Six years ago, in her magnificent running commentary on life in Washington, D.C., Meg Greenfield wrote, "What is overtaking Washington is what has overtaken so many sectors of American society: an all but total weakening of the authority of those who used to wield it...." She also explained that image-making had replaced authority with a "new, atomized life ... unmoored from reality...." This "virtual politics" is carried on by candidates whose real qualities are hidden. What we see is a simulated, camera-ready leader who struts onto the national stage.
According to pollsters the American people have certain expectations. Influenced by television, the culture is obsessed with imagery. A candidate needs a certain look. It is necessary for him to mouth the shallow half-truths of the hour. Vital political energy is spent on fabricated political positions, so that the public is diverted by an unreal parade while grave dangers remain unacknowledged. Real debate, real issues, real problems cannot be discussed let alone solved because the "actors" running for office have rehearsed a performance that has nothing to do with the dangers that confront us and everything to do with feeding our hunger for fantasy, for easy answers and slick solutions.
Greenfield thought that the political process in the United States was headed for a grand disconnect. "Virtual life," she wrote, "is one prolonged encounter not between the public person and his colleagues or constituents but between the public person's image and the image's supposed audience 'out there.'"
Madness necessarily follows from the interaction of the image-man and his imaginary "public." You see, the public is an unreal monster. It is the job of pollsters to describe its mood at any given moment, but their descriptions shift as the monster continually changes its mind (though it really doesn't have a mind). There is nothing stable, nothing fixed, nothing steady in this monster. And yet, today's successful presidential candidate owes his ratings to the fact that he tells this monster what it wants to hear.
The monster is made up of various parts. One candidate will appeal to its hind quarters while another will appeal to its stomach. Yet the monster itself, like the projected image of the candidate, is unreal. Greenfield called it "the Loch Ness Monster of American public life." And like Nessie, wrote Greenfield, "it can neither be sighted nor even authenticated."
The domestic political game in the United States, as currently played, threatens the country's prospects for long-term survival. The game, in fact, depends on the witcheries of poll-taking and candidate image-making. Without an intelligent, painfully honest discussion of current economic and international problems, the world's greatest country is bound to fall into chaos while its enemies gather strength abroad. It is, first and foremost, a crisis of leadership. It is also an intellectual crisis. A system that stuffs the "public" with political sweets easily loses touch with strategic as well as economic realities. Consider the sorry state of education - the collapse of historical knowledge in the face of pop fiction. It is all of a piece.
The politicians and the American media promote useful fictions in place of facts. There has developed a consensus around these fictions: (1) that the United States is the world's only superpower; when in fact, a severe economic crisis would cripple America's ability to project military power overseas. (2) There is also the fiction that America's enemies are too weak, too economically insignificant to project their military power into the Western Hemisphere; when in fact, the Russians and the Chinese together deploy a much larger merchant marine than the United States. (3) There is the fiction that nuclear war signifies the end of all life on earth. But nuclear weapons are now clean weapons, which may be directed to destroy specific targets without destroying the earth's environment. (4) There is the fiction that civil defense is useless because nobody can survive a nuclear war; when in fact, the Russians and Chinese have been digging bunkers, shelters and underground cities that can protect many millions of people. In other words, Russia and China are preparing for a future nuclear exchange with the United States while the Americans make no preparations whatsoever. (5) There is the fiction that the U.S. economy is going to continue to lead the world economy; when in fact, the dollar is falling and the United States no longer manufactures (at home) the items necessary to maintain its military or economic ascendancy.
What is happening in the news today, what is happening in the markets and in the banking system, has profound strategic implications. Nobody in the presidential race is talking about any of this because it would hurt their chances at the polls. Today's candidates are wrapped up in image-making, and this forestalls realistic talk because realistic talk is considered "unattractive" to the blob called "the public" (as portrayed by pollsters).
There are no invulnerable countries. There is no guarantee of prosperity or peace. If a government does not see ahead, make defensive preparations, establish a dialogue with citizens, lead the way to awareness and responsibility, then the nation stumbles into the next world war unarmed and psychologically unprepared.
Even worse, today's politics has become a politics of "divide and conquer" in which one constituency is played off against another: poor against rich, non-white against white, the secular against the religious. Before a positive outcome is possible, we must have unity and we must have reality. America cannot afford to wallow in the unreality of the image-makers and the pollsters. And yet, until the economic crisis worsens and takes us by the collective throat, there will be no change. There will only be the continuing parade of unreality.
