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.
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