The Long Shadow of 90s Political Apathy

One of my favorite podcasts, Unclear and Present Danger hosted by Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz, recently featured a discussion of the 1996 film Mars Attacks! They discuss films from the 1990s with connections to the politics of the time, and mostly riff on their meaning rather than craft. Both hosts pointed out how that film reflected the deep distaste for politics in that era, an attitude that I too held back then.

There really was nothing more emblematic of the lowered political temperature of the time than the 1996 presidential election. Bob Dole was an old-school Kansas Republican, used to cutting deals in the Senate as opposed to Gingrich’s gang of arsonists in the House. Bill Clinton, bruised by early defeats in his presidency “triangulated” to support more conservative positions, such as limits on welfare and gay marriage. I had supported Clinton in 1992, but by this point I thought of him as a betrayer. Like a lot of Gen X guys with a cynical attitude towards politics, I voted third party in 1996.

My favorite TV show at the time agreed with me. On The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episode that year Homer is kidnapped by the aliens Kang and Kodos, as well as presidential candidates Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. Kang and Kodos come to earth disguised as the presidential candidates in a plot to take over the United States. In some of the best Simpsons writing ever, the candidates fail to act human at first, but then learn to mouth the usual platitudes on the stump. (“As a boy, I dreamed of being a baseball” still cracks me up.) Soon Kang and Kodos are forced to reveal their true selves, but they remind voters that they are their only choices, and when someone says “why not vote third party” the aliens reply “Go ahead, waste your vote!” which Ross Perot reacts to by punching through his straw boater. (That detail has always cracked me up.)

In the meantime Homer has accidentally jettisoned Dole and Clinton from the alien ship into space, killing them. As in Mars Attacks! when the aliens lay waste to Congress and kill the president, the death of America’s leaders is played for laughs. It is hard to imagine such a thing in today’s political climate, with its very real threats of violence. (For some reason the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was treated as an isolated incident, which it certainly was not!) In 1996 there was a very broad and non-partisan contempt for politics that mostly expressed itself in humor and grumbling. People did not want to start movements to fix things and they did not attach themselves to demagogic politicians, either. Mostly, they just wanted to be left alone.

I learned this the hard way at the time as a college student desperate to make a difference. I helped some friends start a progressive student group on campus, but it was extremely difficult to recruit members. Our peers were mostly looking forward to graduating and joining the booming 90s economy. We were all products of the Reagan Era, which meant most people just accepted supply side orthodoxy, union busting, and the destruction of the safety net, while those of us who didn’t just kind of ineffectually kicked around on the margins. I wanted to be an activist, but there were no avenues, which made it likelier for me to just write off mainstream politics. It should not surprise anyone to find out that I voted for Nader in 2000 with zero hesitation, and that the 1999 protests in Seattle at the WTO gave me some hope. (Of course, this style of protest ended up revealing itself to be…ineffectual kicking around.)

At the end of The Simpsons episode the titular family is laboring to build a space laser for their new alien overlords, who drive them with whips. When Marge complains Homer replies “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!” The point seems to be that participating in politics is pointless because both major parties are essentially the same, and both are malevolent. While there were real differences in the parties (just look at the Supreme Court nominees), in the 1990s post-Reagan neoliberal consensus, you had to squint a little to find them.

What’s interesting to me is the large number of people who still persist in this “both sides are the same and all politicians are bad” belief despite our current political polarization. I am not just talking about “culture war” issues either. Biden and Harris have joined workers on the picket line, Trump just did an interview with Musk where he fantasized about firing striking workers, for example. Of course, politics is more about narratives than it is about reality, and a large chunk of people formed their political narratives in the 1990s world of anti-politics expressed in Mars Attacks! and on The Simpsons. Old narratives really and truly die hard.

While this “both sides are the same and all politicians are liars” narrative may still result in apathy among these voters, others have used this narrative to support Donald Trump. While he enacts very conservative policies from abortion to corporate tax cuts, he has crafted an anti-politics persona that appeals to apathetic Gen Xers. In 2016, his message to these voters boiled down to: “Hate the political system? Good, I do too and I will burn it all down. You think all politicians are selfish liars? Unlike those other people I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.” I had a former friend in 2016 who expressed as much, saying that he didn’t really agree with many of Trump’s ideas but just wanted to “shake things up.” Hilary Clinton represented the maligned, MOR politics skewered on The Simpsons and a certain group of people got excited to be able to give it the middle finger.

Not all of the people my age clinging to the 90s apathy narrative will necessarily vote for Trump. Some won’t vote, some will go third party, and some will even vote for Harris but won’t do anything to push others to do the same. Something I am still trying to figure out is why all kinds of people from similar backgrounds to me are like this. They too are comfortably middle class, white, male, straight, and not facing any serious obstacles in their lives. They are angry at “the system” but seem totally fine with capitalism. “The system” works a lot better for them than it does for most people. I am not sure if this free-floating rage is just sublimated frustration about their own personal lives, fear that their privileges are being undermined, or if it represents the inherently unfulfilling nature of life in our consumerist society. The dynamic of political rage coming from those who are relatively privileged is something apparent in other countries, too. Figuring out how to channel that anger into a more productive direction is a key political issue of our time, one far more fraught than the mid-1990s.