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Here’s Some New Anger For You (III)

Dissents make the spaces between the two sides larger than they need to be and paper over the fundamental agreements. And while some of my favorite writing happens in dissent, it sure is exhausting when it’s all you read. ~Dahlia Lithwick Someone will really have to point out to me the society in which dissidents […]

Dissents make the spaces between the two sides larger than they need to be and paper over the fundamental agreements. And while some of my favorite writing happens in dissent, it sure is exhausting when it’s all you read. ~Dahlia Lithwick

Someone will really have to point out to me the society in which dissidents are on the rampage and the chokehold of dreary centrism has been broken, because it certainly isn’t in America.  From my perspective, it is the fundamental agreements between the two parties and the two broad ideological camps that drive me up the wall, because the artificial imposition of the stale centrist consensus on the entire population is deadening and generally bad for participatory government and good government.  I don’t deny these fundamental agreements between the two “sides,” nor do I deny that party and pundit elites on both “sides” basically share 85-90% of their worldview.  These things are the problem.  To some small extent, if they have any positive value, progressive blogs and blogs like this one are part of the solution. 

This is not simply the old, “we want a choice, not an echo” logic, but it is the view that in a representative government it is actually legitimate to demand representation for all those tens of millions of people routinely ignored or given the shaft by the consensus elite.  It is actually legitimate to highlight and stress political differences between groups of people who have fundamentally different views.  This is not evidence of “dangerous polarisation,” but the basic functioning of political representation and expression.  The reason why there is a “politics of disdain” is that the political and chattering classes have had special disdain for us and people like us (i.e., people who have strong articulated, informed political views); we disdain what passes for government in this country because those in government have nothing but disdain for the real interests of the American people as we understand those interests. 

Of course, persuasion is desirable, and reasonableness is desirable, but the least persuasive arguments are those that engage in “on the one hand, on the other hand” hemming and hawing and the least reasonable arguments are usually those that insist that “the truth is always somewhere in the middle.”  Often the truth isn’t in the “middle,” at least not as the “middle” of our politics is currently defined (in favour of war and corporations, against borders, the Constitution, the family and American labour, among other things).  There is probably a good reason why some strong progressives and some traditional conservatives find themselves in agreement about certain vital policy questions and also find that they are not ashamed to acknowledge this agreement.  Their deep commitments to their respective worldviews give them a sense of certainty about who they are and what they believe.  This gives them the freedom to face up to new economic, political or social realities with some greater clarity than that possessed by those whose commitments are less secure and much more confused and have to be shored up through constant ideological posing about how much they hate Hillary Clinton or how much they fear the coming of the Christianists.  The dissidents at the relative margins are not the ones who need to indulge in displays of anger and hatred–it is the marginally conservative and marginally liberal people at the center who must overcompensate for their own milquetoastery by making the bashing of people on one “side” proof of their bona fides as a member of the other “side.”     

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