I’ve got no problem accepting the importance of aesthetics in the formation of political identities; but then comes the question of how you justify (if you can justify...) one choice of identity, one aesthetic, over another. Below is an attempt at evaluating a couple of the political lifestyles available to choose from in this day and age, a justification of my own choices; my response to this from DM in comments: “This would involve constructing an argument for why involvement in the Democratic Party enables the production of an identity that is more appealing than being an evangelical, an anarchist, or an apathetic academic....” This ended up pretty long, so rather than take up the whole front page with my post, I’m going to start it here and continue it in comments...there should be a way to collapse longer posts; I don’t feel like messing around with Blogger right now to figure out how, but if any of you know how, please fill me in! Anyhoo...
Basically, right now in the US you've got a coalition of evangelicals, neocons, and various other right wingers that has attained an enormous amount of power in our society. Intrinsic to these different strains of right wing identity is the desire to limit the ability of other people to freely form their own identities. This can be a very direct attempt to limit identity formation: The attempt to deny gays and women identities not confined to traditional gender roles. It can also be a more indirect, secondary effect of other actions: Economic policies that result in stagnating wages, the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the erosion of the social safety net leave more and more people, including increasingly more affluent members of the middle class, on shaky ground. In this state you're far less free to construct a a satisfying identity for yourself as you're too busy just trying to meet basic needs. My dream may be to, say, open a 24 Hour Pho Restaurant, but I can't follow that dream because I've got a health condition and can't afford to buy private health insurance; so I stay at a job I don't like that defines me in a way I didn't choose. Another example is the suppression of unions and unionization by the right. The ability of workers to take back a little control over their workplace, to improve the work environment and get fair hours and compensation, which allows them to pursue non-work identities in their leisure time. We could also mention the right’s attempts to limit immigration, their apathy and incompetence leading to lives lost and destroyed in New Orleans. We could talk about how the increasing authoritarian streak on the right limits political identity formation by limiting protest and conducting massive surveillance of their opponents. At the extreme end they've claimed the right to arrest Americans on American soil, classify them as enemy combatants, torture them and imprison them without trial indefinitely. I could seriously keep going in this vein for quite a while, but you all know about this stuff. If you want to talk about politics in terms of how we form identities that make us feel good or provide meaning to our lives, I think it's clear that the right wing in America wants and acts to seriously limit our ability to do so.
Continued in comments...
2 comments:
So, what to do about it? Do you have to do anything? Luckily, it's starting to look like the current administration has so fucked up everything they've touched that the Republican Party and the right wing more generally has lost a huge part of the appeal it had, and may take years to recover (knock on wood). This is especially heartening. Still, so much damage has been done, much of this damage will outlast the Bush presidency, and none of the people responsible for this damage are just going to give up trying to achieve their goals because they lost the White House.
So say I'm an anarchist. I do a lot of good things--I live in communal house, try to limit my consumption to the bare minimum, ride a bike everywhere...I don't participate in party politics because it's hopelessly corrupt, phony, the dems pretty much all voted for the Iraq war too, whatever. I want to just work at the local level, in my community. This is indeed a pretty appealing identity, and all of the things that they're doing at the individual and community level are good things to do. The problem is they're largely incapable of affecting things on the larger scale, things which limit other people's ability to create fulfilling aesthetic/political identities for themselves. They're not doing anything to protect or expand the ability of other people to enjoy this right to identity creation that they claim for themselves. And of course these same macro processes will very likely limit the anarchist's ability to maintain their own identity in the long term.
A lot of the same arguments would apply to the academic who doesn’t want to involve him or herself in party politics, finding it too problematic, limiting or preferring to maintain a critical distance and perpetual questioning. They still do a lot of really good and important things: generating new ideas and arguments, encouraging their students to question received wisdom. One of my biggest peeves, in fact, is that I think that there are a lot of people uniquely positioned, due to their expertise and the authority it brings, to be a very powerful voice for progressive causes--if only they’d be willing to engage with the broader public in a way that the public would understand (i.e. no near-incomprehensible, jargon-filled spiels about old German guys). Yes, the way the media is set up makes it difficult to get out a message that is new, or not reducible to a soundbite, but the sort of engagement I’m thinking of can be done. A couple good examples I think are Juan Cole, the professor of Middle Eastern studies who writes the blog Informed Comment and makes pretty frequent appearances on the 24 hour news networks, and Paul Krugman, the Princeton econ. prof. who writes a column for the New York Times. The right has established, over the last thirty years, a vast network of think tanks and “experts” who explicitly use their academic and professional cred to inject right-wing ideas into the mainstream and build support for them. The left has no such thing, in part because there are too many academics who will claim to support mainstream leftist ideas (universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq) but then don’t want to get their hands dirty or give up their above-it-all, hypercritical stance to actually do things that might achieve those goals.
How’s this tie into the aesthetic/political identity formation issue? Well, like the anarchist, the uninvolved academic is practicing his right to develop a meaningful and satisfying identity while not doing all that he could be doing to safeguard the right of other people to do the same. It’s a selfish position and, in the long run, can put the academic’s freedom in this regard in jeopardy as well. So far the right-wing’s efforts to limit academic freedom have been laughably ineffective--the work of David Horowitz; that attempt in Florida to pass a law stipulating political neutrality in all classes at the state universities since professors have a liberal bias and conservative students felt discriminated against. But those efforts are part of a larger effort that affects everyone and there’s no guarantee they won’t become more effective in the future
So, given the state of affairs that I think exists in the US today, I think that there is only one real choice for someone who cares about the right of others to lead a meaningful life and develop a satisfying self-identity, only one real choice for someone who wants to maintain that right for him or herself. That is to support the liberal/progressive mainstream (the “mainstream left” maybe? there’s no real unanimously agreed-upon term for what I’m describing here), the only force that currently has the capacity to effectively counteract the right wing and Republican party. Engaging in party politics is an essential part of this, as control of the government is a (and maybe for now the) major front in this struggle, but the liberal/progressive mainstream is neither identical with or limited to the Democratic party (indeed, there’s even factions within the party--the DLC being the main example--that might as well be on the “other side” for all the harm they do to progressive causes). It also includes the progressive blogosphere (the “netroots”), unions and advocacy or activist groups from the grassroots to the national level. The common denominator to all of these different elements of the mainstream left being the willingness to work within the system to bring about change, in spite of the acknowledged limits and frustrations that this entails. This is the game as its played, and I’ve never heard any convincing explanations of how it’s going to be replaced by some wonderful new game that doesn’t contain limits and frustrations.
I know that arguing for a position based on the competing positions containing certain contradictions or inconsistencies, especially when arguing about how to live your life, only takes you so far. People live with inconsistencies in their beliefs all the time. Telling an evangelical that there’s a contradiction between his freedom to define himself and his desire to take away the freedom of other’s to do the same isn’t going to mean much since he believes he’s got God on his side. But I think for those of us that do care about maintaining some consistency in our beliefs, honestly evaluating the political identity options available to us in this time and place leads to embracing what I’m calling here the mainstream left. I think that if you want to argue that forming an identity that makes you feel good about yourself is an important part of leading a meaningful life, then you should want everyone to have that ability and you should be willing to take steps to protect and expand that ability for everyone--and the best way to do that is to support the mainstream left
That all sounds fine to me. I guess the next step would be to convince others (for example, anarchists and evangelicals) that the aesthetic/political paradigm you've described is also good for them. While your argument here is logical enough my guess is that something involving fashion, music, or religion might be far more effective. Combining all three would be best.
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