Why Democrats Lost: Feral Grumpy Cats Edition

The Power of the Scapegoat

“It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favor, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.”  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“By yourself you can do nothing here.  Have you noticed how tightly we shut out strangers? . . . [We] would reject you in the end.”  Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed

Last week I wrote about how grumpy the United States electorate seemed.  (http://debsbookblog2194.blogspot.com/2014/10/herding-grumpy-cats.html) Last night that grumpiness manifested itself in all its perverse glory.  Despite the Republican party having an approval rating lower than toe nail fungus, it swept almost all contested races – and some that pollsters thought were securely on the Democratic side of the ledger (hello Maryland!). 

Early this morning, I woke up crabby, with a mild hangover and a typical after-party mess demanding attention (thank god, however, for friends who joined me in debacle-watching and making an otherwise depressing night a lot of fun). Usually I watch some of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” while I shake out the sleepy seed; today, I watched five minutes and turned off the TV.  Not in the mood for blather about the elections, I read a book, cleaned up a little, napped, and thought about the election results.  Not what they may mean for the future – more gridlock, some sort of immigration deal, drastic deregulation, stalling on judicial nominees, total grumpy cat fight over the 2016 presidential nominations (here I’m including Hillary Clinton’s now more precarious run . . . the Clinton magic didn’t bippity-boppity-boo any candidates to victory) – but why endemic grumpiness yielded these results.

Republicans have been adept at what Tolstoy identified as the “easy” manipulation of blame.  For the past six years, opponents have connected President Obama with everything wrong in the country and in the world, be it Benghazi or Boko Haram, Hurricane Sandy or the Carolina Hurricanes’ bad NHL record. The damned-if-he-does-damned-if he-doesn’t illogic (see, for instance, the issue of bombing Syria: Obama is at once too timid, too bellicose, and too late) oddly strengthens the blame claim.  Analysis, discussion, and judgment don’t matter; neither, evidently, do actions and outcomes (see, for instance, the improving economy or lower gas prices).  What’s important is that whatever makes people unhappy, fearful, defensive, confused, or angry is the president’s fault.

Once the president is established as the FUBAR poster child, the next step is also easy.  Identify every Democrat with Obama.  Forget any positions or policies that may differentiate candidates, and confine campaigns to asserting fatal contamination by that horrible failure who incomprehensibly still occupies the White House.  This tactic certainly worked on November 4, and it worked in large part because the Democratic Party bought into it. 

Why did this year’s Democratic candidates run from the real accomplishments of the Obama presidency, not to mention from the president himself?  Why did the U.S. electorate do the same? 

Perhaps the best-known painting of the (biblical) scapegoat, the noble but sentimentally unresisting animal conceived by the Victorian artist William Holman Hunt (c. 1855).

As I was thinking about these questions, I remembered an early play by Wole Soyinka.  The Strong Breed centers on the scapegoat, both on his human individuality and on his social and ritual function.  The figure of the scapegoat, of course, has appeared in cultures throughout the world; Soyinka combines Greek traditions (the scapegoat as the pharmakos with power to sicken and to cure), Christian traditions (Soyinka’s scapegoat is named Eman[uel] and has distinct Christological overtones), and Yoruban traditions (the scapegoat is identified with the deity Ogun, who tried to bridge the abyss between the human and the divine).  In so doing, Soyinka creates something approaching a universal scapegoat, a man who tries to evade his sacrificial destiny but finally and willingly accepts it.

Whereas most scapegoats expiate the sins or misfortunes of their own community, Soyinka’s scapegoat can fulfill his destiny only among strangers.  He himself must be the outsider, the alien, the specter of otherness.  The host group (Eman’s new village, where he is a teacher but always an interloper) can only rid itself of its self-generated “curses” through eradicating a stranger, a rather homeopathic remedy for the estrangement the group experiences from its own lost cohesion. 

This play suggests a reason for the success of the obama-damna-slambama blame game played during this recent election. Barack Obama has been defined as a stranger . . . usually incorrectly and often prejudicially so (a Kenyan, a Socialist, a Communist, a radical Islamicist).  Even putting all this nonsense aside, Obama IS different than the traditional U.S. conception of a president:  he is a non-white, un-schmoozy, coolly intellectual man with a global upbringing that opens him to global sensibilities.  His supporters, who have celebrated these differences, can also run from them, as November 4th demonstrates.  As a socially and politically constructed stranger (a construction that he himself has helped build), he is easily ‘rejected in the end.’

No point in history is ‘the end,’ however.  The ‘hell-no’ Republican caucus may self-destruct, world crises may recede for a while, and history itself will keep revising and reevaluating Barack Obama’s presidency.  For now, though, he’s the scapegoat – in all its knee-jerk, quasi-religious, change-resistant, wagon-circling power – for the country’s anxieties.  Which is why, I think, the Democrats lost.

Feral cats -- probably all cats -- will cannibalize their own, plus anything else that presents itself as food.  They don't even have to be grumpy.

[Note:  obviously, I wrote this yesterday.  Computer problems prevented me from posting it until today.  Also, I have merely poked at the complexities of Soyinka’s The Strong Breed;  those who’ve read the critical literature (as well as the play itself, of course) will recognize that including Holman Hunt’s painting implies recognition of, if not complete agreement with, many informed readers’ problems with the work.]