Perpetual Political War
by digby
The intersection of propaganda and creative culture has always been a centerpiece of political communication, from the branding of totalitarian regimes to the design legacy of the Works Progress Administration to Soviet animated propaganda. Now, from The Library of Congress — America’s most centralized collective memory — and Quirk Books comes Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election Art — a magnificent large-format volume of 100 tear-out, ready-to-frame political campaign posters from the Library of Congress archives, each contextualized by a short historical essay on the respective election, alongside its final electoral and popular vote statistics.
It’s interesting that Grant is depicted as a “working man” in that poster instead of a general, although he was both. You would have thought that his leadership was the big selling point but having Real American credentials has always been a big seller in our politics.
Brooks Gladstone does the preface and says something that rings very, very true:
The ultimate lesson of this collection is how choppy those waters are. Political art is nothing less than an illustration of the skirmishes and stalemates that created and continue to animate the American experiment. As you look at each poster and read about each campaign, it becomes increasingly clear that the tug of war over taxes and trade, the distribution of wealth and power, and the role of government itself, will never end.Every generation renews the battle and fights it again. And every time, political candidates borrow from past campaigns the lexicon of perpetual political war. It reverberates in the slogans and the speeches, the urgent need: for tax relief or social protections, for an active government or a dormant one, for war or peace, to stay the course or to change direction.
It’s taken me a long time to realize this. Progress is made, in fits and starts, but the fight is never over — especially in America which was founded on a particularly odious “Grand Bargain” that resulted in duelling cultures as much as political divisions. I suppose you could get depressed about that and bemoan the fact that your efforts haven’t resulted in the wholesale change you think they should, but I think it’s better to assume that as long as you keep fighting, the authoritarians and the plutocrats can’t ever entirely relax. That’s worth something. After all, as long as the fight continues, we can at least be sure they haven’t won it.
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