaganda.  Postman cautions, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk… then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility” (156). 
     
Schmitt’s concept of the state and its operations are not any less serious; the friend-enemy distinction in contemporary U.S.-Middle Eastern conflicts attests to the existence of the political.  It is the entertainment schema assumed by consumers and peddlers of entertainment that lacks seriousness.  Ironically, the world of entertainment’s very lack of seriousness supports the political via the voting disempowerment gradient, and as voter disempowerment increases, the validity of the democratic system America claims to espouse ebbs. Clearly, the political and entertainment are not mutually exclusive.  Rather, the contemporary conception of the political thrives because of the world of entertainment; the whimsical world of entertainment is immensely serious indeed.


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