4. The Displacement of Conflicts

This chapter is in 「Schattschneider, E.E., 1960. The semi-sovereign people. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.」

 

WHAT happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes, etc. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position. The proposition may be illustrated by a simple diagram:

In this figure, the circle represents the political universe and the lines AB and CD are two possible lines of cleavage, among an infinite number of possibilities. The cleavages shown in the figure are completely inconsistent with each other; that is, a shift from one to the other involves a total reorganization of political alignments. Not only is the composition of each side changed as a result of the shift, but the conflict in the CD alignment is necessarily about something different from the conflict in the AB alignment, and the outcome of the conflict is therefore different. The political universe remains the same in spite of the shift, but what people can do and what they cannot do depends on how they are divided. Every shift of the line of cleavage affects the nature of the conflict, produces a new set of winners and losers and a new kind of result. Thus a change in the direction and location of the line of cleavage will determine the place of each individual in the political system, what side he is on, who else is on his side, who is opposed to him, how large the opposing sides are, what the conflict is about, and who wins. Since this is the process by which majorities and minorities are made, it may be said that every change in the direction and location of the line of cleavage produces a new majority and a new allocation of power.

 

The reader may want to amuse himself by playing with the idea outlined in the foregoing paragraph. Let us take an imaginary electorate and divide it in a number of different ways as follows:

It is obvious that the meaning of the contest and the allocation of power will be different in each of the four cases illustrated, even though the electorate remains the same. This is true because to a greater or lesser degree the antagonists change with every change in the cleavage. The impact of any change in the lines of cleavage can be better understood if we take a closer look at what happens to the political universe when it is divided by a conflict. What are the preconditions for the development of a conflict? The evolution of a major conflict (important enough to call for a mobilization of opposing forces) involves an effort to consolidate people on both sides. Thus the conflict along the line XY in the figure below implies that an attempt is going to be made to unify the individuals in the area. marked Aa against the individuals located in the area Bb. That is, a conflict presupposes the mobilization of people on both sides of the line of cleavage.

This is true because no conflict that amounts to more than a brawl can develop without a consolidation of the support of the opposing factions. It follows that conflicts divide people and unite them at the same time, and the process of consolidation is as integral to conflict as the process of division. The more fully the conflict is developed, the more intense it becomes, the more complete is the consolidation of the opposing camps. The failure to understand that unification and division are a part of the same process has produced some illusions about politics.

It follows from the foregoing analysis that political cleavages are extremely likely to be incompatible with each other. That is, the development of one conflict may inhibit the development of another because a radical shift of alignment becomes possible only at the cost of a change in the relations and priorities of all of the contestants.

A shift from the alignment AB to the alignment CD means that the old cleavage must be played down if the new conflict is to be exploited. In this process friends become enemies and enemies become friends in a general reshuffle of relations. The new conflict can become dominant only if the old one is subordinated, or obscured, or forgotten, or loses its capacity to excite the contestants, or becomes irrelevant. Since it is impossible to keep the old and cultivate the new at the same time, people must choose among conflicts. In other words, conflicts compete with each other.

 

If the foregoing analysis is a good one, our concept of the nature of conflict must be reconsidered.

In the next figure, the real conflict may not be what it seems to be (a conflict between black and white along the line AB) but a conflict between the people who want to maintain the AB alignment and the relatively invisible people who want to start a new fight by shifting the cleavage from AB to CD of EF or GH. The motivations of people who want to bring about these shifts of alignment are not difficult to understand because each new cleavage produces a new allocation of power. The whites who are in power have more reason for supporting the old alignment than the blacks who are hopelessly out of power.

The calculus of politics becomes vastly more complex and the potentialities are multiplied tremendously when we move from the frontal attack of the whites on the blacks to flank attacks designed to bring about a substitution of a new conflict for the old one. The flank attack produces a conflict of conflicts in which an attempt is made to displace the AB alignment by another.

There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, but only a few become significant. The reduction of the number of conflicts is an essential part of politics. Politics deals with the domination and subordination of conflicts. A democratic society is able to survive because it manages conflict by establishing priorities among a multitude of potential conflicts.

Any political system which attempted to exploit all of the tensions in the community would be blown to bits. On the other hand, every combination involves the dominance of some conflicts and the subordination of others. Politics deals with the effort to use conflict. Every political party consists of discordant elements which are restrained by the fact that unity is the price of victory. The question always is: Which battle do we want most to win?

