Against politics without politics

The dangerous temptation of anti-politics

Politics is a bummer. People have incompatible visions of a good society. There are hard trade-offs — in priorities, in limited resources, in irreconcilable interests. Industrial society tends toward institutional infrastructure full of politics — legislation & regulation, bureaucracies to implement those, et cetera.

Mid-20^th liberal political philosophers like Isaiah Berlin & Karl Popper looked at the totalitarian movements of the new century and concluded that many of them emerged paradoxically from a dream of escaping from the politics of politics, somehow creating a world without political processes and political strife.

We could all live together in peace, harmony, and prosperity if we just …

… eliminate the state

… smash capitalism

… give this brilliant leader total power

… all embrace the One True Religion

     et cetera

Those liberals insisted that there was no getting away from the grubbiness of politics, that anti-politics was doomed to disaster. They framed liberalism as, in large part, reflecting a commitment to engaging in political process and an effort to make it as just and effective as possible despite a deep pessimism about the impossibility of perfect process, outcomes, or justice.

My own commitment to liberal democracy rests largely on that analysis.

On the left

That I am a liberal in that libdem Isaiah Berlin sense is not to say that I am a “liberal” in the sense that many leftists use the term to object to positions lacking political imagination any further left than the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I am a leftist. My deepest political dreams are unmistakably radical. Socialism. Institutional changes that ultimately require re-writing the US Constitution. Dignified universal basic income. Transformative cultural politics.

Despite my fundamental alliance, I often feel uneasy among leftists. Partly this reflects a common rejection of “liberalism” which unnecessarily throws out the rights & rule-of-law baby with the capitalism bathwater, partly it reflects too little skepticism about the authoritarianism embedded in left ideologies downstream of Lenin, but aside from those ideological objections which one can confront directly, there is the slipperier problem of too many of my comrades frighteningly tempted by anti-politics fantasies. Even many strains of left-anarchism — inherently resilient against authoritarianism — are comparably scary in assuming that simply eliminating the state automatically eliminates coercion and politics.

Anti-politics is not at all universal on the left, even among radicals, but it is worryingly common.

On the right

Anti-politics is a distinct problem from the right’s opposition to equality which always emerges as opposition to liberal democracy among their radicals. Not everyone on the right suffers from the anti-politics fantasy, even among the radicals. The maniacs who both understand the feudal social / political order and yearn for its revival dream of more politics in their politics. But anti-politics is common, and it is currently ascendent.

Fascism exemplifies the problem of anti-politics, asserting that if we can purge the nation of the people who corrupt its essence, politics and policy challenges will just evaporate. This creates a fascist slide toward totalitarianism as they scramble for control in response to the failures of their nonsensical plans.

It is important to understand how anti-politics paradoxically rationalizes fascism’s authoritarian essence as anti-authoritarian in the minds of true believers. Fash read the liberal order (as in liberal democracy) and liberal order (as in an imagined dominance by “leftists”) as “authoritarian” (or even “totalitarian”) because these step outside of what they see as the correct role of government, by enfranchising & materially supporting the undeserving. In the US fash often frame themselves as not merely anti-authoritarian but anti-government, perverting our democratic civil language to cast “We The People” (real Americans) in opposition to the government. Among savvy fash leadership this is deliberate bad faith kayfabe, but many fash followers take it at face value.

No horseshoe

This post emerged from an online discussion with friends. One of them read these objections to anti-politics (and other problems in radical movements) as an embrace of the horseshoe theory that the far left & right wrap around to meet each other. It is not.

Dumb radicals on the left & right resemble each other in being dumb.

Likewise, anti-politics resembles anti-politics. There are radicals on both sides who do not indulge in anti-politics; there are moderates on both sides who do. Democratic Party stalwarts who say “had we won I would be enjoying brunch instead of thinking about politics” drift into anti-politics. Smart moderate conservatives turn out to have anti-politics baked into their thinking.

My friend who saw a horseshoe in my thinking is the kind of Dem many leftists disdain as a “lib”, and he returns their disdain, finding the left all dangerously unrealistic. I deeply disagree with him about the project of the left, but he is correct in seeing us aligned in dreading anti-politics. I will take informed libdem pragmatism like his over the anti-political fantasies of many of my comrades seven days a week and twice on Sundays.