avoiding politics: some scattered thoughts

I didn't use to consider myself very politically aware, or even very political at all. But the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016 was one of a couple seismic events that thrust politics upon me. The first event was probably the 2003 invasion of Iraq—a move I saw as wrongheaded, and that put me in opposition to my more pro-war friends, causing a bit of tension. I like to think I was ultimately proven right: the entire neocon agenda, which an inarticulate Dubya was never able to express coherently, proved to be as ghastly a misunderstanding of human nature as all of leftism is. Now, my being anti-war at the time was more a matter of being anti-that-war than being anti-war in general. But it sparked the beginning of a political awareness that has only grown over the years alongside a slow, tectonic drift somewhat rightward on whatever the traditional left-right spectrum might be. It's actually hard for me to say how much of a leftie or a rightie I am given the rhetoric of, say, JFK in the Sixties (which sounds positively Trumpian these days, along with MLK or Malcolm X's eloquent rhetoric), or Bill Clinton during his 1995 State of the Union address, or even Joe Biden himself from a few decades back. There are ways in which Democrats and Republicans, the left and the right (and these are not all the same things), have shifted places over the years, and other ways in which they've remained utterly the same. So... what's the spectrum, and where do I sit on it?

It's an important question, somewhat tied to the question of political awareness, but it's the awareness that I wanted to focus on in this post. I recently wrote about how watching people argue politics had become a source of stress and might even have been a factor affecting my sleep habits. My buddy Charles wrote the following comment in response:

When I cut political content out of my life my stress levels went way down. Just a thought.

On the surface, I see nothing to argue with here. It's a matter of simple therapy: see a stressor, remove the stressor. But when you start getting into specifics, the issue immediately becomes more complicated. If I interpret Charles's comment charitably (and he's earned that since he's a friend), it doesn't mean that I should crawl under a rock and totally avoid all politics. I'm sure that even Charles is, to some extent, quite politically aware and will, if he votes, go to the voting booths as an informed voter. He won't be one of those inarticulate, "low-information" people who merely vote on inchoate gut feelings, with no actual idea of what the candidates have done or what they represent. So I don't interpret "cut political content out of my life" as a total, radical statement in the spirit of "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out."*

I watch a lot of political vids now, including radically opposing views like those of Vaush (self-avowed socialist who is a fierce debater and very articulate even if I disagree with everything he says). While I'm not at the level of a political junkie who binges nothing but political videos and has an extensive knowledge of history, sociology, and the machinery underlying politics, I think I'm much more politically aware, these days, then I was pre-2003. Donald Trump, when he arrived on scene around 2015, wasn't someone I took seriously, and I maintained that unserious attitude through most of his campaign. I did end up becoming a convert to his agenda, however (if not to his megalomaniacal personality), and I wrote a mea culpa soon after the 2016 election, enumerating the many ways in which I'd been wrong.

My unprofessional analysis of Trump—and this is far from an original insight—is that he broke wide open the underlying fissures that had been dividing the American public for a very long time. He also reframed the fundamental conflict as not so much between the left and the right as between the nationalists and the globalists (an equivalent term for "globalist" from 10-15 years ago was "transnational progressive"). In the 90s, Republicans were the globalists, outsourcing cheap labor in other countries to boost their crony, corporatist capitalism. Even now, many Republicans/conservatives still are globalists.

Trump gets blamed for problems that had been simmering long before he arrived on the political scene—racial tensions, the erosion of civility in public discourse, etc. This stuff was already happening in the 90s, three decades earlier (cf. Morton Downey Jr.'s obnoxious media character in "Predator 2" for an example of the coarsening of public discourse); Trump came along and shined a light on the situation, forcing people to declare themselves and come out of the woodwork. As I said, the preconditions for the fracturing and polarizing we see today existed long before Trump's arrival in Washington. The reorienting of our awareness—i.e., that this is a nationalist-globalist conflict and not a left-right conflict—has given rise to the awareness that the so-called "neoconservative" agenda (as represented by Trump-haters like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, George W. Bush, etc.) closely and scarily parallels the "neoliberal" agenda—so closely, in fact, that people now routinely speak of a "Uniparty" whose only interest is in maintaining power. As my alt-media guy Styx repeatedly notes, these supposed enemies on Capitol Hill all retreat to the same bars every night and yuck it up together despite appearances.

As I paid more and more attention to the discussions around Trump, I began to see him as a 90s-era, quasi-Clintonian Democrat touting the 90s-era slogans of "Made in America" and "America First" and even, to some limited extent, "Union Yes" insofar as Trump has been pro-worker while the radical end of the leftie spectrum has gone all-in for all the rich people. (The "one percent" that the liberal Democrats were decrying only a few years ago are, ironically, almost all Democrat voters: Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and on and on.) They say a tiger doesn't change its stripes, and Trump, along with being pro-worker and America First, also proved to be far more anti-war in his stance, like the leftists of old, than today's Democrats. There can be no doubt that Hillary Clinton, had she acceded to the White House, would have started one or more major wars, and the current Oval Office occupant has us involved in all sorts of military conflicts following a sloppy, clumsy withdrawal from Afghanistan that left megatons of military equipment for the enemy to pick up, examine, reverse engineer, and use. Understanding Trump also requires understanding not so much what he says as what he does—a lesson that the leftist/globalist media repeatedly and stubbornly refused to learn (and, by all accounts, is still refusing to learn).

We could go on and on about different issues—how Trump contrasts with Biden, what specific aspects of Trump's agenda Biden has undone, etc. My larger point, though, is that the only reason I can talk or write even semi-intelligently about these things is that I made it my mission to be aware of them, and in doing so, I've become aware of the steady erosion and destruction of my country. I have, at this point, little desire to move back to America even though I've written longingly about moving to a remote place like Wyoming, which seems almost Edenic in its remove from everyday affairs—from the general muck and moil of American culture and society. But even Wyoming isn't immune from the cultural stink: US Representative Liz Cheney was based in Wyoming (why the voters voted for her is beyond me, but it could be because she hadn't shown her true colors until Trump came along).

So I've paid a price for my awareness, and at this point, I can't retreat to unawareness. (I'm not saying that that's what Charles was advocating.) Where does that leave me? I can blog less about politics, I suppose, but that won't change my level of awareness of what's going on, and since the blog is where I vent my spleen, I'll inevitably write about my opinions. I could try thinking less about politics, but I suspect it's too late for that. I could set a daily maximum for my YouTube viewing and news reading, but even if I set that maximum, I'd probably still write about politics as much as I already do. If anything, I think I may feel some obligation to stand athwart the destruction of my culture in the same way that Dr. Vallicella has written about:

Would that I could avoid this political stuff! But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country and its Western heritage be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical.1 The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. 'Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. What one takes to be the truth: that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and non-negotiably. There is little or no common ground left, and if you think otherwise, you are fooling yourself.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the Converse Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

I think it may be too late for me. While I'm no political junkie, I am a zoon politikon for sure, and I too am unable to retreat into my "inner citadel." While I'm not a wild-eyed activist willing to join demonstrations and/or set myself on fire for a cause, I can at least be part of the larger ocean of discourse and maybe, in that way, persuade a mind or two.

Charles is probably right that "cutting political content out of my life" would lead to less stress. But I've learned enough from reading and listening to better minds that I prize my current awareness, even at the cost of being more stressed. So if I'm looking for practical answers to my sleep-schedule problem, I'm going to have to look elsewhere, I'm afraid.

__________

*Probably not meant to be taken literally, either.