The Social Animal (47 page)

The process seemed stupid and superficial. But Harold couldn’t get over the crowds. There was real passion at each event—thousands of people, and sometime tens of thousands, roaring their support for Grace with some sort of orgiastic hope.

Given what he had learned so far about life, Harold concluded that all the campaign trivialities were really triggers. They served to trigger deep chains of associations in people’s minds. Grace would spend an hour getting photographed at a flag factory. The event was stupid on its face, but somehow the sight of him holding all those American flags triggered some set of unconscious associations. Another day, they put him on a stool and he held a rally in Monument Valley, where all those John Wayne westerns were set. It was a tacky device, but it triggered another set of associations.

The campaign managers had no clue what they were doing. They lived in a blizzard of meaningless data. They’d try various gimmicks to see what clicked with voters. They’d try a new sentence in the stump speech and then look to see if people at the rallies nodded unconsciously as Grace said it. If they nodded, the sentence stayed. If not, it went.

Somehow the electorate possessed a hidden G-spot. The consultants were like clumsy lovers trying to touch it. The two campaigns would spar over some detail in a tax plan, but the argument wasn’t really about tax regulations; it was about some deeper set of values that were being stoked indirectly. The candidates argued about material things, which were easy to talk about and understand, but the real subject of their debate was spiritual and emotional: Who we are and who we should be.

One day on a plane ride, Harold tried to explain his theory of the campaign to Grace and Erica—how each position about, say, energy policy was really a way of illuminating values of nature and community and human development. Positions were simply triggers for virtues. Grace was tired and couldn’t really follow what Harold was saying. Between rallies he sort of shut down, and put his brain on pause. Erica was sitting nearby pounding on her BlackBerry. There was a silence, after which Grace said with an air of exhaustion: “This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.”

But Harold kept watching. He was, as we know, mostly a watcher. And what he saw beneath the normal thrust and counterthrust of the opposing teams was a bunch of underdebates, arguments about things that were addressed only implicitly. These arguments went deep into the nation’s soul and divided voters in important ways.

One underdebate was about the nature of leadership. Grace’s opponent bragged that he made his decisions quickly, by trusting his gut and then moving on. He claimed (dishonestly) that he didn’t bother reading the pundits and the papers. He portrayed himself as a straightforward man of action and faith, who prized the vigorous virtues: loyalty to friends, toughness against foes, strong and quick decisiveness.

Grace, on the other hand, conspicuously embodied a set of reflective leadership traits. He came across as the sort of person who read widely, discussed problems thoroughly, understood nuances and shades of gray. He came across as cautious, cerebral, thoughtful, and calm. Sometimes, he gave interviews in which he left the impression that he read more than he really did. Thus, there were two definitions of the leadership virtues, vying in the frenzy of a campaign.

Another underdebate concerned the basic morality of the country. The easiest way to predict who was going to vote for and against Grace was by asking about church attendance. People who went once a week or more were very likely to vote against him. People who never went were very likely to vote for him. This was despite the fact that Grace was himself a religious person, who attended regularly.

And yet somehow the contest between the two men and the two parties had put each on the side of some semi-articulated moral divide. People on one side were more likely to emphasize that God plays an active role in human affairs. People on the other were less likely to believe that. People on one side were more likely to talk about submission to God’s will and divinely inspired moral rules. People on the other were less likely to talk about these things.

Yet another underdebate concerned geography, lifestyle, and social groupings. People who lived in densely populated parts of the country tended to support Grace. People who voted in sparsely populated parts supported his opponent. The two groups seemed to have different notions about personal space, individual liberty, and communal responsibility.

Every day Grace’s pollsters came in with new ways to slice the electorate. People who enjoyed sports involving engines—motorcycling, powerboating, snowmobiling—opposed Grace, while people who enjoyed nonengine leisure activities—hiking, cycling, and surfing—supported him. People with neat desks opposed Grace, people with messy ones supported him.

The interesting thing was that everything was connected to everything else. Lifestyle choices correlated with political choices, which correlated with philosophical choices, which connected to religious and moral choices, and so on and so on. The campaigns never engaged the neural chains directly, but they did send off little cues that triggered the mental networks.

One day Grace’s opponent went hunting. Acts like these activated networks in voters’ minds, too. Hunting meant guns, which meant personal freedom, which meant traditional communities, which meant conservative social values, which meant reverence for family and reverence for God. The next day Grace ladled soup in a soup kitchen. The soup kitchen visit meant charity, which meant compassion, which meant a craving for social justice, which meant understanding the losers in the great game of life, which meant an activist government that would spend more to promote equality. The candidates needed only to set off the first step in these networks of meanings. Voters did the rest. Message received.

Some days Harold watched the campaign and thought about how meaningful it really was. Despite all the triviality and show, it really did highlight, if only subliminally, the fundamental choices in life. Politics, he would conclude some days, is a noble undertaking. On other days, of course, he just wanted to throw up.

The thing that disturbed Harold was this: Most voters held centrist views and were moderate in disposition. But political values are not expressed in the abstract. They are expressed in the context of a campaign, and the campaign structures how political views get expressed.

The campaign was structured to take a moderate nation and to make it polarized. The parties were organized into teams. The pundits were organized into teams. There were two giant idea spaces, a Democratic idea space and a Republican idea space. The contest was over what mental model would get to dominate the country for the next four years. It was an either/or decision, and voters who didn’t share either of the dominant idea spaces simply had to hold their nose and choose. The campaign itself took a moderate nation and turned it into a bitterly divided one.

