Art by Evan McCarthy | CC BY 2.0
In the opening pages of his Symbolic Uses of Politics, sociologist Murray Edelman writes, “Political forms thus come to symbolize what large masses of men need to believe about the state to reassure themselves.” Edelman argues that political forms and the symbols that represent them are infused with different meanings by different observers, and those meanings often disguise “…wide gulfs between our solemnly taught, common sense assumptions about what political institutions do and what they actually do.” These political symbols thus sustain people in their belief systems, shielding us from more tenebrous truths we’d rather not face.
For example, the plurality of citizens appear to believe we live in a democratic society, a view undermined by the enduring political power of money, and more recently by the deliberate marginalization of progressive candidates, the concession by the DNC that it need not observe voter choice and the handcuffing of third-party candidates to chairs in hidden basements during televised presidential debates. But the symbols of democracy—the donkeys and elephants, the mesmerizing digital counters, the brightly hued electoral maps, , the rigid stars and floating confetti, and decorous rhetoric by winners and losers alike—all sustain the myth of self-determination, a mass delusion of great value to the minority of elites that effectively determine the destiny of the masses.
And so, on crisp, luminous…