Signs and symbols are increasingly being wielded by politicians around the world in place of reasoned debate about serious issues
f one town could be emblematic of the vicissitudes of blue-collar life in America, Springfield, Ohio, might be as good a pick as any. At the heart of the midwest, Springfield’s prosperity was built on manufacturing and publishing. But its decline began early. The giant Crowell-Collier publishing plant closed on Christmas Eve 1956. Three decades later, in 1983,found that Springfield had lost more high-income earners and gained more low-income earners than any other metropolitan area in America.
The case of Springfield could have been an occasion for a fruitful debate about the policies and resources needed both to encourage economic growth and to absorb large numbers of outsiders; a debate about how to create decent jobs with decent wages and how to assuage pressures on social infrastructure. Instead, mainstream politicians and public figures have used it to sponsor sordid far-right conspiracy theories and urban myths, and to fuel racist hatred.
This is a characteristic not merely of American politics. As far as I know no British politician has accused asylum seekers of eating pets, but mainstream politicians routinely regurgitate far-right conspiracy theories such as “the great replacement” andSymbolism and signalling has always been part of politics. Today, though, it often seems as if it is politics
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