In the Democratic Primary here in the States, too much of our politics--whether centrist, conservative, socialist, identitarian, or nativist--has been driven by raw emotion. Some of us feel the sting of a nation governed by billionaires. Others feel the righteous anger of a nation that has never come to terms with its racist history. Still others fume over climate change, xenophobia, labor rights, health care, and on and on and on. I've been guilty of plenty of unreasonable fury myself the last six months.
And I feel I get it. I get how we've gotten to this fierce and passionate place in our country that we wouldn't have recognized 10 or 20 years ago. The emotions we're feeling are real, irreducible, and powerful, and they stem from undeniably important causes, even if the American public often disagree on the most basic facts. The fear, anguish, anxiety, and loss we're feeling as a nation is near-universal, and it's not for no reason that we're feeling it. And so these emotions have a validity and an urgency all their own, even apart from their causes.
But, as a fairly young person, squarely in the Millennial bracket, I am all too in touch with my emotional life. And I've found there's quite a harsh limit to what disclosure, vulnerability, empathy, and sentiment can produce. At some point, we have to move from passion to politics. It's time, for once, to be pragmatic rather than emotional, and not simply in the dullard centrist's notion of putting aside fundamental disagreements to "get things done", whatever they may be and whoever must be harmed. No, we have to get things done that are substantive, positive, and efficacious. Emotions have no place in this calculation. Passionate anger fades or turns to bitterness with time while political power and its institutions alone endure.
We can't be held in thrall purely to emotion--however valid its causes might be--as so crucial an election is upon us today. Rather, we have to go beyond our grievances and start thinking about the United States as a whole, to think about what kind of nation we're going to be living in 10, 20, and 30 years down the line, and what kind of nation we're leaving to the generations who will follow us on their own cohort-specific journey.
So as January draws to a close, with the Iowa caucuses mere days away, it's time to think about the pragmatism of the electoral situation now--bereft of emotion.
Here's where I'm coming from:
==
1. Life is unfathomably difficult and hopeless for the worst off among us, except by the standards of the Third World--which is to say, the standards of abjection and subsistence. In the US, where the mean income is high but so many are left out in the cold, a small plutocracy stalls every attempt to reform this state of affairs. This isn't sentiment; it's the truth of the matter, if you'd only care to look.
And if you're left out in the cold, you might as well just die, because second chances are hard in coming. It's so hard to make it in this world without a car, or with a disability, or if you're a person of color, or if you're a poor woman who can't afford to have a child, or if you're a kid on the wrong side of the education-reformer track, or if your town has no jobs. And there's, naturally, quite a lot of overlap between all of these groups.
For those of us not in near-misery, we're still teetering on a dark precipice: If you can't afford health insurance, or, if you aren't quite poor, but you're always one catastrophe away from food insecurity, starvation, homelessness, or utter dependence, then you're hardly free from the vicissitudes of the powerful and the whims of the wealthy, which seem increasingly likely to be the same thing these days.
If you're an immigrant or an ethnic minority on the wrong side of a xenophobic working class, you're hearing what they're saying and you're afraid a little more every day of expulsion or persecution.
In short, if you're left out in the cold in America, what you really lack is freedom from fear, whether you're from the poor and afraid of falling out, or you're from the middle class and afraid of falling back. Much of the anger we've seen in this election is a simple mutation of this fear.
It's hard to make it in this world with a job, and without a job. It's hard to make it in this world with a college education, and without one. It's hard to make it in this world unless you were born along a path of success, all because we live in an unforgiving corporate feudalism in which all who wander too long are lost.
This has been a cold world for humans since time immemorial, and yet the social democracies in Europe have seemed a bit warmer and more forgiving than their wealthy-but-overworked technocratic cousin across the Atlantic.
2. So far, the Democratic establishment, led by its candidate Hillary Clinton, is the seat of power for a staunch left-neoliberal party which says all the right things on cultural theory and does everything in its power to take them away in fiscal practice. Bernie Sanders is much further to the left of Hillary, but it's clear that Hillary represents the Democratic establishment and that, even if Sanders won, he would himself have to helm this same broken establishment.
