Why Writers Can Never Be Politicians (Or Can’t Let These Worlds Collide)
Nowadays, everyone’s a little bit politically engaged. We can be more public about our views on Twitter and Facebook. Everyone’s got an angry uncle releasing a screed about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and everyone’s probably posted or retweeted something that makes you want to pump a fist in the air, too. Politics is a matter of deep and concerted passion, and in our polarized political climate, we feel all the more obligated to leap into the fray.
I’m the same; with the chicanery and circus-act mentality of the current presidential election, I find myself paying close attention to the debates and Tweeting my thoughts from time to time. Never have the stakes seemed higher for the future of American discourse and thought. But the closer that rhetoric gets to the fiction writing I do, the leerier I get. The more I want to back away.
The problem is that fiction writing, writing of true literary and artistic merit, is fundamentally, diametrically, opposed to the language of politics. It must be so and must always be so.
The problem is one of character and individualism. The best novelists and storywriters set themselves the task of creating characters who feel like real individuals who might just walk off the page. They create unique, distinctive voices. They create characters with personalities, and people who are complex and contradictory and human. And fundamentally, the mission and aim of politics is to move and manipulate people in exactly the opposite way.
Even when we support the aim of political movements, we must acknowledge that the goal of politics is to bring them together. In order to achieve change in the political sphere, we have to herd people into large and actionable groups. The larger the groups, the more united (and uniform) the coalition, the more powerful it is, and the more likely it is to create change, whether that is justice, reform, liberal agendas, conservative agendas, whatever that may be. This process is a fundamentally de-humanizing one.
You know what I’m talking about: do you feel just the slightest bit uneasy when the pundits speak confidentally of “the Hispanic vote” or what “soccer moms” think or “the Black vote”? Hold on just a second, I always want to say. Does every Black voter think the same? Does every “soccer mom” — whatever that means — have the same background, the same interests at heart? Maybe in some ways — but not in others. This is the nature of “intersectionality” — but even intersectionality as a concept falls short of the true beauty of an individual. No demographic classification will ever capture the dimensions of myself. And just about any time a poll or a survey tries to classify me, they inevitably get it wrong.
I felt this in particular when filling out a questionnaire during jury duty. The questionnaire was designed to try to figure out what biases I might hold. The case was about a medical device that had potentially damaged women’s health; the corporation that manufactured the device was being sued. The questionnaire asked about my education level and my economic status. Because of these things, I was disqualified, I was told, because I would be biased toward favoring major corporations. I accepted the evaluation of myself, but I couldn’t help thinking that they couldn’t have been more wrong. If I were honest, I should have been disqualified because I would have been biased against the corporation. How could all the best data out there have been so wrong about me? Simple: everyone’s story is more complex than it seems. If they’d been so wrong about me, the data and the demographics must be wrong about others, too. I can’t help but notice how thoroughly and completely wrong every major pundit has been about the twists and turns of the presidential campaign so far. Every time a pundit assumes he or she knows something all-encompassing about a voting block, such as evangelicals, s/he’s been completely wrong.
All this goes back to why writers can’t simultaneously be political and successful in their art. Art is the antithesis of uniformity and demographery. Art shows complexity where we once saw only sameness. Stories show us that there is more than one story to every vision of the world, every experience. But a single story is what politicians must sell to us if they want to succeed in their sphere. If I insist on seeing complexity and multi-dimensionality, it makes me a pretty bad politician; I’ll never have enough people to march under my banner. But I will also tell a unique story, one that’s far more human.
