So I think that part of the anxiety striking people like Rod and Andrew who are uplifted and inspired by Obama and Huckabee is the result of our cultural inability to decisively defeat our fear that if we don’t remain bound in commitment to reality then we risk not just anxiety but great agony. On the one hand, we want real change, and people who promise, or evoke the promise, of real change therefore generate much genuine enthusiasm. On the other hand, we also long for the simple enjoyment of a sense of change. We’ve revised our expectations about politics downward, as a therapeutic prophylactic and analgesic, against the agony of realizing that the major structural change necessary to truly solve the huge problems that we can only cope with from year to year is actually impossible. With the feverish dislocation and trivial pursuit of the market, the dissolution of authority in our personal relationships, and the ominous contingency of terrorism and ecological change, we want to ‘live in the moment’, to be ‘heroes for just one day’, we want the freedom to be carried away without guilt or nervousness into the swell and flush of true fellow-feeling, following the proud yet inclusive call of politicians that seem to redeem politics by transcending it.
Yet we struggle to repress the knowledge that transcending politics from within politics can’t really redeem it. It’s a stage trick. Any appeal that transcends politics must actually transcend the political. We criticize politicians for playing politics, but what else can they play? What we really mean is that they are good politicians but defective people, and we wish that we could have good politicians who are good people, too. But a good person isn’t necessarily a good politician, and the structure of American politics today makes us want to rebel against the standards of effective politics.
If I hear “change” one more time, I am going to throw up.
“Change!”
🙂
But seriously — change for the sake of change is NEVER a good thing. The only time change is necessary or warranted is when something positive is offered in place of what is already in place. So far, the plans put forth by the Democratic candidates offer steps backwards, not forwards. But then, I don’t see much to commend the plans of the Republican candidates, either.
Cute, Jim.
And you pretty well state my point, with the additional cynicism (on my part) that “change” in this case has become an abstraction, a marketing tool, a cliche.