When the Political Becomes the Personal – Redux

The Character Argument

I have a bevvy of comments to my wrangling around beauty pageant politics to which I need and intend to attend. Of course, I’m not so superhuman as to be able to go through and respond to each and every comment that was left, but I thought there were some good points brought up that deserve further exploration.

One point that came up a couple of times was the role that character plays in our determination about how to approach an individuals’ bid for office. Now, I get how some folks would think that I was suggesting that character plays no role in cultivating a sound political analysis about how suitable an aspiring politician might be for an elected representative role when I said things like,

Watching Andrew’s efforts, one is compelled to conclude that in Andrew’s mind the focus of attention ought to be placed upon who Sarah Palin is and how the answers there attained render her unfit for office. This approach is deeply flawed on two counts.

One can read that to mean that I don’t think who Sarah Palin is has any bearing on what one ought to have thought of her candidacy of Vice President. But look,  a mere nine paragraphs later I also said,

I recognize that it is perhaps impossible to ask that beauty pageant politics be banished forever — who someone is has an undeniable influence in what they represent and how they are perceived. But those of us who believe there is a discussion of substance to be had about our current situations and proposed prescriptions ought at least spend as much of our time focused on that discussion as possible so as to balance the debate out to the best of our ability.

Obviously I was tilting in one direction heavily in this post, railing against what I take to be the over-prevalence of personality in our political discourse, but I think my closing comments make it clear that I don’t actually think that who someone is should or even can be jettisoned from our political discourse. The point I was trying to make is that those of us (and if you’re reading this, then I probably count you in the “us”) who are committed to a serious political and cultural discussion have some scales to tip back in the direction of relative balance.

It’s not so much that ideas must rule supreme, but rather that ideas ought to at least matter as much (if not more) than identity politics (in terms of individual rather than collective identities). Andrew’s response itself said,

The problem with Palin is that there are no discernible policies to analyze. There is nothing but platitudes and catch-phrases attached to an identity-politics candidacy.

To which I can only respond: more identity focused politics doesn’t solve the problem that many see with Palin’s candidacy, in many regards it only exacerbates it. I take that to be the case because, at least in part, there is a qualitative difference that I’m leaning on about political analysis that seeks to pressure test character and the kind of personality crazed politics that seems to have taken over a disturbing proportion of our collective conversation.

There are plenty of perfectly valid questions that one might choose to bring up about Sarah Palin’s character and what it might say about whether one should vote for her. But saying something like, and I’ll directly quote again, “she’s a delusional, narcissistic and disturbed person who would be voted off a reality show in the first rounds,” just doesn’t strike as that kind of testing. It smacks of smearing based on an extreme dislike for a person.

Too many political arguments seem to boil down to statements of preference gussied up as principled pronouncements these days. The reason I pointed to E.D.’s post was to show that this problem works in both direction: we can choose to attack someone because we don’t like them and we can choose to support someone because we like them.

Again, I’m not denying that some gut level of attraction or repellent plays a role — and a potentially a valuable role — in how we come to our political conclusions. But when that’s all that seems to be playing a role, when our politics comes down to personality tests and preferences, my concern is that it becomes easy not to think long and hard about what’s going on behind those impulses, what that says about how we come to those conclusions, and what some of the longer range impacts of a person’s ideas might wind up being down the road — whether we like or dislike that person.

Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but I take the above to be a disconcerting possibility — and one that I see no shortage of evidence to suggest is occurring on a large enough scale to warrant critique — on the face of it. That I saw it happening with one of my favourite bloggers caused me even more concern and prompted what might have been a slightly caustic, but, all the same, sincere cry of wolf. If I can’t get a daily discourse that at least attempts to leave as much room for ideas as it does for Rorschach tests from the guy who wrote Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott, where the hell might I expect to find it?

As a side note: I also can’t help but point out how strange I find it that I received blow back on a piece calling for an increasing inclusion of ideas in our political discourse from folks harbouring mild to extreme prejudice towards Sarah Palin, when one of the most often cited arguments against Palin’s candidacy was her lack of ideas.

Oh, the taps of irony were pouring a heady brew on the Intertrons last Friday, I tells ya.

PS – there were lots of points made, this post deals with but one of them. But I’ll have others forthcoming dealing with others as I think that politics as the cult of personality deserves a fair and fairly lengthy airing.