 

Since politics has its origin in strife, political strategy deals with the exploitation, use, and suppression of conflict. Conflict is so powerful an instrument of politics that all regimes are of necessity concerned with its management, with its use in governing, and with its effectiveness as an instrument of change, growth, and unity. The grand strategy of politics deals with public policy concerning conflict. This is the ultimate policy.

 

The most powerful instrument for the control of conflict is conflict itself. A generation ago E. A. Ross, a distinguished American sociologist, pointed out that conflicts tend to interfere with each other and that the very multiplicity of cleavages in a modern community tends to temper the severity of social antagonisms.

 

The unstated assumption made by Professor Ross is that there is a kind of equality of conflicts. If this assumption were correct the rise of a multitude of inconsistent conflicts would tend to weaken all antagonisms in the community, producing a system of low-grade tensions. Is this assumption a reasonable one?

 

It is not much more reasonable to suppose that conflicts are of unequal intensity? Why should we assume that people are equally excited about all issues? On the other hand, what are the logical consequences of the inequality of conflicts? It seems reasonable to suppose that the more intense conflicts are likely to displace the less intense. What follows is a system of domination and subordination of conflicts. Therefore, every major conflict overwhelms, subordinates, and blots out a multitude of lesser ones.

 

The greatest hazard to any faction is not a frontal attack by the opposition but a flank attack by bigger, collateral, inconsistent, and irrelevant competitors for the attention and loyalty of the public. If there are degrees of intensity, the more intense will become dominant. The result is a reduction in the number of conflicts that can develop. The process is not to divide and divide and divide to infinity but to divide and unify as a part of the same process. For this reason it is probable that there exist a great number of potential conflicts in the community which cannot be developed because they are blotted out by stronger systems of antagonism. Thus the unequal intensity of conflicts determines the shape of the political system.

 

In the competition of conflicts there is nothing sacred about our preference for big or little conflicts. All depends on what we want most. The outcome is not determined merely by what people want but by their priorities. What they want more becomes the enemy of what they want less.

 

Politics is therefore something like choosing a wife, rather than shopping in a five-and-ten-cent store.

The conflict of conflicts explains some things about politics that have long puzzled scholars. Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition. He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates power. It follows that all conflict is confusing.

 

Historians describing armed conflict refer to this confusion as the "fog of war." A description of the battle of Get tysburg by Frank Aretas Haskell, a young officer attached to the staff of General Hancock, illustrates the point.

 

The wildest confusion for a few minutes obtained sway among us. The shells came bursting all about. The servants ran terror-stricken for dear life and disappeared. The horses, hitched to the trees or held by the slack hands of orderlies, neighed out in fright, and broke away and plunged riderless through the fields. The General at the first had snatched his sword, and started on foot for the front. I called for my horse; nobody responded. I had time to see one of the horses of our mess wagon struck and torn by a shell. The pair plunge the driver has lost the reins-horses, driver and wagon go into a heap by a tree. Two mules close at hand, packed with boxes of ammunition, are knocked all to pieces by a shell. General Gibbon's groom has just mounted his horse and is starting to take the General's horse to him, when the flying iron meets him and tears open his breast. He drops dead and the horses gallop away.. No more than a minute since the first shot was fired, and I am mounted and riding after the General. The mighty din now rises to heaven and shakes the earth. How the long streams of fire spout from the guns, how the rifled shells hiss, how the smoke deepens and rolls, but where is the infantry? Has it vanished in smoke? Is this a nightmare or a juggler's trick?... Who can describe such a conflict as is raging around us?

 

If Haskell had been a political scientist he might have written a book to prove that Gettysburg was a sham battle because the lines were not neatly drawn.

 

The fog of political conflict is as impenetrable as the fog of war. Political conflicts are waged by coalitions of inferior interests held together by a dominant interest. The effort in all political struggle is to exploit cracks in the opposition while attempting to consolidate one's own side. Inevitably this results in many people saying many different things simultaneously.

 

One might match Haskell's account of the Battle of Gettysburg with Morton M. Hunt's account of the election of 1856, a truly fateful year in the history of American politics.

