John Gaventa ’71, in his study of Appalachian poverty, hit it out of the park with his discussions of the three dimensions of power. He took the premise of Schattschneider (in The Semisovereign People) and followed it to its natural conclusion. In the Gaventa/Schattschneider model, political and social power exists at three levels:
1) The decision of what is to be done about select issues. This is what most people think of as the political realm.
2) The decision of what issues are to be considered in the first place. Schattschneider considered this to be the actual point of decision-making, as political institutions chose to promote certain issues over others.
3) The decision of what issues are allowed to exist. Gaventa’s case study was of coal mining communities in the Appalachians, where company towns were run by the all-pervasive hand of the mining company. Workplace safety, unionization, health care and related topics were simply quashed out of existence in the political realm, and any political figure who brought them up was assured of a short career.
I’m almost tempted to attribute 3) to something in the cultural background of Appalachia, because God knows I go through this with my mother all the time: the complete unwillingness to acknowledge something as a topic of debate, never mind the point of view or prospective resolution. But to some extent, this is American politics in the 21st century, writ large: each side talks past the other, unwilling to even acknowledge that something is a legitimate field for debate.
In a way, this becomes a vicious cycle: the politicians talk past each other, the media reports everything verbatim without challenge or analysis, the public tunes it out, the media glosses past it to get back to American Idol, and the politicians focus themselves on the ever-shrinking (and ever-radicalizing) audience that DOES hear them and care, leading to further polarization and even greater odds that they will talk past each other…
There’s not really a way to get past this. The media itself will not be an active part of the solution; stockholders tend to make companies risk-averse and as long as there’s more money in Brad and Angelina than in heavy political reporting…well, you can guess who will win. And the vast middle is uninterested and, almost by definition, uninformed – so the only way to get their attention is to do something huge. And even then, it won’t last. You can attack the United States mainland for the first time in almost two centuries, and within six months we’ll be back to arguing about Britney Spears. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody gives a shit, does it matter?