The current Democratic establishment--birthed as it was as the Soviet Union was falling and as the United States was in the midst of issuing decades of anti-socialist propaganda towards its own citizens--has given no indication that they will ever decide to represent a humane, popular, moral agenda of social democracy. Furthermore, most of the Democratic operatives, with their smug elitism, now take my generation's votes for granted, despite that we would clearly prefer such a social democracy. Our votes are treated as unserious, impractical, and naive. We who feel most acutely the difficulties of this world also feel most acutely that those difficulties have stopped mattering to most of the people who matter in the Democratic party.
We've seen two major popular uprisings in the Democratic base the past two years--the Ferguson/Baltimore demonstrators, and the Sanders supporters. Both of these were spearheaded by committed young people who wanted a brew a tad stronger than the tepid Occupy, um..., tea. The Democratic establishment warmed to BlackLivesMatter only when they could put some of their own people in charge (e.g. Deray McKesson from TFA, a political backbone of the charter-school movement), and only to the extent that those folks don't get out of line. And the Dems still really haven't warmed at all to the Sanders people--whom they treat with condescending scorn as angry harassers, naive outsiders, and conspiracy theorists, even when the only consistently-held conspiracy is that people who receive money from finance and pharmaceutical companies will act in the interests of those industries.
The Democrats are so out of touch. All they know how to do anymore when they meet an opposing force--even one of immense populist potency and social justice--is to triangulate and compromise to the right, and to co-opt, colonize, concede, or marginalize the left. Since the ascendancy of the DLC in 1988, they've never met a good idea on the left that they actually liked enough to advocate nor to implement--they can be forced, if absolutely necessary, but they don't actually believe in the ideal of a social democracy or of a society which lacks a permanent underclass. Whether they lack the imagination or the spirit to believe in such a society is beside the point. What we know is that they act in the interests of the richest individuals and corporations in the United States, and not in the interests of the poorest individuals or unions.
The Democratic establishment has revealed itself to be close in spirit to the New York Times editorial page--boomers dissembling about civility and looking for any excuse to avoid the central questions of our time. They read Piketty and Stiglitz on inequality and cluck and shake their heads. They read about the uncompromising GOP which wins every battle and how important it is, therefore, to compromise. They seem to be wounded by genuine engagement that isn't conducted with the respectful civility of an Aaron Sorkin play about Franklin Roosevelt--as if all of that silly uprising nonsense should have ended with the air controller strike. Occupy is nice, but can you clean up a little bit and go get a job at Goldman or Blackstone? They're not such bad people there. They're not. In short, Democrats like Black Lives Matter and think it's tragic what that cop did, and they can offer a few BLM/Sanders people a job, but they are as deathly afraid of any Republican of a good old-fashioned mass movement.
3. So here's the ultimatum: The Democrats either need to shift quite a bit further to the left than their party leaders have signaled they'd be comfortable with in this general election, or I simply cannot vote for them. I'm not too proud to beg, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna vote for you. I can't see myself voting against the Democrat; more likely this "protest" vote would take the form of a third-party candidate. I say "protest" in quotes because it's not simply symbolic--it's proof-positive that I did not treat your bad candidate's inadequacy with "Millennial disengagement", but with dispassionate rejection. It's information for the technocrats to process, to do with as they will, no more and no less.
4. If a Democrat can act like my generation of young and legitimate disaffected individuals exists, can make a sincere effort to court the poorest people in our society with an agenda, promises, or can give some genuine and public demonstration of good faith on that front, then I'll vote for them. And I might even work for them. I might even try hard to get them elected. It's that simple. Give me a good reason to vote for you, and I will vote for you. Please stop making this so difficult.
One of the most egregious things about the DLC/Obama era is that they publicly shame poor mothers and black fathers and take all the credit for their efficacious victim-blaming. The Romans make a desert and call it peace. The Democrats help to make an underclass and call it reform. That in and of itself isn't so bad, but then they turn to their victims with smug self-confidence and tell us to our faces that it was just politics, and "we're really on your side!"
So, they tell us, we shouldn't shame them for their debased pride. They bragged--and found it in their interests to brag--about mass incarceration and welfare reform, until very recently. The Democrats can be tough on crime too! If that's what you're telling us to get elected, why should I assume you won't go twice as far when you're elected? Seriously, tell me, beyond just trying to appeal to me, what exactly I'm supposed to do with the pride you took in demonizing the hard-working underclass that you continually have conspired with Hayekian Republicans to create?
