Post-Partisanship: The Twenty-First Century’s Political Red Herring

I read with great interest Kyle’s excellent post on partisanship wherein Kyle made some excellent points about the political process, its strengths and its faults. In that post, Kyle talked about his hopes around the election of Barack Obama saying,

I too am a partisan, and on rare occasions I could be viciously so.  But at the same time my approach to politics would suggest an eagerness for post partisanship that is echoed by my long time support of the newly minted President of the United States.  I am a lefty, but for two years I have been a staunch supporter of the single candidate who succeeded most in making post-partisanship one of the defining themes of his campaign.

Admittedly, I too was drawn in by Obama’s talk of post-partisanship, it formed much of my basis for support early on. But further consideration of a variety of issues and the future of political discourse in general has left me somewhat doubtful about post-partisanship as a likely phenomenon.

When we talk about post-partisanship, the indication is that we’re talking about a point in time at which we’ll get beyond partisanship. The problem here is that partisanship isn’t a temporally located phenomenon. Granted, various ideologies arise in specific time periods and may or may not undergo a process of evolution, but the perspectival interrelationships of those ideologies that give rise to a partisanship persist so long as there are contrasting points of view available. In other words, so long as there are different perspectives that people can take on a variety of issues and so long as those perspectives are roughly represented by some kind of ideological housing, we are likely to see the rise of partisanship. Given that it seems highly unlikely that all of the disagreements we have in the process of perpetuating political discourse will evaporate, it begins to look increasingly likely that post-partisanship is a conceptual misnomer.

One step further, as Kyle points out, we actually benefit from having contrasting points of view expressed on various topics. The veracity of our decisions is greatly bolstered when we’ve had a healthy debate on the issue at hand in which people of contrasting points of view have challenged one another on the strengths and weaknesses of each others’ claims. How else are we  to identify ideological blind spots and uncover previously unnoticed implications from various ideas? It seems fairly clear from the functioning of most modern polities that sincere and passionate debate is an intrinsic ingredient to the health of democracy.

And yet, one can’t escape the feeling that something is amiss in our political discourse. Moreover, much of the stagnation of government actually demonstrably belies the accuracy of that feeling. But if post-partisanship is a misnomer, then what is it we seek to remedy our perceived failings?

I would suggest that rather than post-partisanship, what we really seek is right relation of our partisan tendencies. Or, to put it as Kyle suggested, we seek some kind of guiding orientation towards the “good side of partisanship”, we want partisanship that works in a productive manner.

Right relationship of partisan tendencies is born out of a respect for the elements of an issue that a particular ideological perspective is best able to hit upon and articulate.  Liberals, conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all emphasize different elements of different issues precisely because there is generally something important about the element that each grasps on to as its “first principle” on that front. In the articulation of first principles; however, we often become so identified with our own particular articulation and, perhaps even more overtly, the group identity we take on and draw strength from in locating others who agree with us, that we generate rhetorical blinders to the elements of issue that other perspectives/ideologies identify and articulate. This calcification, it seems evident, can become so set in as to result in not just failing to notice the particular elements of an issue that ideologically opposed interlocutors point out, but rather denying the existence of those elements altogether.

What we seem to be fighting then, is the calcifying tendencies of partisanship. How we do that is not to strive towards some point in time where partisanship no longer exists, but rather to cultivate a greater dexterity in our partisan maneuvering. Which is to say that right relationship of partisanship requires participants who not only steel against the calcification of their own necessarily perspectival take on a particular issue, but who also consciously seek out the articulation of other perspectives and then apply a certain adeptness at “seeing” what those articulations are describing. In other words, right relationship of partisanship is an orienting political disposition that seeks to utilize the differing perspectives of as many different ideologies as possible to get the most comprehensive picture of a given issue possible.

Now, of course, there arises the question about whose take on a particular issues highlights the most salient elements, and thus can be considered the most correct (allowing that each perspective hits upon some valuable element of the issue at hand). Given that we don’t have some sort of removed omnipresent political being to settle these sorts of questions for us, we rely again on the good faith debate that ensues as each political participant seeks to find the right relationship of partisanship on the particular issue. Which is to say that we battle it out in good old fashioned terms, which helps to elucidate why notions of post-partisanship are unhelpful — if we have no partisanship we lose an important element of the determination process on our various truth claims.

The most important component of that debate, at least in my mind, is the quality of it being in good faith. That is to say that the debate has to happen with a modicum of respect underwriting the whole endeavour. This, I think, is where we start to really drill down on the challenges we currently face. Not only do we tend to calcify into our preferred ideological corners, but as we do we cease to acknowledge the subjective components our own perspective on the world that lead us to those corners. We reify our ideologies and take them to be unassailably correct in all ways and means, objectively, and so cease to put forward ideas for discussion and rather assume the ideas we hold to already be true and set out in search of facts to back those ideas up. Anyone who seeks differing facts is therefore out of touch with reality and deserving of derision. We lack respect for one another’s perspectives because we’ve forgotten what our postmodern friends worked so hard to show us: they are perspectives. We also conveniently assume that there are objective facts that will back up our claims, forgetting that often times the “facts” are actually quite contradictory and their efficacy depend greatly on how we choose to interpret them, or if we choose to acknowledge the at all (that “fact” doesn’t back up my claim so it must not be true, ergo not a fact, ergo not really real).

But if we bear in mind what many identify as the key postmodern insight — that we inevitably take a particular perspective on the world — then we are able to cultivate a certain looseness to our own belief systems and offer a greater degree of respect to our interlocutors and engage in a debate that seeks to use the vantage points of other’s perspectives to better inform our own limited, but valuable take on things. We must, as Freddie warns, save ourselves from “men who know everything”, most notably when those men/women are ourselves.

In this way I’m not necessarily slipping into some kind of relativistic malaise where everything is simply a case of personal preference. Rather, I’m acknowledging that we only ever have access in a first-hand way to our own perspective on an issue and must communicate with others to gain at least a conceptual — and in some cases emotional — understanding that pushes beyond the walls of our own experience. We better enable ourselves to do this by embracing a respect for the elements of an issue that our so-called opponents present (and thereby our opponents themselves, insofar as we tend to co-identify our opponents and their ideas/perspectives), which means a certain dexterity as regards our own perspectives and the articulation of other perspectives and what they reveal.

Elusive as the above described process might seem, it strikes me as eminently more practical than the utopian ideal of post-partisanship. And insofar as post-partisanship often euphemistically translates into, “At some point everyone who disagrees with me will realize they’re wrong and we can all finally get along,” I am inclined to see such efforts not just as lacking practicality, but swerving into some kind of sugar-coated fascism.

So throw that red herring to the side and let’s duke it out like old friends do.

Tagged as: dexterity, partisanship, perspectives, post-partianship, postmodernism, respect, right relation