you are not a pundit
This Monday, as on most Mondays, there was a new report repackaging neoliberal Democratic policy as common sense, moderate thinking that will Win Elections.
Their thinking takes the standard three-step pundit progression:
- Decide what policies should be enacted by the government.
- Show polls that show the pundit's preferred policies to be popular.
- Claim publicly: "if we want to Win Elections, we have to support this set of policies. This has nothing to do with what I want politically, I simply want to Win Elections."
People might contest my claim that people are starting from what policies they want, and then lying. It’s true that I don’t know what’s inside these people’s hearts, but it’s been continuously shown that you can basically get whatever result you want, depending on how you frame the question. Just this month, the Trump administration claimed massive public support for his deportation program, while the New York Times said 51% of people thought Trump’s actions on immigration went too far. I really doubt that these pundits are going to point to my favorite poll ever, from June of 2020, when 54% of Americans supported burning down the Minneapolis police station.
I’m pretty certain that, with a few million bucks, I could get some polls that prove the American public agree with the principles of anarchism (“who knows more about how to do a job, a long-tenured employee or an executive who works in an office?” “Agree or disagree: power corrupts; whoever gets power will be affected by it in ways that are bad for those they rule over” “I am capable of making my own decisions, without a bureaucrat enforcing rules with violence”). Unfortunately, Big Anarchy isn’t funding such polling operations at the moment.
But I’m not here just to make fun of Welcome PAC or Deciding to Win or whatever they’re calling themselves this week. I’m here to talk about something even worse: people being infected with pundit-brain themselves from these superspreaders. Just like I saw one episode of Power Rangers at age five and immediately started doing karate moves in the living room, politically-engaged Americans see these pundits on TV and start thinking like them.
Chances are, you are not a professional pundit. Your salary is probably not from going on TV and pontificating about what will Win Elections. Unlike people doing it professionally, you are under no obligation to filter all your beliefs through the framing of Winning Elections. You can simply say what you believe. We aren’t used to this, because to pundits, beliefs only matter in the second degree: “how are voters going to react to these beliefs?” They do this while pretending that they, themselves, are neutral umpires, completely belief-less themselves, simply giving an honest, outside perspective.
I’m for abolishing police, prisons, ICE, CBP, borders, and the military. If I say this, and someone responds that this is alienating to voters, or that very few people agree with me, that means I have a lot of work ahead of me to get more people on my side. While sometimes, such as with gay marriage, politicians will jump on the clear trend of the will of voters, when it comes to something more fundamental to capitalism in America like our health care system, it’s easier to just ignore public opinion or pretend it’s something else. Oh, a majority of people want Medicare for All? Elites and their professional pundit lackeys, like the authors of that report, can just say, “no they don’t.” It’s not like Gallup has a built-in veto where, once 65% of America is on one side of an issue, they get to overrule the branches of government.
We have to change what we think “politics” is. Instead of a wide view of the concept, where it encompasses things like workplace activism, mutual aid programs, neighborhood organizing, and antifascist direct action, we’ve been trained to think “politics” just means “voting for who we want to represent us in government.” And the only aspect of that we care about is not the policies of those candidates, but the “horse race” of who’s going to win. The punditization of American politics is how every policy proposal has to be filtered through the framework of how it affects a given candidate or party’s chances of winning an election.
So stop doing that. If you’re trying to discuss politics with someone and they insist on the pundit model, tell them it’s silly. Don’t back down.
