Authors: Michael Ignatieff
The rules that govern standing deserve a closer look, since standing has become the primary area of combat in modern politics. You no longer attack a candidate’s ideas or positions. You attack who they are.
“Standing” is a word from the law that means the right to have your day in court. Judges decide who gets standing. They regulate standing to control their courtrooms and maintain the boundary between law and politics.
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In everyday life, we use the word to accord respect to forms of personal authority. Experts have standing with us by virtue of their expertise, professionals by virtue of their training. A friend who has gone through a tough time has standing with us. We listen to what they say. Granting someone standing is not displaying deference. It is showing democratic respect.
When you enter politics, your first job is to secure your standing, the authority to make your case and ensure a hearing. This will not
guarantee you election, since your opponent might have more, but without it, you don’t have a chance. In theory, all citizens ought to have standing, since all citizens are equal and all have the right to run for office. But standing is not a right. It is a privilege earned from voters, one at a time. It is a non-transferable form of authority. Nothing about past rank, expertise, qualifications or previous success entitles you to it. We can all think of people of good character who never achieved standing with a national electorate. We can also call to mind political figures whose character was questionable, Bill Clinton being a possible example, who never lost standing with the voters. Nor is having standing the same thing as being liked. We can all think of successful politicians, like Richard Nixon, for example, who were never much liked but still managed to conserve reluctant standing from the electorate. You might suppose that popularity would confer standing, but there are plenty of celebrities, pop stars, basketball players and television show hosts who fail to translate their popularity into political success. Some think that money will confer standing, but multi-millionaires recurrently run for office in the United States and lose, the most recent example being Mitt Romney. Nor do degrees confer standing. Success in education is a badge of merit that people actually earn, yet people with degrees often have trouble converting their achievements into standing. The reason is simple: education codes as entitlement, and voters hate entitlement, the way they hate privilege. Educated people routinely complain about this but they are wrong. Standing has to be earned and degrees earn you nothing. This estimable principle leads, however, to a paradox. You can be elected without education, character, likeability, popularity, degrees or a fat bank account, but you cannot be elected without standing. Given these rules, it’s a wonder that we elect as many capable politicians as we do.
Endorsements from powerful people and organizations used to confer standing, but these endorsements matter less than they once did. Unions used to endorse candidates, but unions are weaker than they were and union members vote their own preferences more often than they take political dictation from their leaders. Women’s organizations used to endorse candidates, but women voters want to decide their vote for themselves. When I was in politics, various self-appointed power-brokers among the immigrant organizations would come and promise an endorsement in return for some favour, but I always had the sneaking suspicion that they were pretending to an influence over their people they didn’t actually have. Likewise environmental groups, the news media and editorial pages all endorse candidates and the endorsements do not confer much in the way of standing.
In many democratic systems, Brazil and Mexico, for example, political parties confer standing. Without formal party endorsement, you cannot seek election. Democracies like ours allow independents to stand, but most have a hard time getting a hearing from an electorate. Parties still retain their preponderant role in choosing who gets to stand for office, but their capacity to deliver standing for their candidate is declining. Electoral choice has become less an expression of party allegiances, held in place by family, religious or regional ties, and much more a matter of individual preference. I should know: our party had been slowly leaking members for twenty years before I arrived on the scene. The decline in the number of people who identify themselves as party members underlines a general shift toward a more individualized and volatile electorate. With only weaker allegiance to appeal to, parties are losing their capacity to deliver votes for their candidates. The machines that do get the vote out are personal. Every candidate in our party had to build his or her own machine. Obama’s organization delivered the vote in 2008 and 2012, but it was his
machine, purpose-built for his election, and the next candidates for president in 2016 will have to build theirs from scratch.
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First-time candidates, like myself, learn soon enough that party selection, authoritative endorsement and our supposedly impressive CVs do not entitle us to standing with voters. If you think standing is an entitlement, you are bound to lose. You have go to out and earn it, face to face, doorstep by doorstep, phone call by phone call.
As voters decide whether to give you standing, they listen to the political parties as well as to neighbours and family members, but increasingly they make up their minds alone in front of a computer or television screen. Instead of empowering the voter, this solitude disempowers: it increases the influence of big-buy advertising, the negative attack ads that were used so effectively against me. The solitary voter faces the negative ad onslaught alone, and if there is no one out there prepared to contradict those ads, their impact shapes how voters see you. In our response to the Conservative onslaught, we turned to mediators and institutions to defend us, third parties who would help us make our case to voters, and without exception, we found ourselves without allies. The party itself lacked the membership base and the funds to mount a counteroffensive; unions, women’s groups, university commentators stayed out of the fight, concluding—quite understandably—that I had better defend myself. Few if anyone saw the attack ads as an attack on democratic politics itself.
Public opinion polling accelerates the effect of negative advertising and plays an increasingly large role in determining standing. When the polls say your numbers are slumping, you can talk all you want, but you won’t get a hearing. By the time the negative attack ads had done their work and the polls had confirmed that we were in trouble, it had become a commonplace among political journalists that I was a dead man walking. I remained determined to prove that
rumours of my political demise were exaggerated, but it was an uphill struggle.
Where does all this leave the voters? How do they make up their minds about standing? It would be easy to conclude that voters’ decisions are prisoners of the ads and the polling firms. It’s easy to think that voting itself has degenerated into a form of impulse buying. Certainly there are plenty of political strategists who try to convince politicians that political choice can be manipulated the way advertisers manipulate the purchase of a bar of soap, but this analogy between political and consumer choice strikes me as wrong. It’s not just that voters are smarter than most politicians and marketing experts give them credit for. It’s that voters attach a meaning to voting that they do not give to buying a skirt or a pair of pants. To vote is to express your belonging to a political community, to say what you believe in and to join in the collective act of choosing a country’s direction. Voting is an expression of symbolic allegiance more than an instrumental expression of interests. Most voters know that their individual vote will not make much difference to the outcome, but they still come out to vote because they believe it matters to take part in democracy.
