The Social Animal

CHAPTER 19 THE LEADER

THEY FIRST MET THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT backstage before a campaign rally. He was still campaigning for the party nomination at that point and had been calling Erica for weeks to “bring her on the team.” His staff had spent weeks looking for women, minorities, and people with business experience to bring into senior positions, and Erica was a trifecta. Grace called to talk for about forty-five seconds nearly every day—wooing, begging, laying it on thick with his instant intimacy and flattering persistence. “How’s it going, sister? Have you made a decision?” And so she found herself in a high-school classroom next to a packed gym, with Harold in tow. They were supposed to meet him now, watch a rally, and then talk in the van on the way to the next event.

About thirty people milled about timidly in the classroom, none touching the cookies or cans of Coke. Suddenly there was a rhythm of rushing steps, and in he burst, somehow bathed in his own illumination. Erica was so used to seeing him on television that now she had the disorienting sensation that she was watching him on some super HDTV, not actually seeing him in the flesh.

Richard Grace was the projection of a great national fantasy—tall, flat stomach, gleaming white shirt, perfectly creased slacks, historically important hair, Gregory Peck face. He was followed by his famously wild daughter—the promiscuous beauty whose behavior was the product of a childhood marked mostly by paternal neglect. Behind them, there was a bevy of ugly-duckling aides. The aides had the same interests as Grace, the same secret ambitions as he, but they had paunches, thinning hair, a slouch, so they were destined to play the role of whispering tacticians, while he was Political Adonis. Because of these minor genetic differences, they’d spent their lives as hall monitors and he’d spent his life getting away with things.

Grace swept the room with a glance and saw immediately it was used to teach health class, with anatomical posters of the male and female reproductive systems on one wall. There wasn’t even a conscious disturbance across his mind; just the vaguest ripple of knowledge that he couldn’t allow himself to get photographed with a uterus and a dick splayed out behind his shoulders. He slid to the other side of the room.

He hadn’t been alone in six months. He’d been the center of attention in every room he entered for the past six years. He had cast off from normal reality and lived now only off the fumes of the campaign, feeding off human contact the way other people survive on food and sleep.

He was all energy and adrenaline as he moved around the classroom. In rapid succession, he gave his Man-of-Destiny smile to a quartet of World War II vets, to two overawed honor students, six local donors, and a county commissioner. Like a running back, he knew how to keep his legs moving. Talk, laugh, hug, but never stop moving. A thousand intimate encounters a day.

People told him the most amazing things. “I love you.” … “I love you, too.” … “Hit him harder!” … “I’d trust you with my son’s life.” … “Can I have just five minutes?” … “Can I have a job?” They told him about the most awful health-care tragedies. They wanted to give him things—books, artwork, letters. Some just grabbed his arm and melted.

He surrendered himself to fifteen-second bursts of contact, detecting and reflecting, with that razor sense of his, the play of movement around each person’s lips and the expression in their eyes. Everyone got sympathy and everyone got a touch; he’d touch arms, shoulders, and hips. He’d send out these momentary pulsar beams of bonhomie or compassion, and he never showed impatience with the celebrity drill. A camera would appear. He’d drape his arm around each person as they posed with him. Over the years, he’d developed a mastery of every instant camera manufactured on earth, and if the photographer stumbled, he could throw out patient advice on which button to push and how long to hold it down, and he could do it like a ventriloquist without altering his smile. He could take attention and turn it into energy.

Finally, he came over to where Erica and Harold were standing. He gave her a hug, offered Harold the sly conspiratorial grin he reserved for trailing spouses, and then brought them into the envelope of his greatness. With the others in the room he’d been ebullient and loud. With them, he was insiderish, quiet, and confidential. “We’ll visit later,” he whispered in Erica’s ear. “I’m so glad you could come … so glad.” He gave her a serious, knowing look, then clapped his hand behind Harold’s head while staring into his eyes as if they were partners in some conspiracy. Then he was gone.

They heard a rapturous roar from the gym and hustled over to watch the show. It was a thousand people smiling at their hero, waving at him, bouncing on their sneakers, screaming their heads off, and pointing their camera phones. He flung off his jacket and basked there in the rush of support.

