Magic Against Myth The Battle of Magic against Myth in American Elections Joseph F. Freeman Lynchburg College
Elections have become boring. A generation ago, when the television age was young and the application of the new polling technology was in its childhood, it seemed to many that we were entering a period of wider participation by a better-educated and informed electorate in a process that would raise the practice of democracy to a new level. Today it is notorious that our electoral process, particularly at the national level, has become a self-referential process, dominated by competing groups of campaign professionals armed with the weapons of electronic age marketing, and serving obscure interests who fund the elaborate campaigns to attend ends that are seldom discussed in public. The voters are turning out in fewer numbers, and government at times hardly seems worthy of the name. The “political analysts” who are such an integral part of manipulation are, of course, helpless to explain the consequences of what they set in motion. Though they would be loathe to acknowledge it, the work of the “analysts” does not produce some kind of knowledge that is complete in itself; their practices are embedded in a broader context of culture and meaning. They take this for granted, even as they influence and are influenced by it. Despite argument and evidence to the contrary, their analyses are presented as complete in themselves, and, therefore, unchallengeable. Even when analysts disagree among themselves, their basic inability to see beyond the presuppositions and contradictions that underlie their activity prevent them from questioning deeply or coming to terms with the changing perceptual structures that may dissolve our notions of democracy while the talk shows gabble on. This paper proposes to use some of the insights of Jean Gebser to explore elections and the problems with the way we have come to address them. Those familiar with Gebser would, of course, agree that the forbidden topic of consciousness and its variations is the necessary starting point of any social analysis and that changes in culture must eventually addressed in these terms. But the prevailing rhetoric and habits of thought in what passes for the public domain make this is a difficult undertaking. Of course, this is nothing new. Our well-publicized election analysts are subsets of a much larger group that does precisely the same thing in a number of fields of study. And it is just as well known that what happens when cultural contexts shift is notoriously baffling for the “experts” who find their carefully crafted predictive models disintegrating before their eyes. The breakup of the Soviet Union is one conspicuous example of a major change that no analyst predicted. Another more obscure example is closer at hand. Though the academic discipline of political science embraced, refined, and propagated the technique of polling, I am not aware
30