==
In sum, I really, really want to support the Democrats, but they've given no indication they care about my engagement, my values, or, in the final tally, my country--at least beyond their donors in the upper class and their middle-brow upper-middle-class. They expect my generation's vote despite doing nothing to show they'll even bring our concerns to the table, much less to the president's desk. Again and again and again they disappoint us, and again they chide us for not voting. They get in the pages of the Washington Post and write an op-ed about the staggering entitlement of the Millennials. Won't they ever learn to deal with reality?
And I guess, increasingly, I've come to accept that my answer is no: I can't accept this reality--I can't accept this country--until it begins to act in basic consonance with any of its stated values. And it seems that Democrats, while responsible stewards of what is left of our republic, don't really want to act that way. They simply want to maintain a stable position on their own little island of influence while the sea level rises imperceptibly every year. The wonks propose increasingly toothless agendas and technocratic trickery in service of pathetic candidates and reforms.
Liberals are seeking to salvage the country by becoming a group with such an unremarkably small and copacetic vision that no one will mind their presence, and in a way they've succeeded wildly. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' vision of the hereafter in The Great Divorce, where sinners, in their self-imposed smallness, fall through the cracks of heaven.
==
Despite the anti-poverty rumblings and the outrage that might be detectable in the preceding discussion, I'm not exactly a Jacobin wanting dead counterrevolutionary bodies in the street, nor a revolutionary seeking any Romanovs to smother. It's not emotional, it's not hateful, and I'm amenable to compromise. These are loose demands. But that compromise should come from a place of genuine necessity and not deception or naked power-brokerage. Hillary is making noises about repealing the Hyde Amendment, and good for her, and good for Bernie for voting against it. But they're running to become the successor of the president who allowed the most striking and most unkindly iteration of the Hyde Amendment in one of his more egregious compromises. It's so wearying to read all day about the rights of women and find, just before you close your eyes that night, that all your work was for nought, women across the country condemned to a harder life.
I use this example to point out that in and of itself, my trouble is not about whether the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. I'm not so naive to think a nominated Sanders might not tack right himself in the general election, because at the end of the day, it's his job not just to run but to win. What's more, I understand that Washington is full of sophisticated political scientists who can lecture you for an hour about the Median Voter Theorem and how it's so important to be just to the left of your Republican opponent, who will, of course, be swinging left to capture the same swath of Median Undecideds. I get that politics is more of a team sport, like cycling, than a pure marathon of individual candidates' wills. And I get that the well-educated Harvard graduates carefully whispering in each candidate's ears just want the best for all of us, because they know that we on the left can all make things easier for one another if we just follow these simple rules of power and compromise once in awhile. As a political entity, Washington is myopic and technocratic, and even a major shift in their calculations will be just that--a shift, not a fundamental challenge.
So yes, these are loose demands I'm making, and perhaps some part of me also recognizes that it's absurd to hope the aristocratic echochamber might pause to "lean-in" from their virtual-reality Vader-eggs in Davos to listen to a guy who can barely write a half-decent sentence. But I don't think my absurd desire to be heard reveals absurd desires: My demands are rational and not driven by emotions. I will vote for the candidate I do believe in and a half-vote for the candidate I don't believe in. And while many of us will ultimately hold our noses and cast a ballot for the nominee no matter what, I'm willing to bet that what I'm saying is the spirit of my disaffected generation of young social democrats. I'm willing to bet that this is more or less the logical underpinning of all our apparent fickleness and sentiment.
It's very simple: We won't show up for another wolf in sheep's clothing. We will not skip work or school or organizing or our otherwise-difficult lives to cast a ballot for someone who isn't really going to ameliorate our nation's problems. Some of us would rationally prefer to starve. We're on a decades-long, involuntary hunger strike for basic dignity, and every year more and more of us realize it. This is the calculation we've made, and now that we've made that calculation, we cannot act otherwise. Anger doesn't enter into it. It's time for those of you in positions of power to realize this, not simply to rationalize it. We are dying, and we will not stop dying until you help us fix the mess you helped to create. As soon as you recognize it, you will have so much power, and in service of a just cause. But until you do, you will have neither power nor justice nor will you deserve it.
In Wisconsin, the leaves will be falling as November approaches. Unswept oak leaves, once young, die and decompose and deposit tannic acid into the ground, harming the topsoil and grass.
The grass and flowers that might have flourished and thrived--if someone had only swept the leaves away!--will be stunted, sparse, and discolored the following spring.
Chemistry takes its course regardless of our laments.
January 28, 2016
January 4, 2016
Where Did All You Zombies Come From?
