by Primo Encarnación, who apologizes in advance for the long post:
Uncle Jimmy Barstool taught me “you ain’t goin’ nowhere in this town without you got your chinaman.” In Chicago politics, your chinaman is a mentor, and advocate. His power reflects on you; it gives you entre into the corridors of clout. In Chicago, as in any other political milieu, you can follow the money – it’s ridiculously easy to do – or you can follow the clout, which is more difficult and infinitely more interesting, because it leads often times to chinamen. Your chinaman can be a big fish, whose patronage lifts you up as a protege, but always in service to da boss. But the interesting chinaman is the back room operator, with his hands on multiple levers of power, who has tagged you as a rising star and will thrust your career in the right direction. It’s just a way of accruing more clout.
My chinaman was a guy who ran a direct mail business; among the many lessons he taught me was this: individuals are smart, but people are stupid. It’s the dirty little secret of politics. We spend billions – with a “B” – every election cycle making you think you are smarter than you are. (We pay those billions back and forth to each other.) We act as though upon your vote hangs the fate of the world. We make you believe you have all the answers, and punching a chad, darkening an oval, pulling a lever or leaving Cheeto-dusted fingerprints on a touch screen imparts your wisdom to the ages.
Suckers.
In reality, we con you, pure and simple. We find people whose prejudices already incline them to our cause, we play upon those prejudices via a carefully crafted message, locking in their vote, and then we move heaven and earth to get them to the polls to punch, darken, pull or touch the vote we knew they were going to make all along.
As in any good con, this relies heavily on the inherent flaws of the mark, err, voter. And one of those inherent flaws is political ADD. It takes a lot – a LOT – of time to educate yourself on all the issues, and on all the candidates’ views on each of the issues, and to try and decide the nuance between their oft-changing positions. So most people put it off, and put it off, and then only check sources which already agree with their prejudices, in order to make what they think is an informed decision, but is really only a reinforced prejudice. Then they look at adorable puppy videos and try to find out the “one odd trick” to better hair, thighs and interest rates.
Now, you’re going to say to me, “Primo, that ain’t ME!” Well, of course not. You, dear reader, are educated and discerning. You have your finger on the pulse of this election. You can discuss the pros and cons of every candidate on both sides, and you are keeping your powder dry in order to see how everything plays out, and you will make your decision based on the best mixture of poetry and prose. Your preference for President will be inspiring, be able to win the general election and be able to govern effectively for the next 4 years, while negotiating the treacherous diplomatic waters of a world coming apart at the seams, and saving us all from global warming. Go YOU!
I’m going to take you at your word, but remind you that the vastiness of the electorate in America means that there are over a hundred million voters who 1) don’t care about this as much as you do and 2) don’t spend anywhere NEAR as much time on this as they do deciding what to watch on TV tonight (hint – it’s not a political show). And we want every one of them to feel like they’re as smart as you feel.
As a chinaman, myself, I would often warn my clients and protégés about the echo chamber we all lived in. In a sense, we who are politically active and savvy live within our own Beltway. That echo chamber we accuse the other side of living in? We live in one just as effective and of our own making…and liking! But outside it, there are one hundred million Americans who have no idea of the difference between Hillary and Bernie, or the difference between Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. And thanks to the law of large numbers, although many of you are smart, thoughtful and engaged, the whole thing averages out to stupid.
That’s really sad, right? That’s depressing. Have we reached that level of cynicism? Hell. Yeah! Only it’s not something we just recently reached: in 1755, George Washington lost his first election to the Virginia House of Burgesses because his opponent provided more booze to the electorate on voting day. He never made that mistake again, eventually becoming the biggest distiller in America. And President.
OK, he became the biggest distiller AFTER he was President, but the point is, for 300 years in this country, the politicos, including the Father of This Country, have been buying votes, with the enthusiastic connivance of the voters. At least back then you got a buzz. Now, all you get is the hangover.
Is anything going to fix this mess? Nope. We can fix campaign funding. We can fix gerrymandering. We can fix voter suppression. We can fix it so the outcomes more nearly represent the aggregate beliefs of the electorate, which due to the things that need fixing are currently skewed white, male, old and angry. But in the immortal words of Ron White…
You can’t fix stupid.
So all we can do is level the playing field which, paradoxically, helps the progressive cause because “reality has a well-known liberal bias” (Stephen Colbert). That, in turn, will bring the average voter toddling over to our side in a herd movement, and we can get back to trying to save democracy from itself which, as Churchill observed, is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.
