Presenting and Meta Conflicts:  Seeing Political Strategy

Liberals call for the President to respect states’ rights and not oppose the voters of Washington and Colorado who just chose to legalize marijuana in their states.

Conservatives call for the President to respect states’ rights and not oppose the elected representatives of states who have chosen to reject Obamacare.

Liberals call for limiting the power of federal and state governments to regulate a women’s right to choose.

Conservatives call for limiting the power of federal and state governments to regulate gun ownership.

We could extend this list; it is just illustrative.

Yet, the presenting conflict usually portrays liberals as big government nationalists and conservatives as small government state’s righters.  Beneath these presenting conflicts are deeper conflicts over the location of sovereignty, political agency, power, and resource allocation. 

These meta-conflicts can be traced back to our founding generation, divided as well between those who favored ‘energetic state government’ that is close to the people and more easily held accountable and those who favored energetic federal government empowered to protect property, pay back revolutionary war debt, fight Native Americans, and enforce the terms of treaties. 

The former favored our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation; the latter preferred our second constitution, the Constitution.

Moderately interesting academic point?  At best…but it is also an essential insight for understanding political conflict, because elites understand the strategic dimensions not usually highlighted in mass media accounts of the ‘horse race.’ 

“What happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided…which of the multitude of conflicts [fears, concerns, issues, challenges] gains a dominant position (60).”

Schattschneider develops a framework for thinking about politics that centers on conflict and the importance of elite efforts to use conflicts to mobilize supportive constituencies (‘audiences’ or ‘crowd’ in Schattschneider’s metaphor).  Elites compete in a struggle over the scope of conflicts—a struggle to make particular conflicts salient, to amplify these conflicts and support and mobilize the communities prioritizing concern about these issues.  And just as making a conflict salient creates an attentive community of insiders, it marginalizes others muting their concerns.

And one central strategy is this struggle is to displace, or resist the displacement of, conflicts (or framings of conflicts) on the public agenda—in order to win the meta argument over what the argument will be about. And most of us never even notice the meta conflicts, because we both interested in, and our attentions are repeatedly drawn to, an intensive focus on the presenting conflict. 

This makes politics more confusing than it might otherwise be for non-elites.  It makes is harder to anticipate and see the efforts of elites to reframe their private interests as ‘the’ public interest.  A failure to see the strategic dimension confuses efforts to understand why ‘common sense’ solutions to presenting conflicts (filibuster) can be so elusive, because we need to anticipate that elites are (in Galanter’s terms) playing for a rule, playing the long game, using this or that presenting conflict to create an advantage in a larger meta conflict.

“The most important thing about any democratic regime is the way in which it uses and exploits popular sovereignty, what questions it refers to the public for decision and guidance, how it refers them to the public, how the alternatives are defined and how it respects the limitations of the public.  A good democratic system protects the public against the demand that it do impossible things. The unforgivable sin of democratic politics is to dissipate the power of the public by putting it to trivial uses.” (137)

So, ironically, Schattschneider ends up focusing on the importance of leadership in a democratic society, but even this focus is about ‘the audience.’  He would suggest that when we get off track, our leaders (public officials and private leaders who run the mass media) are likely asking the wrong questions—elites are likely making less significant conflicts more salient—dissipating public energies.

The most important questions in politics focus on how leaders use conflicts to mobilize audiences by publicizing some conflicts and ignoring others, displacing more trivial conflicts with conflicts of concern to a broader general public, that unify and create a larger national community. 

We need leaders to set agendas that make sense and enable meaningful citizen participation, to frame (or reframe—displacing one way of thinking and talking about a conflict with another) debates to make agreements easier to achieve.  And this understanding of democracy highlights leadership failures as particularly crippling to democratic societies seeking to find ways to contain violence and self-govern—through energetic state governments and/or a more powerful federal government.