Power, Politics, and Palin: A Conversation

This post started out as an email thread between Erik, Mark, and Scott and then morphed into a full blown conversation that we thought was worth posting. Hopefully you’ll find it somewhat less than tedious, perhaps even useful, but at the very least entertaining.

Enjoy…

Scott: So, out of curiosity, I decided to run the numbers and of the 23 posts at the Dish today (November 17 @ 2:24pm MST), 13 are about Palin. That just seems creepy to me.

Erik: Totally creepy.

Mark: No doubt. Then again, the entire blogosphere seems to have an unhealthy obsession with Palin. Check out memeorandum. I count no fewer than 14 Palin-related headlines at the moment, and I think it was even more yesterday. Sully’s just the worst among equals it would seem.

(Sadly, Mark couldn’t participate after this due to professional obligations. Next time!)

Scott: Palinmania is the most morbidly fascinating phenomenon to hit US politics since Monica Lewinski. It’s like a train wreck that is dying to be seen as culturally significant by all of it’s true believers who are going down with the flames. The question is whether it is a sincere movement or just a novel blip. Andrew could be helping to determine that quandary, instead he’s simply muddying the waters by not just believing, but hyping the hype.

Oh, for a William F. Buckley of the twenty-first century…

Erik: It’s symptomatic of our current political discourse. On the one hand, many typically thoughtful conservatives like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat almost had to support her in order to remain part of the conservative movement (whereas truly dissident conservatives like Larison took a very different approach). Meanwhile, liberals can use her to their advantage since even the most thoughtful of their intellectual opponents have to at least mildly support her for now. It’s just personality politics taken to its monstrous conclusion.

Scott: Which prompts the question: is politics inherently glib?

Erik: Until bodies start piling up, sure…

Scott: Even then.

I mean, I’m not saying that people aren’t impassioned and sincere about the stands they take and the arguments they formulate, because I think often they are. People are as vehement about politics as they are because they really and truly believe in the positions they take and care about the perceived stakes. But being sincere and being glib are not mutually exclusive nor, necessarily, contradictory. So people can be frothing at the mouth about this, that, or the other thing and really mean what they’re saying, but their ultimate consideration of the issue at hand is superficial because that is the popularly enforced norm of political discourse in which they’re swimming.

I love Daniel Larison, he is probably one of the smartest bloggers currently writing regardless of ideological labels, but he is, for all intents and purposes, on the side lines in terms of the larger movements of American politics. So I’m not saying you can’t have intelligent and nuanced pundits with valuable and thoughtful analysis, but that just isn’t, in the main, the currency of mainstream political discourse.

So then do we just sort of sit back and accept that reality, or do we attempt to do something about it? And if so what, without coming off as condescending and preachy know-it-alls?

Erik: Well, I’m not sure there is anything that can be “done about it” beyond simply engaging with others honestly. Politics is about power, and power inevitably corrupts the discourse, because retaining power or regaining power becomes a lot more important than really anything else – ideology, practicality, anything. So it becomes almost inevitable that the conversation will be dishonest. That’s why the whole Palin debate is so skewed. It’s not really about Palin at all, it’s about visions of power and the residue of those visions – either hopeful or fearful. Sullivan and others who honestly fear Palin and fear any hint of her ascendancy to the White House obsess over her constantly, and Sullivan in particular seems hell-bent to point out her every “lie” and inconsistency. Supporters of Palin see in her their best chance at regaining power so they construct a narrative surrounding her that helps them actually believe it.

And maybe that’s what you mean by people really meaning what they’re saying but also that “their ultimate consideration of the issue at hand is superficial because that is the popularly enforced norm of political discourse in which they’re swimming.”

Because politics is about power, narratives within politics are constructed around power as an objective, and half-truths that work to further prop up that narrative become the “popularly enforced norm of political discourse.”

Scott: And that analysis about power goes a lot deeper than we really care to admit. The contexts in which power is generated and applied are the very same contexts in which we ourselves develop a sense of ourselves and our understanding of the world. The postmodern political project is to speak truth to power insofar as doing so means identifying politics and, really, most social interactions as the application of power. The suggested solution is to escape power, to be liberated from its confines and realize an “authentic life”. But where exactly is one to escape to? I think if we’re really being brutally honest about the state of affairs, we’ll conclude that there is no where to escape to, we are bound within those contexts much more tightly than the postmodernists ever really acknowledged.

