“Man,” Aristotle declared long ago,
“is a political animal.” Perhaps too
political.
Sonny Bunch, managing editor of
the Washington Free Beacon, has
written a few times about his frustration with people so consumed by politics that
they can’t separate it from the rest of their lives. “I’m not talking
about people getting worked up about politicians,” he writes:
We live in
divided times, so things are bound to get heated when talking about elected
officials. I’m talking about people who say “I want nothing to do with [Person
X] because he is a conservative/liberal/Republican/Democrat in his personal
life.
We do indeed live in divided times,
an era in which Americans are more polarized about politics and culture (and
the intersection thereof) than at any time since the 1960s, and possibly even
since the 1860s. The nonstop din of our
ubiquitous social media has widened that polarization, as armies of political
foot soldiers of the left and right skirmish online, pointlessly spewing 140-character
vitriol at each other. There is precious little political engagement anymore, online
or off, that does not consist of plain bullying. Bullying wins enemies, not converts.
For people obsessed with politics,
friendships – even relationships – can narrow to political alliances. As Bunch puts
it,
politicizing
every aspect of your life, allowing politics to determine your every move, and
judging everyone you meet online and in person by how stridently they agree
with the positions you support, is immensely, horribly destructive to the very
fabric of our society.
He quotes from the
blog of journalist Rod Dreher:
What a strange
culture we live in, in which people are expected to approve of everything those
they love believe in and do, or be guilty of betraying that love. I have
friends and family whose core beliefs on politics, sexuality, religion, etc.,
are not the same as my own, and it would not occur to me in the slightest to
love them any less because of it... People are somehow more than the sum of
their beliefs and actions.
This can extend to a narrowing of our
cultural tastes as well. So “how can we expect to have a fully functioning
society,” Bunch wonders,
“if we spend all of our time adjudicating whether or not the people we read and
the culture we consume is of the correct political persuasion?”
I would take his argument further and assert that politicizing every
aspect of your life is corrosive
not only on a societal level but on a personal one as well. I’ve experienced it
myself. I make my living at least partially by publicly engaging
in the clash of political ideas and ideologies, sometimes to a combative
degree, and it’s easy to find
yourself sucked into the bottomless vortex of politics at the expense of other
interests, other pursuits, other dimensions of the human experience, unless you
pull yourself back from the brink. Otherwise, you become the sort of person
Sonny Bunch complains
about, who “can’t set aside
their political hangups enough to enjoy a realm unrelated to politics.”
I know what he means. I have found
myself at dinner parties with people who can talk all night about the players
and odds of every 2014 Congressional race in the country but who either have
zero interest in, or are incapable of, discussing (non-political) books or music
or films. There’s something about politics that can become so all-consuming you
don’t even realize how narrowly it ultimately defines you.
Fortunately, I’ve never been a
political person at heart. Culture and history fascinate me; politics in the
strict sense bores me. I am
interested in politics to the extent that political ideologies manifest
themselves in the culture, so it is sometimes a challenge for me to see the culture
except through that lens. It doesn’t help that in my lifetime American culture
itself has become a political battleground (it could be argued that this is
true of cultures in all places and times, but that’s an essay for another day).
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/26/13)
