Addiction to Political Categories

In politics, we are addicted to categories.

Categories are useful, but in political debate they are not sufficiently nuanced. They release us from the discipline of specifics about the subject being discussed, and they give us a rush as we romp about in generalities.

Categories can be mocked: show biz celebrities, politicians, welfare queens. Categories can be praised: reformers, teachers, patriots. In the first Presidential debate the candidates spoke in categories: Wall Street, Main Street, big governments, pundits, celebrities, hockey moms, liberals, conservatives, veterans, mortgage brokers, populists, elitists, the media, among many others. Both balked when pressed by the moderator to reveal one specific program they would eliminate in the face of the current financial crisis.

Both got away with it, because we American voters mistake political speeches for late-night entertainment. We laugh as they use categories to mock their political opposition. At the Republican Convention we heard Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, mock big, cosmopolitan cities and praise small town values. We heard Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin mock ivy league educations and praise moose hunters. We also heard Presidential candidate John McCain praise President Ronald Reagan and mock Hollywood celebrities.

In 2002, most of us accepted President Bush’s categorizing the war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein as a war against "weapons of mass destruction" and "terrorism." We came to learn that the war—two wars, actually—was Osama bin Laden, whom our CIA trained to fight the Soviet war machine, and who has eluded our best efforts to destroy him. Most Americans accepted the category of terrorism, and we allowed our government to torture prisoners of war and deny accused citizens due process of law.

Politicians know that to get the support of the American voter, they must avoid specifics and employ "good" categories and "evil" categories. Most of us accepted the categories of free market (good) and regulation (evil); and now businesses face a disastrous credit squeeze, and workers face unemployment.

Health insurance is evil if paid for by the government, unless you are US Senators or Representatives; who do not pay one penny for their 100-percent-coverage-health insurance. Taxes are evil, so our highways, bridges and air traffic control systems are underfunded, undermanned, and technologically obsolete.

Sarah Palin and her debate coaches are skilled users of categories. During the Vice Presidential debate she told us how much she knew about our economic woes. She told us that she had talked to soccer moms and hockey moms who were suffering economic pain. Apparently, she didn’t speak to working moms who don’t have money to spend for sports equipment, team membership dues and gasoline to drive their SUVs to games. Working moms hold two or three minimum-wage jobs and have to spend their money for food, clothing and shelter.

I wish I knew a way to wean us from all the generalizations and categories in American politics. Even the terms Democrat and Republican mean very little. Some think that the name of the category "liberal" is self-defeating, and they have started calling themselves "progressive." Some former conservatives now call themselves "libertarians" or "populists."

This not new. In 1946, George Orwell wrote: "… one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.… Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
("Politics and the English Language," Shooting an Elephant, Harcourt Brace, 1950.)

And in the words of the late Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy and he is us." We are grateful that politicians use these categories. Self governance is hard work and requires that we know the details of our government. But, instead of learning government statistics and the decisions and actions that led to them, we rush to learn which movie made the most money over the weekend, and how many strike-outs our favorite millionaire pitcher threw.

We are all junkies, high on money, movies and sports.