The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Notes in Defense of Ordinary Politics

1. There are different political vocations among and within persons—some outsider, some insider, relative to different spheres. Some folks "are called" to make a difference from within systems (parties, governments, companies, etc.), some from without. The two might not always get along and tend to represent different temperaments; still, each can make a difference in its own ways. Likewise, those in power, and the systems of power, must receive pressure from both within and without in order to change.


2. Witness Hillary Clinton's infamous remark about the 1964 Civil Rights Act: it took Lyndon Johnson's (a once pro-segregation Southern Democrat) legislative engineering from within to bring Martin Luther King Jr.'s cultural activism to become law. Though she took hell for this, she was absolutely right.


3. In a diverse republic, no one faction can expect to rule over all the others absolutely. If it is to usher in the next society, political work must at one point or another, join in a spirit of unity (i.e., compromise) among factions.


4. Being a supporter in a republican society gives one some claim over the allegiance of leaders one supports. This claim is not always easy to wield, but it can be done. For example: the "religious rights"'s move from quietism to alliance with the Republicans, first in the late 70s and then coming to fruition in the second Bush administration. (There are dangers: this alliance made them complicit in Bush's failures as well.)


5. Zizek's "Resistance Is Surrender" article, which I have often cited here, powerfully points to the limits of utopianist protest movements. Their efforts to prevent the Iraq War not only failed but backfired against the reactionary leadership. Protest must take a dose of realpolitik: "The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse." (Very much echoes the Naomi Klein article linked at the top.)


6. What does a boycott on voting really represent?
   
   • A refusal to grant legitimacy to leaders that don't represent one's views perfectly
   • An act of excluding oneself from leaders' constituencies; if they can win without you, they have no need of you
   • Shrinks political coalitions into oligarchies
   
   To call it a "boycott" is misleading. The government will not go bankrupt without votes.


7. Of course, the vital & proper qualifications against idolatry:
   
   • Expect salvation by god alone (read: not from politicians)
   • Leaders may be loved (as people and possibilities) but not depended on (as gods)
   • Ordinary politics is not anything but an instrument of the Fall, pulling at the levels of such Powers as reign over the kingdom of death


8. Voting is a paltry thing and an individual vote will never matter. If anything, to vote is to be a member of a society that is beyond oneself, that no one person (even presidents) cannot and should not be able to fully orchestrate.


9. In part because it is so paltry: voting must not mean the abdication of all political action to politicians voted for. Rather, for a citizen, it is one political act among many others.


10. There are many issues, many pressing problems that face us. Any movement in the right direction on as many of them as possible deserves our vigorous support. It also deserves our criticism.

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