The stump speech had a simple structure: twelve minutes of “you” and twelve minutes of “me.” For the first half, he talked about his audience’s common sense, about their fine values, about the wonderful way they had united to build this great cause. He wasn’t there to teach them anything, or argue for something. He was there to give voice to their feelings, to express back to them their hopes, fears, and desires, to show them that he was just like them, could possibly be a friend or a family member, even though he was so much prettier.

So for twelve minutes he told them about their lives. He’d said all this hundreds of times, but he still paused at crucial moments, as if a sentiment had just popped into mind. He gave them a chance to applaud their own ideas. “This movement is about you and what you are doing for this country.”

Grace, like most first-class minds in his business, tried to find a compromise between what his voters wanted to hear and what he felt they needed to hear. They were normal people who paid only sporadic attention to policy, and he tried to respect their views and passions. At the same time he thought of himself as a real policy wonk, who loved nothing more than to dive down into an issue with a crowd of experts. He tried to keep these two conversations within shouting distance of each other in his head. Occasionally he’d give himself permission to flat out pander, and say the crude half-truth that got the big applause. He was a mass-market brand, after all, and had to win the votes of millions. But he also tried to keep his own real views in his head, too, for the sake of his self-respect. Fed by adulation, the former was always threatening to smother the latter.

In the final half of the speech, Grace turned to the “Me” section. He tried to show his audience that he possessed the traits the country needed at that moment in history. He talked about his parents—he was the son of a truck driver and a librarian. He talked about his dad’s membership in the union. He made it clear, as all candidates must, that his character was formed before he ever thought about politics—in his case by his military service and the death of his sister. He told all the facts of his life, and they were all sort of true but he had repeated them so many times he’d lost contact with the actual reality of the events. His childhood and early manhood was just the script he had been campaigning on all his life.

Self-definition is the essence of every campaign, and Grace stuck to his narrative, which, as one consultant had put it, was “Tom Sawyer grows up.” He described his small-town Midwestern upbringing, his charming pranks, the lessons he learned about the wider world and the injustice contained in it. He showed his wholesome manners, which came from a simpler time, his innocent virtue and his common sense.

The final passage of the speech was “You and I Together.” He told an anecdote about a meeting with a wise old lady who told him stories that just happened to confirm every plank in his campaign platform. He told them about the acres of diamonds they would seize together, the garden of plenty they would find at the end of the road, the place where inner conflict would be replaced by peace and joy. Nobody in the audience really thought a political campaign could produce such utopia, but for the moment the vision of it swept them away and erased all tension from their lives. They loved Grace for giving them that. As he finished his speech, shouting over their cheers and applause, the gym went wild.

The Private Campaign Speech

An aide appeared and swept Erica and Harold into the van—Erica in the middle row and Harold in the rear. Grace appeared cool and matter-of-fact, as if he had just come from a dull meeting on quarterly-earnings reports. He made a few scheduling consultations with an aide, did a three-minute cell-phone interview with a radio station, and then turned his laser beam on Erica, who was sitting next to him.

“First I want to make my offer,” he said. “I have political people and I have policy people, but I don’t have anybody first-rate who will make this organization run. That’s what I’m hoping you’ll do, be the chief operating officer of the campaign and then do the same thing in the White House after I win.”

Erica wouldn’t have been in the van unless she was prepared to say yes to his offer, which she did.

“That’s fantastic. Now that you’ve committed, I want to tell you both about the world you two are about to enter. I especially want to tell you, Harold, because I’ve read your work, and I think you’re going to find yourself in a strange new place.

“The first thing to say is that nobody who is in this business has any right to complain. We choose it and it has its pleasures and rewards. But between us, there is no arena in which the character challenges are so large. You don’t get to serve unless you win. To win you have to turn yourself into a product. You have to do things you never thought you would do. You have to put your sense of reserve on the back burner and beg for money and favors. You have to talk endlessly. Walk into a room and talk, walk into a rally and talk, meet with supporters and talk. I call it logorrhea dementia—talking so much you drive yourself insane.

