Good Ole Joe Biden is coming to town here in Austin. The university responded in kind a couple of weeks ago by selling student tickets on a Tuesday morning. Tickets were projected to sell out quickly (by noon the day tickets went on sale, to be exact), so the university limited sales to two tickets per student. Lines were expected, so the university additionally advised students to come early to guarantee a ticket. I caught a wind of the upcoming hysteria that would be getting Joe Biden tickets through friends asking me whether I was planning to wait in one of the lines. They knew that I have a Leslie Knope level of love (…obsession?) for Joe Biden, and this love (obsession.) predated those Biden memes that started circling the internet and littering Facebook walls a couple of years ago. Asking whether I were planning to get tickets was more of a conversational formality that week if close friends wanted to more easily transition into a politically-oriented conversation. They knew I was going to see Biden, I knew I was going to see Biden, my friend Sarah knew, my mom knew, my thesis advisor knew, the local mailman knew, Greg from the grocery store knew, everyone knew. Certain truths are universal and on the day before tickets went on sale, the fact that I was going to see Biden when he comes to Austin was one of them. Yet, that Tuesday came and went, and I didn’t get a ticket.
Fast forward to last weekend when the Texas Tribune Festival (TribFest) was occurring in town. The Texas Tribune hosts an annual 3-day event that highlights current issues impacting the political, educational, economic, and environmental spheres of Texan and American life. TribFest panels local, state, and national politicians, media personnel, historians, political activists, etc. in order to best talk about these relevant issues. The keynote speaker that Friday night was Al Franken, a Democratic Senator for Minnesota and a former Saturday Night Live comedian. As anyone can expect, Franken garnered much attention and interest from TribFest participants.
I volunteered at the festival, and as a volunteer, I was able to listen to Franken’s interview. Earlier that Friday, someone asked me why I enjoyed attending TribFest so much when I was expressing my enthusiasm for this year’s lineup. I told them that the audience’s engagement with the panel made attending TribFest worthwhile, in comparison to just waiting for the Texas Tribune to release audio recordings and videos of the panels after they occurred. Between laughter and clapping and booing and cheering, a panel’s audience makes itself a part of the paneling experience, regardless of whether it should be or not.
Al Franken’s audience was no exception to this rule. The audience loudly laughed and cheered many times throughout the night, making their existence impossible to ignore. The audience latched onto every personal anecdote and funny quip Franken told, becoming more and more enthusiastic in their acceptance of Franken’s appearance at the festival. It almost slipped my mind how little real substance could be extracted from the interview that night. Reflecting on this point during his interview, I was reminded of a problem rampant in modern American politics that ultimately impacted my decision to not buy Joe Biden tickets. Americans celebritize their public officials, and they do so at their own peril.
I fall into this trap with Joe Biden. The man is downright charismatic, and although I can gush over him for days, I realize how dangerous it is to idolize someone who is supposed to be working for me in my best interest. By essentially celebritizing public officials, we take away responsibility for their actions. We begin to create unrealistic expectations for them and their sense or moral responsibility. They become angelic, or devilish—someone to love or to hate or to love to hate. They become characters in a show called the American government, and the audience, the American people, cherry pick their favorite characters, excusing certain actions because of their loyalty to the persona the character displays. Sometimes we forget that our elected officials are real people, and their actions have real consequences for real people when they make policy decisions, or even just simply stand in a public light. In economic analyses, winners and losers in policy decisions are often discussed, and the best, i.e. most efficient, policy option is the one that minimizes the amount of losers and their losses. While we may evaluate policy decisions based on a winners and losers analysis, it is easy to forget that our elected officials bare the responsibility for exacting the future of the losers, even at the gain of the winners, assuming the winners’ gain is efficient for society. Assuming that public officials pursue a policy decision that is adverse to the general welfare of the people, they equally might lose moral responsibility for exacting the undue future of the winners. Politicians’ policy actions might be justifiable in regards to their alternative actions, but they cannot be absolved purely of all moral responsibility. Celebritizing politicians attempts to achieve moral absolution by dehumanizing politicians as mere political personas and, more or less, realistic literary characters.
Politics is not a reality television show, and by making it one, politicians begin to adhere to a different moral code. The public evaluates their actions differently than they would a normal person. With the loss of a reasonable moral code, politicians also adopt skewed notions of adequate performance. Celebritizition corrupts how humans interact with each other and how they impose reasonable social and political norms onto each other. Celebritization is a corruption of what it means to be human and what it means to extend the categorization of humanity.
With this in mind, I reasoned that I should not celebritize Good Ole Joe, and because I felt like me personally standing in a line for hours on end just to see him in person would celebritize him, I convinced myself not to buy tickets. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to demand that Americans should do the same.