Post-modernism comes to politics

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, February 1993

Politics used to be a lot about remembrance. The best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common memory of the constituency.

Politics was also about gratitude. Politicians  were always thanking people, "without whom" whatever under discussion could not have happened. You not only thanked  those in the room -- as many as possible by name -- you even thanked those without -- for "having prepared the wonderful meal which we have just partaken of."  The politician was the creation of others, and never failed to mention it.

Above all, politics was about relationships. The politician  grew organically out of a constituency and remained rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted.

Today, we increasingly elect people about whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during the carnie show we call a campaign.

At the beginning of the 1992 campaign, few of us knew -- let alone remembered -- anything about Bill Clinton. If  we were not from Arkansas,  we had nothing for which to thank him. And our whirlwind relationship  has been under the preeminent control of  the great American matchmaker: the media. Clinton's past is not only unimportant to him, but to us as well.

Clinton is part of a generation which grew up as many of the communal support systems of society were disintegrating. Family, church, and neighborhood were all on the ropes. Politics was also breaking down: not only had the machines faded, but the parties were faltering  and Congress splintering.

Extraordinary national common symbols were gone as well: the Kennedys, Rev. King, and -- just as the 80s began -- John Lennon. Young America entered the decade very much alone.

The egocentrism of yuppie America did not spring originally from greed, but from an apparent reality; it truly seemed a struggle between oneself and the rest of the world. Quietly, and unnoticed at first,  the economy was following community into disarray and a Darwinian imperative took hold.

It was, it turned out, just what rapidly changing American corporations needed, a crop of well-schooled, mobile, undistracted young warriors to boost productivity and profits. Working until early in the morning at an investment banking firm became the new machismo, so much so that in one year a majority of the graduating class of Yale attempted to pursue that course.

The purported skill of the yuppies was that they knew how to "manage" and they knew how to "communicate." They did these things so assiduously that before the decade of 80s was over, process and words appeared to have become the country's major products. With the avid assistance of the media, the 80s brought us the largest collection of euphemisms ever to invade the English language -- like  managed competition and investing in people. And it brought us sly words that mean something far from what they seem to mean -- like Progressive Policy Institute or national health insurance.

It was not only our manufacturing base that eroded,  our base of understanding of what we meant when we spoke to each other was in shambles as well.

The 80s were filled with constantly reiterated sincerity. There was too much of it around, too much that didn't pan out, from the waiter's hyperbolic preview describing what would turn out to be a third-rate meal to the sign on my ATM that announced that "for your  convenience" the device had been moved ten blocks away. When an Arkansas union leader said that Bill Clinton will slap you on the back while he's pissing down your leg, I knew well the feeling even if I couldn't vouch for its specific applicability. It was the classic sucker punch of the 80s.

The 80s also gave great weight to analysis, but often penalized action. Those most skilled in the analytical arts found themselves moving up -- lawyers, journalists, economists and the politicians who could talk like them. The recent Clinton economic conference seemed a giant 1980s potlach ceremony -- 329 warlords of industry and academia  demonstrating their power by tossing the wealth of their ideas into the bonfire. Facts were presented, alternatives proposed,  concern expressed -- Clinton found one chart "very moving" -- but what finally emerged was a magnificent justification for not doing much. The problems, as always these days, are just too complex. How, one wonders, did FDR ever managed to fight the depression with a White House staff smaller than that now allotted the president's wife and World War II with less staff than Dan Quayle?

The 80s also taught us that all politics was office politics; voting became a personnel decision rather than an ideological or policy choice. We hired politicians. Clinton, like many pols reared in the 80s, is strong in skills and weak in creed. His new chief of staff is said to be "apolitical," a description used in praise. Politics without politics. He is someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda that would interfere with a successful management of the White House." 

"What part of government are you interested in?" I asked a thirtysomething lawyer who was sending in his resume. "I don't have any particular interest," he replied, "I would just like to be a special assistant to someone." It no longer surprised me; it had been ten years since I met Jeff Bingaman at a party. He was in the middle of a multi-million dollar campaign for US Senate; he showed me his brochure and spoke enthusiastically of his  effort. "What brings you to Washington?" I asked. "I want to find out what the issues are." 

 If you got the right grades at the right school and understood the "process," it didn't matter all that much what the issues were or what you believed. Issues were merely raw material to be processed by good "decision-making."

The Washington media is very comfortable with the Clinton crowd. Much of it rose in the same era, an era when "objectivity" was  supposed to have adequately supplanted media competition. The journalists and the politicians share a mutual assumption that life can be distilled of the impurities of ideology,  inclination, influence, faith and prejudice. Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, exemplifies the new creed; he refuses to vote and asks his reporters to "cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions." Non-ideology has become the great ideology of America's professional elite. It is, of course, a lie and it is also Clinton's biggest campaign promise.    