Intro - Non-Dullards And Cents
On Twitter, Ryan Cooper tweeted out a piece by MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, written in 2004 after his experience canvassing for Kerry in suburban Dane County (in Wisconsin around Madison).
In the piece, Hayes writes methodically for a sophisticated, entrenched New Republic audience about the real nature of those mythical Undecided Voters out in the hinterlands, which turns out to be at once more humane, exotic, damning, and revealing of the electorate than the thousand standard-issue election-year takedowns of those faceless non-entities.
As someone who grew up in Dane County around this time, I was struck with some thoughts after reading Hayes' piece.
I highly recommend you read Hayes' piece first, as my piece is based on that piece, and his piece is a good piece all on its own. To put it in economic terms, my two cents are only worth one cent to you right now, unless you read his two cents first, so you get four cents in total by reading both of these pieces. If you think about it, that means his is worth three, but the third cent of his piece is only redeemable if you read this one, and this paragraph is the voucher, upon whose authority I argue you should read both pieces and get the desired four cents. Even if you don't accept my authority at those rates, I'm arguing that his - by virtue of its broad relevance to U.S. politics - is a more lucrative venture on its own per unit of time.
Folks, while that was a metaphor, I'm being very literal with the currencies, too. I haven't received ad revenue from this blog, though I did buy the domain for a nominal annual fee, and God knows I'm not any good at self-promotion. We're literally taking about two cents in marginal lifetime income if you read and enjoy this. I need to start shilling books.
Part 1. When in Dane, do as the Danish do
I grew up in Middleton outside of Madison and might have answered one of the doors that Chris was knocking on in that piece. I would've been 15. I was passionately political; first (at that time) among the anti-war left, then shifting to the libertarian right in the anecdote below, before drifting out of politics and then suddenly to the far left, a couple years ago and then ever since.
All this to say: Even at a fairly young age (perhaps as young as 12), I was well-versed in the pundit's sense of having opinions on all the issues of the day, even if my inexperienced mind was pretty useless for contextualizing those issues. And I was well-versed not simply in regurgitating issues and stock opinions, but genuinely interested in--and engaged with--the underlying governing philosophies spanning the American political spectrum. I was 15 when the 2004 election came around, and so naturally most all of the important details of these issues still eluded me. But I kept up with cable news all the time, read dozens of articles online to understand the issues I didn't yet have a grasp on, and had preferences for the commentators whose lies I couldn't yet detect, and who, therefore, might just be telling the truth. I was fascinated by all I heard and determined to understand politics. I watched the Daily Show and got most of the jokes. I watched Bill Maher but didn't like it as much. He wasn't as funny and he and his guests shouted over one another. I was so engaged that I had preferences about how to vent my political energy with comedy.
In short, I was committed as hell. I thought I was pretty smart, albeit with a whole lot to learn. I was far more right on this count than I could have imagined, to my great embarrassment and chagrin. But that's a whole other thing. It will have to wait for Part 2.
Part 2: Shocking Levels of Stupidity For Someone So Young
Fast forward a couple of years. The author, at this juncture, found himself attracted to libertarian ideas at this point in the narrative. You need to know that for the story I'm telling but I'm saying nothing else. I have no intention of going into how taking Econ 101 in high school had led me down the dark path of Going Galt--this isn't meant to be horror, but instructive comedy.
So, sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, at 17 or so, I was still reading politics everyday and was generally regarded as "the one libertarian that [forum-goer] don't [really] hate" on the liberal Obama-centric Facebook group I frequented. I grew a lot intellectually and found myself exposed to lots of ideas, thinkers, and writers I probably never would've found alone. And it was on this site that I had a staggeringly-revealing online conversation after some months of discussion. It (staggeringly) revealed a fundamental mode of stupidity I had kept within me, and which I had apparently kept from everyone else as well as I'd kept from myself.
I don't remember exactly how it went down but I do remember I'd started in on a well-meaning conversation with some bearded, elder socialists in the Facebook group, and they tried to patiently illustrate to me how libertarianism was a silly ideology which lacked not only consistency but failed even to produce meaningful answers on any relevant political issue. I was obviously skeptical, so they pushed back and asked me to name an issue relevant to my everyday life. And this is where it happened. See, gang, for all that reading I'd been doing and all the indisputable comprehension of the issues I'd shown in thousands of political conversations, I'd entered a conversation in which I was suddenly unable - no less to my own astonishment than to the astonishment of anyone else - to name a single everyday effect of politics on my life.
