The Malevolent Leaders
POLITICAL CULTURES
Aaron Wildavsky, Series Editor
Political cultures broadly describe people who share values, beliefs, and preferences legitimating different ways of life. This series will be distinguished by its openness to a variety of approaches to the study of political cultures; any defensible comparison, definition, and research method will be considered. The goal of this series is to advance the study of political cultures conceived generally as rival modes of organizing political and social life.
A single set of common concerns will be addressed by all authors in the series: what values are shared, what sorts of social relations are preferred, what kinds of beliefs are involved, and what the political implications of these values, beliefs, and relations are. Beyond that, the focal points of the studies are open and may compare cultures within a country or among different countries, including or excluding the United States.
Books in the Series
The Malevolent Leaders: Popular Discontent in America
Stephen C. Craig
Handling Frozen Fire
Rob Hoppe and Aat Peterse
The American Mosaic: The Impact of Space, Time, and Culture on American Politics
Daniel J. Elazar
Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty
Godfried Engbersen, Kees Schuyt, Jaap Timmer, and Frans Van Waarden
Culture and Currency: Cultural Bias in Monetary Theory and Policy
John W. Houghton
A Genealogy of Political Culture
Michael E. Brinta
Cultural Theory
Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky
District Leaders: A Political Ethnography
Rachel Sady
FORTHCOMING
Politics, Policy; and Culture: Applying Grid Group Analysis
edited by Dennis J. Coyle and Richard J. Ellis
First published 1993 by Westview Press
Published 2019 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Craig, Stephen C.
The malevolent leaders : popular discontent in America / Stephen C. Craig
p. cm. (Political cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political participationUnited States. 2. Political culture
United States. 3. United StatesPolitics and
government19451989. 4. Political leadershipunited States
Public opinion. 5. Public opinion-United States. I. Title.
II. Series.
IK1764.C7 1993
320.973dc20
93-19807
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29372-7 (hbk)
For Kathryn
Being a political scientist is not nearly as disreputable these days as being a politician, but it does make some people wonder. When new acquaintances learn that I am a university professor, they often are impressed; upon being told what it is that I teach, their reactions tend to be quite different: Oh, really? (as though I must be joking) or maybe Yecchh! I cant stand politics (implying some basic flaw in my own character for being even indirectly associated with such nasty business). Others mutter something unintelligible and try very hard to avoid further eye contact. The truth is that, unlike many of my colleagues, I did not choose to study politics because of a desire to join the world of academia. Instead, I did so mainly as a result of my fascination with the nature of political competition itself. The give-and-take among candidates at election time, the debates over rules of procedure, the public and private maneuverings among interested parties when policy options are discussedfinding out that I could forge a career out of observing, teaching, and writing about these things was a revelation.
As it happens, my earliest political memory is of my father teasing my mother about her supposed intention (which she steadfastly denied) to vote for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. Four years later, I sat with a seventh-grade classmate along the first-base line of old Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg listening to presidential candidate Richard Nixonand enjoying every minute of the experience, though I could not have understood a fraction of what he said. I watched people passing around the Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets (for donations) at a George Wallace rally in 1968 and stood for three hours waiting to see Bill Clinton and A1 Gore when they visited Gainesville in 1992 (my patience rewarded by the picture I was able to snap of Hillary Clinton holding my one-year-old daughter, Kathryn; unfortunately, because the young man in front of me declined to move his head, friends and family will have take my word for it that the child in question is who I say it is). Because of my role as coordinator of the University of Floridas graduate program in Political Campaigning, election night at the Craig home has become something of a traditiona cacophony of sights, sounds, flavors (dinner is potluck), and emotions (the gatherings are necessarily bipartisan). I am no longer willing to stay up until dawn to learn the outcome of key races, but sleep always comes slowly after all the excitement. My wife and I talk about many things over the course of a day, and politics is invariably one of them. Politics, not policy. I have strong views on most issues, but it is process rather than substance that has interested me since I was a child. Although there is a smile on my face when I describe politics as a spectator sport, I am not exactly joking. Film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have their guilty pleasures (including, for Ebert, I believe, the original Emmanuel ), and I have mine. It is politics.
This is not the sort of thing one readily admits in polite company today. Having witnessed and, in a limited way, experienced personally three of the most dramatic upheavals of any era (the civil rights movement in the South, Vietnam, and Watergate) during my adolescent and early adult years, I come by my interest in politics more or less as generational theorists suggest that I should. But many Americans responded altogether differently to these and subsequent events. They became angry with their elected leaders, frustrated with an electoral process that no longer provided accountability, and increasingly concerned about what the future might hold for themselves and for their children. In fact, I am angry, toobut I also believe that the general public must shoulder at least part of the blame for what has happened and that in the end it is we who are ultimately responsible for our own fate. Too many citizens see politics only as a spectator sport or, even worse, as something akin to a carnival freak show whose unwholesome allures are to be resisted by anyone wishing to maintain his or her self-respect. Yet, however little we may think of the job our politicians have been doing lately, change is unlikely without a strong push from below. Apathy, indifference, and an unfocused disdain for all things political accomplishes nothing.
