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How do your characters vote politically?
It seems like a stupid question at first. "They're fictional characters...they don't vote!"
Well, yes and no. For most of us, our fictional characters are set in real-world scenario that involves politics and political views. Large portions of them are American citizens - off the top of my head: Jack O'Neill, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Cameron Mitchell, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Jennifer Keller, Walter, Chuck, Siler, Jethro Gibbs, Tony DiNozzo, Abby Sciuto, Tim McGee - now Ziva's an American citizen, with the right to vote.
And that's just three fandoms!
No, Americans don't have to vote the way we do in Australia...but if you're a thinking, intelligent human being - and if you want to argue any of the above being unintelligent, I have Mistah Steel Brick In A Sock waiting to meet your brain - then you have political opinions, even if you don't vote.
So which way do your favourite characters swing politically? What do they think of the vast range of political topics available for consideration and discussion? Have you ever thought about this?
It seems like a stupid question at first. "They're fictional characters...they don't vote!"
Well, yes and no. For most of us, our fictional characters are set in real-world scenario that involves politics and political views. Large portions of them are American citizens - off the top of my head: Jack O'Neill, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Cameron Mitchell, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Jennifer Keller, Walter, Chuck, Siler, Jethro Gibbs, Tony DiNozzo, Abby Sciuto, Tim McGee - now Ziva's an American citizen, with the right to vote.
And that's just three fandoms!
No, Americans don't have to vote the way we do in Australia...but if you're a thinking, intelligent human being - and if you want to argue any of the above being unintelligent, I have Mistah Steel Brick In A Sock waiting to meet your brain - then you have political opinions, even if you don't vote.
So which way do your favourite characters swing politically? What do they think of the vast range of political topics available for consideration and discussion? Have you ever thought about this?
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I'd argue that Gibbs, Jack, and Cam are very likely Republican. Which isn't to say a fanfic couldn't convince me otherwise, but overall they seem to fall more on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Sam, Sheppard, and DiNozzo are probably Republican too, though a case can be made that they arent: Sam being a woman who probably has more liberal tendencies, DiNozzo and Sheppard might vote Democrat in opposition to their more-than-likely Republican families. Daniel Jackson is very likely a Democrat, though in recent years he might have voted Republican since a Republican president would most likely give SGC more funding.
I think McKay is probably Liberal or NDP. I base this mostly on geography, because McKay is either from Vancouver (based on Jeannie's location) or Toronto (based on Hewlett's) and those cities are generally Liberal. Plus, he's from academia, which skews left.
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Sometimes it's interesting to imagine the non-Earth characters (or non-democracy characters, such as the Merlin crew) observing the voting process (in any country) and commenting on it.
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Cam Mitchell (male, Caucasian, military officer from a military family, from rural Kansas) would definitely be Republican, however.
Which isn't to say that they always vote that way, or that they agree with all the issues
ITA.
Ooh, here's a challenge for you, if you'd be interested in writing it: politics among the Athosians. How exactly did Teyla become leader? Is it a solely inherited position? Or did she still have to "campaign" or get voted in? Does she have a council?
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*Yes, until the 1960s, Republicans were generally better about race issues than Democrats. But that's not saying much.
Also, with American politics it can be important to know what branch of a party speaks to someone. We have only two major parties, but that doesn't mean we have any fewer political viewpoints/groups than other countries, just that the alliances between the different groups tend to be more entrenched than elsewhere. For instance, I am a Republican because I am fiscally conservative (i.e. don't spend money you don't have) and think small governments are better than big ones; there are certain things that must be done by government, but most things tend to be much better run if they are not done by government. I like small businesses and am leery of big corporations. There are a lot of Republicans like me. But there are also a lot of Republicans who don't really care much about small government or fiscal conservatism. There are Republicans whose main reason for voting Republican are the military and foreign policy. There are Republicans whose hot-button issue is the Moral Majority/Conservative Christian let's-legislate-morality-and-go-back-to-the-1950's thinking. (I am conservative, and a Christian, but I am emphatically not a Conservative Christian.) You get the idea.
It's got to be tough for an outsider to make sense of well enough to write. I mean, even in America there is a nasty tendency to view the other party (whichever one is opposite you, I mean) as one big stereotypical bunch of idiots marching along in lockstep, and ignoring things like the fact that the feminists, the Black Caucus, and the good-ole-boy Southern Democrats are members of the same party but extremely different.
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Oh wow, that is completely fascinating -- while I did know that the Republicans have historically been the progressive/anti-slavery/pro-civil rights party, I had absolutely no idea about the Civil War having had that effect. I'd always assumed the strong Republican association with the military was a much more recent thing. It is a good question, cause or effect ...!
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In the US, voting is *very* sensitive to religion and gay-friendliness, and becoming more so all the time. I think Sam Carter votes Dem, Daniel votes either Democratic or Green. Jack used to vote Republican, but now doesn't vote, he's met too many politicians to stand the smell of any of them.
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Region, yes; gay-friendliness, I'm not so sure about -- I think that whether or not that's a big issue for a significant number of voters probably depends on where you are. I mean, I can authoritatively say that in Alaska, it's not even on most people's radar (though it's a signficant issue in my own voting patterns, so individual exceptions, etc). The big issues that drive voting in this state are gun control and environmental issues (particularly those surrounding federal control of wild lands).
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The gay-friendliness thing can be *very* important if you're gay, or know you have gay friends.
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I think that's true across the board, though, right? People vote based on the issues that affect them most closely as individuals. Abortion is a huge voting issue for women and for religious people. Gun right/Second Amendment issues are one of the biggies in rural areas. In Alaska and some of the other Western states (Montana, Wyoming, places like that) federal control of lands, i.e. environmental conservation, is one of the big ones, but in urban areas and heavily urbanized states, it's hardly a make-it-or-break-it voting issue. I think gay rights are something that's newly come onto the landscape *as* a big issue in America (to join a small fleet of other big issues -- abortion, economics, war & defense, etc.) but I think it's a bit misleading to say that it's next to religion as the biggest on a national level.
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Again I'm going off personal anecdata here, which is, well, you know. But, for example, I'm close friends with a married couple who are queer on a couple of axes (bi and poly), and are firm, vocal supporters of gay rights and mildly to strongly liberal on most social issues. So you'd think they'd vote Democrat, right? Except they are also gun owners and their "make it or break it" issue happens to be the Second Amendment and gun control, which frequently leads them to vote for Republican candidates.
Soooo ... I'm really not trying to be argumentative here; I'm not saying that a fictional character being concerned with gay rights would necessarily jump out at me as automatic OOC-ness, but I do think that it often reads in fanfic as the author projecting their own politics onto the character. I think gay rights/gay-friendliness as a determiner of voting behavior is hugely important in some circles (it's certainly a big thing in the feminist/queer blogosphere, which is one of the reasons why I like it there *g*) -- but outside those demographics, not so much, and from inside, it's hard to see that the rest of the country doesn't view it likewise. Kind of like, say, gun rights/gun control are a huge thing in some demographics, but if you're living in a big city or a blue state, keeping the government's hands off your guns is probably not even in the top 20 things you're worried about.
Which is why I still think that "region" in your comment makes a lot of sense, misread or not. *g* I do think that viewing U.S. politics as a set of overlapping regional and subcultural demographics is more useful than trying to lump it all together into one bloc of voting behavior.
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Steve has always voted Republican -- at least, up till now.
Danny comes from a union family, and is a union man. He votes Democratic, now more than ever.
I don't know enough about how party politics plays out in Hawaii to be sure how Chin & Kono vote. If it correlates with national politics, Chin doesn't vote, Kono votes Democratic.
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