Posts tagged politics
Posts tagged politics
The politics of ordinary affect can be anything from the split second when police decide to shoot someone because he’s black and standing in a dark doorway and has something in his hand, to a moment when someone falls in love with someone else who’s just come into view. Obviously, the differences matter. The politics of any surge depends on where it might go. What happens. How it plays itself out and in whose hands.
Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives come up with a huge list of Things Need Doing
Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians come up with a huge list of Things They Will Never Do
The Party Platform, at one time the cornerstone of a strong democratic process, benefited from the creation of parties. Political parties could organize resources, including human capital, from which they constructed sweeping visions of the future. Often these were based on American Exceptionalism, which is a whole other topic of discussion.
But in the last 40 years, party platforms have all but disappeared; mostly because they can’t keep up with the frontloaded fundraising of contemporary, extended elections. Without platforms, elected parties don’t have tangible mandates for legislation that they can use in the House, and the system of checks and balances becomes a tyranny of the most vocal minority.
Election politics, however, have become much simpler. Instead of putting their backs and hearts into their work, now all a politician has to do is fire up the base in the primaries, suck up to the respectively left- or right- leaning corporations on the campaign trail, and move ever-so-slightly to the center during the general election.
Bring back the platform. Votes shouldn’t be a popularity poll, they should be a call to action.
We lack such a political concept of love, in my view, and our contemporary political vocabulary suffers from its absence. A political concept of love would, at the minimum, reorient our political discourses and practices in two important ways. First, it would challenge conventional conceptions that separate the logic of political interests from our affective lives and opposes political reason to the passions. A political concept of love would have to deploy at once reason and passion. Second, love is a motor of both transformation and duration or continuity. We lose ourselves in love and open the possibility of a new world, but at the same
time love constitutes powerful bonds that last.
