That way lies the dark side
You can't escape politics. It's is like air—you breath it whether or not you want to.
This week, 10 years after first getting my German citizenship, I went to the German consulate in Barcelona to renew my passport.
As I was waiting for my number to be called, I had to marvel at the view:
The Germans had it pretty good up there in the tower by the beach. The nice lady who processed my application agreed.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about the piece I wrote last year about how I got my German citizenship (the naturalization path exists because of German guilt over the Holocaust, which my grandfather narrowly escaped).
There was one part in particular that I’ve been wanting to say more about:
I understand that some Germans might resent the fact that I now have access to all the same privileges of citizenship as they do, despite not having been born or ever having lived there... The response, I think, should be to treat this extreme privilege with respect. To understand that it is a gift, born out of something terrible and that now I too have a responsibility.
What is that responsibility? I think it is something like this: to reject tribalism and jingoism. To reject those beliefs intended to divide us or set up the “other” as a scapegoat. And instead, to go toward our common humanity. To emphasize that—as a certain U.S. president once said… we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.
I’ve been thinking that this message has gone out of fashion. Instead, I see humanity being divided into groups, races, or genders. I see arguments that histories of trauma or oppression create unbridgeable divides. That we cannot possibly understand each other’s experiences.
This cannot be right. If it were, humanity would truly be doomed, and our descent into tribalism and jingoism assured.
History shows—history has proven—that this need not be the case.
But we tend to forget a lot of history these days. There appears to be a Great Forgetting that has been underway for some time. For example, we forget that many things used to be far, far worse.
We forget that, if freedom and self-determination are not defended, at times through force, that there are leaders of nations and armies who will gladly take away that freedom, even if only for the sake of their own egos. We forget that human rights are a mere human invention and that they too may go away if not defended. We forget that entire peoples and nations can be infected by poisonous ideologies that are opposed to human flourishing, and that this can be true even of well-educated peoples and nations, including those that have their own long history of culture and humanity.
We do have tools to guard against all of this—they are ideas. Classical Liberalism. Humanism. These are the ideas that are used to underpin functioning Republics and Democracies because those are the ideas about how to live with people who are different from you, whether in their belief systems or in their race, gender, or experience of life.
I learned about all of this as a kid. Many of you all did too. It just seems that now, as an adult, these ideas are no longer being defended by huge swaths of societies in the midst of a transition from liberal to illiberal.
In place of these ideas, we now have determinism, identity, oppressor, and oppressed, persecuted and persecuting. This has created a global trend toward tribalism. I see it in the crazed crowds at Trump rallies unaware they’ve entered a personality cult to a selfish, clownish demagogue. But I also see it in the activists whose organizing principle of the world is about identity. Elements on both sides insist there is no possible way for us to understand the experience of the other (for the record, I recommend reading memoirs of people different than you if you want to begin to understand the experiences of others—as many of us were assigned to do in grade school, and I still do to this day).
To all of these sad developments, I can only say: that way lies the dark side.
You will forgive me for this naiveté, but I remain a Classical Liberal. Maybe it’s just how I was raised.
I. Apathy loses
Perhaps this is the most obvious political point to make in the world, yet still, every time an election rolls around, I somehow feel the need to remind people: if you don’t show up to vote, you cede all decision-making and right to complain about future events to those who do show up.
Conor Friedersdorf wrote about this in The Atlantic in February. Here’s one part:
“We grow justly weary of our politics,” the late Charles Krauthammer once wrote. But politics, “in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations,” is not something prudently ignored. “For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius,” he argued, “everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics. Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.”
Did you hear that? Everything depends on politics, including things you profess to care about. For me, it’s art, writing, and creative and free expression generally. But for you, maybe it’s something different.
Politics may be distasteful, or maddeningly frustrating, and I agree! But that’s why Max Weber defined it as a slow boring of hard boards.
If you are frustrated by the lack of progress, again I invite you to read history—this is how progress happens in liberal societies with a lot of different people who are empowered to participate (Yes I know many things are wrong with the process, but these are the basics).
