Those of us who see ourselves as educated, engaged citizens frequently complain about how political candidates, of both parties, “pander” to their less sophisticated voters while campaigning. But what is “pandering,” exactly?
Pandering has a pejorative connotation because it implies an appeal to baser, perhaps immoral, inclinations of people. Prejudices, selfishness, greed, and ignorance are often assumed to be the main determinants of voting behavior. Could that assumption be a reflection on the politician or speechwriter, instead? That’s “projection” in psychology: “I’m rubber, you’re glue.”
Grievance, resentment, and frustration, however, can be legitimate concerns of the electorate. Politicians appealing to those feelings may also be called “populists.” And being a populist in a democracy is a natural orientation – not necessarily evil. The chief alternatives would be either condescending elitist or bad faith panderer. The real problem with political messaging is not the emotional content, but the lack of specificity regarding solutions. Very few political speeches, press releases, or debates advocate for legislative or administrative remedies, beyond the requisite “On day one I’ll ______.” This is because there is typically conflict between the interests of donors (required to continue your campaign) and voters (who must ultimately go to polls and vote for you). That friction inevitably leads to some less-than-honest posturing from political candidates torn between two opposing forces.
A favorite ploy of political campaigns is to claim that they are funded primarily by “small donors” – essentially by the voters! There are statistics to back this up, but as with most political assertions, few voters will check the accuracy of the claim. (The top ranked “small donor” politician in the U.S. Congress is Sen. Bernie Sanders.) General cynicism toward politicians favors the myth of the “self-financed” campaign — e.g., Donald Trump’s in 2016, and other “Washington outsiders.” Such bias may reflect a feeling of powerlessness shared by average voters.
But voters are not powerless if they organize themselves into various interest groups supporting sympathetic candidates. The main constraint here is the money available to that interest group to sustain their campaign. The solution to pandering lies in the ability to organize both people and money around specific issues. Many of these organized groups are faith-based, often interfaith, like Northern Virginia’s VOICE (Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement).
What are the issues that a hypothetical interest group might coalesce around? Some are economic, some social, and some moral. Economic issues include familiar themes: availability of jobs; ability of wages to keep up with inflation; and some groups are mainly interested in protecting their assets. Social issues include family stability, community organization, and class or social status. Then there are moral issues like: Who are we as a group? How important are democratic principles? What has history bequeathed us? And what do we owe our progeny?
There is no reason to doubt that any given interest group can articulate for themselves or relate through an articulate spokesperson (a political candidate?), some combination of these issues that are important to them. No need to pander, no need to condescend. If there are complaints and grievances, the successful candidate should be able to address them.
Real political campaigns, however, deal with more than issues. It’s clear that the voting population in most parts of the United States suffers from a knowledge deficit. They don’t know much about the political process – at least partly because they have never seen even their local legislative body in action. Mystery surrounding political machinations is the norm. In addition to a divide in formal education, there is an unmanageable proliferation of media sources today. No wonder it is so difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lies.
Social media is run by algorithms designed to maximize views, thus generating advertising revenue. And content moderation for accuracy, or social value, is rapidly disappearing. Engagement, from the point of view of social media platforms, means clicks; it doesn’t usually mean reading anything, or even viewing and understanding a video message. It seems attention deficit disorder has reached pandemic proportions. Bad faith pandering has become unavoidable in today’s media environment. We need to accept this knowledge deficit as permanent – and learn to live with it.
Opinion surveys often ask: “Are you satisfied?” Recently, the answers in these surveys for American voters point toward the negative. Yet, other surveys also tend to reinforce the view that Americans tend to be satisfied with their own lives. There is a clear disconnect between satisfaction in life and satisfaction with elected representatives! While much of this puzzlement may be due to the inexact science of survey design – asking the right questions and finding the right sample – the gross takeaway is that politics in this country, as a profession, is held in low esteem. There are generational differences to be sure, and public optimism is unfashionable these days. But a default orientation toward cynicism seems unhealthy to me.
The fragmented media landscape, lacking any sense of authority, financed by possibly nefarious sources, only highlights the need for people to socialize more. They need to gather in clubs, churches, neighborhood groups, union halls – much as they did in those long-ago days of relative unity among Americans, the 1940s and ‘50s. Community organization could be the best antidote to pressure group domination of politics. It is true that there are divisions in communities – regarding residential development (NIMBY vs. YIMBY), schools (parental rights), and ethnic or religious fractures – but failure to participate in issues involving your own community is punishable by having pandering politicians! They will appeal to fears more than hope, to insecurity and gullibility more than real threats to the community’s well-being. If crime is a real problem, agitate for more police presence on the street. But anxiety about alternative gender preferences of some community members is just not an equivalent threat. Declining attendance in your church may have more to do with your pastor than it does your elected representative in the legislature or Congress.
Most importantly, community engagement and local organizing is a real-life experiment in the workings of politics – compromise and negotiation among competing interests is not unlike the family squabbles to which we all can relate. Getting together to discuss mutual concerns, balancing rights of one party against another, these are all characteristics of typical legislative bodies. Appealing to hope rather than fear may work best with the younger generation, and your community’s demographics may not help. But “si, se puede” worked well for Barack Obama in 2008.
Finally, casting the whole process into a bi-partisan filter only emphasizes the importance of the “big tent.” Since we’re stuck with only two parties, they both need to accommodate a diversity of views on a wide variety of issues. Let’s not make it easy for elected representatives, pandering or not, to reject the priorities of the other side simply because it is their position, not ours. We can do this without threatening the two-party structure. Time to try!
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 