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Grand Theft PoliticsShould Democrats look to video games for inspiration?

By Joshua Glenn
Updated Tuesday, April 3, 2007, at 1:38 PM ET
Still from Grand Theft Auto. Click image to expand.

On June 12, 1982, my mother and I took a train from Boston to New York, joining nearly a million other Americans who'd turned out to protest the nuclear arms race. In front of United Nations headquarters, we were coached to sing "Give Peace a Chance" and brandish signs (I'd stapled a Star Wars fan club-issued photo of Yoda to mine). Then we were shepherded to Central Park, where we listened to Dr. Spock and Carly Simon. It was at the time the largest political demonstration in U.S. history, but despite my youthful idealism, the rally failed to engage me. I remember thinking, "This rally is lame—and that's why it's not going to change a thing." I was 14, and I was absolutely correct.

At the time, many Democrats felt the same way. After Reagan's re-election, the Democratic Leadership Council was formed to unburden the Democrats of their '60s-style ideological baggage. The New Democrats borrowed planks from the Republican platform and eschewed Dionysian spectacles like large peace rallies in favor of studying, lobbying, and regulating. Throughout the 1990s, Apollonian progressive figures such as Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore tut-tutted about rap music, violent video games, and action movies without pausing to reflect on why suburban middle-class youth might enjoy those phenomena. Our leaders seemed out of touch, even inhuman.

In a new book, Dream, NYU media professor and political activist Stephen Duncombe laments that progressives have become … well, tedious. The people who built the New Deal and led the civil rights struggle are now engaging in old-fashioned, top-down political practices. These days, whether you attend a rally, sign a petition, or forward a MoveOn e-mail, it can be a disempowering experience. Duncombe is not contemptuous of the traditional anti-war demonstrations against Iraq, but, he argues, obscured within these and other well-intended political actions is "a philosophy of passive political spectatorship: they organize, we come; they talk, we listen."

Worse, today's progressives fail to tap into America's collective unconscious through spectacle, which Duncombe defines as "a way of making an argument … through story and myth, fears and desire, imagination and fantasy." Republican Party leaders don't hesitate to derive inspiration from Madison Avenue and Hollywood. George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo-op may have backfired, but it demonstrated an impressive commitment to spectacle. In this way, Republicans are actually far more populist than the New Democrats.

If progressives ever want to set the national agenda, Duncombe insists, they must embrace what he calls dreampolitik, a politics that "embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which give these fantasies form." With the exception of street activists at the far fringes—he praises Billionaires for Bush, Critical Mass, and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping—progressives remain convinced that "their sense of superior seriousness will win debates, convince the public, and lead them back into the halls of power." Talk about fantasy! Witness the last presidential race, when stagecrafted spectacles that associated President Bush with military prowess trumped the sober-sided efforts of John Kerry to win debates and votes.

It wasn't always thus. Duncombe points to a "counterhistory of the left that has long embraced the dreamscape of the imaginary, using symbolism and narrative in an attempt to create new realities." Rosa Parks, for example, wasn't an average citizen acting spontaneously when she refused to move to the back of the bus: She was a professional organizer who knew exactly what she was doing. But what's more important, demands Duncombe: the history lesson or the myth?

Duncombe notes approvingly how the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman pursued an "explicit strategy of mythmaking" when he dreamed up the mock-serious levitation of the Pentagon during a massive, though otherwise run-of-the-mill, anti-war rally in 1967. In our current moment, Michael Moore's documentaries may not be fair and balanced, but they make us laugh and cry, and they also sell tickets. The once buttoned-up New Democrat Al Gore doesn't rate a mention in Dream, which was written before An Inconvenient Truth, but he's obviously learned some new tricks.

So, how might today's progressives develop an alternative political aesthetic? Duncombe suggests that Democrats co-opt and transform the fantasies against which they have for so long inveighed. He urges progressive activists, for example, to study video games like Grand Theft Auto. Doesn't the game's popularity blatantly indicate that many of us fantasize about carjacking and other violent crimes? Yes, it may, admits Duncombe, before drawing a more optimistic conclusion. "If a game offers power, excitement, and the room to explore, people will play evening after evening after evening, almost regardless of the results," he writes. "Perhaps the problem is not that people don't want to get involved in politics, but rather that they don't want to take part in a professionalized politics so interested in efficiency that there is no space for them, or they don't want to spend time in a political world so cramped that there's no freedom to explore and discover, to know or master." Which brings us back to where we started: How can progressives invent a political process that figuratively and literally involves us?

Duncombe's answer is something he calls the "ethical spectacle." Unlike the unethical kind of spectacle, which conceals a rotten state of affairs, and which demands passivity and acquiescence from spectators, an ethical spectacle promotes progressive ideals of egalitarianism and inclusivity. It models at the level of form what progressive politicians promise in the content of their speeches: demonstrating the ideals of its participants, none of whom are relegated to the role of sign-toting spectator. Duncombe, slipping into hortatory mode, makes some grand predictions about the progressive movement of the future: "Our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves," he claims. "And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire." This is not a wake-up call—what Duncombe asks of progressives is to dream better.

