"But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism"
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Presidential approval isn’t just a mood ring for policy success; Mann is pointing to how it gets conscripted into moral theater. In the era he’s writing about - post-Watergate distrust, the rise of nonstop polling, and the modern presidency as a permanent media spectacle - a percentage point on Gallup starts doing double duty. It measures sentiment, sure. It also becomes a loyalty test.
The key word is “surrogate.” It implies substitution: something easier to count takes the place of something harder to sustain. National unity is messy, plural, often conflictual. Patriotism is historically contested and frequently weaponized. Approval ratings offer a clean, headline-friendly proxy that flattens those complexities into a single number that can be praised, shamed, or spun. In that logic, dissent can be rebranded as disunity, and disunity as insufficient love of country.
Mann’s sociologist’s eye is on the social function of the metric, not just the metric itself. Approval becomes a cultural instrument: politicians invoke it to claim a mandate, media treat it as a scoreboard, and citizens are nudged to interpret their political identity through it. The subtext is slightly accusatory: the public and institutions collaborate in outsourcing civic meaning to quantification. It’s not that unity and patriotism can’t be real; it’s that modern political life increasingly demands a visible, numeric performance of them, especially in crises when “rally” effects blur critique into taboo. The number doesn’t merely report the nation’s temperature; it helps set it.
The key word is “surrogate.” It implies substitution: something easier to count takes the place of something harder to sustain. National unity is messy, plural, often conflictual. Patriotism is historically contested and frequently weaponized. Approval ratings offer a clean, headline-friendly proxy that flattens those complexities into a single number that can be praised, shamed, or spun. In that logic, dissent can be rebranded as disunity, and disunity as insufficient love of country.
Mann’s sociologist’s eye is on the social function of the metric, not just the metric itself. Approval becomes a cultural instrument: politicians invoke it to claim a mandate, media treat it as a scoreboard, and citizens are nudged to interpret their political identity through it. The subtext is slightly accusatory: the public and institutions collaborate in outsourcing civic meaning to quantification. It’s not that unity and patriotism can’t be real; it’s that modern political life increasingly demands a visible, numeric performance of them, especially in crises when “rally” effects blur critique into taboo. The number doesn’t merely report the nation’s temperature; it helps set it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Pride |
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