I was talking with a friend today and he brought up an interesting thought. The idea is that almost everything in our everyday lives has become political. Example, someone who ones an ipod is more liberal than someone who bought their mp3 player at walmart. Where you drink your coffee, or where you eat. if you eat here you are this and if you eat that you are something else.
so is this really true? is this really going on? and if so is it healthy or unhealthy for a society?
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this may be in between the lines of what you already said but i'll say it anyways. I don't think that ipods and indie coffee shops are liberal or that walmart and starbucks are conservative (although coincidentally both of those examples are big business. but then again, so is apple.) i think its a bigger issue of identity. Those who are are the hipster-indie-fucks, should they decide to be one, have positions that they "have to" hold in order to qualify as a hipster-indie-fuck. of course they are just societal pressures but they include things like left leaning politics and supporting small business, not to mention being into music no one has ever heard of and often for good reason. So i don't think that the marks of a liberal, ipods and indie shops, are in themselves even political one way or the other but that they get adopted by the politically minded (or the politically idiotic yet verbose) and so become tainted.
ReplyDeletehere ends my two cents.
haha, very true. Great point about political identity. The idea is that you can buy, wear or listen to something and it places you in a political category and then from that category the whole party/political leaning is labeled to those products. Now that products and lifestyles are labeled to certain political parties it brings what was once a complicated individual decision of choosing a candidate into a simple decision of where you fall into based on your purchases and lifestyle. People are surprised to hear that a black gay guy would be a republican, or a white Christian male is a democrat.
ReplyDeleteSo what is the point of simplifying political identity? Here is my take on it, take it for what it is worth. In the grand scheme of things, the political parties don’t want independent voters, who make their decisions based on their already individually created political identity. Example of such a person, they won’t vote straight down party lines. In addition they have certain issues (usually more than just one issue) and in those issues they don’t change and they vote according to whichever candidate they feel is with them on those issues. (example, someone who wants a balance budget, or someone who wants equal rights for everyone, or someone who works for the environment, or the iraq war and so on) these issues may change from one party to the next and really for one candidate to the next. But the political parties don’t want this, because in a way it keeps them in check on the major issues. But by creating this simplified political identity based on superficial things, the citizens may feel like they won one election and lost the other, but in reality nothing really has changed if they won or lost. Example of this is, voting in the republicans in the ‘90s, but little was changed and in fact towards the end more was added on, so the democrats were voted in in 2006, but very little has changed. However, republicans felt like they won in the ‘90s and the democrats felt like they won in ’06 all because of this simple labeling of political identity. This works well for the two parties, because then they really don’t have to stand for anything, and only care about staying in power.
I think political identity is very complicated and should be a more active process for the voter. It’s not a republican this and a democrat that. I made a comment about obama to a friend and she immediately suspected I was a republican, which I’m not. It’s more than that, and it should be for every voter. A great example is you, Nathan, on how I think you lean more to the Left (for whatever that may mean) but you and I on some issues do agree, while I lean more to the Right (for whatever that may mean). But how do we get people to be more of an active citizen?
My questions for you are these, is political identities become more simplified, and if so why? And how do we get people to be more of an active independent voting citizen and stay away from party lines?
in defense of the strict political parties (which i really, really, really, don't want to do since i dislike most things about them), it would seem like a very difficult position for an elected official at any level to look at those who elected him and find that there a myriad of political opinions on numerous issues. If a party candidate can fall back on the idea that everyone who elected him is a party line voter and thinker, he knows exactly what it is he is elected to do. So pragmatically i can see why a party would want such voters. But i don't think the two parties wish for party line voting for its pragmatic benefits.
ReplyDelete"This works well for the two parties, because then they really don’t have to stand for anything, and only care about staying in power." You hit the nail on the head with that line. Our two party political system has reduced itself to a struggle for recognition an thats it. Even when it comes to policies it seems more about whether their policies is in effect rather than how it is effecting the American people.
To answer your questions (or rather to attempt an answer), i think that Americans have an inclination to simplify things by labeling them. It is much easier to sell something, be it a product, idea, religion, if you can simplify it to something easy to handle. I think that is one reason why political identity has become so simplified.
The second question, definitely the more important one, is i don't know. I can say that if people educated themselves more about the issues, then i think they would have a lesser tendency to toe the party line. But then how do we get them to do that!? I think less divisive political conversations would be extremely helpful, but that seems almost impossible since as you pointed at in the quote i took from you, the system is basically predicated on division. Us v them, republican v democrat, rich v poor, ad infinitum.