I think there was a moment in this election which jumped out at me.
Please note that when I say “election,” I refer to the media event, and not to the act of voting. It was just a little thing a news presenter did, but this little gesture seemed to tell me something completely new about who I am supposed to be as an American — it seemed to hail me in a new way — and it led me to a series of realizations about how the structure of American identity has been transformed in the past year. We were looking at a map of Florida. CNN was telling me about red and blue districts, which translated to “urban” and “rural” without much further analysis, while the “bluing” of the suburbs was a recurrent topic. When I looked at the map, I saw a patchwork of red and blue — but then the presenter made things much more clear for me by representing sociopolitical truths which were not visible in the facts. He drew a football-play crayon line across the state just below the panhandle and explained that below this line is blue territory, and above the line is red territory. Even now they are telling me again as I write: “We have two divergent Americas.”
Just a moment later, the commentator did not seem to show any evidence of being aware that this feedback loop was creating facts on the ground, as he moved over the state line to a congressional district in Georgia, and explained to me that it is perfectly normal that a blue incumbent is losing a re-election bid here, because this district has become “red territory.” Life imitates media. Meanwhile, it was explained to me, Atlanta is becoming more liberal; this will surely be a factor to consider if I’m ever up for a job at Turner Networks or Coca-Cola.
I am going to go out on a limb, and suggest that this presenter actually cares whether I am blue or red, and he is trying to tell me. As always, the things that seem invisible are the real message: What is presented to us as natural is that people would move to different parts of Georgia or Florida because they are “red” or “blue” as people — while a year ago I would have been capable of saying that the two-party system was evitable, and not an essential aspect of the map and fact of our selves.
Last year Colorado rewrote its election laws, and I wrote a letter as part of a public call for comment. I can remember saying a number of things about the implications of maintaining a public roll of party affiliations, and about the ramifications this has in countries like Russia and the United Kingdom — for example, causing voters to claim party membership out of hopes of gain or fear of discrimination, or information privacy, or compromise and coercion of voters, or voter safety, or, not least, reification of the two-party system. Back then, writing as an unaffiliated voter, I was able to say that party membership should be able to be irrelevant — after all, who has ever heard of any Swiss political party?
Yet now in America, red on blue violence seems to have displaced white on black violence — even anti-Muslim violence — and nobody seems even to have entirely noticed the change. I won’t try to answer the question of what it means to be a “red woman” or “blue woman,” since I can’t even begin to be qualified to answer this, and I’m not even sure where to put Muslim or Jewish sociopolitically anymore. All of these categories seem riven with contradictions to me. Yet I keep hearing stories about families that don’t speak because of political differences.
The work the election seems to be doing is to make these categories appear natural and to reify them for us. This seems to be a direct result of the president, as it seems hard to ignore that people who support him have to take a clear moral decision to tolerate what is clearly transgressive of previous morals. The very fact of failing to see this clearly would represent a large part of this moral work. Maybe in that way, the real ideological work is not making what is arbitrary appear natural, but making it possible to ignore what should be obvious.
Adam Warner is a Boulder native living in Southampton, England.
