Dialogue: 5
Monday, 19 December 2016
Paradox Containment
Successful candidates contain paradoxes.
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Just one point…
To master the political landscape, master the ideological landscape.
And to do that, contain ideological paradoxes.
Great candidates understand a practical truth about politics.
To win, they must appeal to stranger voters.
That is, there aren’t just three kinds of voters: reds, blues, and undecideds.
There is a jungle of diversity: as many voters as there are personalities.
To survive that jungle requires confronting its many contradictions.
Eagles will vote for snakes. Elephants for chimpanzees.
Lions for beatles.
Ruckus.
Every species in the jungle has its pet ideology.
Lions believe in lion-ism, so they like leonine candidates.
Snakes believe in snake-theism, so they like serpentine candidates.
Getting the lions and the snakes to love you,
that’s politics.
Contain more paradoxes than your opponent.
And better ones.
You stand on contradictions.
Conceal them. Make them blend together.
Celebrate their destined, sacred union. Of alloys, not impurities.
Subsume them in transcendent enlightenment.
Magnetic singularity: all roads intersect here, swallowed in wheel’s center.
Your opponents also stand on contradictions.
Pull them out from underneath their feet.
Expose them for imposters and opportunists.
Question their intentions. Besiege their impure foundations.
Unravel the tapestry.
Beware!
When you hear people say things like…
“This candidate is just a pragmatist, not an idealist.”
“Our culture is post-ideological.”
“Politics these days is more about identity than ideology.”
“There are no really new ideas in politics.”
Ha! The joke’s on them.
Or, rather, on those who listen, and believe.
Just a pragmatist?
Pragmatism is intensely ideological.
Post-ideology? That’s a very interesting ideology.
Politics cannot be post-ideological.
Ideology is belief.
Even believing in non-belief is a belief.
Ideas and beliefs are self-swallowing, inescapable realities.
If you want to understand why our political landscape is the way it is,
You must first understand our ideological landscape.
Why is it the way it is?
You see, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Matteo Renzi are the same person.
For that matter, so are Bill Clinton, Michelle Bachelet, and many others.
They contain the same essential paradox.
The paradox that “Progressivism” contains is socialism and liberalism.
(I am using ‘liberalism’ in its classical, European sense; of “Liberty”).
When it contains it well, it harmonizes both.
When it contains it badly, it neuters both, or one wins out.
When one wins out, this “reveals the true nature” of the movement.
The Cold War was obviously ideological.
Autocratic communism vs. democratic capitalism.
So when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
on the Left, there was felt an ideological void.
“The West” had won.
Now what?
Progressive politics filled that void.
Post-Reagan, Post-Thatcher, market forces were popular.
Globalization was seen as healthy.
So the “Progressive” formula was genius.
Contain the paradox: embrace markets and embrace government.
There need be no condradiction.
We live in a new world. Markets create abundance for all!
Let’s all make money, and be good capitalists;
And take care of each other with public programs, and be good socialists.
But don’t call us socialists. We’re not that! Socialism failed!
And don’t call us capitalists. We’re not that! Capitalists exploit workers!
Call us progressives. Because we represent sharing progress.
These candidates emphasized their youth and their “coolness”.
Why “coolness”? Because “cool” means harmonized with the Tao of Culture.
In an environment of relative peace and prosperity;
In an age of post-modern consumerism;
In a generation in search of values and meaning:
Voters cared less for a sense of physical security, and more for that harmony, which you might say gave a comforting sense of cultural security.
It’s hard to over-state: this platform was a stroke of political genius.
It carried the Left for a quarter century, made it the ascendant movement;
Supplanted the Right as the default governing party.
Identity politics, “political correctness”, the overwhelming center-left consensus among elites in technology, entertainment, finance, academia, media, and government — these are cultural manifestations of the success of the Progressive formula. Progressive-ism created the illusion of a “post-ideological” landscape, in which identities mattered more than ideas, because for so long, it seemed to harmonize a contradiction. Liberty, equality? Socialism, capitalism? Psshh, no contradiction here — that’s so 20th century! And so the Right just seemed hawkish and hopelessly out-of-fashion.
In much the same way, Reagan and Thatcher were the same person.
They contained the same paradox.
The paradox that modern Conservatism contains is liberalism and conservatism. The union of those who care about markets, and those who care about guns, Christmas, and the Constitution.
In the political landscape of the late 1970s, this too, can be seen a stroke of genius. But to them, it seemed so natural as to be uncalculated.
Those who came after: Cameron, the Bushes, McCain, Romney;
Made quite a stump about being in this tradition.
But more often than not, operated as what Thatcher called “wets”.
They had far more in common with the Progressives than either side would like to admit.
Every paradox is a kind of uneasy, unholy alliance.
Wets and Drys. Medici and Papacy. Russians and Americans.
Union workers and business titans. Libertarians and Evangelical Christians.
The Snakes and The Lions.
Candidates harmonize factions within the paradox;
creating an illusion of unity.
But when the candidate fails, the illusion fades.
And the factions remember that they dislike each other.
In the Progressive movement,
the far left socialists (the drys) blame the more liberal centrists (the wets).
And vice-versa.
In the Conservative movement,
the centrists blame the far-right libertarians and conservatives.
Whom, in turn, blame each other; and the centrists.
Now, Trump.
An unlikely candidate who contains unlikely paradoxes.
Trump has shifted the ideological landscape.
For the first time in nearly 40 years.
He has done so by attacking the paradoxes of his opponent.
In a kind of flanking maneuver, or supply-chain raid,
he went after workers.
Workers.
The Left has always been the worker’s ideology.
And so the Democratic Party had come to take these votes for granted.
It had over-extended. In its attempt to contain its fundamental paradox, the Progressives had gotten too cozy with Big Business. Too corporatist. Too elitist. Too cool. Not radical enough. “You don’t care about me anymore.”
Trump contains other paradoxes:
Protectionist trade-rhetoric, pro-market prosperity gospel.
Make government smaller, but spend more money on infrastructure.
Cares about climate change, but pro-mining and energy independence.
Anti-interventionist (so isolationist?), but “we’re going to defeat ISIS”.
Tolerant secular New Yorker, now pro-life.
Make the military better than ever, but threaten large defense contractors.
Contradictions! Contradictions!
The mainstream commentary on this is so predictable.
Level 1 analysis:
He contradicts himself.
He has no consistent ideology.
He is a pragmatic populist.
Therefore, he is stupid, evil, or both.
Probably both.
Level 2 analysis:
He contradicts himself.
He mirrors the people.
He doesn’t just tell them what they want to hear.
He sees unusual possibilities to synthesize, to harmonize.
Unexplored paths whereby the practical and the ideological might meet.
Fueling the expectation that maybe, just maybe,
he can actually contain these paradoxes.
Calculated gambles to piss off his base without losing their support.
He is a genius.
Maybe evil, maybe good.
Probably both.
Successful candidates contain paradoxes.
Trump contains paradoxes.
More, and better.