While the 80s literally crashed in 1987, the cultural disintegration didn't really occur until the initial graduating classes of prospective yuppies of the 90s went out and couldn't find a job. This young president, despite his saxophone and his appearances on MTV, already has a cultural gap with the young.

Even during the 80s,  as a study by economist Frank Levy of MIT shows, the yuppie phenomenon was a rarified one and hardly reflected what generally happened. In the ten years ending 1989, for example, the income of male workers aged 25-34 with a college education rose 7% while those with only a high school diploma fell 15%. And Robert J. Samuelson reports that the gap between the best and the worst paid college graduates increased, as did the gap between the best and the worst paid lawyers.

What it all means is still hard to grasp but there are important clues to be found  in Marshall Blonsky's  remarkable American Mythologies. Blonsky is a semiotician, yet an unusually  readable one. He describes Umberto Eco, the semiotician turned novelist, balling up a wad of paper and throwing it at a startled student.

"Is that a sign?" he asked while wadding another piece of paper.

The student nodded.

"No," said Eco. "is not a sign. That was stimulus response. Step on a dog, he barks. A stimulus is something present clashing with something else present. It's not a sign situation. This paper now" -- he raised the ball as if to throw it  -- "is a sign. I am looking around with a menacing gesture, but I do not throw the ball. All of you have associated a possible consequence. The consequence didn't happen, therefore the presence of my body is a physical presence sending you back to something expected but absent.  My body is a sign."

Bill Clinton, to a degree greater than any previous president, would understand not only what Eco said but how to use it.  He knows that we live in a time in which the major clashes are between things that are not present.  And he knows his body is a sign. Like constantly being photographed in a warm-up suit and baseball cap. Like riding a 'bus' from Charlottesville to Washington for his Inauguration -- even though it's really a  fully outfitted motor coach rather than, as columnist Tony Kornheiser put it, "891 hard miles with a warm Dr. Pepper and a stale cheese sandwich."

Other presidents have engaged in periodic  symbolic extravaganzas -- Bush particularly liked military invasions in the months around Christmas  -- but mostly have relied on stock symbols (the Rose Garden, the helicopter) for everyday use. Clinton, on the other hand, understands that today all power resides in symbols and devotes a phenomenal amount of time and effort to their creation, care and manipulation.

The co-chair of his inauguration announced that people would be encouraged to join Clinton in a walk across Memorial Bridge a few days before the swearing-in. "It signifies* the way that this president will act," Harry Thomason said. "There are always going to be crowds, and he's always going to be among them."

Clinton is, I believe Blonsky would agree, a very post-modern man. Blonsky, in an early chapter on men's fashion,  says:

 High modernists believe in the ideology of style -- what is as unique as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body. By contrast, postmodernism. . . sees nothing unique about us. Postmodernism regards "the individual" as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. If you're postmodern, you scarcely believe in the "right clothes" that take on your personality. You don't dress as who you are because, quite simply, you don't believe "you" are. Therefore you are indifferent to consistency and continuity.

Change the sign from clothes to politics and the 1992 campaign begins to emerge. Later, Blonsky writes, perhaps illuminating why Gennifer Flowers and the draft and ever-changing policy positions don't matter:

Character and consistency were once the most highly regarded virtue to ascribe to either friend or foe. We all strove to be perceived as consistent and in character, no matter how many shattering experiences had changed our lives or how many persons inhabited our bodies. Today, for the first time in modern times, a split of multiple personality has ceased to be an eccentric malady and becomes indispensable as we approach the turn of the century.

If Clinton is post-modern, he is in some interesting company. Such as Vanna White, of whom Ted Koppel says "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which  can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."  Koppel sees himself as having a similar effect and implicitly ascribes Bush's political resilience in a post-modern age to his very dullness: "You would think that the voter would become frustrated... but on the contrary he has become acclimated to the notion that you just fill in the blank." And then Koppel warns: "It is the very level of passion generated by Jesse Jackson that carries a price." Clinton understands the warning and the value of the blank  the viewer  can fill in at leisure.

Blonsky sums up:

Connotation today -- far beyond advertising phenomenon -- is no longer merely 'hidden persuasion' but is in fact a semiosphere, a dense atmosphere of signs triumphantly permeating all social, political, and imaginative life and, arguably, constituting our desiring selves as such.

The 80s began with the murder of John Lennon.  Mark David Chapman now explains it this way: "I wasn't killing a real person. I killed an image. I killed an album cover."

Within days of the election, Ford began running a TV ad using a voice-over that sounded just like Clinton delivering a speech to an enthusiastic audience. Or was it really Clinton delivering a speech to an enthusiastic audience? Or really Clinton  selling cars a few days after his election?

We have helped put Clinton in the center of this semiosphere. He knows how it works and how to work it. Do we know how to read it?

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