The Danger in Political Melodrama

Cue the script: Dark music builds and a familiar villain—perhaps Scandal’s _Daddy Pope or _Batman’s Joker—sneaks into our sights, lurking. We know he’s planning to hurt an innocent victim because he’s cruel and he’s done it before. Just as his evil plot is about to come together, a hero or heroine comes to the rescue. Perhaps it’s Olivia Pope—or Batman, or Jason Bourne. The story always has a happy ending because the virtuous victim is saved, evil is thwarted, and freedom is secured for the good guys.

Melodramatic stories saturate popular culture, but they are more than our guilty prime-time pleasures. They script much of our political discourse, and shape national debate on policy issues by drawing upon pop culture narratives to describe political events. There’s no harm in a little entertainment; these stories are often pleasurable, satisfying, and fun. Yet sometimes the theatrics can warp our politics to a dangerous degree, obscuring important nuances and transforming political debates into moralizing spectacles.

Those who use melodramatic political discourse—media outlets, political speechwriters, and campaign strategists—typically employ heightened emotions and moral absolutes like good and evil to interpret politics and make an impact on broad audiences. They specialize in characterizing regular people as villains, victims and heroes, often using this framework to make the claim that punishing the villain is the same as experiencing freedom. Political figures from across the ideological spectrum rely on melodrama to describe political life to their constituents. They position themselves as the gladiators, the heroes who quash evil and bring greater freedom to our injured nation.

Political figures from across the ideological spectrum rely on melodrama to describe political life to their constituents. They position themselves as the gladiators, the heroes who quash evil and bring greater freedom to our injured nation.

Ads from this midterm campaign season exemplify this tradition, wielding melodrama to project a candidate’s virtues and an opponent’s villainy. Negative ads are often the most reliant on melodrama; their hyperbolic descriptions paint the opposition as the incarnation of evil. Take Republican Scott Brown’s New Hampshire Senate campaign ad. Brown states that ISIS is “threatening to cause the collapse of our country” and he links this threat to his opponent Jean Shaheen by suggesting that she enables the terrorists.  The music swells as Brown positions himself as the hero who can save the country from both ISIS and Shaheen. Or we can look at this campaign ad from Democrat Mark Pryor’s bid for the Senate, which accuses his Arkansas opponent Tom Cotton of spreading Ebola and harming sick children for financial gain, while creepy, discordant music plays and shifty and unstable images appear in the background. Pryor’s ad implicitly suggests that he would save the victims of these acts, and save the nation from Cotton.

Other electoral ad campaigns cast the U.S. government in the role of the evil villain. Democrat Natalie Tennant, running for Senate in West Virginia, shuts down the White House electrical grid to save the people of her state from Washington’s nefarious plan to take away their jobs with environmental legislation. Will Brooke, a Republican Congressional primary candidate in Alabama, dramatically loads the Affordable Care Act onto a rifle target and proceeds to shoot through it with different guns. He is literally shooting a piece of democratically-created legislation to defend innocent Americans against its harmful content. His need to play the hero legitimizes a near-comical, yet chilling rhetorical violence. Not to be outdone, Montana Congressional Republican candidate Mark Rosendale shoots a drone out of the sky to defend his wounded fellow Montanans from a government that is “too big and too powerful.”

This turn to melodrama as campaign strategy is not new: one of the earliest and most iconic melodramatic ads was LBJ’s “Ice Cream” segment from the 1964 presidential race; it showed an adorable little girl licking an ice cream cone, while the voiceover described how Barry Goldwater would give her strontium-90 poisoning if he were elected.  But melodramatic political discourse has become increasingly common in the last decade.  It is perhaps the most popular (and certainly most attention-getting) form of campaign ads in the 2014 election season.

And yet, it can be problematic. Melodramatic political discourse often substitutes for nuanced discussions about a candidate’s position on complex political problems. Why have a serious debate about the role of drones in domestic surveillance when you can simply shoot one down with dramatic flair? In a crowded media field with little real or substantive debate of issues, melodramatic political discourse allows those in the driver’s seat of electoral campaigns to link their platforms to a storyline with a clear moral compass of good (their candidate, the nation) and evil (their opponent, the “government” they want to join). In melodrama, any action taken in the service of fighting villainy becomes legitimate.  Shoot the law with a rifle? Sure, if the law is an evil villain.  Shut down the electrical grid? A heroic act that will heal a political injury done to virtuous citizens.

In melodrama, any action taken in the service of fighting villainy becomes legitimate.  Shoot the law with a rifle? Sure, if the law is an evil villain.  Shut down the electrical grid? A heroic act that will heal a political injury done to virtuous citizens.

The most important question to ask is not why campaigns use melodrama. It’s why these are ads so effective. Melodramatic ads work because they turn complicated political problems into emotionally simplified moral stories that make it clear who the bad guy is—say, ISIS—and tell us that getting the bad guy makes us all more American. Turning a complex geopolitical problem like ISIS into a dramatic moral scenario of impending doom accomplishes two things. It validates our sense that politics is often a site of injustice. And it characterizes choosing the “right” candidate at election time as a way to solve that injustice. Melodrama gives people the illusion of greater agency in the political process because voters believe they’re striking a blow for the good guys.

Our current partisan political scene is rife with discomfiting moral complications about the use of state power and disorienting political shifts about America’s role on the world stage. In times of confusion and ambiguity, melodramas provide moral clarity and identify a singular problem that seems to be easily solved by heroic measures. They assure us that our nation (or congressional district) is a “good guy” and that we can solve any problem that injures our nation through dramatic action.

As it turns out, our 2014 Congressional show is a re-run. It’s true that today’s campaigns are increasingly narrated with predetermined melodramatic stories that use heightened drama and the promise of quick solutions to skirt real debate on complex political issues.  But the bigger concern is that since 1964, we voters have continued to tune in.

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Some might say: so what’s new about melodrama in politics? Fair enough. Now more than ever, melodrama is a very popular, and powerful, form of political discourse.  But it's one thing for this to be used in the largely binary world of electoral politics. But the use of melodrama extends far beyond campaigning into national policymaking, and that’s an even bigger risk. When candidates who use melodrama get elected, they’ve sold the voter on the promise of simple choices. When policymakers can’t deliver with dramatic results, the heroic costumes of their campaign ads fall away, revealing to all of us just how badly melodrama misconstrues the complex nature of democratic politics.

This melodramatic turn makes any number of policy issues harder to solve, because it not only weakens the political agency of citizens but also further fuels the people’s derision of national politics when their problems aren’t solved with rapid speed. The challenges our nation faces—climate change, domestic surveillance, affordable healthcare, terrorism, or any of the issues these campaign ads address—involve multiple stakeholders, complex trade-offs, and difficult compromises.  We need a political discourse that can address them without offering heroes to solve them for us.