“And what do you talk about? You have to talk endlessly about yourself. Every speech is about me. Every meeting I have is about me. Every article that’s shoved under my nose is about me. When they start writing about you, it’ll happen to you, too.

“At the same time, this is a team sport. You can’t do anything alone, which means you sometimes have to suppress your individual ideas and say and believe the things that are good for the party and the team. You have to be brothers in arms with people you probably wouldn’t like if you gave yourself a minute to think about it. You can’t get too far out in front of your party or the people you serve. You can’t be right too early or interesting too often. You have to support measures you really oppose and sometimes object to things you think are for the good. You have to pretend that when you’re elected you’ll be able to control everything and change everything. You have to pretend that the team myths are true. You have to pretend that the other team is uniquely evil, and would be the ruin of America. Saying otherwise is seen as a threat to party solidarity, and that’s just the way it is.

“You live in a cocoon. I once read a beautiful essay on the life of a tick. A tick can apparently respond to only three types of stimulus. It knows skin. It knows temperature. It knows hair. Those three things constitute the entire umwelt for a tick. ‘Umwelt’ is a word for the relevant environment of any creature. When you’re in this business your umwelt will shrink and be crazy. You will be asked to pay furious attention to minute-by-minute breaking-news stories of no consequence, which you will completely forget by the next day. You will find yourself monitoring the blogs of the twenty-two-year-old kids with their webcams who have been sent out to cover this campaign—kids who have never seen an election before, who have no sense of history and the attention span of a ferret. Because of their presence you can never utter an unrehearsed thought. You can never try out a notion in public.

“All of these things threaten your ability to be honest with yourself, to see the world clearly, to have some basic integrity as a person. And yet we endure this theater of the absurd because there is no other life so filled with consequence. When you are in the White House with me, you will be busier than ever and every decision will be an important decision. Once we’re in the White House, we won’t have to pander to the nation so much. We’ll be able to lead and educate it. When we’re there, you will never want to take time off, and you won’t.

“Once we’re in the White House, we’re not going to swing for singles. We’re going to hit home runs. I refuse to be a timid president. I’m going to be a great president. I have the gifts. I know more about more policy areas than anybody else in this country. I have more political courage than anybody in politics. My attitude is going to be, ‘I’ve got game. Give me the ball.’”

Other people, viewing Grace from beyond the reach of his charisma, might have mixed reactions to this little speech. But Erica and Harold were deep in the gravitational pull of the aura. At that moment, they thought it was the most impressive speech they’d ever heard. They thought it showed his amazing self-awareness, his astonishing wisdom, and his remarkable commitment to service. They’d been with him just minutes, but they’d already been caught up in the starstruck love affair that would consume them, especially Erica, for the next eight years.

Political Psychology

Harold had never really paid close attention to an election before. He’d never had access to the internal polling and the inside strategy memos. After a few days, Erica was more or less submerged within the organization, but Harold got to float around the fringes, with not all that much to do but observe and think. He was struck by the fundamental divide amongst Grace’s advisors. Some thought that campaigning was primarily about delivering goods to voters. Give voters policies that will make their lives better, and they will pay you for services rendered with their votes. Good policies at good prices.

Others thought campaigns were primarily about arousing emotions—forging an elemental bond with groups and voters; inspiring hope with a vision of the future; sending the message “I am just like you. I will react to events as you would react. I will be what you would be.” Politics isn’t primarily about defending interests. It’s primarily about affirming emotions.

Harold, given his background and life’s work, sided with the latter group. Grace was in a tough primary with a flinty New England governor named Thomas Galving. Their policies were basically the same, and so the race had become a battle of social symbols. Grace was the son of a truck driver, and yet he campaigned with a poetic, lyrical style, so he became the candidate of the idealistic educated class. In primary after primary, he won college-educated voters by twenty-five percentage points or more. For the first ten primaries, he seemed to hold every rally within fifty yards of a provost’s office. He didn’t just offer lists of programs. He offered experiences. He offered hope instead of fear, unity instead of discord, intelligence instead of rashness. The message was: “Life is beautiful. Our possibilities are endless. We just have to throw off the shackles of the past and enter a golden tomorrow.”

