Between the ridiculous and the righteous

I wrote on Monday about my frustration with the insane antics of Congressional Republicans over the government shutdown (which by this time has metastasized into a full-on debt ceiling fight). But there is something admittedly unfair about that characterization. “By all reasonable accounts,” I wrote, the Republicans have marched themselves down a dead end of madness. But who gets to decide which accounts are reasonable and which are not? Doubtless the Tea Party and its fellow-travelers don’t think they’re insane. This is the great trouble with insisting on “civil discourse” or “reasonableness” or its analogs: someone, ultimately, has to map the border between civility and incivility, and that power to declare some opinions within the space of legitimate contention and others as beyond the pale is a privileged role indeed. So who should execute it?

In my junior year of college, I broke ranks with the left-activist wing of campus over a hunger strike that they held to demand a wage increase for custodial workers. The incident has loomed large over my political thinking ever since, and left me permanently suspicious around activist tactics. It wasn’t that I thought, as did many of the conservative and libertarian critics of the movement, that the goals of the hunger strike were misguided. Far from it—if I were running the ship at a big university, I actually would try to turn it into the socialist fantasyland that so many outsiders think it already is. But a hunger strike to demand wage increases felt profane to me, since the hunger strike is one of the few tools a democracy has to forcefully demand change at the fundamental level. A hunger strike isn’t an invitation to discourse, it’s a ransom; the political equivalent of an ex-girlfriend leaving a note saying “I’ll commit suicide if you don’t take me back.” As such, it’s the sort of tactic that ought to be deployed with utmost discretion, as a last option when the forces of oppression are closing tight around your neck. If you start using it for just anything, no matter how praiseworth that anything might be, then it loses its power against the real abuses of democracy and human rights for which it is most needed.

The borderline between civility and incivility is therefore a borderline between the ridiculous and the righteous. And, of course, it is historically contingent. Hardline abolitionism was ridiculous almost all the way until the eve of the Civil War, and yet now we see it as pure righteousness. The Branch Davidians were ridiculous; Thoreau righteous. Without the consensual gaze of history, though, the distinction is much harder to draw. And, in any moment, that distinction is suffused with social power, an observation which left-leaning intellectuals have since the 1980s put at the center of social theory.

But, as the current episode makes clear, if we give up on the negotiated power to define civil and uncivil realms of discourse, what we’re left with is an even more sinister form of powermongering that is perhaps best described as intellectual warlording, in which raw obstinate strength acquires absolute precedence. In order for a democracy to work, some things have to be marked as unacceptable.

How might we do this in a way which doesn’t just mark out our own positions and tactics as the acceptable ones and the the opposition’s as the unacceptable? And how do we ensure that the genuinely righteous, however unfashionable, doesn’t accidentally get plastered as ridiculous? One way, as I’ve suggested before in regards to marijuana laws, is acquiescing to laws that we don’t like so long as they’ve been produced by a process which fairly included us. Middle-class recreational drug users are fairly represented in national politics, so, as foolish as they may find drug laws (and I find them foolish too), they ought to acquiesce to their lawfuless (while fighting through the political system to have them changed). No matter how much of a boondoggle the Affordable Care Act seems in the eyes of Tea Party members, they too must admit that it made it through the political process fair and square. Second, while reserving the right to change our minds in light of new evidence, some bare principle of non-contradiction ought to apply to political platforms. What’s most nakedly ridiculous about the Republicans’ current apoplexy over ACA is the fact that it was a Republican idea in the first place, the conservative alternative to a liberal-supported single-payer plan. This holds true for a wide swathe of today’s political wrangling, where Democrats compromise or capitulate to long-held Republican ideas, and the Republicans respond by moving ever-further right and discliaming their previous positions. It doesn’t take a long historical view to agree that this is a political strategy fraught with ridiculousness. Finally, though, in civil political discourse, no matter whether in Congress or in one’s living room, every side needs to genuinely entertain the possibility that they might be wrong. Neither side is perfect on this count, but time and time again President Obama has indicated his willingness to take up Republican ideas, work to fix the shortcomings of the ACA, and negotiate common ground; and he has openly and publicly mused about his own political ambivalences. On the other hand, the Republicans are so thoroughly convinced that they are the lonely defenders of a dying nation that they cannot breathe the possibility, in public or in private, that their positions might be wrong.