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It’s impossible to understand why voters in many American states waited hours in line to vote in the 2012 election unless you accept that they wanted to be heard, to count, to have their voices registered in a national contest. Those who actually turn out regard voting as a social act, one they feel an obligation to justify to neighbours and friends. They wouldn’t have to justify their choice of a bar of soap or their choice of a dress, but they do feel they have to justify why they chose a certain candidate. They know that only some kinds of justification will work. You can say you bought the dress because you liked the colour; it’s more difficult to get away with saying that you voted for someone simply because you liked the way the candidate looked. Voters have to give reasons for electoral choice, and this obligation to
justify separates voting from impulse buying. I’d go so far as to say that this obligation to give reasons is what makes voting rational.
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Too many defeated politicians blame voters for their defeat. Defeated candidates will tell you that they just can’t understand why voters rejected them, why their message didn’t get through. Having been defeated myself, I can admit it’s easy to blame the irrationality of voters. But it is a mistake. Putting the blame on voters is just a way to duck your own responsibility.
Having fought three elections in five years, I came to appreciate the rationale of voters’ choices. They know their country’s problems are complicated and they know that if solutions were easy, the problems would have gone away by now. They suspect that the solutions politicians offer are no miracle cure and that, in any event, they haven’t got the time or the information to decide which of the miracle cures on offer might be the better one. It is rational for them, in other words, to shift their evaluation from areas of decision where they feel the issue is either moot or just too difficult to decide to areas where they have confidence in their own judgment. As the cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown, when we are faced with cognitive difficulty, we shift effortlessly from hard questions we can’t answer to ones that seem intuitively easy. Everyone has some confidence in their ability to decide whether to trust another human being, and this is the fundamental evaluation that goes on in an election.
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The rational reason why issues matter less than personality in politics, why elections turn on which candidate successfully establishes standing, is that voters are good at deciding who is worth hearing and who is worth trusting. To decide whom to trust, voters focus on the question of whether the candidate is like them or not. The question a citizen asks when determining whether another citizen should represent them is whether that person is representative
of
them. Voters want a candidate
to recognize who they are, and candidates do this by showing that they
are
one of them. Voters ask further questions, like: “Is this person who he says he is?” This is where negative attack ads that dredge up some inconsistency in a candidate’s narrative can be so devastating. The voters don’t necessarily trust the ad, but they begin questioning whether they can trust the politician who has been attacked. In my case, the “just visiting” ad left voters wondering whether I was who I said I was. The ad that said “he didn’t come home for you” questioned the motives for my homecoming. If a politician cannot succeed in convincing voters that he is in it for them, he cannot win standing. Without a narrative that defines the messenger as one with the audience he wants to reach, no message can get a hearing.
Barack Obama showed democratic politicians everywhere how to get a hearing, when he came under attack in his first presidential campaign. His famous speech on race in Philadelphia in the spring of 2008 was actually about standing—defending his right to represent black Americans, but also his capacity to understand the resentment of whites passed over in the name of affirmative action. With that speech he established the joint standing necessary to become the first black president of the United States. His rocky path in office also confirms that incumbency is no guarantee of standing. Once in office, the “birthers” dogged him with allegations that he had not actually been born in the US, forcing him into having to make public his Hawaii birth certificate. In the 2012 election year, his opponents did their best to once again deny him standing as a real American, but voters supported him overwhelmingly, and in doing so, they changed the rules on standing in American politics forever. Race has ceased to be a bar to standing for the presidency, and in elections to come gender and sexual orientation will no longer be an issue. America and the democracies that take inspiration from it are inching a step closer to that
place glimpsed by Martin Luther King when he spoke of a distant country where people would be judged not by their characteristics but by their character. Despite the victories that Obama has won, however, that country is still distant. Democratic societies that have outlawed discrimination nonetheless retain a complex code that still allows class, education and citizenship to be used to deny standing and to turn citizens from friends into foes in our politics. The best that can be said about the battle for standing is that the voter remains the arbiter. In the stubborn instinct that standing is not an entitlement but a privilege to be earned, there is hope for democracy. As Abraham Lincoln once asked, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?”
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At the same time, there are grounds for concern when the entirety of politics is consumed by the battle for standing. In a healthy democracy, you would not question an adversary’s right to be in the ring, or that peron’s citizenship, patriotic attachment, motives or good faith. You would question competence, experience, vision, platform and ideas. In the degraded politics we are enduring, the explicit goal of attack is to avoid debate, to avoid the risks that go with a free exchange of ideas. Once you’ve denied people’s standing, you no longer have to rebut what they say. You only have to tarnish who they are.
We can do better. I would advocate a ban on party advertising outside of election times. Let’s leave the poor voters alone and confine our arguments to the halls of the legislature. Libel laws should also be used to punish the worst lies. Eventually, a negative politics poisons everyone’s well. A politician who needs to unite a country in a time of crisis may find, having vilified his opponents, that he has betrayed the trust he needs to rally and inspire. If you win ugly, you are unlikely to govern well. None of us wants a democracy where elections become nothing more than referenda about standing, with the result determined by the
most vicious attack ad. If standing becomes the only question in politics, none of the issues a society has to solve will get decided in elections. They will cease to be referenda on the kind of country we want. Of the three elections that I fought, none was a debate on the country’s future. All were vicious battles over standing. It is striking that in five and a half years in politics, none of my opponents ever bothered to attack what I was saying, what my platform said, or what I wanted to do for the country. They were too busy attacking me. I’m not complaining, and I’ll never regret fighting my corner, but the country’s politics was the loser.