 

The political situation as it appeared after the conventions, was supremely illogical. The Democrats approved of slavery and applauded the conduct of Representative Brooks and the Border Ruffians, and at the same time they denounced the Republicans for promoting religious intolerance and xenophobia. The Republicans, liberal though they were, were working with the Northern KnowNothings. The regular Know-Nothing candidate, Fillmore, was damned in the South as an Abolitionist and was damned in the North for accepting as his running mate Andrew J. (Hundred-Nigger) Donelson, a Southern planter who boasted of owning a hundred slaves. The Democrats charged the Republicans with being Abolitionists, but William Lloyd Garrison angrily declared that the Republican platform was a sellout to slavery, and his Abolitionist Party ran its own hopeless campaign. The Irish and the Germans were equally new to the country, and were equally detested by the Know-Nothings, but all the former became Democrats and almost all the latter became Republicans. Quite a few Know-Nothings in New York, adhering to the Fillmore cause, managed to be simultaneously anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner, anti-Republican, anti-Border Ruffian, and anti-Bully Brooks; if they were for anything, no one knew what it was. And not only was the situation supremely illogical; it was supremely perilous for the country.

 

All politics deals with the displacement of conflicts or efforts to resist the displacement of conflicts. The substitution of conflicts looks like an argument about what the argument is about, but politicians are not as confused as they seem to be.

 

If we must talk about politics in terms of conflict of interests, the least we might do is to stop talking about interests as if they were free and equal. We need to discover the hierarchies of unequal interests, of dominant and subordinate interests.

 

The crucial problem in politics is the management of conflict. No regime could endure which did not cope with this problem. All politics, all leadership, and all organization involves the management of conflict. All conflict allocates space in the political universe. The consequences of conflict are so important that it is inconceivable that any regime could survive without making an attempt to shape the system.

 

Americans hold more elections than all the rest of the world put together, but there must be millions of issues on which we cannot vote, or we cannot vote on them when we want to vote on them, or we cannot define them as we want to. A conclusive way of checking the rise of conflict is simply to provide no arena for it or to create no public agency with power to do anything about it. There are an incredible number of devices for checking the development of conflict within the system. Sectionalism is a device for submerging a whole order of conflicts. All legislative procedure is loaded with devices for controlling the flow of explosive materials into the governmental apparatus. All forms of political organization have a bias in favor of the exploitation of some kinds of conflict and the suppression of others because organization is the mobilization of bias. Some issues are organized into politics while others are organized out.

 

Perhaps it would not be an overstatement to say that there are Republican and Democratic concepts of political organization. The Democratic party tends to be proparty, while the Republican party tends to be antiparty. Much of the controversy about the future of the party system stems from the prevalence of partisan differences of opinion about purposes of political organization. This is not evidence of the meaninglessness of party politics but of its importance, for people do not invent competing theories of organization and strategy about unimportant things. In other words, the quarrel is as apt to be about the means as about the ends of politics.

 

The very fact that politics deals largely with procedure rather than substance (with power, institutions, concepts of organization, rights, and government, none of which is an end in itself) demonstrates its strategic character. We get confused about the meaning of politics because we underestimate the importance of strategy.

 

One difficulty scholars have experienced in interpreting American politics has always been that the grand strategy of politics has concerned itself first of all with the structure of institutions. The function of institutions is to channel conflict; institutions do not treat all forms of conflict impartially, just as football rules do not treat all forms of violence with indiscriminate equality.

 

Nobody knows what American politics would be like if we had the institutions to facilitate the development of a wider span of political competition. No matter what we do about the problem, however, it is unlikely that we shall ever become hospitable to all conflict, for the function of institutions is to discriminate among conflicts.

 

There is no more certain way to destroy the meaning of politics than to treat all issues as if they were free and equal. The inequality of issues simplifies the interpretation of politics. Politics becomes meaningful when we establish our priorities.

 

Since the displacement of conflicts is a prime instrument of political strategy, what are the potentials of the strategy? What are some of the raw materials of the strategy of displacement? An enumeration of some of the incompatible conflicts in modern politics may show how the substitution of issues works.

 

The use of racial antagonism by southern conservatives to keep poor whites in line or the use of a sharply sectional alignment to destroy the radical agrarian movement in the 1890s illustrates the uses to which the strategy can be put. The revival of sectional antagonism was used to drive a wedge between the western and southern branches of the Populist movement, to consolidate the sectional monopoly of the southern Bourbons. At the same time it enabled the right wing of the Republican party to make itself supreme in the North and West. More recently the nationalization of politics has been used to subordinate older sectional cleavages to a new nationwide division. Urban-rural conflict has been used to check the political success of the labor movment, McCarthyism has been used to destroy a variety of liberal causes, and the religious issue has been used to confuse a great variety of other causes. Classical instances are the conflict between international class war and nationalism, the Marxian attempt to subordinate all other conflict to class war, totalitarianism, the primacy of foreign policy, and the use of war to subordinate revolutionary movements. In the United States there has been a long history of attempts to substitute procedural conflict for substantive conflict and attempts to subordinate political conflict to nonpolitical, nonpartisan movements (i.e., to subordinate avowed conflicts to unavowed conflicts).

