Political Symbols and Misdirection
Murray Edelman's Theory of Politics
If what North, Weingast, and Wallis call our Open-Access Order makes the political economy of the United States and other Western countries appear benign, then cynics may prefer The Symbolic Uses of Politics, published in 1964 by Murray Edelman. While Edelman could have conceded to NWW that ordinary people have been granted the right to form large political or economic organizations, he would have said that narrow elites nonetheless are firmly in control of political and economic institutions. Edelman probably would say that political and economic power is just as concentrated in our open-access order as it is in a limited-access order. The masses are not held back by force. Instead, their own lack of rationality allows them to be exploited by elites through misdirection and melodrama.
Edelman’s model of politics has two layers. As I have put it before, on the inside it’s rent-seeking (not that he would have known that term). On the outside, it’s theater.
Twelve years ago, I wrote a longer appreciation of Edelman. I think I did a good job of placing him in his times, including an economy that was much more heavily based on tangible goods.
Edelman’s view is that ordinary citizens become fixated on famous individuals and political conflicts that are merely symbolic. It is partly from Edelman that I have derived my view that we are biased to over-state the importance of the Fed chairman and the President for economic outcomes.
While the rest of us are distracted by political theater, in the back rooms a few purposive elite organizations are using government to obtain real, meaningful resources. They get the subsidies and protection from competition, while the rest of us have our attention elsewhere. For example, I would say that government intervention in financial markets works primarily to channel credit to favored groups, rather than to stabilize the economy as a whole.
What might Edelman say about contemporary politics?
Many of us have gotten caught up in the controversy over Wokeism. That seems like a case of what Edelman would have seen as a symbolic issue. It gives some of us something to choose sides over, while back-room politics allocates the tangible resources.
I think that the controversy over Donald Trump also can be seen as a symbolic issue. Edelman would have expected that while Trump’s supporters and opponents yell at one another, at the government trough the usual pigs (the rational, elite organizations) are doing their normal feeding.
Social media is the perfect environment for elevating symbolic issues and ignoring what is going on in terms of tangible resource allocation. From an Edelman perspective, one would expect that the irrational attention that we give to social media allows the rational elite organizations to be even more effective.
Of course, Trumpists, anti-Trumpists, and the social media combatants are not consciously thinking “We are engaging in theater to distract the masses while rent-seekers have a field day.” It is not just the audience that is immersed in the drama. Most of the performers probably are caught up in it as well.
This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.
Wokeism doesn't result in changes to the deployment of tangible resources? How about DIE(sic) coordinators (and their voluminous staffs), minority contract set-asides, race and sex-based discrimination in hiring and promotions, welfare programs specifically directed to various identity groups including the big kahuna - slave reparations? And these are not just happening in government but widely across many businesses and other private organizations as well.
I think the distinction is not quite as sharp as you are drawing it. Even in ancient Rome we talk about the rabble being given bread *and* circuses, not just circuses. Edelmann probably sits at the point where most grifting off the government was, to use the Plunkett term, 'honest graft' of providing real improvements like new roads even if the specific deals were shady but Obama was finally forced to admit that there were few 'shovel-ready' projects funded by the 2008 stimulus bill (IIRC the vast majority of that money went to bail out various state government programs). With COVID all pretense of doing anything but the equivalent of dropping C-notes from helicopters was abandoned.
Per Christopher B's comment, I think there is a big temptation from people of a certain personality bent to really WANT politics and culture wars to be pointless theater. If its pointless theater, then there is no moral obligation to participate in it. If anything, there might be a moral obligation not to. And if that was already what you wanted to do, it's awfully convenient.
But does that fit the data?
Let me take a simple example. COVID spending was absolutely enormous. There were an unprecedented amount of real resources at stake. And it was a highly political issue. Lockdowns necessitated bailouts, and one side was clearly more in favor of lockdowns. More specifically, trillions of dollars was spent on bills that passed on party line votes in congress by a single vote. To say that politics didn't matter to the allocation of real resources is fantastical in light of such events.
Furthermore, we can make very direct links between things like woke-ism and real resource allocation during the pandemic. My sick 75 year old father had to wait months to get a vaccine he should have been able to get immediately. The justification for de-prioritizing him was directly spelled out by the CDC in the guidance they put out that our state adopted. "Equity" was listed as a prime reason for their allocation logic. Note that people who didn't bow to the CDC, like DeSantis in Florida, prioritized vaccines by age, my father would have been able to get his vaccine earlier if he lived in a red state.
The mind virus can go beyond government too. I still feel bad for all those kids I saw on playgrounds wearing masks, even though there was no government mandate. Their parents were infected by a mind virus that caused them to abuse their own children for culture war reasons.
Before 2020 I used to believe that politics and culture, if not unimportant, didn't influence my life enough to justify allocating much energy to it. I updated my priors after 2020.