The other day I spotted an arresting bumper sticker: "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for the Other Guy." Unlike so many similar decals, it bore no hint of which "other guy" was under discussion. Just blue words on a plain white background. The driver might have been a Republican angry at Barack Obama, but the sticker was so weathered that she might just as well have been a Democrat angry at George W. Bush. Or the message might have been generic, like the fan who wears both teams' colors to the big game, intended to cover all contingencies. Whatever the driver intended to convey, the effect was to remind me of how frustrated we children were by our father's refusal to allow bumper stickers on the family car--and why, looking back, he might have had a point.
Think about how a bumper sticker works. Through the words plastered on the back of the car, the driver in front proclaims that she has been places I haven't, that his child has done things mine hasn't, that her religion is better than mine, that his atheism is better than my religion, that she loves--sorry, that she hearts--her team.
The trouble arises when the bumper sticker offers a message about politics. Sometimes the messages are clever, whether or not one shares the sentiment (one that sticks in my mind is "I'll Keep My Laws Off Your Body If You'll Keep Your Laws Off My Money") but more often they run toward solemn silliness ("U.S. Supreme Koch," for example). But, clever or silly, the assertion is squeezed into a space so small that it cannot possibly offer an actual argument.
The biggest problem with bumper stickers is that they're . . . well . . . bumper stickers. They're affixed to the rear of the car. The driver wants to force his views upon me, but is determinedly uninterested in mine.
The electoral bumper sticker was popularized in the years after World War II, when the draft-Eisenhower movement began distributing "I like Ike" stickers.
The Democrats came late to this discovery--or at least couldn't figure out how to use it. Adlai Stevenson's 1956 campaign tried a sticker that imposed "I've switched to Adlai" over "I like Ike," but it was so poorly designed as to be almost unintelligible.
By the 1960s bumper stickers were everywhere. Here as in so many areas, my brothers and sisters and I longed to be like everyone else. Dad disagreed. As the years went by, he offered reasons. Bumper stickers debased not only the car but democracy as well. They presupposed that the issues of the day, in all of their complexity, could be reduced to a few cleverly chosen words. In that direction, he said when I was a teenager, lay fascism. It took me decades to understand what he meant.
Nowadays, the function that was previously served by bumper stickers has arguably moved online. At least with Twitter and Facebook, one can try to argue back. But only a little. More and more of our politics is dominated by the tools of emotion and slogan. Fewer and fewer of us seem to care what others think. Which is another way of saying that maybe Dad was right all along.
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Stephen Carter is a Bloomberg News columnist and a law professor at Yale.
Editorial on 05/26/2015