Now, that's not at all to say that politics was just a fun little game to me, nor is it to say that I didn't really care. If I'd thought harder, I might've mentioned gay marriage and the family friends I knew who were directly affected by the neo-lithic Republicans and mindlessly-centrist Democrats on gay marriage. Here were literal gay people who literally wanted to get married in my immediate circle who couldn't, because of politics. But even if I'd thought of that in the moment, all it would've done is paper over what the conversation had revealed to me: My comprehension of politics, for all its sophistication and internal consistency, lacked something deep and fundamental. It's not that I'd been thinking of politics as a fun little game, but that, much like a game, I was allowing politics to be placed inside a box in my mind which was largely separate from the rest of the world, rather than as a totalizing force which exerted itself on every price, action, and even thought, as all-consuming, foundational pyre which deserved, if anything, more attention than the ephemera-obsessed mass media could ever give it. In my defense, I did recognize some of this complexity but largely ascribed it to "market forces and government distortions", in that inimitable and adorable ideological game that such people play. But even accounting for this, I was still shockingly ignorant of the full totality of the effect that politics has on observable reality.
In an interview from around this time, I recall Stephen Colbert discussing how his character never overtook his real personality, thanks to Second City's improv dictum that one should "wear your character as lightly as a cap". Nothing could better describe the level of engagement of my fast, agile, fidgety mind on my hobbies. I could discuss politics for hours on end, but at the end, politics was just a hobby to me. I wore politics as lightly as a cap, and discarded it when I went to class or met with friends or wrote.
Despite my superficial understanding of the game and how it was played, I was, much like Hayes' Undecided Voters, fundamentally ignorant of the myriad ways politics actually affected my life. For all I really grasped as it pertained to the world outside the conversations, I might as well have been an idiot savant who could only produce columns from the internal logic of other columns. And, going forward, I began to observe (to alarm) that I'd always confront a new or unfamiliar issue with dumb, almost-blank silence, as if I had no thoughts within my head. I came later to realize that what I'd been doing in this silence was assimilating the new issue and my opinions about it into a self-consistent narrative which fit with my other opinions on other issues. Once I had fully assimilated the issue, I internalized it and refocused my gaze on the world. All this to say: Keeping your ideological blinders on is hard work!
If Hayes' undecideds often didn't grasp the relevance of issues to the world around them, I was a tad smarter: I did the same, then compounded my problem by aggressively imposing atop this ignorance a self-consistent mass of sophisticated opinions about those same issues, so that at all times I felt very sophisticated and yet had the same basic distance that allowed my beliefs to exist and frame my identity and yet remain totally independent of the world outside. Which led to strange behaviors, like ranking Ron Paul my favorite candidate and espousing anarcho-capitalist rhetoric all year, then voting Barack Obama in the general election without a second thought. It makes perfect sense in a land where anything can be justified, so long as it fits what had come before. And just about anything does.
As soon as the others in that original conversation started to respond, nicely of course, with obvious and real ways in which the economy, ideologies, and policies in my world-at-large didn't "just happen", I knew at once the depth of the mistake I'd been making.
Part 3 - The Dialectic Comes Around
I drifted out of politics amid a few years of decreasing interest and the increasing demands of a STEM degree, but I began to notice that for a lot of ostensibly-sharp libertarians and not a few liberals, this same compartmentalization of politics from the life they lived was real and ubiquitous. For these people--whose politics generally tended toward default variants the by-osmosis slightly-liberal status quo of Madison--politics was, like religion, a thing you believed in and prayed to in private, and which only reared its head in public in pathological or contrived instances where the participants hadn't yet papered over their relatively-superficial differences or converted one another.
Now, I wasn't quite apolitical during these years - though I was conveniently absent when Madison became the literal focus of progressive thought for two years - so much as I felt very deeply that I didn't have the epistemic basis for having any political opinions. I felt my own stupidity had to be accepted once and for all, or, at least, addressed, before I felt comfortable moving past the brilliant nonsense of my past.