Galving’s family had been in the United States for three hundred years, and yet he was a pugnacious, combative sort. He positioned himself as a warrior, fighting for your interests. His campaign played up clan loyalty, sticking together, fighting together and defending one another to the death. As the weeks went on, Galving had himself photographed in a bar or on a factory floor every single day. He’d be seen throwing back a shot of whiskey, wearing a flannel shirt, riding shotgun in a pickup truck. The message was: “It’s a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who puts toughness and loyalty over independence and ideals.”

The candidates’ methods weren’t subtle, but each approach worked to some degree. In primary after primary Galving won working-class voters by gigantic margins. Grace won the cities, the affluent suburbs, and the university towns. Nationally, Grace won the coasts. Galving won the wide swathe of farming and former manufacturing centers in the South and Midwest, especially where the Scots-Irish had settled centuries before. In Connecticut, Grace won most of the towns that had been settled by the English in the seventeenth century. Galving won most of the towns that had been settled by immigrant groups two centuries after. These were century-old patterns, but they still shaped voting. As weeks went by, campaigning didn’t seem to matter. Demography was destiny. In states with large working-class populations, Galving won. In states with large educated-class populations, Grace won.

Harold was fascinated by these deep tribal cultural currents. His theory was that the political party, like many institutions, had segmented into different subcultures. There was no great hostility between the cultures; they would come together once a nominee was selected. Nonetheless, people in different social classes, defined largely by education level, had developed different unconscious maps of reality. They had developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They had developed different definitions of justice and fairness, liberty, security, and opportunity, without even realizing it.

Voters form infinitely complex mental maps, which are poorly understood even by those who adopt them. They pick up millions of subtle signals from the candidates—from body language, word choice, facial expressions, policy priorities, and biographical details. Somehow voters form emotional affiliations on that basis.

What Harold saw during the campaign certainly didn’t fit the rationalist model of politics, in which voters carefully weigh programs and pick the candidate with the policies that serve their interests. Instead, it fit the social-identity model. People favor the party that seems to be filled with the sort of people they like and admire.

As political scientists Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler argue in their book Partisan Hearts and Minds, most people either inherit their party affiliations from their parents, or they form an attachment to one party or another early in adulthood. Few people switch parties once they hit middle age. Even major historic events such as the world wars and the Watergate scandal do not cause large numbers of people to switch.

Moreover, Green, Palmquist, and Schickler continue, when people do select their own party affiliations, they do not choose parties by comparing platforms and then figuring out where the nation’s interests lie. Drawing on a vast range of data, the authors argue that party attachment is more like attachment to a religious denomination or a social club. People have stereotypes in their heads about what Democrats are like and what Republicans are like, and they gravitate toward the party made up of people like themselves.

Once they have formed an affiliation, people bend their philosophies and their perceptions of reality so they become more and more aligned with members of their political tribe. Paul Goren of the University of Minnesota has used survey data to track the same voters over time. Under the classic model, you’d expect to find that people who valued equal opportunity would become Democrats and that people who valued limited government would become Republicans. In fact, you’re more likely to find that people become Democrats first, then place increasing value on equal opportunity, or they become Republicans first, then place increasing value on limited government. Party affiliation often shapes values, not the other way around.

Party affiliation even shapes people’s perceptions of reality. In 1960 Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, The American Voter, in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party’s approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it. Over the years, some political scientists have criticized that observation. But many researchers are coming back to Campbell’s conclusion: People’s perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship.

For example, the Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has pointed to survey data collected after the Reagan and Clinton presidencies. In 1988 voters were asked if they thought the nation’s inflation rate had fallen during the Reagan presidency. In fact, it had. The inflation rate fell from 13.5 percent to 4.1 percent. But only 8 percent of strong Democrats said the rate had fallen. More than 50 percent of partisan Democrats believed that inflation had risen under Reagan. Strong Republicans had a much sunnier and more accurate impression of economic trends. Forty-seven percent said inflation had declined.

