Political Identity Politics

There's nothing more I hated at college than the widespread obsession with identity politics. I'd sort of wished it was a thing irrelevant in the rest of the world--turns out, I was mistaken.

All the same, individual identity, as opposed to the necessarily sweeping, incorrect, and potentially dangerous notions of group identity, is still neato.

Political candidates have an interesting relationship with their personal identity, because, like actors, they have to tailor their projected identity to a specific character. But actors usually play many different people throughout their careers, except for confused hacks like this guy, whereas politicians generally pick a character--often some sort of mythological archetype--and stick with it. (Except for chameleon politicians, who I'll get to.)

These characters can be extensions of their own natural personalities, or something completely different, depending on the situation, the honesty of the politician, and the perceived desires of the people.

Our current president, for example, is a blue-blood Yankee who ran as a Texas Cowboy. To his credit, he genuinely seems to like the cowboy thing, and New England snobs generally affect some display of intelligence and that's clearly beyond him. But The Cowboy is a powerful image in our culture, and a lot of people responded to it.

Kerry lost for a lot of reasons, but for one, he never could match the cowboy archetype. Who he was--probably genuinely--was The Senator; it was even his nickname at Yale. But when people started going for The Cowboy, due to its mythological resonance and the general disdain of Americans for intellectualism, he tried on all kinds of 'man of the people' personality traits. He rode a motorcycle, etc...and none of it dismissed his obvious, possibly condescending intelligence and his billionaire batshit wife.

Our current presidential candidates have all chosen--and in one case, somewhat discarded--some interesting personalities. I'm going to blather about them now.


Barack Obama: The Young Hero

After all, only he can wield the Sword of Destiny and return the Crystal of Reason to the Orchard of Hope.

This is a really powerful and useful image for him and his supporters to cultivate. (I'm not going to talk about whether or not his earnestness is genuine--his supporters believe it is, his detractors believe it isn't, and that's that.) Many fantasy and science fiction stories have The Young Hero, and for good reason--he's brave, he's usually brilliant, and represents in his youthful strength the hope of change for the world. You can probably trace this archetype to the Fisher King myths--the old king and the land are dying, and the king is resurrected and restored to the form of a much younger man/and or replaced by an actual younger man. (Not to majorly geek out, but this is what happens to Theoden. The whole Rohan episode in The Two Towers is a terrific riff on the Fisher King.)

Another interesting detail about The Young Hero is that the question of his parentage is always extremely important. He's often a prince in disguise, raised away from his royal parents for some reason. His parentage, prince or not, is nearly always a hybrid. Most of the Greek heroes, not to mention Jesus, are a mixture of god and man. Harry Potter (and Voldemort) are half wizard and half Muggle/Muggleborn. Tiger Woods, etc.--the list goes on.* Hybridity represents something extremely interesting to us, a quality that the hero must naturally possess. The quest to discover this--usually hybrid--identity is what drives a lot of these stories.

There are certain problems with assuming this identity, of course, or Obama would be clearly in the lead. One problem is that The Young Hero is not a guy you can have a beer with. Everyone wants to be The Young Hero, and secretly believes that they are, but you only get one per story. That can breed resentment among those who can't stand the idea of someone being better than them. So Obama's been trying to bowl and things like that, because politicians, if they want to win, have to do those sorts of things to win the support of morons. And I think the fact that, like Kerry, he's so desperately bad at dumbing himself down is a good sign that he really is a genuine person.

Another huge problem with being The Young Hero is that he is always a creature of fantasy or spiritual belief, not immediate reality. A real person has failings and makes mistakes and can't possibly fix the world. If Obama wins, there are going to be a lot of exasperating losers who will be disappointed in him for not being the Messiah.


Hillary Clinton: The Queen

This was her initial persona--remember "Miss Bill? Vote Hill!"--the person with the 'on-the-job' White House training. But Hillary, thanks to Mark Penn, is a chameleon politician, who thinks that the best way to handle a two-point dip in the polls is to reinvent herself for whatever micro-group looks ripe. Like Obama, she's in the rough spot where, due to Americans hating smart people, it's honestly good political sense for her to take shots of whiskey and talk about her Scranton grandpa.

The Queen persona was dangerous to begin with. There simply aren't a lot of good Queens or older women of power in mythology and stories: The Queen in Snow White, the evil fairy in Sleeping Beauty, the stepmother in Cinderella, the White Witch, Gertrude, Margaret Thatcher, Lady Macbeth, etc. Queens--or stepmothers--are often witches or murderers, because of an ancient terror of powerful women. Good women are usually frail, virginal girls. I'm not one of those people who's willing to vote for Hillary because I'm so annoyed at this lingering terror, but I do recognize her difficulties.

However, she never should have run as The Queen, for other reasons. The Queen is rarely a power in her own right, but the spouse of the powerful man. Even if she doesn't like to admit it, the First Lady is essentially a ceremonial position, and much of her activities as First Lady, while groundbreaking, were honestly undemocratic. She wasn't elected by the populace or confirmed by Congress--she simply usurped powers which historically belonged to the vice president. So she's in a complicated position while presenting herself as Queen.

What she did after that was represent herself as the The Senator, the fairest and most accurate identity she assumed. I think initially she tried to run not as a woman senator, but as an honest, tough, experienced politician who just happens to be a woman. (This made certain people question her femininity, which is just charming.) This persona lasted until New Hampshire, where she started to play like a victimized woman, relying on the stereotypical weaknesses of the gender (weeping, complaining when attacked) as opposed to its strengths. The Senator persona didn't work because she simply isn't charismatic enough (though much more so that Kerry) and fair or not, that counts for a lot, especially when faced with The Young Hero.

And now--her concern isn't with self-definition, but with trashing The Young Hero, no matter what the cost.


John McCain: The Old Warrior

McCain cultivates this for obvious reasons. We have an innate respect for warriors, especially someone who has suffered as much as he does. (We either respect or revel in suffering, depending on the situation, our mood at the time, and our particular levels of cruelty.) Unlike The Young Hero, we can look up to him without feeling inferior, because he's older and more experienced than us. And, The Old Warrior persona sure takes away from the fact that McCain knows nothing whatsoever about anything about any other topic, especially the economy, which, you know, is kinda important. It even cloaks the fact that he's been dead wrong about this particular war from the start.**

In terms of myth, The Old Warrior has a tendency to die before the end of the story. He might be wise and noble, but his primary function is to educate The Young Hero before kicking the bucket. There's Obi Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore and Mad-Eye Moody, even Gandalf in a way. The Old Warrior is often a wizard or some other kind of sage, but McCain isn't a magic man, just a plain old soldier.

And there aren't many personas besides The Old Warrior that McCain can cultivate. He lacks Hillary's chameleon ability, as evidenced by his half-hearted efforts to support Bush's policies.

At best, McCain the venerable and ailing Fisher King, once competent but about to be replaced by The Young Hero. Or by a chameleon Senator/Queen. The abject failure of the press corps to predict anything useful about this election--at all--is an important demonstration of the limits of archetype, narrative, and myth--we use them to make sense of our present world and the people who inhabit it, but they are inaccurate predictors of future reality. After all, an archetype is just an image, nothing more.


*Notable exceptions, interestingly enough, include most superheroes. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the X-men, are not hybrids by birth. But, there is a different kind of hybridity in their stories--they embody two separate personas. Superman is an alien raised by humans with a human identity that he can assume, and of course the superhero stories are all about the interplay of the divided self...Ok. Enough geekage.

**Gah, he's such an easy mark.