And so engagement becomes the only real option, because what we do know about those contexts is that they are dynamic, they shift over time. And so rather than sink into nihilistic despair, we start looking for the ways in which those contexts shift and explore whether we might as actors within those contexts have any kind of impact on their shifting. That kind of belittling of political action leads, I think, to a distinctive feeling of humility, which is, itself, anathema to our current conception of politics, but it is vital to really internalize the limitations of one’s understanding. To lack that humility is not to really see any of that picture at all.

All of which, I think, brings us back to that point that we went around in circles with Conor Friedersdorf about: what does an honest engagement of those with whom you disagree most fervently look like in the spirit of humbled and limited political discourse/action that seeks to explore the contours of shifting contexts that one might seek to influence (which properly understood, is still an application of power, but in a less Manichean sense).

Erik: I think it also raises an important conundrum in conservatism and in politics in practice as well. Mark pointed this out in his discussion of the panel he attended on the future of conservatism. Writing about Larison’s take on the problem with the conservative movement, he wrote:

If conservatism means anything, it must be a return to an emphasis on decentralization because of power’s ability to corrupt. For the most part, GOP reformers fail to recognize that they are captive to unconservative interests, chief among them a nationalism that, while politically useful in the short run, leads to extraordinarily un-conservative policy that ultimately turns the public against conservatives while masking long-term weaknesses.

I think this gets right to the issue of humility and power and the problems facing any political group which seeks to actually limit the state’s power. Perhaps the only real viable limited-government candidate in the last election was Ron Paul. But if Ron Paul were elected president, how would he actually reduce the power of the executive and scale back the federal government? It seems that in order to do so, one would first have to drastically increase one’s own power. This was the conundrum facing Claudius in Robert Graves’ Claudius the God. As Emperor, Claudius desperately wanted to restore the Republic, but in order to run the government effectively he had to shore up his power, not relinquish it.

All of which is to say that our discourse may be tainted by a lack of humility but how our politics actually play out is even more entrenched. You mention that for all his integrity, Larison remains on the side-lines. Does any politician with even remotely similar views stand any semblance of a chance on the national stage? And if they did, would they have any chance to enact any of their policies or would the powers that be simply provide too great an obstacle?

And in that sense, does our discourse merely reflect reality?

Scott: My immediate response is to say that it would be useful if we ceased conceiving of politics as a top down affair and expecting a shift in our discourse to traverse those channels of power. People are most firmly ensconced in the victimology of power-politics when they believe that is a necessary reality and that there is nothing they can do to change it. Ergo, they have to pin their hopes to ascendant personages like Sarah Palin.

An enlivened sense of both our own abilities and obligations to exert some degree of influence on the state of affairs that we experience quite apart from the goings on in Washington/Ottawa/London/where ever would, by my lights be helpful. Which is not to suggest that what happens in those centers of power is not of concern, but rather to suggest that the narrative of possibilities needn’t flow from those centers outwards in a one way fashion. We would do well to stop having our political meaning dictated and spoon fed to us.

Of course, the challenge with that proposition is in a.) cultivating a willingness and recognition of the extreme diversity it enables and not looking to gloss that over for the sake of presenting some kind of “movement” and b.) to also not fall into the common pitfalls of a populism of lowest common denominators and, to quote what seems to be a buzz phrase, avoid pushing the soft bigotry of low expectations. There needs, and I use that kind of firm language quite consciously, to be an intention of rising to occasions and working towards a more careful analysis than much of the sloppiness that currently defines populism.

This is where, I think, the impetus towards honest engagement is most useful.

Erik: But how much of this is structural? How much of our apathy or, conversely, our hanging on to “ascendant personages like Sarah Palin” is created simply by the way our system is structured? In other words, does the structure of our political system lead to apathy/personality politics, or is it the other way around?

I think apathy and populism are similar beasts, and both seem to be driven by feelings of futility at ever being able to change anything. Which of course plays into the hands of those enforcing the status quo, those most interested in power, and so forth. I’m all for a more decentralized political process, of course. Things like the Swiss model of competitive federalism might work wonders at bringing politics back to our communities rather than always focused on the much more intangible national politics.

I wonder if the discourse surrounding national politics simply suffers from the effects of distance, of being all about personality and yet entirely impersonal. Sort of like the internet.

Scott: I think that you’re probably correct that at least part of the issue at play here is structural in nature. But I suppose I would answer your question with another question: what are we best to focus our efforts on first, changing the structure or changing the way we perceive/conceive of and react to that structure.

The mistake, and what I think generally girds feelings of apathy, is to assume that structures are static. Which, really, gets back to one of my original questions: is politics inherently glib? In asking the question at all, we, perhaps, seek enough distance to at least see the contexts in which we’re swimming and open ourselves to the possibilities that other contexts are possible. And I think in such a movement, the altering of seemingly entrenched structures becomes much more likely.

