There’s something different about this presidential campaign. It’s hard to pin down for those who see it and easy to dismiss for those who don’t. No matter how remarkable Barack Obama is as a candidate – and there is much to find remarkable – the difference is not located in him. It’s not in his campaign staff who never waver in their message of hope, nor in the volunteers who arrive before the office opens and refuse to leave at night, nor in the voters who cheerfully stand in eight hour lines. It’s not in any of these specific people or actions or attitudes; but it’s in all of them. I’m going to call it an emergent property.
Election results are already a kind of emergent property. For all except the most provincial of plebiscites no one vote ever won or lost an election. By one to ten-million no one person staying in bed on November 4 will make any difference, and yet if everyone stays in bed then all will be lost. This is the paradox of emergence. No one can point to one vote, one volunteer, or one whispered conversation and say that is the one that changed the world. They all did, or none.
So it should be in a democracy. And yet there is another way, the path of division. Dividing citizens by their in-group concerns and pitting them against each other offers a vicious political calculation. Concerns can be recast as cohorts, and their percentages computed. Can we win enough blacks? Can we win enough women? Can we win enough evangelicals if we ignore the unions? Both politics by wedge issue – which force groups to vote in easily coerced unison – and triangulation – which panders too all in fear of alienating too many – treat people as things. Those things put together in small coalitions can win elections, and it’s easy to point to the one that mattered most. But this way loses emergence, and we lose ourselves.
The braver, more difficult path is to embrace the emergence, and to transcend the politics of division. But it pays dividends, and I think we’re seeing the results. This campaign is counting on millions upon millions of individual votes, not the aggregate votes of a few antagonistic camps. Every single person working to get Obama elected realizes that while they are a tiny part of something huge, they are just as essential as every other part. Citizens have grappled with the paradox that their vote in the end is infinitesimally small, and they have concluded that casting it is the most important thing in the world.
I guess what I’m saying is: go vote.
- jack*
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