Dramatizing Political Traditions: The Lesson of the 2010 Midterm Elections

One of the challenges for the field of Conflict Analysis and Resolution is to develop its analytic tools and practical techniques to deal with the problems of political conflict in general and domestic political conflict in the United States in particular. There is little doubt that the heart of the field is devoted to bloody conflicts between ethnic rivals in the far-flung places that we have all come to know with a striking intimacy, but it is impossible to ignore the problems in ICAR’s backyard that carry hints of intractability. The tumultuous transition from the 2008 presidential election to the midterm elections of 2010 demonstrates how symbolic forces in the United States can lead to perplexing outcomes worthy of sustained attention from conflict resolvers. Conflict resolution processes often take place within elite circles and behind the scenes, but deeper resolutions have a public side as well. Barack Obama is surely the most conflict resolution friendly president America has had since Jimmy Carter, but the challenges he has faced, like his rise to power, highlight the challenges inherent in developing this public face of resolution processes—to move away from simple conflict management to something closer to resolution or transformation.

If one reviews the record of the President’s achievements, it may seem odd that Obama took the"shellacking" he did on November 2nd. Consider his record of legislative successes from renewing the bank bailout plan, to negotiating a massive stimulus (with tax cuts), to salvaging General Motors, to achieving the dream of national health care, to extending student loan programs, financial regulation and so on. If it is fair to say that Obama shares President Carter’s taste for pragmatic problem solving, then he also shares President Johnson’s knack for maneuvering his programs through the legislative logjam. Not only has the President been extremely successful in promoting his legislative agenda, he has also confirmed two Supreme Court justices whose legal philosophies seem to closely resemble his own. On administrative performance criteria, he has been a success.

What is surprising is how thoroughly the American people have rejected the President’s programs. It has been suggested on the left that much of this is a messaging problem, in that the President was too busy governing to worry about marketing his legislative agenda, yet the disconnect in this explanation is glaring. Ironically, Obama is the great communicator who was criticized by Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press in the 2008 primaries for relying too much on mere rhetoric.  Did President Obama simply overcorrect and give up his rhetorical focus to concentrate on deeds rather than words, assuming that pragmatic Americans respect results?

I think not, and the gap in our understanding here speaks to a crucial weakness in our thinking about political processes. What made the election of 2008 so exciting and historic was not the policy debate that tended to be overlooked in election coverage. Differences in policy focus were important in both theprimaries and the general election, but the grand social drama that had the whole world watching was the chance for Americans to demonstrate that the era of Jim Crow was behind us. These post-racial musings were always exaggerated and it is never enough in a struggle for social justice to simply place leaders of a certain demographic in power. However, the symbolic clarity of such a move was lost on no one and the social drama being played out before the world had implications not only for the nation, but also for that global audience. The President’s nickname, “no drama Obama” only reinforces the central theme of the 2008 election. Obama had little need to dramatize America’s struggle for racial redemption because he himself embodied the drama. Symbolic politics helped to drive the outcome in 2008, as they would again in 2010 in very different form.

One can often learn more about what interests will be served in government by following the problems facing industries and the campaign funders than by polling public opinion. But these special interests work within the medium of political culture and cannot violate the key features of its traditions if they wish to succeed. In 2008, the Democrats were able to exploit the social justice tradition to energize their constituencies with a clear and compelling narrative that directed their attention and outrage. Connecting the dots, it is impossible not to see a line drawn from Frederick Douglass, to Rosa Parks, to Martin Luther King, to Barack Obama. This story was the context for the reconstruction of political meaning in 2008. Special interests could hook their wagon to it and go far in the direction they would travel.

In 2010, another perhaps more pervasive political tradition returned to prominence. This is the classical ideal of the liberal society in which rugged individuals band together against the government to promotemoral and economic success through self-regulating processes.  Arguably in its purest form, this resurgent conservative philosophy, a tradition that its proponents associate with Thomas Jefferson, has been discredited in an era in which giant corporations have revenues larger than many national governments. However, the moral and intellectual resources behind the laissez-faire ideal provide Americans with a social drama just as compelling as that which carried President Obama to the stunning heights of January 2009. It is a story of moral order grounded in individual virtue. Many Americans can see themselves in this story and know that what makes them who they are—their collective identity if you will—is wrapped up in the application of this great liberal tradition to emerging political circumstances. By electing an African American to the highest office in the land, America achieved a core goal of the social justice strain of the American political tradition, but in purely logical terms, promoting diversity and promoting economic exploitation can be rendered perfectly compatible. At the limit, if the governing classes come to look like America, so too could the hapless and unemployed. In today's world, the once contrary traditions of social justice and unbridled capitalism have settled into a kind of truce.

This brings us to the lesson of Obama’s setback in 2010, which must inform any political recovery the Democrats can hope for. To be successful in the future, Obama would need to engage in a clash of liberal traditions in which one strain is pitted against another. This would take all the dramatic resources he could muster. It would not be enough to be the drama of enacting social change, instead he will have to enact the drama, relying on the third core fighting faith in the American political storybook: the populist strain— the ideal of social protection from an impersonal and socially disruptive market system. Moving in this direction would be extremely difficult for him to do. Public-spirited institutional reforms of the free market system have few organized constituencies and are often caricatured as a form of socialism on the right or vitiated by association with various forms of atavistic bigotry on the left. But arguments in favor of universal social protection, when advocated under the umbrella of principled economic liberalism (read conservatism), have historically commanded popular consent. Good examples are Social Security and Medicare.

A perfect example of what happens to mixed economy reforms in the absence of clarifying social drama canbe seen in the health insurance law, which was not dramatized to fit a story of transformative justice on a scale comparable to the historic dimensions of the 2008 campaign. Health reform was passed on pragmatic grounds by techniques of compromise among elites with the hope that the people would recognize the practical benefits down the road. Here the President could have promoted his agenda by cultivating the drama rather than down-playing it, even at the risk of failure. Dramas require villains, risk, conflicting values, and sacrifice. These were most clearly demonstrated by opponents of health reform rather than by its proponents.         

The lessons for the analysis of political conflict are clear: conflict scholars should attend to the history and rooted dramatic potential of political traditions in the conflicts we study. By working within those political traditions, those who seek transformative change can gain broad political support. Without that support, conflicts are simply deferred to a later date. Like basic human needs, traditions cannot be negotiated away, but they can be navigated, tailored, developed, and combined. We can glean a sense of how this process works in the gubernatorial election of Jerry Brown in California, who paradoxically suggested that he would look for common purpose without compromise. This well describes the principled politics of the Republican Party in the era of movement conservatism. The goal is to simultaneously win over key portions of the public with a vision of justice while out-positioning one’s adversaries. Matching the tradition to the moment—the dramatic action to the play—is the key to this process. Conservative success in this regard should not be arrogantly dismissed as pathology.

The challenge for the President and for the left in America more generally is that the transformative moment may have passed. By failing to frame our contemporary social issues in terms of structural violence, Obama may have undermined acceptance of this line of interpretation for a generation. Even so, the near certainty of wrenching market dislocations that will attend the application of the laissez-faire ideal provides the Democrats with a chance to recover. The American political future is destined to be filled with high drama and we have three complementary dramatic traditions on which politicians can draw: classical liberty, social protection, and social justice. It is up to those who would invoke them to determine how these traditions will help us reconstruct the meaning of our collective political challenges.