Election By Emotion Part 1

“A MAN is not elected by his friends but by his opponent’s enemies.” That is an axiom of American politics. And in any election campaign, the professionals on the campaign committees do not worry too much about winning favor for their own candidate; they busy themselves mostly with plans for stirring up animosity against his rival. This is inevitable. It is inevitable because it succeeds. You might as well object to the use of dramatic love-interest in a stage play as resent the appeal to hate and prejudice in an election. The amateur may plead that the campaign should be kept to the issues and the appeal be made to an intelligent electorate to decide each issue on its merits, and all the rest of it; but the practical politicians know that people do not vote with their intellects but with their emotions, and the emotion easiest to arouse in an American community is hatred. Certainly it is much more easy to arouse than any more affectionate or loyal and friendly feeling.

Why? And why is the present contest between Smith and Hoover so largely a campaign of prejudice, a whispering campaign, with appeals to religious enmities and moral animosities, and the use of anti-Irish incitements against Smith and anti-English ones against Hoover? And counting up the currents of hatred on both sides, which candidate will win?

I know that the proper way to make an election forecast is to consider how many farmers will vote for a candidate’s measure of farm-relief, and how many business men will support his tariff, and how many laboring men be won by his record on labor, and how many drys go this way and how many wets the other, and so forth. But this is to suppose that people vote more or less intelligently and in response to considerations of “enlightened self-interest,” as the socialists used to call it. And if the experienced politicians do not act on that belief, why should we? And if the whole socialist program has obviously gone to smash because of this Marxian delusion about “enlightened self-interest” being a ruling motive in man, why should we continue to court on it even in an election forecast?

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

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