Harold watched week by week as Grace got swallowed up by his party’s idea space. Deep down he held quirky and idiosyncratic views. But in the frenzy of the final push he was swallowed up by the crowds, by the party apparatus, by the donors. If in the final weeks of the race you had judged Grace by the things he said, you’d have concluded that he wasn’t really a person, just the living and breathing embodiment of the party positions, which emerged from history and transcended individual thought.

The only thing that remained distinct about Grace, through it all, was his equipoise. He never lost his cool. He never snapped at his aides. He never panicked. He’d always been the coolest person in any room, and drew people to him by force of his coolness, and that never changed. Harold used to watch him in the most trying circumstances and think, “Graceful is as Graceful does.”

Even on election day, Grace was calm. He projected order and predictability. He aroused trust. And that, along with economic news that helped his campaign and a few other historical accidents, pushed him over the top. Harold saw Grace smile on election night, but he did not see him elated. After all, he knew he was going to win. He had known it since fourth grade. He had never doubted his destiny.

What really startled Harold that night was Erica. In the final few weeks she had become utterly absorbed by campaign work, to the point of exhaustion. Late at night, back in one of the hotel bedrooms, away from the party, he came upon her in an armchair heaving with sobs. He came up to her, sat on the armrest, and put his hand on the back of her neck.

In moments like this, Erica thought about her journey. Erica thought about the grandfather sneaking across the Mexican border, the other grandfather arriving by ship from China. She thought about the apartments she had lived in with her mother, where the doors didn’t shut because they’d been painted and repainted so many times that they had grown too wide for the frame. She thought about the hopes and dreams that her mother had, the small nothing she had sometimes felt like. And then she thought with some pride but with more astonishment of the White House, where she would soon work, the amazing intensity of the campaign, and her love for the people who had put her boss in the office where Lincoln had once sat. There were hundreds of years of history behind her, many generations of ancestors and workers and parents, and none of those people had had a chance to enjoy the privileges that had now fallen into her lap.

THE
SOFT
SIDE

THERE’S
A
CROSS
STREET
IN
WASHINGTON
, D.C.,
WITH
A
THINK
tank on each corner. There’s a foreign-policy think tank, a domestic-policy think tank, an international-economics think tank, and one specializing in regulatory affairs. Many people consider this the most boring spot on the face of the earth.

The research assistants gather at coffee shops, scheming about how to get
C-SPAN
to cover their boss’s “Whither NATO?” conference next spring. The junior fellows share cabs to Capitol Hill and generously agree to sit on each other’s panel discussions. The senior fellows, the former deputy secretaries of this or that department, engage in a Washington institution called the Powerless Lunch, in which two previously influential people dine and have portentous conversations of no importance whatsoever. Meanwhile, they all have to deal with the emotional consequences of their Sublimated Liquidity Rage, which is the anger felt by Upper-Middle Class Americans who make decent salaries but have to spend 60 percent of their disposable incomes on private-school tuitions. They have nothing left to spend on themselves, which causes deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

When Erica disappeared into the administration as deputy chief of staff, Harold joined these happy symposiasts by taking a job as the Robert J. Kolman Senior Research Fellow for Public Policy Studies. Kolman was a four-foot-ten-inch investment banker on his fifth six-foot wife (that’s thirty feet of combined womanhood) who thought most of America’s problems would be solved if he got invited to the White House more often.

Harold thus found himself in the land of policy johnnies. He found them emotionally avoidant overall, people who had established their credentials as university grinds, built their authority on analytic rigor, and then had congregated, like swallows to Capistrano, at a place where sexuality was rigorously suppressed, pleasure was a low priority, and where if you attended four entitlement-reform conferences you found that your virginity had been magically restored. Harold noticed that his new colleagues were very nice and incredibly smart, but they suffered from the status rivalries endemic to the upper middle class. As law-school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure. They all had NordicTrack machines crammed into their kids’ play areas downstairs, but no matter how hard they labored they were careful never to become beautiful, because if they did they would never be taken seriously at the Congressional Budget Office.

Harold’s office was directly next to a guy whose political career had blown up because of rank-link imbalance. He’d spent the first part of his life defining himself by his career rank. He’d developed the social skills useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names; the subtle skills of effective deference. He got elected to the Senate and had come to master the patois of globaloney—the ability to declaim for portentous hours about the revolution in world affairs brought about by technological change/environmental degradation/the fundamental decline in moral values—had achieved fame and a spot as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was often talked about as a presidential hopeful.

But then, gradually, some cruel cosmic joke got played on him. He realized in middle age that his Senate grandeur was not enough and that he was lonely. Some Senators manage to build friendships once they are in Congress. In fact, a study by Katherine Faust and John Skvoretz found that the friendship networks within the U.S. Senate were remarkably similar in structure to the social licking networks among cows. But this poor fellow never built those friendships. He had spent his entire life building vertical relationships with people above him; he had not spent time building horizontal relationships with people who might be peers and true companions. The ordinariness of his intimate life was made more painful by the exhilaration of his public success.

And so the crisis came. Perhaps alpha-male gorillas don’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling sorry for themselves because “nobody knows the real me.” But Harold’s neighbor went off to heal the hurt as best as he knew how. After years of repression he had the friendship skills of a six-year-old. When he tried to bond, it was like watching a Saint Bernard try to French-kiss. It was overbearing, slobbery, and desperately wanting. Some perfectly normal young woman would be sitting at a dinner party and suddenly she’d find a senator’s tongue in her ear. Having decided in midlife that in fact he did have an inner soul, he took it out for a romp and discovered he had just bought a ticket on the self-immolation express.