Is Politics Just Like War?
I read your attack on politics as war with great interest, Conor -- for I too am dissatisfied with our tendency, since the Great Society '60s, to approach every policy, and any political contest, through the metaphor of war. Not only does it make things that aren't war more warlike, it confuses us about what war really is. But politics, which does involve actually competing for power, is considerably more like war than many other things -- at least sometimes. You yourself acknowledge that the warlike approach to politics "usually doesn't make any sense." I'm very interested in understanding the exceptions.
It helps to look at two different visions of war. In the first, war is a state of exception -- a situation in which many rules change, some rules are suspended, and a few new rules kick into effect. War begins when someone creates that situation, or when soon-to-be combatants mutually acknowledge that such a situation exists. The war has a beginning, a middle, and and end, the point at which hostilities are suspended or completed. Maybe one side wins a total or a partial victory. Maybe the loser surrenders conditionally or unconditionally. Maybe one side gains some territory, resources, prestige, or all three.
In the second vision of war, the state of exception is more severe than the one I just identified. Aside from the most basic rules of war, like kill or be killed, there really aren't rules, just strategies. Most important, there's no real narrative or story giving the war a beginning, middle, and end. There's just a mythological notion that now is a time of crisis so profound that we must stop at nothing to win.
It seems pretty commonsensical to recognize that oftentimes politics does resemble the first kind of war. And I think your real concern is that we're developing a particularly ignorant and troublesome habit of analogizing politics to war in the second sense. It's true that there are vested interests in making that kind of view a popular one. But there's a difficulty, which is that the two visions of war I identified actually sit on a continuum, blurring into one another. This isn't some especially heinous feature of 'modernity' or any other bugaboo -- it's on full display in Thucydides. And one of the purposes of politics is to sort out what kind of wars we face, and how we want to wage the ones we're in. In fact, it's hard to think about how we could practice politics in that way without persuading people of the case we're making about war and crisis. You think that the politics of persuasion can lead us out of the distorting view of war as permanent crisis and politics as that kind of war. But isn't that distorting view itself a consequence of the politics of persuasion?
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Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
The logical response to your piece is to quote Von Clausewitz: "War is the extension of politics by other means." When politics fails to accomplish the goals of one of two parties, the issue is resolved by war. The real question is, do wars ever really resolve anything, or do they simply postpone further politics and resolution, perhaps more war?
May '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
We really need to hear from Jonah on this.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
In regard to the equating all of the political drives to war, the War on Drugs, etc., I believe that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism handles that one better than anything I can offer from my humble experience.
Jun '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
As the ideologies, the political agendas, of the two major parties get farther and farther apart, the stakes get higher and higher too. We're not to a civil war level of conflict, yet, but the needle on the gauge has been slowly moving in that direction for the last forty years. Another way to reduce the pressure is for the voters to realign around one of the parties, and abandon the other. That's probably how this period ends. I just hope voters pick the right party.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Do you really believe that the ideologies of the two parties are that far apart? I think there is a growing movement of the country toward the right, but the Republicans are being dragged there screaming and protesting. There are in this country the Democrats, the Republican, and the majority of the American people fed up with the leftist (statist) movement of both parties.
Jun '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Former KGB operative and defector Yuri Bezmenov would disagree with you. If you have an hour to burn, look him up on Youtube. You will be as fascinated as you are horrified at what he has to say.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Paules, Great suggestion, I am watching the first of the nine segments as write. He is superb. Thank you.
May '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Liberals created "the moral equivalency" argument because they wanted each of their pet social projects treated with the same selfless sacrifice that they saw in the effort to win WWII.
The problem is that they fight their "moral wars" about as well as they fight the shooting wars.
Jun '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
The problem is that every time some politician is interviewed he uses the word ‘fight’. He’s fighting for this or that. Imagine a McDonald’s counter-kid saying to you, “I’ll fight for your Big Mac, sir.” You’re likely to respond, “Hey kid, I don’t need it that bad”. When I see a politician with a piece of his ear bitten off then I’ll know he was in a scrap, and that most likely with a constituent who wanted to know where he stood on Obamacare. Just once I’d like to hear a politician say that he traded his vote on a bill for a yea on his earmark funding a new gym at his daughter’s school, or that his vote was payback for the screwing he took on the ethanol subsidy because the price of bourbon went up. Everybody knows these guys, when off camera, go drinking together on the taxpayers’ dime, so the least they could do is stop with the fight shtick. To paraphrase Von Clausewitz politics is not war by other means. I would posit that politics is sleaze by any means.
Jun '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
~Paules
Former KGB operative and defector Yuri Bezmenov would disagree with you. If you have an hour to burn, look him up on Youtube. You will be as fascinated as you are horrified at what he has to say. · Aug 1 at 10:45am
I did watch his sit-down interview, and it was horrifying, but I think the method may not work as well in 2010 America, since nobody can co-opt all the media today, or all the universities, as thoroughly as they could just 25 years ago. I understand that millions of pro-Marxist "useful idiots" are already in place and full of zeal, some in the White House even, but I don't think there are enough to go around. American commonsense and individualism will prevail. Nobody can control the message as well as it needs to be controlled. Not anymore.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
The War for American Independence, the Civil War, World War 2 resolved something.