Then, at the end of the Clinton presidency, voters were asked similar questions about how the country had fared in the previous eight years. This time, it was Republicans who were inaccurate and negative. Democrats were much more positive. Bartels concludes that partisan loyalties have a pervasive influence on how people see the world. They reinforce and exaggerate differences of opinion between Republicans and Democrats.

Some people believe that these cognitive flaws can be eradicated with more education, but that doesn’t seem to be true, either. According to research by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook University, educated voters may be more factually right most of the time, but they are still factually wrong a significant amount of the time. They are actually less willing to correct their false opinions than less-informed voters because they are so confident that they are correct about everything.

The overall impression one gets from this work is that the search for a candidate is an aesthetic search—a search for a candidate who clicks. Some of the things that influence a voter’s decisions can be instantaneous and seemingly unimportant. As noted earlier, Alex Todorov and others at Princeton showed their research subjects black-and-white photographs of the faces of rival political candidates. The subjects were asked which of the candidates looked more competent. (The subjects were not familiar with either of the candidates).

The candidate who was perceived as the more competent by the people looking at the photographs won 72 percent of the actual Senate races in which they were involved, and 67 percent of the actual House races. The research subjects could impressively predict the actual winners even if they were given just one second to look at the candidates’ faces. This result has been replicated internationally as well. In one study called “Looking Like a Winner,” Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, and others gave people in the U.S. and India quick glimpses of people running for office in Mexico and Brazil. Despite ethnic and cultural differences, the Americans and the Indians agreed about which candidate would be more effective. The American and Indian preferences also predicted the Mexican and Brazilian election results with surprising accuracy.

A study by Daniel Benjamin of Cornell University and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago found that research subjects could predict the outcome of gubernatorial races with some accuracy just by looking at ten-second silent video clips of the candidates talking. Their accuracy dropped if the sound was turned up. A study by Jonah Berger and others at Stanford found that the location of a voting booth can also influence voter decisions. Voters who went to polling stations in schools are more likely to support tax increases to fund education than voters who went to other polling stations. Voters who were shown a photograph of a school were also more likely to support a tax increase than voters not shown such a photograph.

Some of these are experiments conducted in a lab. In real campaigns, the races go on and on, month after month. The voters make snap judgments by the minute, hour, day, week, and month, and their instant perceptions accrete to form a thick and complex web of valuation.

To say that voter decisions are emotional does not mean that voters are stupid and irrational. Since unconscious processes are faster and more complicated than conscious ones, this intuitional search can be quite sophisticated. While following a political campaign, voters are both rational and intuitive. The two modes of cognition inform and shape each other.

The Underdebate

At the end of the day, Grace just ground down Galving. There were more of his kind of people than there were of Galving’s kind of people. He won the party nomination, and within months all was forgiven as members of the two wings of the party went into battle with the other party. They were united by a new us-them distinction.

The general election was bigger and, at least on the surface, stupider. In the primary fight, everybody knew everybody on all sides. It was a fight within the family. But the general election was a combat against a different party, and almost nobody knew anybody on the other side. The “others” were like creatures from a different solar system, and it was convenient to believe the worst.

The general view on Grace’s campaign was that the people running the other campaign were uniquely evil and devilishly clever. The people in Grace’s camp believed that their side was riven with internal disputes (because of their superior intellects and independence of mind), whereas the other side marched with totalitarian unity and precision (because of their clonelike conformity). Their side was thoughtful but fractious, while the other side was mindless but disciplined.

By the fall, the campaign was just a series of jet hops. Grace would hold rallies at one airport hangar after another, in an effort to hit as many TV markets in a day as possible. Most of the internal campaign debates seemed to be about where to put the risers for the TV cameras and how high they should be.

The candidates traded insults relayed at BlackBerry speed. The media kept track of who won each week, day, and hour, though it’s not clear that these victories meant anything to the actual electorate. Grace’s supporters turned bipolar. A senator would come on the campaign plane one day, exultant over certain victory. The next day the same senator would be back, in despair over the prospect of certain defeat.

There were consultants all around honing the message. “Never say ‘families’; say, ‘working families.’ Never say ‘spend’; say ‘invest.’” These subtle word alterations were used to provoke entirely different associations in voters’ minds.

