“Style is character,” Joan Didion famously declared in her essay on Georgia O’Keeffe.
A lot of people share this opinion, whether they realize it, or not. And this, I think, partially explains the dichotomy between the ruling class and the hoi polloi. It’s often not about ideology, but instead, about style.
For example, I think elites were as much repelled by the way Sarah Palin spoke — and by her refusal to genuflect at the altar of political correctness — as they were about any of the policies she supported.
It’s also worth noting that media have changed. We have a new breed of media elites, sometimes affectionately called “juice boxers,” who have become especially prominent in the era of Twitter/Arcade Fire. These young pundits tend to value “indie cred,” and the best way to offend their aesthetic sensibilities is to appear in some way to be a phony.
But here’s the rub. Appealing to the base often requires offending the aesthetic sensibilities — if not the intellectually honest BS detectors — of the people covering politics most closely. The base rewards one thing, while the elites reward another.
The challenge, of course, is to find a way to be taken seriously by the insiders, while simultaneously retaining the respect of the outsiders. It’s a tough task. And that’s partly what my latest column for The Week was about. Here’s an excerpt:
“The incentives are bad. It’s as if the world is saying, ‘You can be Lucinda Williams if you want. You can be interesting and edgy and nuanced. But Carrie Underwood is what gets radio airtime. She’s the one with the big audience. She’s the one everybody loves….’
And so we have a lot of Carrie Underwoods on TV, and a few Lucinda Williamses, mostly relegated to the print world, where cynicism and rebellion are more valued commodities.
Of course, we should at least acknowledge that the music snobs prefer Lucinda, just as the juice boxers can see through the phoniness of Jindal’s base pandering. And they are even less tolerant of it coming from someone who ought to know better — someone who is transparently attempting to “dumb down” his message. A politician can survive without these nattering nabobs. But the problem is that there is an increasing dichotomy between what the base gobbles up and what our larger society is buying.”
Laments about establishment insiders who attend cocktail parties are ubiquitous, and sometimes even true. But people who cover politics for a living accumulate knowledge and information not available to the casual follower of politics. It makes perfect sense that messages which appeal to one group might sometimes repel the other. In this regard, it might be wise for politicians to target their messages (as much as possible) to the desired audience. For example, Gov. Bobby Jindal could probably have chosen a better venue for his recent message than Politico.