Has Conor read Machiavelli?
May '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Politics isn't like war, it is a sport. For those of us in the DC area with no professional sports team worth cheering for (the Caps being an exception), politics is the next best thing. The giant reality TV show that is national politics is partly the result of many media outlets shuttering bureaus around the country and the world, but keeping their DC ones open. There's no offering of different perspectives, because papers just run the same AP and Reuters stories. But you have 10 papers covering which Arlington ice cream shop Obama slipped into. Wouldn't it be nice if they actually invested time and money in the news and current events? If journalists are so frustrated with the divisiveness of politics, than stop encouraging your colleagues to write about Boehner's tan or Pelosi's botox injections and develop a story beyond "This just in...". In summation, politics isn't the problem, but 1) D.C. has crappy pro-sports teams and 2) most media outlets have made themselves irrelevant.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Michael Tee. I have studied the three wars you mentioned. I imagine they resolved some issues, but I suspect we are still dealing with many issues involved in all three.
I finished watching the Bezmenov interviews. During the last two parts I could not help but think that he had predicted Obama 25 years ago. The entire goal of the KGB seemed to be aimed at putting someone like Obama into the office of the presidency and a Harry Reid and a Nancy Pelosi in charge in the Congress. I hope I am wrong, but I feel like we have been royally screwed.
Aug '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Eugene Kriegsmann: Michael Tee. I have studied the three wars you mentioned. I imagine they resolved some issues, but I suspect we are still dealing with many issues involved in all three.
I finished watching the Bezmenov interviews. During the last two parts I could not help but think that he had predicted Obama 25 years ago. The entire goal of the KGB seemed to be aimed at putting someone like Obama into the office of the presidency and a Harry Reid and a Nancy Pelosi in charge in the Congress. I hope I am wrong, but I feel like we have been royally screwed. · Aug 1 at 5:47pm
Eugene - Only if good men allow it to be so....
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a wonderful response to Friedersdorf: http://mbdougherty.com/blog/the-people-love-to-hate/
Words stolen from my mouth.
Contra Aristotle, I think that man is the satirical animal. As Nietzsche and Hegel both observed, political identities are formed by negation. We keep pretty consistent in our political identities over time, even as our ideas and knowledge of the world change, because of a constant visceral feeling that the 'other side' is, in the original meaning of the word, ridiculous. Conservative college students go through their Rand phase, then their Burke phase (what two could be more antipodal?), then their WSJ phase--they're only consistent in the conviction that lefties are silly.
We can have our think-tanks deploy armies of statistics against each other, hope that our facts and reason will win the day, but ultimately feelings of revulsion and fears of humiliation will motivate our public positions more strongly. I'm convinced that John Stewart is one of the most political influential men alive today--a terrifying idea, but one that recent college graduates will understand--because he is my generation's arbiter of revulsion and humiliation.
Where is John Stewart's foil?
May '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Politics is, in one respect, the art of acquiring and maintaining power - that is, the power to destroy (which is distinct from the power to produce, i.e., economic power). War, by contrast, very often is "the health of the state." Historically, wars have lent illegitimate expansions of government power veneers of legitimacy. They have granted plausibility to crackpot schemes like monetary inflation, conscription, price controls, excessive borrowing, excessive taxation, and a repertoire of other wholly unnecessary initiatives. So politics and war, historically, are related in the following way: war is but a tactic within the broader strategy of politics.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
I believe that is exactly what Von Clausewitz was saying.
Jul '10
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Terry Taylor, you are assuming that Good Men outnumber the masses of the amoral driven by that stupid box in their living room that absorbs so much of what passes for thought. I think the TV has been one of the great disseminators. It has given a platform to the useful idiots who continue to carry KGBs message long after the source has died. (not that I am convinced that it is dead, certainly not under Putin.)
Re: Is Politics Just Like War?
Matthew Shaffer: We can have our think-tanks deploy armies of statistics against each other, hope that our facts and reason will win the day, but ultimately feelings of revulsion and fears of humiliation will motivate our public positions more strongly. I'm convinced that John Stewart is one of the most political influential men alive today--a terrifying idea, but one that recent college graduates will understand--because he is my generation's arbiter of revulsion and humiliation.
Where is John Stewart's foil? · Aug 1 at 7:00pm
Where indeed? But let me ask you, Matthew, how such a foil would act. Some might point to Glenn Beck. But I think the person you have in mind wouldn't be such a master of smarm and self-awareness, nor would he or she be continuously bleeped out and lustily cheered for saying naughty words before a live studio audience. Are cultural conditions on the right capable of producing a foil for John Stewart? I wonder...