No, Politics Is Not About Power

Whatever that means

One often hears from leftists: “Politics is about power.” To differentiate themselves from centrist liberals — that is, to emphasize the intramural disparity that exists between themselves and these more moderate counterparts — leftists often take pains to elaborate further: “Politics is about gaining power to impose values, not compromising to develop policy.”

The problem is that formulated this way, the principle is either meaningless or vacuous.

For one thing, it’s not clear that politics is the sort of thing that can be about something at all. Is cooking about eating? or is it about chemistry? Is a chair about sitting? or could it be about the material it’s made from? These are relatively idle questions. Furthermore, aboutness is not exclusive. Soccer can be about speed, footwork, fitness, and teamwork all at once. The HBO series “Silicon Valley” can be about the tech industry while also being about friendship and about the human drive to build something lasting and meaningful. So the slogan falls apart quickly.

More cogent is the title of Nathan J. Robinson’s recent piece in Current Affairs: “Politics is a Contest of Domination.” He is joined by Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick in defending Will Menaker of the popular leftist podcast “Chapo Trap House” against New Republic’s Jeet Heer.

Menaker tells “the pragmatists out there” to “bend the knee”; their “entire worldview has been discredited,” and when leftists join them to defeat Republicans in power, it will not be with “means-testing and market-based solutions, but with a powerful social-democratic message like what just happened in the U.K.”

Heer, who supported Bernie Sanders, worries that “dominance politics” is a bad fit for a left-liberal message of solidarity and anti-hierarchy. Surely the value undergirding the sort of libertarian socialism Robinson advocates is that nobody should have to “bend the knee” to anyone.

What does it mean to say that politics is a contest of domination? For Robinson, “there are conflicting interests in society, and they are deep.” One side has value V, the other value not-V, so “there is no available compromise. There is only a test to see which one of us can have our values enacted in the world.” Conservative values, he says, “are that people should struggle for subsistence in a miserably unequal, sexist, and racist economy.” But to centrist liberals, “compromise is a goal rather than a tactic.” So, according to Robinson, these liberals end up allowing conservatives to inflict the immiseration they so desire upon the world.

This is a wild caricature, of course. But even in terms of his basic logic Robinson is doing some projecting here. For it is “dominance” as a tactic, not as a goal, that Heer critiques, and no tactical justification is given in response.

Freddie deBoer has wondered: “Why is it forbidden to say ‘I support your goals, but I find your tactics, your strategy, and your messaging counterproductive’?” Nothing against Freddie (and compare his views to mine), but the answer is common sense: If the people in question cared more about their goals than about their tactics, then they wouldn’t have such ridiculous tactics in the first place. They would be actually winning rather than talking, on podcasts and in online journals, about winning.

Kilpatrick writes that “it’s we who represent the many. And the Democrat intelligentsia who represents the powerful few.” But Bernie Sanders lost the primary to Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Corbyn, cited by both Robinson and Kilpatrick, lost his election to Theresa May. If winning is what matters to these guys, why are they so pleased with themselves for losing? If politics is a contest of domination, why would Menaker tell powerful Democrats to “bend the knee” — why not just crush them underfoot?

Just as mainstream liberals have drawn on Harry Potter to dramatize a self-indulgent “resistance” to Donald Trump, so does “Chapo” here draw on “Game of Thrones” to dramatize a self-indulgent “resistance” to the Democratic Party. The result in both cases is whiny and twee.

Lurking in the background is another issue: that of the aptness and usefulness of “liberalism” and “neoliberalism” as labels, with this linguistic question tracking a deeper disconnect the left believes exists between themselves and other liberals. As a result, the left sees these terms as crucial for their self-presentation — the liberal as the leftist’s central foil, with the intellectual avatars of neoliberalism coming in for special ridicule.

Nikil Saval in The New York Times and Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine have covered this derision less than sympathetically, with responses coming from The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig and Vox’s Mike Konczal, among others.

Bruenig helpfully contrasts philosophical liberalism with economic liberalism, but she fails to appreciate the term’s new slipperiness. Why is this important? What bothers many leftists about those whom they designate “liberals” is a matter neither of political philosophy nor of political economy but of political tactics and of the metapolitics that inform our engagements with people who disagree with us.

But I suspect that to many observers it’s unclear just what the left’s derision of liberals is supposed to be motivated by. Or, if the motivations are clear, it remains difficult to understand why a mere procedural or tactical difference should be capable of generating such an intense measure of animus.

Robinson, for instance, writes that “Heer’s belief that dominance in politics is a bad thing is uniquely illustrative of the pathology infecting those people variously known as ‘liberals,’ ‘centrists,’ ‘pragmatists,’ or simply ‘mainstream Democrats.’” Yet this is impossible to reconcile with either of Bruenig’s definitions (“liberty, rational inquiry, egalitarianism, and so forth” and “free or freeish market capitalism”) because neither of those definitions imply anything about whether dominance should be a political tactic or compromise should be a political goal.

It seems more likely that “liberalism” is now coming to stand in for “civility,” the topic of quite a few online disagreements in its own right (comparable to “respectability politics” and “tone policing” within social justice).

As it happens, Bruenig herself argued forcefully against an overarching norm of civility a few years ago, and her points about civility look much like Robinson’s points about dominance politics. “[C]ivility is about, at some level, establishing common ground,” but since “there simply isn’t always common ground” and some situations require “arguing across frameworks,” civility can end up “muzzl[ing]” people who try to emphasize radical differences of value, or who suggest the wrongs of another person’s stance are morally beyond the pale. Despite such considerations, “[n]o case is ever actually made for the wholesale superiority of this style” — “neutral, disinterested,” and civil — “of argument.”

Of course arguing for civility does not require arguing for its “wholesale superiority” any more than arguing for the usefulness of any heuristic or the importance of any value requires arguing that other heuristics or values should be abandoned. The Menaker/Heer dustup shows us exactly why civility is an important starting point, and exactly how leftists hurt themselves by abandoning it. Some arguments are about fundamental values, but many are not, and even those interlocutors who don’t share one value with us may share others. An instinct towards incivility can make it seem as though a comrade with a purely tactical dispute is actually one of those awful centrist liberals.

There is, in fact, a fascinating philosophical literature on the epistemology of disagreement. From it we can gather some questions for Robinson, Bruenig, and the others.

If moral and political values are fundamental, where do they come from? Are they formed by a mechanism completely different from all other belief-forming? Many people seem to switch throughout their lives from having one set of values to having another — Within a leftist framework, how is this possible?

Further, even if civil discourse is pointless because of conflicts at the basic value level, what improvement upon this predicament is uncivil discourse supposed to make? Say there really is a situation where one person asserts V and the other asserts not-V — If values have the features leftists take them to have, then anyone listening to the discussion would also already have either the value V or the value not-V. But this means that the “debate” will do no more to convince listeners than to convince the people involved. In other words, the leftist picture seems to have mounted a case not against civil discourse but against discourse proper.

These “dirtbag leftists” and Democratic Socialists of America members should also consider whether they can really accomplish much without discourse, of whatever type. Kilpatrick infers from the popularity of Bernie Sanders that “it’s we who represent the many.” But although humans love fairness and evince “a particularly strong motivation not to get less than anyone else,” according to Paul Bloom, there isn’t “a smidgen of evidence that humans or any other species naturally value equality for its [own] sake.”

In other words, leftists’ basic values are values they must convince others to adopt. Unfortunately, they seem to have theorized themselves out of the possibility of doing just that. Not a great outcome if politics is about power — which makes one wonder, when it comes to these eloquent activists, just what else it might be about.