The most important part of the campaign was taking place away from the candidate, among the consultants who designed the TV commercials. They were pitching them toward voters who didn’t normally pay attention to politics and who were woefully misinformed about where each candidate stood on the issues.

Weird issues popped up and became the subject of furious insults between the two campaigns. Grace and his opponent spent a week furiously accusing the other of causing childhood obesity, though it was not clear that either of them had caused it or could do anything about it. A minor crisis in Lebanon turned into a major campaign showdown, with each side demonstrating toughness and resolve and accusing the other of treason. Mini-scandals erupted. People in Grace’s camp were genuinely outraged by a leaked memo from the other side that included the phrase “How to fuck them over.” They were genuinely unmoved by the memos produced by their own campaign with the exact same wording.

The process seemed stupid and superficial. But Harold couldn’t get over the crowds. There was real passion at each event—thousands of people, and sometime tens of thousands, roaring their support for Grace with some sort of orgiastic hope.

Given what he had learned so far about life, Harold concluded that all the campaign trivialities were really triggers. They served to trigger deep chains of associations in people’s minds. Grace would spend an hour getting photographed at a flag factory. The event was stupid on its face, but somehow the sight of him holding all those American flags triggered some set of unconscious associations. Another day, they put him on a stool and he held a rally in Monument Valley, where all those John Wayne westerns were set. It was a tacky device, but it triggered another set of associations.

The campaign managers had no clue what they were doing. They lived in a blizzard of meaningless data. They’d try various gimmicks to see what clicked with voters. They’d try a new sentence in the stump speech and then look to see if people at the rallies nodded unconsciously as Grace said it. If they nodded, the sentence stayed. If not, it went.

Somehow the electorate possessed a hidden G-spot. The consultants were like clumsy lovers trying to touch it. The two campaigns would spar over some detail in a tax plan, but the argument wasn’t really about tax regulations; it was about some deeper set of values that were being stoked indirectly. The candidates argued about material things, which were easy to talk about and understand, but the real subject of their debate was spiritual and emotional: Who we are and who we should be.

One day on a plane ride, Harold tried to explain his theory of the campaign to Grace and Erica—how each position about, say, energy policy was really a way of illuminating values of nature and community and human development. Positions were simply triggers for virtues. Grace was tired and couldn’t really follow what Harold was saying. Between rallies he sort of shut down, and put his brain on pause. Erica was sitting nearby pounding on her BlackBerry. There was a silence, after which Grace said with an air of exhaustion: “This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.”

But Harold kept watching. He was, as we know, mostly a watcher. And what he saw beneath the normal thrust and counterthrust of the opposing teams was a bunch of underdebates, arguments about things that were addressed only implicitly. These arguments went deep into the nation’s soul and divided voters in important ways.

One underdebate was about the nature of leadership. Grace’s opponent bragged that he made his decisions quickly, by trusting his gut and then moving on. He claimed (dishonestly) that he didn’t bother reading the pundits and the papers. He portrayed himself as a straightforward man of action and faith, who prized the vigorous virtues: loyalty to friends, toughness against foes, strong and quick decisiveness.

Grace, on the other hand, conspicuously embodied a set of reflective leadership traits. He came across as the sort of person who read widely, discussed problems thoroughly, understood nuances and shades of gray. He came across as cautious, cerebral, thoughtful, and calm. Sometimes, he gave interviews in which he left the impression that he read more than he really did. Thus, there were two definitions of the leadership virtues, vying in the frenzy of a campaign.

Another underdebate concerned the basic morality of the country. The easiest way to predict who was going to vote for and against Grace was by asking about church attendance. People who went once a week or more were very likely to vote against him. People who never went were very likely to vote for him. This was despite the fact that Grace was himself a religious person, who attended regularly.

And yet somehow the contest between the two men and the two parties had put each on the side of some semi-articulated moral divide. People on one side were more likely to emphasize that God plays an active role in human affairs. People on the other were less likely to believe that. People on one side were more likely to talk about submission to God’s will and divinely inspired moral rules. People on the other were less likely to talk about these things.

