Stick to the Stuff You Know
“Stick to the Status Quo” is the iconic song that breaks out in the middle of a lunch at East High in the childhood Disney original movie, High School Musical. Prior to the song, the school is thrown for a loop when the head jock decides to audition for the musical because he has left his known place in the school’s social strata. People now feel as if they can disaffiliate from their stereotypical roles in their specified cliques. In the same way, there are rumors of the waning importance of partisanship in America today. Based on measurements of social cleavages, it seems that “there is no support for the thesis that social cleavages have declined in magnitude in U.S. presidential elections since 1960” (Brooks and Manza, 944-945).
Furthermore, it is vital to understand why people naturally organize themselves into certain groups before we can comprehend our special allegiance to them. Throughout the whole song the power of cliques in East High’s atmosphere is echoed by the way people from different groups stand up to express a characteristic that does not collide with their group’s ideals. A school nerd expresses her desire to “pop, lock, jam and break!” which is replied to by another nerd saying, “is that even legal?”. My point is, although they express different desires from their label in this song, they originally placed themselves into groups based on their stronger individual characteristics. In order to join a partisan group, individuals usually examine the parties’ political policies or that party’s administration management on all affairs while in office. In reality, people decide based upon an evaluation of the group’s beliefs and their stereotypical image of the group, and the way “people examine the fit between their self conceptions and what they take to be the social bases of the parties” (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 10).
Lastly, the students speak out against this overlap of cliques by bellowing out, “if you wanna be cool, follow one simple rule: don’t mess with the flow no,no. Stick to the status quo!” Only a few of the students cross the social boundaries while the rest remain within their cliques, therefore declaring stability for the majority over the social change for those few jocks, nerds and drama geeks. Likewise, the same stability is shown in partisanship. In the earlier years, people align themselves with a party and join the partisan group as they are going through major changes, but stability is reached in adulthood because “both stereotypes and self-conceptions tend to be stable” (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 11). Although party images do change, change in partisanship is gradual, which even the movie relates to because it takes three movies to express the full change of that particular group of jocks, drama geeks, and nerds. No matter what, people will “stick to the status quo” of their partisanship throughout their life.