The result of this self-doubt was an irritating variant on the "just asking questions" guy that sometimes appears in comment sections or social media. Very much in the vein of a "silent majority"-type, but with a strong paranoid streak, I decried any and all claimants to political knowledge and tried to figure out, right in front of them, the banal artificiality and falseness of their beliefs. I went from the amused, humane parodist of my adolescence to a corrosive, detached satirist, especially as Obama showed who he really was, to the general exhaustion and exasperation of most everyone with whom I'd previously relished discussion. "How could you have been so naive? How could I?" I would ask, perhaps with a more pleasant tone. "Drone Strikes??" I'd inquire sharply. And others politely demurred.
I didn't ever come back to politics so much as my idiocy at 18 (earnest intention without engagement) met its equal and opposite idiocy: Engagement without earnest intention. My political detachment had forced me, almost by default, out of the present and ephemeral completely in order to focus on other interests like music, sports, writing, and my fields of study in math and computer science. And, because there was a lot of that to do and, because a lot of it could be a slog, I was forced, again almost by default, into reading the authors of history, biography, and politics, all of whom made more broad-minded analyses than I'd been capable of handling when I was younger. And I took them more seriously than when they were mere markers of Yet Another of Young Dewey's Prodigal Intellectual Achievements; rather, I began to take far more pride in processing the arguments of great texts \well\ than in merely being able to claim the conquest of Such An August Text As "War And Peace". From all these readings and all the writerly banter that ended up ensuing, I came to see, quite directly, what had been exposed for me long ago but hadn't concretely materialized: that nearly everything, in fact, was influenced by politics. And, in many cases, I was able to point to the causes of this-or-that, and unravel what otherwise might have seemed obscure, inscrutable, or, most absurd of all, apolitical.
The events in Ferguson, Missouri were the capstone on this informal curriculum -- for the events represented an undeniable demonstration of white supremacy, and therefore a demonstration of everyone defending it, everyone fighting it, and everyone within and outside this spectrum. Without realizing it, I had things to say about this event grounded in historical fact, and I had things I wanted to read, because I grasped its partial significance in an instant and knew I wouldn't fully grasp it until I had completed a broader corpus.
So in the end, I never really got back into politics so much as, having been freed from any fiction that it could be compartmentalized, politics in its ubiquity lurched forward into my awareness and came to suffuse my whole consciousness, the undecided voter within me finally starving by the siege laid inadvertently by the committed non-voter, who'd hungeringly conquered every surrounding territory with indifferent ease.
On Twitter, Ryan Cooper tweeted out a piece by MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, written in 2004 after his experience canvassing for Kerry in suburban Dane County (in Wisconsin around Madison).
In the piece, Hayes writes methodically for a sophisticated, entrenched New Republic audience about the real nature of those mythical Undecided Voters out in the hinterlands, which turns out to be at once more humane, exotic, damning, and revealing of the electorate than the thousand standard-issue election-year takedowns of those faceless non-entities.
As someone who grew up in Dane County around this time, I was struck with some thoughts after reading Hayes' piece.
I highly recommend you read Hayes' piece first, as my piece is based on that piece, and his piece is a good piece all on its own. To put it in economic terms, my two cents are only worth one cent to you right now, unless you read his two cents first, so you get four cents in total by reading both of these pieces. If you think about it, that means his is worth three, but the third cent of his piece is only redeemable if you read this one, and this paragraph is the voucher, upon whose authority I argue you should read both pieces and get the desired four cents. Even if you don't accept my authority at those rates, I'm arguing that his - by virtue of its broad relevance to U.S. politics - is a more lucrative venture on its own per unit of time.
Folks, while that was a metaphor, I'm being very literal with the currencies, too. I haven't received ad revenue from this blog, though I did buy the domain for a nominal annual fee, and God knows I'm not any good at self-promotion. We're literally taking about two cents in marginal lifetime income if you read and enjoy this. I need to start shilling books.
Part 1. When in Dane, do as the Danish do
I grew up in Middleton outside of Madison and might have answered one of the doors that Chris was knocking on in that piece. I would've been 15. I was passionately political; first (at that time) among the anti-war left, then shifting to the libertarian right in the anecdote below, before drifting out of politics and then suddenly to the far left, a couple years ago and then ever since.
