Mar

7

An Open Letter to All Political Scientists: Does the Obama Campaign Represent the Future of Politics?

Filed Under politics 

To all political scientists:

When asked what politics will look like in the future, I almost always say “Ghost in the Shell.” My reasoning is that our “politics” is really a product of our drive for progress, which is based in no small part on our unlimited desires. Technology therefore will overwhelm political life, if it hasn’t done so already. Bureaucratic infighting over what comprises “security” for all of us will be all that is left of political life, and the only way we will “understand” freedom will come from cultists who value expression and violence instead of education and fraternity.

In short: the future of politics is the infighting between entities like the CIA, FBI, NSA (security) and al-Qaeda (freedom). Obviously I’m painting an extreme picture here, but then again, we’re the ones who feel our desires should be boundless.

One indirect proof of this is those books historians write about a product like coffee or tobacco, and how it caused changes in certain societies and set a number of other events in motion that created the modern world. Those books always feel false to me, as if they’re our own perspective imposed on the past. Our modern perspective is that if people are empowered to do something, if their desire can be satisfied by the market, then the whole must change. Hence, once technology came about for safer abortions, abortion was as good as a right, and look – once coffee met a society that hadn’t known it, there had to be changes there too, right?

The safer argument, though, is that other ages could be defined by piety more than desire. Fear of authority, at the least, comprised the whole. Now we fear each other far more than authority – it’s always some small evil group (neocons, superdelegates, etc.) that are planning to manipulate us for god-knows-what reason. Only through that evil group is authority compromised: otherwise, we’re willing to follow whoever speaks what we want to hear over a cliff. And it is our feeling comfortable, more than our actually being secure, which comprises security – hence, evil micro groups everywhere need to be identified and eliminated, sometimes with a message being sent, sometimes completely under the radar.

Again, I’m painting an extreme picture. I’ve outlined in a number of places how we can avoid the extreme outcome – the argument is that merely taking the past seriously, trying to hear more voices than only our own, will bring back politics. Perhaps the parties, which are in shambles, can play an educative role for us citizens instead of catering to candidates I wouldn’t trust my car keys with.

With all of the above as backdrop, I want to make a twofold suggestion:

  1. You, as political scientists, should be working through Obama’s rhetoric and marketing and assessing the populism that is beneath it. You can ask whether his campaign represents a deliberative politics or not, whether it is making us more aware of what issues face us and how they can be solved, or whether voting against him is truly a vote against “hope” and “change.”
  2. If “Ghost in the Shell” is the future of politics, what does the Obama campaign represent?

I want to spend a little time on the second point – I will leave it up to you to come up with metrics to measure what is going on, and objective ways of classifying the phenomena we are witnessing. I don’t quite think alarmist articles like this one comparing Obama to Canada’s Pierre Trudeau are quite accurate, given that Obama’s inexperience (and yes, Hillary is inexperienced too) and Leftist rhetoric makes him more apt to be President Carter than Trudeau. The big problem with Obama is that if the US is threatened, he will more than likely back down, seeing his mandate as never fighting anyone since only the US causes wars, not dictators and terrorists. He will cause a loss of American life in his passivity, but I don’t know how actively he can pursue a hard-Left agenda when all is said and done. Things just don’t work that way in the US, where even Michael Moore is a gun-owner (I think. I read this a while ago).

Rather, it could be that the Obama/Clinton debacle is the grand exit of an old style of politics, one that catered to the idea of politics as noble. And make no mistake, this is a debacle: no matter who wins, a full half of Democratic primary voters are going to feel screwed, and that number is enormous. 14.6 million Democrats voted on Super Tuesday, compared with 9 million Republicans. The GOP could be blown out of the water come November, if it weren’t for one little thing: how many Democrats are going to feel like the populism which ennobles them (“your vote counts”) is just a sham once the primaries are over? And how many are going to find that refuge in just being oneself is just as effective – if not more effective – than overt participation in politics?

Nothing in this letter is meant to be fixed or final. I’m just suggesting lines of inquiry you might want to pursue, instead of asking the same dumb old questions again and again. It really is a disgrace that my profession spends its time trying to predict election outcomes or find psychological factors (“do voters like green?”) for the sake of advancing an agenda. If you don’t like these questions, you’re always welcome to meet me in the University of Dallas library, where I am happy to go over passages of Plato or poems by Dickinson with you, and show you a time when political life itself had a nobility, and wasn’t merely about preference.

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