The popularity of the Republican primary presidential debates this cycle (they have been drawing viewership in the eight million range) has been attributed to their resemblance to reality television.
Of course, between Rick Perry’s alluding to campaigning while carrying a concealed weapon and the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, this season of American Political Idol has more sex and violence than its television rivals, but the race has had the same tumult and rapidly emerging — and vanishing — champions, the same breathless commentary, leavened with portentous disclaimers of “so much more to come”, and the same unselfconscious grubbing about in the lower reaches of human desires. And all this is without Donald Trump in the race.
Whether or not the participants realise it, they have been drawn into a pantomime that rewards drama over lasting influence. This is something that their audience may be unaware of as well — how else to explain the strange bifurcation of desires that puts Cain at the top of the polls even as Republican voters, again and again, say they want to increase taxes on the richest Americans?
To be clear about this: Cain has proposed a tax plan that, in the words of a former Obama White House economist, would be “the most dramatic and regressive shifting of the tax burden in the history of our nation”, a policy that would effectively cut taxes for the top 0.01% of Americans by about half.
This is at the same time as two-thirds of Republicans say income inequality is a problem and the Occupy Wall Street movement can claim that 26% of its membership is conservative.
So, on economic policy, at least, what the Republican-voting public says it wants does not fit comfortably with what its leaders propose to give it.
I suspect the same is true when it comes to less concrete policy issues: questions of torture and nationalism, for instance. The audience physically present at the debate hooted its approval for waterboarding and pre-emptive military action as a majority of the candidates competed for the Dick Cheney memorial throne of blood seat.
In a 2009 Washington Post poll of 804 “Republicans and Republican-leaning non-partisans” just one person cited Cheney as the best example of the party’s principles — you read that correctly: a single individual, not 1%.
Politics has always been at least partially about entertainment, and winning polls has always been at least partially about sheer popularity, and that observation is usually the source of pundit handwringing , but in this Republican race the gulf between what putative leaders say they stand for and what voters say they actually want gives me a weird sort of comfort.
To be sure, it does not necessarily mean that the eventual Republican nominee will not thunder into the race full of threats to invade Iran, electrocute immigrants and provide fluffy pillows and turn-down service to Wall Street executives — that is exactly what Democrats are hoping for, in any case. That nominee would almost certainly lose — and both moderate observers and anyone clinging to the idea that the Republican Party can be a force for anything besides marginal obstructionism should hope that the loss is overwhelming.
Whether they knowingly cite economist Joseph Schumpeter or not, smug free-marketers (here’s looking at you, Mitt Romney) blanket the misery of our economic climate with the soothing thought of “creative destruction”. Lost jobs, empty houses, desolate outlooks — these are the necessary ashes out of which the free market creates future prosperity. This is bullshit, usually — simply the justification not for the evolution of markets but for the stagnation of income inequality.
But the Republican Party ideological imagination is a pretty bleak landscape in its own right. Cain, Michele Bachmann and Perry, in the context of the roiling populism shown in polls, look as if they are clinging to the husks of a weedy field.
Meanwhile, in the background, candidates such as Jon Huntsman are hunkering down, guarding a few small but powerful ideas.
I have never been good at picking the winners in reality television, even aside from the debates, but I have forgotten the names of enough contestants to know that simply being famous does not always count as a win. —