Yet another underdebate concerned geography, lifestyle, and social groupings. People who lived in densely populated parts of the country tended to support Grace. People who voted in sparsely populated parts supported his opponent. The two groups seemed to have different notions about personal space, individual liberty, and communal responsibility.

Every day Grace’s pollsters came in with new ways to slice the electorate. People who enjoyed sports involving engines—motorcycling, powerboating, snowmobiling—opposed Grace, while people who enjoyed nonengine leisure activities—hiking, cycling, and surfing—supported him. People with neat desks opposed Grace, people with messy ones supported him.

The interesting thing was that everything was connected to everything else. Lifestyle choices correlated with political choices, which correlated with philosophical choices, which connected to religious and moral choices, and so on and so on. The campaigns never engaged the neural chains directly, but they did send off little cues that triggered the mental networks.

One day Grace’s opponent went hunting. Acts like these activated networks in voters’ minds, too. Hunting meant guns, which meant personal freedom, which meant traditional communities, which meant conservative social values, which meant reverence for family and reverence for God. The next day Grace ladled soup in a soup kitchen. The soup kitchen visit meant charity, which meant compassion, which meant a craving for social justice, which meant understanding the losers in the great game of life, which meant an activist government that would spend more to promote equality. The candidates needed only to set off the first step in these networks of meanings. Voters did the rest. Message received.

Some days Harold watched the campaign and thought about how meaningful it really was. Despite all the triviality and show, it really did highlight, if only subliminally, the fundamental choices in life. Politics, he would conclude some days, is a noble undertaking. On other days, of course, he just wanted to throw up.

Teamism

The thing that disturbed Harold was this: Most voters held centrist views and were moderate in disposition. But political values are not expressed in the abstract. They are expressed in the context of a campaign, and the campaign structures how political views get expressed.

The campaign was structured to take a moderate nation and to make it polarized. The parties were organized into teams. The pundits were organized into teams. There were two giant idea spaces, a Democratic idea space and a Republican idea space. The contest was over what mental model would get to dominate the country for the next four years. It was an either/or decision, and voters who didn’t share either of the dominant idea spaces simply had to hold their nose and choose. The campaign itself took a moderate nation and turned it into a bitterly divided one.

Harold watched week by week as Grace got swallowed up by his party’s idea space. Deep down he held quirky and idiosyncratic views. But in the frenzy of the final push he was swallowed up by the crowds, by the party apparatus, by the donors. If in the final weeks of the race you had judged Grace by the things he said, you’d have concluded that he wasn’t really a person, just the living and breathing embodiment of the party positions, which emerged from history and transcended individual thought.

The only thing that remained distinct about Grace, through it all, was his equipoise. He never lost his cool. He never snapped at his aides. He never panicked. He’d always been the coolest person in any room, and drew people to him by force of his coolness, and that never changed. Harold used to watch him in the most trying circumstances and think, “Graceful is as Graceful does.”

Even on election day, Grace was calm. He projected order and predictability. He aroused trust. And that, along with economic news that helped his campaign and a few other historical accidents, pushed him over the top. Harold saw Grace smile on election night, but he did not see him elated. After all, he knew he was going to win. He had known it since fourth grade. He had never doubted his destiny.

What really startled Harold that night was Erica. In the final few weeks she had become utterly absorbed by campaign work, to the point of exhaustion. Late at night, back in one of the hotel bedrooms, away from the party, he came upon her in an armchair heaving with sobs. He came up to her, sat on the armrest, and put his hand on the back of her neck.

In moments like this, Erica thought about her journey. Erica thought about the grandfather sneaking across the Mexican border, the other grandfather arriving by ship from China. She thought about the apartments she had lived in with her mother, where the doors didn’t shut because they’d been painted and repainted so many times that they had grown too wide for the frame. She thought about the hopes and dreams that her mother had, the small nothing she had sometimes felt like. And then she thought with some pride but with more astonishment of the White House, where she would soon work, the amazing intensity of the campaign, and her love for the people who had put her boss in the office where Lincoln had once sat. There were hundreds of years of history behind her, many generations of ancestors and workers and parents, and none of those people had had a chance to enjoy the privileges that had now fallen into her lap.