Saturday, October 27, 2007
Opinion

The (Ad)vantage of Democracy

Sending out a call to all ingenious inventor-types...

By Mark Douglas

Unbelievably, the primary campaign season is likely to be all but over in a little more than three months. By the end of January, so many state primaries will be completed that we’ll know which two candidates we’ll see on the ballots in November of ’08. So I’m sending out a call to all ingenious inventor-types: If it’s not already too late, I’d like a campaign-ad spam blocker for my television.

I’m tired of claims about how various candidates can cure all that ails us. And I’m not just talking about the deliberately deceptive ads, the fear-stoking ads and the “my opponent is an evil and moronic butt-kisser who smells vaguely like overcooked broccoli” ads. I’m talking about all of them—even the ones that show happy pictures from family albums. In my worst moments I could even be tempted to vote for a candidate whose political platform is, “Only yard signs and televised debates allowed.”

My problem with campaign ads is that they work. In an age when candidates’ platforms are boiled down to 15-second sound bytes, I’d prefer to think that my fellow participants in this great American democratic experiment are resistant to their charms, but that just isn’t the case. Election after election, the ads succeed. And in succeeding, I wonder if they don’t reveal a truth that is deeply unsettling—something that political advisors attend to but that the rest of us would rather not think about. For as I observe their effectiveness and their impact on the people with whom I talk politics, I’ve started to wonder whether the biggest political divide in the United States isn’t red vs. blue, conservative vs. liberal, coastal vs. heartland or rural vs. urban—but cynic vs. utilitarian.

On the one side are the cynics—those who are so tired of feeling deceived, dictated to or disappointed that they’re tempted to quit on this whole “government of, by, and for the people” project. When they vote, they do so out of obligation but with a sense of resignation that most other voters (it’s always “other voters”) are voting for foolish reasons.

And on the other side are the utilitarians, whose allegiances to political party, ideological vision or personal advantage lead them to accept campaign ads as the foul means that serve their greater ends. When they vote, they do so out of a fear that things will go to hell if other voters (it’s still always “other voters”) outnumber their side.

Is this what we’ve been reduced to? Are cynics and utilitarians replacing all those mythical responsible citizens of yesteryear? Have elections become political pageants full of platitudinous promises made by painstakingly polished candidates mouthing only the words we want them to say (“I’ll keep us safe”; “I’ll make us strong”; “A chicken in every pot and a Lexus in every garage”) and leaving us wondering whether they could recognize an original thought should it tumble into the echoing spaces of their well-coiffed heads? Are elections—the very things that most clearly define democracies—now destroying them?

In the dark moments of such thoughts, it helps to remember that one of the more profound defenses of democracy isn’t that it’s a wonderful form of government but that compared to other forms of government, it manages not to be a really bad one. Stable democracies regularly get things wrong, but they rarely get things horribly and tragically wrong. There are simply too many voices to hear and too many processes to get through for them to wander too far down the wrong road before someone starts advocating for another way or too quickly down that road before something makes us slow down. Democracies work because they recognize that people are likely to pursue their worse inclinations in the political sphere and so, rather than asking us to ignore those inclinations, they pit them against each other.

The founding fathers understood this. They knew that people would behave in self-contradictory ways (like cynics) and self-interested ways (like utilitarians). In fact, the founding fathers imagined that there was a bit of cynic and a bit of utilitarian in each of us—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The inner cynic reminds us that no matter how passionate we may feel about a politician or position, we shouldn’t accept their claims at face value. The inner utilitarian reminds us that political issues matter, even though they may not matter in the way politicians tell us. Cynics keep us from revolting; utilitarians keep us from surrendering.

So I’ll put up with campaign ads. Even as they feed both the cynic and the utilitarian in me, they remind me that voting isn’t meant to be a virtuous act so much as one that inhibits vices—including those of unconstrained cynicism and utilitarianism.

Mark Douglas is a professor of Christian ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur.