COMM 386: Myths and elections. Paul Bunyan, meets Little Red Riding Hood?

Todd Gitlin, who teaches journalism at Columbia, has an an op-ed piece in Sunday's Los Angeles Times that says a presidential election is about myths, about "not only how [America] wants to be led but what it wants to affirm, how it wants to be known -- really, what it wants to be." Kind of hokey? Well, maybe. But maybe he's onto something. Read it, and let's talk about it.

Let's talk about it especially in terms of how it might relate to not to mention our earlier discussions of Alan Ehrenhalt's article "In Search of Rational Voters" and wisdom of crowds. Does Gitlin's talk of myths suggest a way we might analyze big national elections as ways we collectively, all of us no matter how well- or ill-informed, come to some kind of national consensus about who we'd like to be (or who we'd like to be like), what myths we want to follw?

Here's Gitlin's money graf. Like so many journalists, he spreads it across two short grafs at the end:

So that's the clash. McCain, the known quantity, the maverick turned lawman, fiery when called on to fight, an icon of the old known American story of standing tall, holding firm, protecting God's country against the stealthy foe. Obama is the new kid on the block, the immigrant's child, the recruit, fervent but still preternaturally calm, embodying some complicated future that we haven't yet mapped, let alone experienced. He is impure -- the walking, talking melting pot in person. In his person, the next America is still taking shape.

The warrior turned lawman confronts the community organizer turned law professor. The sheriff (who married the heiress) wrestles with the outsider who rode into town and made a place for himself. No wonder this race is thrilling and tense. America is struggling to fasten a name on its soul.

Gitlin is an interesting guy. He started out in the anti-Vietnam War movement, later went back to grad school and became a public intellectual in the mold of William F. Buckley or Al Gore. Gitlin writes on politics, foreign affairs, cultural issues and the arts. His analysis of the two main American political parties is also worth thinking about. He's how Wikipedia (accessed today) summarizes it:

Gitlin ... emphasizes what he sees as the need in American politics to form coalitions between disparate movements, which must compromise ideological purity to gain power by working together within the two major political parties. He argues that the Republican party has managed to accomplish this with a coalition of what he calls two "major components - the low-tax, love-business, hate-government enthusiasts and the God-save-us moral crusaders" but that the Democratic Party has often been unable to accomplish a pragmatic coalition between its "roughly eight" constituencies, which he identifies as "labor, African Americans, Hispanics, feminists, gays, environmentalists, members of the helping professions (teachers, social workers, nurses), and the militantly liberal, especially antiwar denizens of avant-garde cultural zones such as university towns, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and so on. (The categories obviously overlap somewhat.)" (from The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, pp. 18-19). He adds that "it is easier [for Republicans] to coax one of two ideological tendencies (usually the Christian right) to compromise for the greater good of conservatism than it is to persuade an identity-based group (feminists, gays, African Americans) to make concessions on what is, after all, their identity as they see it.”

That's also worth thinking about. Does it hold water? Does it explain, for example, why some Hillary Clinton supporters had trouble supporting the Democratic ticket when she lost the nomination? Are the Republicans moving into identity politics with their nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president? What do you think? All kinds of interesting issues here for your class blogs.