Re-thinking the Jargon
"Vote or Die" posters in Hell's Kitchen, New York.
Photo by Sandra Ogle.
Red states, blue states. The moral values voter. Religion and politics. God, guns and gays. In the weeks following the presidential election, the media, certain democratic groups and academics rushed to create a narrative surrounding the results of the election as a way of a quick and catchy explanation, and moved on. But for some, it’s just not that simple.
New York University professors recently gathered for a teach-in, entitled “America Votes? Making Sense of the Election,” to discuss Election Day results and their implications and significance for the future. Students and teachers alike congregated on the fourth floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center, in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows across three walls, providing breathtaking scenery of Washington Square Park and a view across the street into the warmly lit stacks of Bobst Library. It was a scene that just oozed with Ivory Towerism.
For Gallatin professor and event organizer Angela Dillard, the idea for the teach-in came to her after exchanging stories with colleagues about how depressed students looked after Nov. 2. With all the numbers, jargon and catch phrases being thrown around post-election, Dillard wanted a place where students and the NYU community could gather to discuss the results rationally and with more insight than the press was providing. “Living in a blue state we feel marginalized, when New Yorkers normally feel like the center of the universe,” Dillard said. Then, gesturing to the professors in attendance, she added, “These are the people who can help you work through what’s going on.”
Being academics, the speakers all seemed to have a haughty disinterest in the emotional aspect of the election, and used big words and complicated theories, drawing from their particular fields, to discuss the significance of the election results, and why it’s just not possible to sum up the entire event 24 hours after the fact.
For George Shulman, a political theorist and professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Election Day narratives have been dished out too quickly to explain the full picture of the American political landscape.
“We’re being told the meaning of the election very quickly,” Shulman said. “It’s being narrativised into three competing stories.” First, according to Shulman, is the story put forth by the Democratic Leadership Council and the major media. This story posits that the Democratic Party is alienated from the core values of America, especially the heartland, and the party needs to change if it ever wants to regain popularity. For Shulman, this is an unacceptable story about backlash that depicts a political center that connects with “America.”
“That is a passive approach, just saying ‘Adjust to it,’” Shulman said. “I like to think of politics as creating centers, not just adjusting to them.”
As for the remaining two stories, one is economic, the other is religious. Referencing a recent popular book by Thomas Frank, Shulman calls the economic narrative, “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” In this explanation, voters in “red states” like Kansas continue to vote Republican during economic hardships, even though by doing so they are voting against their own economic self-interest. The story goes, Republicans are advancing policies that go against people’s interests, but are using a platform of values that attracts their support.
The last narrative, popular amongst academics and people on the left, is one that explains the election as a culmination of the attack against separation of church and state. “For these narrativists, what’s at stake is the ability to separate religion and politics,” Shulman said.
After putting forth these three quick and tidy narratives, the professors at the teach-in went to work dissecting them, to explain why and how there is so much more to the story. For Andrew Ross, an American Studies Professor at NYU, the simplistic explanations for election results based on statistics and numbers are not representative of the real world scenario.
“The American system is so tied to individual rights, but the election language comes down to collectivities – the NASCAR dad vote, the security mom vote, the youth vote,” Ross said. “Statistical analysis is our national past time. The U.S. is the mother of all statistical states.”
Ross compared the political campaign to the marketing strategies of Pepsi and Coca Cola, calling the election the “cola war.” Using this analogy, Ross said, “There’s not much difference between the products at the national election. I don’t mean to trivialize, but to make a distinction between the election process and what the election is meant to represent.”
Ross looked at the election on the global scale, not the national, to explain the real political atmosphere, one not acknowledged in the election narratives. “In the months that lie ahead, remember, the blue and red state map that has been emblazoned on our consciousness is not the real world. The red states are the real minority in the world and the language of ‘true American values’ is empty and dangerous,” Ross said. “Had the rest of the world been allowed to vote, Bush would be packing his bags…The electoral college drives a particular kind of analysis, but we need to move beyond the state-by-state breakdown.”
Like Shulman and Ross, American Studies graduate student Richard Kim tried to dispel the values voter narrative. “Values voters supposedly delivered the presidency to George Bush. This is a fiction of the media, who are now trying to desperately fit this into a narrative,” said Kim, a small man with a powerful, projecting voice. According to Kim’s numbers, while 22 percent of Americans said they voted on moral values on Nov. 2, in 2000, 35 percent of the electorate identified morality as its top issue.
“It shows how silly polling is, and that the value vote was not a real thing,” Kim said. He tried to draw people’s attention to other issues and groups affected by the election results. “With the influx of very right wing congressmen, a new America was elected on Nov. 2,” Kim said. “It’s not just about Evangelical Christian right values voters, even though that’s the story you saw in the press the next day. What happened on Nov. 2 was an assault on minorities, women, immigrants and the poor and middle classes.”
Lisa Duggan, an NYU American Studies professor, addressed the gay marriage narrative, explaining that there is more to the story than the simple pro- or anti-gay marriage dichotomy. For Duggan, the success of the gay marriage bans is not so much an issue of homophobia, but about the symbolic meaning of the institution of marriage and its role in the patriotic national idea of the “proper family.” By idealizing marriage as the great equalizer, and putting it on a pedestal, the gay community actually strengthened the symbol of marriage as a pristine institution, and their fight backfired against them.
“Making marriage a legal issue rather than about pluralism and acceptance of different kinds of households was a real missed opportunity,” Duggan said. The movement, “lost the pressure to democratize and pluralize and de-center marriage, to provide all these alternative households recognition. Collective progressive organizing and vision building in a way is more egalitarian than single issue liberal reforms.”
At times the teach-in was full of academic terminology, long-winded rhetoric and abstract thought. But the professors did manage to widen the discussion of the presidential election results beyond the narrow narratives that have been used to easily explain away what happened on Nov. 2, which had left many students and voters feeling bewildered and disappointed. Sometimes the Ivory Tower can indeed enable people to slow down, open up their minds and attempt to explain important events in the American political landscape with more than a catch phrase.
You can reach Erin Obourn at eobourn@nyu.edu
