Thursday, November 18, 2004
The Unicorn's Mind
When I went off to college to begin my education in radio, I was gung-ho in capital letters. I wanted to learn everything I could about how the industry--most of all, how to be a professional. This was going to be my life's work, and I was damn serious about it. But some of my colleagues didn't view their education as a response to a calling. Lots of them looked at it as just a thing they were doing. They liked radio, but their actual bliss--the thing that gave meaning and purpose to their lives--lay elsewhere. This shocked the hell out of my 19-year-old self, and represented a lesson I have tried to remember ever after: People are in a given place doing a given thing for a wide variety of reasons, and what motivates them to act will not necessarily be what motivates me.
A couple of weeks before the election, I said that undecided voters were like unicorns--mythical. How could any American at this point in history fail to take a stand? Well, I had forgotten the lesson I learned at college. People vote for a wide variety of reasons, and what motivates them to vote will not necessarily be what motivates me. I am motivated by a geek's interest in politics, but not everyone is. Some of my fellow citizens look at it as one of many things they have to do, and often view it as far less important than dozens of other things in their lives. It's not that they don't care, necessarily; it's that they care about other things more.
Christopher Hayes spent seven weeks canvassing for the League of Conservation Voters in the Wisconsin suburbs where I live (was he the League guy who knocked on my door one afternoon?), and wrote about it for the New Republic.
And even when these disconnected voters grasp the scope of a particular problem, they can be fatalistic about the ability of anyone to solve it, incumbent or challenger. Nevetheless, they plan to vote anyhow, which led Hayes to observe the following mind-bending conundrum:
When I went off to college to begin my education in radio, I was gung-ho in capital letters. I wanted to learn everything I could about how the industry--most of all, how to be a professional. This was going to be my life's work, and I was damn serious about it. But some of my colleagues didn't view their education as a response to a calling. Lots of them looked at it as just a thing they were doing. They liked radio, but their actual bliss--the thing that gave meaning and purpose to their lives--lay elsewhere. This shocked the hell out of my 19-year-old self, and represented a lesson I have tried to remember ever after: People are in a given place doing a given thing for a wide variety of reasons, and what motivates them to act will not necessarily be what motivates me.
A couple of weeks before the election, I said that undecided voters were like unicorns--mythical. How could any American at this point in history fail to take a stand? Well, I had forgotten the lesson I learned at college. People vote for a wide variety of reasons, and what motivates them to vote will not necessarily be what motivates me. I am motivated by a geek's interest in politics, but not everyone is. Some of my fellow citizens look at it as one of many things they have to do, and often view it as far less important than dozens of other things in their lives. It's not that they don't care, necessarily; it's that they care about other things more.
Christopher Hayes spent seven weeks canvassing for the League of Conservation Voters in the Wisconsin suburbs where I live (was he the League guy who knocked on my door one afternoon?), and wrote about it for the New Republic.
Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics.And so, the issues that motivate more political animals, like me and maybe you, don't reach these people in the same way. In fact, as Hayes discovered, "issue" is often as foreign a word to these voters as a random noun in Swedish or Urdu--they don't connect things that affect their lives, like health care or labor rights, with "issues," or recognize them as being something politics can deal with. This might be due to the fact that undecideds tend to be more skeptical about the ability of politicians to solve anything, so undecideds don't think in terms of political solutions to problems. Nevertheless, that people might actually fail to connect certain basic American problems to the political system is hard to fathom, but it makes the existence of the undecided voter a lot easier to understand.
The mere fact that you're reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.
And even when these disconnected voters grasp the scope of a particular problem, they can be fatalistic about the ability of anyone to solve it, incumbent or challenger. Nevetheless, they plan to vote anyhow, which led Hayes to observe the following mind-bending conundrum:
So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush's failures as badly as Bush was.In the end, Democratic thinkers need to apply the lesson I learned back in the day to politics now: Not everyone is motivated by the same things we are. We tried to fight this presidential campaign on the turf of ideas, but that turf is unfamiliar to some voters, and uncomfortable to others. We shouldn't decide we won't fight on that ground--which is what merely retrofitting our current positions with fuzzy language about morals and values would represent. Instead, we've got to find a way to make it less painful for people to meet us on that ground.