Erik: Which is, I think, part of what we’re trying to do at the League. I wonder, though, if we really stand a chance.

Creating a new discourse sounds great, and I think it works great, too. But what happens when that discourse comes directly into conflict with proponents of a more combative, dishonest approach? This is, again, the problem I saw with taking on Rush Limbaugh or others in that vein. Is there really any other way to “take on” those types, or that style of discourse, other than trying to outlast them? From the mainstream media on down, the more controversial and outlandish you are, the more tickets you sell. The more fans (and enemies) you create. The more influence you have on political outcomes. Not to sound despairing, but even if you’re right and the first step is to change the nature of the conversation, I’m not sure I see any way that is at all likely to happen.

Scott: You know, despair isn’t a wholly unreasonable feeling to have because I think it points to one very important element of this whole conversation, namely that cultivating the kind of shifts that we’re talking about is very, very hard.

It might be true that structures aren’t static, but any structure (be it political, moral, intellectual, or physical) is likely to tend towards the greatest degree of stasis that it can muster because, well, experience tells us that is what structures tend to do.

So let’s not kid ourselves about the challenge in front of us. Let us not, in our quest not to be glib, wind up being accidentally glib. In shifting our own perceptions and, as a result, the tenor of conversation, we’re talking about digging deep into our own analysis and bringing forward some pretty entrenched and unspoken assumptions. That process is hard enough on its own, but when you start talking about engaging others in this way, well that does come out seeming damn near impossible.

So what do we do, then?

We could, I suppose, throw our hands up in despair. That is an option and so we shouldn’t necessarily dismiss it. But if you’ve bothered to ask the question, it seems unlikely that you’re going to find such a course of action particularly satisfying. Odds are that, even if you perhaps take a bit of a jaded hiatus, you’re likely to come back to the conundrum and want to take another whack at it. Maybe not. Maybe you just say, “Politics is fucked,” and that’s the end of it. But that really is the end of it. So I don’t really have much more of a story to offer on that path.

If; however, you say to yourself, “Okay, this is really hard,” then at least you’ve acknowledged the reality of what you’re dealing with, at least you’re not kidding or deluding yourself (hopefully!) and you can then set aside tempting delusions of grandeur about saving the world and being the leader of the revolution and you can just get down to work — probably starting with yourself. All of which is kind of drab and grinding and rather uninspiring, but it’s real, which is more than one can say for many other initiatives. And if you want to really go about the work of shifting contexts and perceptions and the like, well, it’s best you really be engaged in that work and not some flight of fancy.

As for “taking on” people like Rush Limbaugh et al, I guess one has to ask one’s self what one is really doing there. I mean, I’m not suggesting that you don’t go and point out inconsistencies and put your own arguments out there when they contradict and possibly confront the Rush Limbaughs of the world, but is “taking on/down” Rush Limbuagh really the point here? I don’t think that it is.

The point, if we’re talking about the aforementioned project, is to shift perceptions and that work needn’t again, be seen as a one way street of ideas flowing from centers of disposition like Rush Limbaugh out to his various listeners. I mean, that is how it’s seen, but really you just have another inflection on the top down mentality of political discourse and meaning. So, in “taking on” Rush Limbaugh, you really just reinforce the status quo by creating another binary dichotomy between you and yours and him and his. We love our dichotomies, they simplify things so. But in reinforcing them, you’re really just reinforcing the status quo. If reinforcing the status quo is what you’re out to do, well then, good job! But if you’re out to actually shift things in some kind of significant way, I think you have to acknowledge how you’re failing to do so with this course of action.

And so what might be more useful is to actually engage the people who are really reifying the particular political conception and conversation you’ve identified. And, again, that doesn’t mean not challenging them or confronting them, this is where the note I dropped about populism comes back into play, but it means, you know, confronting them and not the symbolic structure with which they’ve come to identify themselves. And you might not “win them over”, but, then, winning them over isn’t really the point either. The point is to change the nature of the conversation you happen to have with them and in so doing seek to challenge the structure through which your interactions have heretofore been mediated. And you certainly don’t do that by “taking on” Rush Limbaugh as your sole tactic without ever bothering to engage or even really acknowledge the larger group of individuals engaged (or yoked, depending on your perspective) in the conversation.

But it’s all very hard and it all seems very daunting and it really is and so part of what I think it would be useful for us to do is to put away our grand plans and just get down to the work in front of us. Stop fantasizing and start working.

Tagged as: Andrew Sullivan, Conor Freidersdorf, politics, power, rush limbaugh, sarah palin