Take the right-wing push against “election fraud.” In a New York Times profile of conservative voter registration watchdog groups like True the Vote, activists continually point to the ‘Democrats’ as the ones organizing massive fraud campaigns. Ignoring the fact that the claim has been repeatedly proven baseless, it’s still startling to me that these activists never think to blame particular organizations or local bodies: it’s always the big bad Democrats and that pesky Obama. The Glenn Beck fervor attacking George Soros has even fallen out of the spotlight now, yet even that campaign had to find an arch-villain to target. (And it must be said, when Glenn Beck is the most creative and subtle in his criticisms, we have run into a gigantic problem.)
But of course the Democrats have their own version. It was all too easy for George Bush to become the sole focal point of criticism as the bumbling, evil war criminal that ran America into the ground--never mind those little details like Bill Clinton’s gifts to neo-conservatives. And now that Daily Kos has taken on the Fox News theory of journalism, the response to Mitt Romney has ceased painting him as a stiff, successful executive who took advantage of an unfortunately lax regulatory culture and has begun the effort to turn him into a hardened criminal. Recent speculation that Mitt Romney “should be in a federal prison” shows, whether the claims have any grounds or not, that we, as the electorate, have a psychological need for villains that outshines any subtlety in understanding social, political, or historical developments.
The issues that can’t be so easily pared down into black and white are then ignored. Given Romney’s critique of Obama as an apologist for American greatness, and Obama’s ever-hawkish actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the entire debate over our use of drone strikes has become too complicated for public discussion, as James Joyner ably argued in an article for The New Republic. Without a plot structure that fits our expected story arc, neither we nor our representatives know what to do.
To be honest, the problem is more infuriating from the Democrats. Republican ideals have always centered around individualism, the power of a person’s ingenuity, and so on. By nature such a rhetoric plays to discrete points as the cause of great change--it’s a theory that boils the Industrial Revolution down to a list of inventors. But the Democrats are (supposedly) the party of systemic issues. As Obama said, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive,” right? What is that but a recognition of the nature of social systems--a nature that relies not on individual villains, but a complex organization that creates issues which can’t be boiled down to one person and an evil deed? And yet the Democrats still fall back on the good vs. evil rhetoric of those awful Republicans willfully ruining the country.
If we as a nation cannot understand ourselves in more complex terms than this, we’ve lost the thread in a big way. Even those who wish to criticize American drone strikes and other issues ignored by the major parties do so in terms of evil American imperialism--still one singular villain. Everywhere this structure reigns--especially in the fringe groups who merely lump the “Two Party System” together as the cause. We don’t need a new villain--we need to recognize the fact that there may not be a villain. Our systemic problems are just that: systemic. They exist beyond individual wrongs and personal motivations. It’s time we admit some ambivalences, and it’s time we realize that the story of American politics is something worthy of serious literature, not pulp.
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