 

In all of these instances the effect of the substitution of conflicts has been much the same as if some of the troops in a battle were to be wheeled about at right angles to their old positions to join some of their recent enemies in an attack on their former comrades in arms who had meanwhile joined forces with other segments of the enemy. Commanders who are not agile when this happens are likely to be left in possession of deserted battlefields. The substitution of conflicts is the most devastating kind of political strategy. Alliances are formed and re-formed; fortresses, positions, alignments and combinations are destroyed or abandoned in a tremendous shuffle of forces redeployed to defend new positions or to take new strong points. In politics the most catastrophic force in the world is the power of irrelevance which transmutes one conflict into another and turns all existing alignments inside out.

 

In view of this analysis, the most obvious thing in the world is the fact that an issue does not become an issue merely because someone says it is. The stakes in making an issue are incalculably great. Millions of attempts are made, but an issue is produced only when the battle is joined.

 

Why do some movements succeed and others fail? Why do some ideas gain currency and acceptance while others do not? Why do some conflicts become dominant while others attract no support?

 

Dominance is related to intensity and visibility, the capacity to blot out other issues. It is related also to the fact that some issues are able to relate themselves easily to clusters of parallel cleavages in the same general dimension. A successful alignment accumulates a tremendous body of hangerson. The question is: What other uses can be made of the power won by the dominant cleavage? Success depends also on the degree of dissatisfaction with the old alignment already in existence.

 

The number of the subordinated conflicts in any political system must always be great. Every cleavage works to the disadvantage of millions of people. All those whose claims have been subordinated have an interest in a new alignment. These are the restless elements. Hence the attempt to shift the direction of politics is never made in a vacuum.

 

Every defeated party, cause, or interest must decide whether or not it will continue to fight along the old lines or abandon the old fight and try to form a new combination. The danger is that diehard minorities which want to continue the old fights may simply freeze obsolete alignments and become permanently isolated minorities.

 

The majority is held together by the alignment around which it was formed. It has a vested interest in the old lineup in which it confronts familiar antagonists already well identified in old contests. A new alignment is likely to confuse the majority; new alignments are usually designed to exploit tensions within the majority. Hence the fight is apt to be between the interests that benefit by the maintenance of the old alignments and those demanding a new deal. The very fact no alignment and those demanding a new deal. The very fact that no alignment can satisfy all interests equally makes the political system dynamic.

 

Tension is universal in any system of majority rule. This is as true of the majority as of the minority. The party in power is involved in hazardous choices usually not fully consistent with its original mandate. The task tends to become impossible as the party becomes overcommitted with the passage of time. Moreover, no party in power is ever able to do with perfect freedom what is politically most advantageous. To understand the nature of party conflict it is necessary to consider the function of the cleavages exploited by the parties in their struggle for supremacy. Since the development of cleavages is a prime instrument of power, the party which is able to make its definition of the issues prevail is likely to take over the government.

 

For this reason there is always a large number of unavowed conflicts. Some conflicts cannot be exploited because they are inconsistent with the dominant conflicts. Some controversies must be subordinated by both parties because neither side could survive the ensuing struggle. The conflict between the few and the many (the rich and the poor) is built into the American system, but no party could afford to espouse openly the cause of the few against the many. Democracy itself is the overriding issue in American politics, but it is impossible to take an openly antidemocratic position and survive. Neither of the major parties could afford to be proor anti-Catholic, prosegregation, or anti-immigrant, or come out for aboliton of the income tax or repeal of the social security system. There is a perpetual effort of the parties to isolate each other. To say it crudely, all radical proposals for the reorganization of American politics propose to isolate the rich. The parties cannot agree about these things because the schemes of one are the ruination of the other.

 

The parties may agree for reasons that are wholly inconsistent and contradictory. A conservative party may be willing to make concessions as the price of victory, whereas a liberal party may moderate its demands in order to widen its appeal. The parties may therefore arrive at the center by different routes, but each is apt to distrust the motives of the other.

 

It is not meant to suggest here that party leaders are conscienceless men lacking in conviction and wiling to take any position likely to get them into power. All that is intended is that power is utterly implicated in the conflict, and the problem of political leaders is made difficult by the fact that power, like money, is multifunctional. The priorities of political leaders are never easy to establish because every position taken is apt to have consequences for all other positions, especially when the stake is control of the most powerful government in the world.