The Presidency and the Culture Wars

An interesting piece, from Damon Linker, at the Week, "How the race for president became the ultimate battlefield in the culture war":

What if the whole national drama surrounding the American presidency — the canonization or demonization of the office-holder, the obsession with the commander-in-chief's every utterance, the nearly two-year-long beauty contest we call a presidential campaign — isn't really about politics at all?

It certainly sounds counterintuitive.

Reporters and pundits may focus on the horse race in their coverage of a campaign, but most would surely say that a presidential election contest is ultimately about political ideology and the policies flowing from it. The Republicans want to cut government spending, regulations, and taxes, increase spending on defense, and use American military power more aggressively. The Democrats want to increase government spending, regulations, and (by implication) taxes, while cutting defense spending and using American military power a teeny-tiny bit less frequently.

The election itself is about which ideology you support and which personality you prefer to serve as its champion.

That's certainly part of what's going on. But it's not all of it. Or even most of it. Or the core of it.

More than ever, presidential politics is about something other than politics. It's about culture, identity, signaling, and symbolism. In a country of 318 million people, in which there is no shared religious conviction, no shared ethnicity, and increasingly no common culture or moral consensus about marriage and sex, and in which the burden of what is typically a nation's greatest act of collective endeavor and sacrifice (war) has been offloaded to a tiny segment of the population that voluntarily bears the burden largely out of public sight and mind — in such a centerless country, with a media culture that fixates on image, style, and symbolism, a single nationwide quadrennial election in which every adult citizen can participate has taken on existential overtones.

More than affirming his or her ideology or policy proposals, we want to be able to look at a presidential candidate and say: "That's me. That's who I am. That's how I see America."

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