No, I Will Not Take Fries With That

So I’m pretty thoroughly on record around these parts as having a certain distaste for political labels and have a variety of arguments about why to mixed reviews. Over the past while I’ve essentially dropped the argument, seeing it as a losing battle and conceding that there are some useful applications of those labels. But the requests of commenter Michael Drew for some clarification around each of the contributors’ political identity has caused me to revive the topic in my own mind and prompted this post. Ostensibly, Michael (if I may call him by his first name alone) is challenging the site’s assertion that we have contributors from across the political spectrum. Admittedly, we are a little light on the liberal side of the street having lost Kyle Moore a few weeks back, but on the whole I would say that our claim remains true.

Michael has repeatedly called for some kind of bio that outlines each contributors’ political leanings, or at least a post by each contributor similar to the series in which E.D has offered a few posts working out the various kinks in the trajectory of his political identity. I have been toying with posting a similar piece and have written these types of posts before at my older digs, but upon reflection have decided to stick to my guns in telling Michael to read through my various posts if he wants to get a sense of where I stand politically. Michael’s complaint is that he doesn’t have time to read through all of my, let alone every contributors’, posts to get that sense and I don’t frankly begrudge him that response.

There are more than 500 posts on this site and it’s only been around since mid-January. We all lead busy lives and none of the contributors on this site derives a single penny from the writing we do at the League, we all have other full-time work that puts a roof over our heads and food on the table. On top of that, I have a wedding that I’m planning due in two months, have completely overhauled my diet such that it requires that 98% of my food be prepared from scratch, have just been pre-approved for a mortgage and will commence looking for a condo, do five yoga classes a week as a means of spiritual and physical exercise, participate in a healthy, happy, and rewarding relationship, and co-own a cat who is predisposed towards 3:00am meowing fits if she doesn’t get some attention from time to time. Some of the most prolific other contributors on this site also have children thrown into the mix. But we all make the time to write what we think are valuable and useful posts on this site not just because we love writing, but because we think doing so and being engaged in the political process and social dynamics is important.

We started this site not just out of a general dissatisfaction with solo-indie blogging, but also out of a particular dissatisfaction with one-off, news-cycle blogging. Our goal was to create a truly dynamic group site where the focus of the writing and the commenting was on ideas and the discussion itself; we wanted to attempt to elevate the overall quality of discussion taking place by consciously bypassing some of the common rhetorical trigger points and cues around political discourse. With the help of some very generous exposure from other bloggers and sites and a commentariat par excellence, we think we’ve managed to achieve that goal to some degree and are always looking for ways to improve upon what we have going here.

But the point here is that the cultivation of a satisfying, in-depth, and valuable political and cultural discourse takes time, effort and a willingnessy to look and talk beyond the easily used signifiers of such discourse. When someone tells me that they don’t have time to read my posts to find out where I stand on this or that issue and that I need to write a post that is solely dedicated to articulating my political identity, I can’t help but think that they aren’t really all that interested in exploring a topic with me or others on this site and are really just looking for some convenient short-hand to determine whether or not they think they’ll agree or disagree with me and how then they ought to approach my writing, or whether they ought to approach it at all. And I’m not saying that in taking that position Michael and any other of the people that choose to analyze politics in that fashion aren’t intelligent and thoughtful people, because I think that by and large, and certainly in the particular case of Michael so far as his comments reveal, they are intelligent and thoughtful people. But my increasing concern around political labels and my corresponding stridency around not providing that kind of definitive post is that this desire to use the political shorthand of labels is indicative of a larger and more troubling trend.

My fear is that we seem to want to receive our political discourse like we receive our McDonald’s: fast, in pretty packaging, and with little to no concern for the ingredients. It seems as though more and more we don’t engage in politics as much as we engage in McPolitics, generally supersized. And I actually think that beyond just being perhaps a cute and clever analogy, that the comparison goes much deeper than we might care to admit. Just as with McDonald’s in particular and fast food generally as compared to well-made and carefully chosen meals, McPolitics is a poor substitute for real political discourse — it provides little in the way of nourishment and only vaguely acts as a means of filling a void. In the case of fast food, that void is hunger and a Big Mac might abate your hunger quickly, but it does nothing in terms of providing your body with what it actually needs to function in any kind of healthy or sustainable fashion. In fact, over time a Big Mac diet will work against your general well-being and eventually cause a serious breakdown of your system.

So too with McPolitics, you might fill the information void that a certain degree of interesr highlights, but over time an unwillingness to slow down and actually take the time and apply the attention to a thoroughgoing political discourse, to explore a variety of issues with a variety of individuals without the assistance of label shorthand, seems to invariably lead to a aimilar kind of system breakdown. A committed, grounded, and time consuming practice of political discourse can, like the same kind of effort applied to one’s diet, accrue substantial benefits: a greater sense of investment in the political process and a greater ability to affect the outcome of that process, a more robust inclination towards community, an expanded sense of civic responsibility, a more profound notion of the roles and obligations of a citizen of a particular polity, and, frankly, a more intelligent and considered populace.

But, of course, we don’t realize any, or at least much of that when what we practice is McPolitics, which I would argue that we spend a inordinate preponderance of our time practicing. I mean, isn’t this precisely the ridiculousness about who is truly a conservative? Or, at least my mind, the converse ridiculousness about challenging who is truly a liberal. But perhaps more to the point, the kind of unhelpful partisanship that exhibits a paralyzing divisiveness as a feature rather than a bug of the political process that causes so many people to say, “I hate politics”, is perfectly endemic of how steeped we already are in McPolitics and how destructive it is and can be.

So clearly it is my belief that the practice of politics and political discourse broadly defined is something of importance, both in terms of what I’ve said here and in terms of my participation with this site. Now, perhaps I’m laying a bit much at my friend Michael Drew’s feet, and I would agree that in a certain regard I am because it isn’t the Michael Drew’s of the world that responsible for what I’ve described above.

But I use Michael Drew and his proclivity towards desiring the explicit articulation of political labels to suit his time constraints as a window into talking about those larger problems because I believe they are symptoms different in gradation, but born of the same underlying cause. And if we want to have a political discourse and process that benefits us, then we need to start addressing the our milder symptoms in order to cultivate the strength to take on the more severe ones.

Part of that involves committing ourselves to finding the time, focus, and energy to really participate in political discourse in a grounded and full-bodied kind of way. I remain convinced, both in theory and in regards to my own first hand efforts, that the potential upside is well worth the investment. So I while I guess I understand Michael’s request, he ought not to be surprised at my unwillingness to oblige. It would seem odd for me to seek to undermine the very project I write as a means of forwarding.

Tagged as: fast food, McDonald's, McPolitics, partisanship, political discourse, political labels