The folks who look for extra-political answers to political problems are a particular group of dominant centrist-liberal thinkers who are either proximate to existing political authority or who would like to be/flatter themselves that they are. Sometimes I think they view politics the same way that the guy in the Monty Python sketch who keeps bombarding another man with sexual innuendo--"Your wife, is she a goer? Does she go?" only to admit at the end that he's a virgin. They are horrified by politics because they have not the faintest idea how to actually do it--they only know how to invoke procedures and rules against politics roughly the way Transylvanian peasants put garlic in window to keep the vampires away.
The other more self-aware group avoid actual politics because they're entirely aware that they bring relatively little to any genuine coalition and are likely to have some of their own interests, prestige and performative authority badly abraided or corroded if they really do join in some kind of coalition that puts together meaningful social formations and constituencies. (This is kind of the Lincoln Project guys: sure, they can't stand to be Trumpist, but my god, they're not actually going to sheepishly walk into the Big Tent of Democratic coalition-making with their hat in their hands, they just want the Republican Party back under their control.)
There's a lot of cosplay in politics, like the Twitter social-justice guerrillas angrily insisting that we must take radical action before they check in to their jobs as, well, university professors. But the Transylvanian point is the right one. It's a view of politics as literally code, not as a titanic clash among social forces: if you say these formulas, then you will get what you want.
The cynicism of the other side has a certain kind of grifty honesty about it, but it is also a failure of imagination or an overly careerist view of politics. That said, well, if someone were paying me millions of dollars to make Mueller memes, would I really resist?
This makes sense to me and gets why efforts to build up the Afghan or Iraqi police forces kept failing. Policing is a highly political act. The same is true of militaries, though I think the politics there are a least a little easier to manage or the U.S. is just better at it, as the militaries for both states were somewhat able to function (if often only with direct support of the United States as shown in the collapse of Afghanistan).
That said, I do think different venues of politics have different rules in a way that matters. Which is to say that I'd reject a legal realism approach that says all judges are just legislators in robes. There's something to that, and even a sympathetic accounting of Roberts ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court-statesman.html ) gets at the way he acts more as a statesman than his self-description as a umpire. But at the same time Jack Smith exercises legitimate power in a very different way than the January 6th committee even though they're mutually reinforcing.
I think I'm still being naive about politics in some ways that this post helps unpack. I look forward to any more thinking or recommended reading along these lines.
Yes, I think that this is the problem wtih "everything is political" takes -- sometimes we want things to be political in different ways or with different standards than a ward heeler. So anything a judge does is "political" but we would prefer for there to be variations in the standards of politics and the aim of those politics. That does entail the societal and official imposition of penalties for violating those codes, which means (going one step back) that we need to have some positive, animating vision for what such codes should contain. That's not naivety but situationally appropriate thought!
The folks who look for extra-political answers to political problems are a particular group of dominant centrist-liberal thinkers who are either proximate to existing political authority or who would like to be/flatter themselves that they are. Sometimes I think they view politics the same way that the guy in the Monty Python sketch who keeps bombarding another man with sexual innuendo--"Your wife, is she a goer? Does she go?" only to admit at the end that he's a virgin. They are horrified by politics because they have not the faintest idea how to actually do it--they only know how to invoke procedures and rules against politics roughly the way Transylvanian peasants put garlic in window to keep the vampires away.
The other more self-aware group avoid actual politics because they're entirely aware that they bring relatively little to any genuine coalition and are likely to have some of their own interests, prestige and performative authority badly abraided or corroded if they really do join in some kind of coalition that puts together meaningful social formations and constituencies. (This is kind of the Lincoln Project guys: sure, they can't stand to be Trumpist, but my god, they're not actually going to sheepishly walk into the Big Tent of Democratic coalition-making with their hat in their hands, they just want the Republican Party back under their control.)
There's a lot of cosplay in politics, like the Twitter social-justice guerrillas angrily insisting that we must take radical action before they check in to their jobs as, well, university professors. But the Transylvanian point is the right one. It's a view of politics as literally code, not as a titanic clash among social forces: if you say these formulas, then you will get what you want.
The cynicism of the other side has a certain kind of grifty honesty about it, but it is also a failure of imagination or an overly careerist view of politics. That said, well, if someone were paying me millions of dollars to make Mueller memes, would I really resist?
This makes sense to me and gets why efforts to build up the Afghan or Iraqi police forces kept failing. Policing is a highly political act. The same is true of militaries, though I think the politics there are a least a little easier to manage or the U.S. is just better at it, as the militaries for both states were somewhat able to function (if often only with direct support of the United States as shown in the collapse of Afghanistan).
That said, I do think different venues of politics have different rules in a way that matters. Which is to say that I'd reject a legal realism approach that says all judges are just legislators in robes. There's something to that, and even a sympathetic accounting of Roberts ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/opinion/john-roberts-supreme-court-statesman.html ) gets at the way he acts more as a statesman than his self-description as a umpire. But at the same time Jack Smith exercises legitimate power in a very different way than the January 6th committee even though they're mutually reinforcing.
I think I'm still being naive about politics in some ways that this post helps unpack. I look forward to any more thinking or recommended reading along these lines.
Yes, I think that this is the problem wtih "everything is political" takes -- sometimes we want things to be political in different ways or with different standards than a ward heeler. So anything a judge does is "political" but we would prefer for there to be variations in the standards of politics and the aim of those politics. That does entail the societal and official imposition of penalties for violating those codes, which means (going one step back) that we need to have some positive, animating vision for what such codes should contain. That's not naivety but situationally appropriate thought!