All this to say: Even at a fairly young age (perhaps as young as 12), I was well-versed in the pundit's sense of having opinions on all the issues of the day, even if my inexperienced mind was pretty useless for contextualizing those issues. And I was well-versed not simply in regurgitating issues and stock opinions, but genuinely interested in--and engaged with--the underlying governing philosophies spanning the American political spectrum. I was 15 when the 2004 election came around, and so naturally most all of the important details of these issues still eluded me. But I kept up with cable news all the time, read dozens of articles online to understand the issues I didn't yet have a grasp on, and had preferences for the commentators whose lies I couldn't yet detect, and who, therefore, might just be telling the truth. I was fascinated by all I heard and determined to understand politics. I watched the Daily Show and got most of the jokes. I watched Bill Maher but didn't like it as much. He wasn't as funny and he and his guests shouted over one another. I was so engaged that I had preferences about how to vent my political energy with comedy.
In short, I was committed as hell. I thought I was pretty smart, albeit with a whole lot to learn. I was far more right on this count than I could have imagined, to my great embarrassment and chagrin. But that's a whole other thing. It will have to wait for Part 2.
Part 2: Shocking Levels of Stupidity For Someone So Young
Fast forward a couple of years. The author, at this juncture, found himself attracted to libertarian ideas at this point in the narrative. You need to know that for the story I'm telling but I'm saying nothing else. I have no intention of going into how taking Econ 101 in high school had led me down the dark path of Going Galt--this isn't meant to be horror, but instructive comedy.
So, sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, at 17 or so, I was still reading politics everyday and was generally regarded as "the one libertarian that [forum-goer] don't [really] hate" on the liberal Obama-centric Facebook group I frequented. I grew a lot intellectually and found myself exposed to lots of ideas, thinkers, and writers I probably never would've found alone. And it was on this site that I had a staggeringly-revealing online conversation after some months of discussion. It (staggeringly) revealed a fundamental mode of stupidity I had kept within me, and which I had apparently kept from everyone else as well as I'd kept from myself.
I don't remember exactly how it went down but I do remember I'd started in on a well-meaning conversation with some bearded, elder socialists in the Facebook group, and they tried to patiently illustrate to me how libertarianism was a silly ideology which lacked not only consistency but failed even to produce meaningful answers on any relevant political issue. I was obviously skeptical, so they pushed back and asked me to name an issue relevant to my everyday life. And this is where it happened. See, gang, for all that reading I'd been doing and all the indisputable comprehension of the issues I'd shown in thousands of political conversations, I'd entered a conversation in which I was suddenly unable - no less to my own astonishment than to the astonishment of anyone else - to name a single everyday effect of politics on my life.
Now, that's not at all to say that politics was just a fun little game to me, nor is it to say that I didn't really care. If I'd thought harder, I might've mentioned gay marriage and the family friends I knew who were directly affected by the neo-lithic Republicans and mindlessly-centrist Democrats on gay marriage. Here were literal gay people who literally wanted to get married in my immediate circle who couldn't, because of politics. But even if I'd thought of that in the moment, all it would've done is paper over what the conversation had revealed to me: My comprehension of politics, for all its sophistication and internal consistency, lacked something deep and fundamental. It's not that I'd been thinking of politics as a fun little game, but that, much like a game, I was allowing politics to be placed inside a box in my mind which was largely separate from the rest of the world, rather than as a totalizing force which exerted itself on every price, action, and even thought, as all-consuming, foundational pyre which deserved, if anything, more attention than the ephemera-obsessed mass media could ever give it. In my defense, I did recognize some of this complexity but largely ascribed it to "market forces and government distortions", in that inimitable and adorable ideological game that such people play. But even accounting for this, I was still shockingly ignorant of the full totality of the effect that politics has on observable reality.
In an interview from around this time, I recall Stephen Colbert discussing how his character never overtook his real personality, thanks to Second City's improv dictum that one should "wear your character as lightly as a cap". Nothing could better describe the level of engagement of my fast, agile, fidgety mind on my hobbies. I could discuss politics for hours on end, but at the end, politics was just a hobby to me. I wore politics as lightly as a cap, and discarded it when I went to class or met with friends or wrote.
Despite my superficial understanding of the game and how it was played, I was, much like Hayes' Undecided Voters, fundamentally ignorant of the myriad ways politics actually affected my life. For all I really grasped as it pertained to the world outside the conversations, I might as well have been an idiot savant who could only produce columns from the internal logic of other columns. And, going forward, I began to observe (to alarm) that I'd always confront a new or unfamiliar issue with dumb, almost-blank silence, as if I had no thoughts within my head. I came later to realize that what I'd been doing in this silence was assimilating the new issue and my opinions about it into a self-consistent narrative which fit with my other opinions on other issues. Once I had fully assimilated the issue, I internalized it and refocused my gaze on the world. All this to say: Keeping your ideological blinders on is hard work!