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Joshua Glenn writes Brainiac, a blog and column for the Boston Globe Ideas section, and he is co-editor of Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance.
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Remarks from the Fray:

This idea seems utterly absurd to me. Selling myths might sometimes win elections, but policy makers need to deal in reality.

The problems that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had with healthcare reform are an excellent example. Bill Clinton sold healthcare reform to the public as a virtual panacea. When he discussed it, he focused on only the benefits while ignoring and even denying the costs. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton was dealing with the reality of healthcare reform. She was trying to maximize benefits while minimizing costs. However, in the end, there were unavoidable costs.

When Hillary's healthcare plan came out, it wasn't a panacea (and it never could have been). Opponents seized on the costs of the plan. They were able to contrast Bill's own promises to destroy it.

"Dream" seems like a recipe for more healthcare-like debacles.

--montie_3

(To reply, click here.)

The use of visual spectacle as a PR tool (as in the "Mission Accomplished" banner) and as political tool of change are two vastly different things.

It was clear to me after attempting activism while attending college that the children of Boomers ARE NOT convinced of the power of visual spectacle - passive or otherwise.

Blame the MTV-generation thing: whatever it is, Boomlet generations (X, Y, etc.) have already SEEN it all. So we assume that every one else already has too. The efficacy of the civil rights movement also stands as a warning to young people about the fallacy of "spectacles for the spectacles own sake." There also has to be truth-telling. There has to be a challenge to power-brokers.

So this metaphor about Grand Theft Auto doesn't lend itself to your arguments: instead it makes the case that in today's age - with every imaginable type of encouragement to disengage from "non-virtual" life and with so many more compelling visual options - gimmicky political spectacle, with limited policy goals (like Billionaires For Bush) will have less and less chance of real success.

--ProblemWithCaring

(To reply, click here.)

The problem with the notion of an Ethical Spectacle is that civility and reason ARE lame! [..] What the GOP has realized, [...] was that hope doesn't really sell well. Anger, Fear, Disgust, those are things that motivate us to get off our duffs. Sure we all ADMIRE that Olympic Athlete who kept his Dream Alive through years of painful training, the inner city kid who's dream of becoming one of a limited number of black female judges overcame all the bigotry that was thrown her way. But most of us aren't really willing to do the work that Hope calls us to.

But put a Vampire in the castle on the nearby hill and even your most sedentary peasant will be out with a pitchfork. And so the GOP "success" of the last 30 years has been built on:

-Economic Fears (Reagan amplifying the fears of Carter's inflation)

-Fear of being a crime victim (Bush "hortonizing" Dukakis)

-Disgust with corruption (Gingrich vs. Tip Oneill)

-Fear of Socialism and Gays (Gingrich vs. Clinton in 92)

-Fear of changing horses "mid stream" (Bush v Kerry)

This sort of "Fear Based Spectacle" works well. Frankly its part of what turned out the Anti-Nuclear march the author refers to: Fear of nuclear annihilation. [...]

I don't see "ethical spectacles" ever really working. They lack the emotional punch to the audiences reptilian brain that the GOP's fear based spectacles engender.

--Degsme

(To reply, click here.)

"In our current moment, Michael Moore's documentaries may not be fair and balanced, but they make us laugh and cry, and they also sell tickets."

Rumor has it that sex sells, so throw some Hooters girls in with Michael Moore and you might have a winner.

I find it pathetic that populists both left and right feel the need to pander to the lowest common denominator in their pursuit of a following. Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of their gang basically trade on distortion of truth. Thinking people should know better than to place too much stock in anything they say, or imply that their braying somehow qualifies them as figureheads for a civic movement.

This article is not without some truth, but peel back the gilded language and you'll find the suggestion that we eschew objectivity and serious debate for dumb spectacle and misdirection. In my mind that's not a responsible way to participate in a democracy.

--AModerate

(To reply, click here.)

Getting people engaged in politics is going to require bringing it to the level of intellectual contact sport. And the candidates would have to be willing to get in the mud on this thing.

Think about recent attempts at "engaging" the public. The best example I can think of is the "town meeting" style appearance/debate where real life citizens can ask their own important questions and watch as a career politician ignores all but the most general concepts presented and delivers Stump Speech 12b Sub-Section D, paired with Hyper-Personal Anecdote Theta. The registered voters who subject themselves to thse farces (me having been one of them) are nothing but window dressing to the same old nonsense.

Until the people involved in the process can hit back with the follow up question, or call "bullshit" on the candidates, this is going to be nothing more than a different type of pandering, scripted nonsense.

What we need are candidates who are willing to dump aside all campaign advertising in exchange for weekly debates from the time of their nomination up through election night. Each debate would be an hour long and centered on a single topic, requiring participants to get down to their real message, support their views and explain their "ideas" They would be done in the town meeting format, with a monitor on duty to buzz the candidates whenever they start delivering set speeches that they have used previously.

Only when the public can drag the candidates naked through a wall of flame can we feel that the people are in control of the process.

--EMStoveken

(To reply, click here.)

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