If you want things to move much faster, we also have historical examples for how to bring various utopian visions into being, it’s just that they usually involve violent revolutions, millions dead, and more freedoms abridged than anyone had in mind at the outset.
Personally, I prefer what we’ve got now: go vote.
Beyond that: show up for when the decisions get made.
II. A Liberal Arts grad goes to war
To stick on the subject of history a while longer (one can’t stick long enough), I refer you to a piece by David M. Shribman, also in The Atlantic. It’s about a Liberal Arts grad from Dartmouth, all of 22 years old (Shribman’s uncle once removed), sent to go fight the Japanese Empire. The year is 1942.
While deployed on a Naval warship in the Pacific, he writes back to one of his professors at Dartmouth:
I’ve had lots of time to think out here… A decent liberal arts education based on the Social Sciences is all a lot of us have left—and more and more becomes the only possible background on which to view all this.
“All this,” of course, meaning World War II.
He also wrote letters of advice to his younger brother, Dick:
“What you’ll learn in college won’t be worth a God-damned,” Phil told Dick. “But you’ll learn a way of life perhaps—a way to get on with people—an appreciation perhaps for just one thing: music, art, a book—all of this is bound to be unconscious learning—it’s part of a liberal education in the broad sense of the term.”
But that wasn’t the end of it, far from it. “If you went to a trade school you’d have one thing you could do & know—& you’d miss the whole world of beauty,” he went on. “In a liberal school you know ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy—You can always learn to be a mechanic or a pill mixer etc.,” but it’s only when you’re of college age “that you can learn that life has beauty & fineness.”
As Shribman writes, his uncle knew what he had been sent to fight for.
And I, for one, am glad there were enough others around at the time to know that it was worth the fighting.
III. You cannot escape politics
In 2020, turnout in the U.S. presidential election “soared”—meaning 62% of eligible voters came out (“Trump is good for Democracy,” someone recently told me… which is one way to read that I suppose).
Here’s how I read it: in a contest that could well have decided whether the U.S. remained a functioning Republic, nearly 100 million voting-age Americans decided to stay home and not vote, concluding, meh… I’ll let others make that decision.
You see I have always held a special disdain for political apathy.
It’s one thing for you to look around and come to conclusions that I disagree with. The world is a complicated place after all. It’s another thing to not care to look around at all. Or, to look around and conclude that the proper response is to not exercise the one birthright that separates us from tyranny.
For as long as you are breathing air, you are affected by how your neighbors, town, state, province, and country decide to organize and govern themselves (if you are lucky enough to live in a self-governing polity in the first place).
No one can escape politics. It is like air. Not caring does not magically remove you from the system, no matter how much disdain, apathy, or frustration you might feel. Politics happens to you whether you want it to or not, whether you notice or not—nor can you escape it by moving countries, or with location-independence.
So I beseech you, readers: do not pretend that politics doesn’t exist.
There can be no dedication to your neighbors without acknowledgment that you and your neighbors live in space together, breathing the same air, side by side. You are part of a polity. And, at least for many of us, that polity is under some form of self-government.
That means you.
Wonderful article...and it seems so natural to me that all people in America should know this knowledge and not question it. I have great great grandfathers, grandfathers and fathers who fought in wars over the years so that we could be free and live in peace together. This would break their hearts. We must call this a "Cult" by Donald Trump and the Nazi's that support him. He is NOT nor never was a Republican. He should not have of opportunity of a true Republican to run for office or use our media sites for his cause to take over this beautiful country that we have been protecting for over 250 years. Don't stand down.
I agree. The two most important things you can do as a citizen are to vote and participate in surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau. The Census is ALWAYS doing surveys- not just every ten years- and all decisions are made based in their data. If you choose not to vote bc of the electoral college (ie, my vote doesn’t count) I find that very disappointing bc the popular vote does count. But that’s even more reason to participate in Census surveys. Outside of voting, it is the single best way to be heard and seen.
Yes this is my PSA bc too many folks don’t realize the Census is always doing surveys and also bc too often I encounter folks who refuse to participate 😕.