If Hayes' undecideds often didn't grasp the relevance of issues to the world around them, I was a tad smarter: I did the same, then compounded my problem by aggressively imposing atop this ignorance a self-consistent mass of sophisticated opinions about those same issues, so that at all times I felt very sophisticated and yet had the same basic distance that allowed my beliefs to exist and frame my identity and yet remain totally independent of the world outside. Which led to strange behaviors, like ranking Ron Paul my favorite candidate and espousing anarcho-capitalist rhetoric all year, then voting Barack Obama in the general election without a second thought. It makes perfect sense in a land where anything can be justified, so long as it fits what had come before. And just about anything does.
As soon as the others in that original conversation started to respond, nicely of course, with obvious and real ways in which the economy, ideologies, and policies in my world-at-large didn't "just happen", I knew at once the depth of the mistake I'd been making.
Part 3 - The Dialectic Comes Around
I drifted out of politics amid a few years of decreasing interest and the increasing demands of a STEM degree, but I began to notice that for a lot of ostensibly-sharp libertarians and not a few liberals, this same compartmentalization of politics from the life they lived was real and ubiquitous. For these people--whose politics generally tended toward default variants the by-osmosis slightly-liberal status quo of Madison--politics was, like religion, a thing you believed in and prayed to in private, and which only reared its head in public in pathological or contrived instances where the participants hadn't yet papered over their relatively-superficial differences or converted one another.
Now, I wasn't quite apolitical during these years - though I was conveniently absent when Madison became the literal focus of progressive thought for two years - so much as I felt very deeply that I didn't have the epistemic basis for having any political opinions. I felt my own stupidity had to be accepted once and for all, or, at least, addressed, before I felt comfortable moving past the brilliant nonsense of my past.
The result of this self-doubt was an irritating variant on the "just asking questions" guy that sometimes appears in comment sections or social media. Very much in the vein of a "silent majority"-type, but with a strong paranoid streak, I decried any and all claimants to political knowledge and tried to figure out, right in front of them, the banal artificiality and falseness of their beliefs. I went from the amused, humane parodist of my adolescence to a corrosive, detached satirist, especially as Obama showed who he really was, to the general exhaustion and exasperation of most everyone with whom I'd previously relished discussion. "How could you have been so naive? How could I?" I would ask, perhaps with a more pleasant tone. "Drone Strikes??" I'd inquire sharply. And others politely demurred.
I didn't ever come back to politics so much as my idiocy at 18 (earnest intention without engagement) met its equal and opposite idiocy: Engagement without earnest intention. My political detachment had forced me, almost by default, out of the present and ephemeral completely in order to focus on other interests like music, sports, writing, and my fields of study in math and computer science. And, because there was a lot of that to do and, because a lot of it could be a slog, I was forced, again almost by default, into reading the authors of history, biography, and politics, all of whom made more broad-minded analyses than I'd been capable of handling when I was younger. And I took them more seriously than when they were mere markers of Yet Another of Young Dewey's Prodigal Intellectual Achievements; rather, I began to take far more pride in processing the arguments of great texts \well\ than in merely being able to claim the conquest of Such An August Text As "War And Peace". From all these readings and all the writerly banter that ended up ensuing, I came to see, quite directly, what had been exposed for me long ago but hadn't concretely materialized: that nearly everything, in fact, was influenced by politics. And, in many cases, I was able to point to the causes of this-or-that, and unravel what otherwise might have seemed obscure, inscrutable, or, most absurd of all, apolitical.
The events in Ferguson, Missouri were the capstone on this informal curriculum -- for the events represented an undeniable demonstration of white supremacy, and therefore a demonstration of everyone defending it, everyone fighting it, and everyone within and outside this spectrum. Without realizing it, I had things to say about this event grounded in historical fact, and I had things I wanted to read, because I grasped its partial significance in an instant and knew I wouldn't fully grasp it until I had completed a broader corpus.
So in the end, I never really got back into politics so much as, having been freed from any fiction that it could be compartmentalized, politics in its ubiquity lurched forward into my awareness and came to suffuse my whole consciousness, the undecided voter within me finally starving by the siege laid inadvertently by the committed non-voter, who'd hungeringly conquered every surrounding territory with indifferent ease.
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