I suppose this doesn’t quite as much pertain to the topic of “Media and Politics” as it does to a few comments that stuck out to me during today’s mock election. I’m talking about our brief mention of “elected monarchy” and “dictatorship.”
As a philosophy student with a good deal of interest in politics, surprise surprise, I’ve studied a good bit of political philosophy. As such, I tend to know just how a lot of governments are structured and the way power shifts and operates within those governments. I often forget that not everyone has this background. The apparent contradiction in an “elected monarch” stems from a very simple misunderstanding of the terms used, but I think that there are a lot of these misunderstandings of the inner workings of political structures. For instance, to take something from Frum, many people think that the US system is somehow automatically operating under a system of checks and balances. It’s easy to trust in the operation of these without even realizing that they are failing, and require the cooperation and generally the honor of those involved. There are even people who have no idea what the president actually does, or who believe that he can write laws.
You may see where I am going. There are all of these confusions surrounding political structures, despite their being crucial to the inner workings of government. But the fact is, a lot of the times political structures are as much about the faith the people have in the system as they are about the genuine structures. Take the supreme court of the US, for example. While the supreme court can make decisions about laws and policy, they have no actual ability to enforce these repeals or policy changes. Nor can they truly enforce the precedent which forms the common law. However, because the people and the president hold respect for the courts, because there is belief in their power, and in the importance of legal precedent, the courts do have power. If the president chose not to act on one of their decisions, there would be public backlash, but the courts couldn’t do anything. If the public lost faith in the courts, then this backlash would go away, and the Supreme Court would fall.
Similarly, our ideas about government can shift the structure thereof, and once imagined powers can come to be. The way this occurs is through rhetoric and the sharing of public knowledge and ideas. Thinking back to Booth, our ideas about government and political power seems like a reality which is in large part shaped by rhetoric. While there is nothing technically contradictory about the idea of an “elected monarch” the typical idea of monarchy implies one which is hereditary, and as this has been ingrained in our language, the term “monarch” has come to mean “hereditary monarch.” Similarly, the idea of a dictatorship, which while it is technically only an autocratic state operating to preserve its own power, reads as very pejorative. In fact, we specifically point out “benevolent dictatorships” as being contrary to this idea. This is somewhat similar to the way people sometimes append qualifiers for certain jobs as a way of signaling out that quality as being typically dissociated from that job, the way some people say “Black president” or “female doctor” or even “male nurse.” I am sure there are better examples, and I could probably write a lot on just this topic, but I digress.
Regardless, I simply found it interesting to consider the way in which our rhetoric shapes the way political power is consolidated.