The Politicisation of the Personal and the Depoliticisation of the Political
Why has the West fallen into a stage of political stagnation?
This is a text of a presentation at a meeting of the Academy of Ideas in London on 12 August 2023.
This presentation aims to provide a context for understanding what is specific about the present political and cultural conjuncture. Since we are all struggling to make sense of the world that surrounds us, the meeting provides an opportunity to get our bearings and situate ourselves in an era where it is difficult to get a handle on what’s happening.
Era of Stagnation
The present conjuncture's defining feature is that of economic and political stagnation. Last month the IMF slightly increased its 2022 and 2023 growth forecasts. It stated that ‘global growth will slow from 3.4 per cent in 2022 to 2.9 per cent in 2023. It also predicted that China and India would be the main engines of growth. Now that China faces deflation, it is unlikely to play the role that the IMF assigned to it. Stagflation is likely in the UK, and most economies have fundamental structural problems.
Economic stagnation co-exists with a mood of political impasse. The main feature of the current era is the de-politicization of citizenship and the mobilisation/politicisation of the unpolitical. This trend parallels the politicisation of the personal and the subjugation of public life to a technocratic imperative.
Hartmut Rosa’s concept of frenetic standstill captures a key dimension of the present moment. He represents frenetic standstill as a mode with an ever-quickening rate of social change responsible for institutional inertia. Our diagnosis of frenetic standstill has a different emphasis. From our standpoint, the appearance of an ever-quickening rate of social change is, to a considerable extent, due to a disoriented consciousness of agency, one that interprets its difficulty in gaining a sense of causality and control as a function of rapid social change and of increased complexity.
The prevalence of institutional inertia is so pervasive that there is little need to dwell on it. Public and private institutions, especially those of the state, find it difficult to get anything done. Government policies resemble hastily drawn-up wish lists, which everyone knows will have little practical effects. That is why policymakers and their cousins in the private sector are principally devoted to the pursuit of impression management.
When one takes a historical perspective and compares the present conjuncture with previous times since the emergence of modernity, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the condition of stasis best defines the present era.
Stasis has a double meaning. In ancient Greek, the Aristotelian meaning of the term refers to strife, conflict and, above all, factionalism within a city-state. In its more contemporary usage, the term refers to inactivity and stagnation. In the contemporary era, both meanings of the term possess relevance. What we have is an intense level of political and cultural polarisation co-existing with a sense of being trapped in an ever-present.
The very noisy Culture War and the unrestrained verbal violence enacted on social media obscures the fact that public life is on hold, and there is little demand for change. The survivalist ideal of sustainability best captures the politics of studied inertia. This standpoint is devoted to marking time, slowing down, and sacrificing politics on the altar of Net Zero. From the standpoint of climate emergency fanaticism, democracy and public life must be subordinated to the authoritarian impulse communicated through climate determinism.
The relative weakness of the demand for change should not be interpreted as a symptom of complacency. Most people intuit that something is amiss. They do not believe everything is all right or that the situation will improve. However, those far from satisfied with their existence tend to do little more than complain. The occasional flashes of anger and the periodic eruption of protest speak to a sensibility of powerlessness. The mood of powerlessness is, above all, reflected in the difficulty that people have in finding their voice. This is why our principal duty is to assist our fellow citizens in finding their voice. Of course, this can be done most effectively by ensuring we are confident in our voice.
In recent times, I have been constantly asked whether it is time or possible to launch a new party or movement that can help people break out of the state of stasis they inhabit. Many active opponents of the status quo – on all sides – feel frustrated that little seems to be happening, and there is constant discussion about new parties and new alternatives. They can point to the relative success of recently formed populist parties in parts of Europe. No doubt millions are fed up. Recently surveyed Irish farmers indicated they would vote for a farmer's party.
Yes, numerous developments can make us feel optimistic. Still, until we can effectively challenge the cultural hegemony exercised by the mainstream political and cultural establishment, we, too, can only mark time. Through fighting the culture war, the ideal of democratic citizenship can acquire salience, and the spirit of democracy can undermine the mood of stasis.
Making Sense of the Current Conjuncture
One of the most disturbing features of the de-politicisation of public life is the loss of a common language and mode of interpretation for making sense of the world. The institutionalisation of fact-checking and an obsession with Fake News are underpinned by a highly polarised cultural and political landscape. One disturbing manifestation of this development is that there is a growing gap between what people directly experience and the way the media communicate the issues of our time.
From the standpoint of the hegemonic culture, we inhabit a world where crisis is the norm. Consequently, the current political stasis coexists with a permanent sense of crisis. For example, people’s experience of economic hardship has been rebranded as a ‘cost of living crisis’. Just Google the term ‘crisis’, and it will become evident that this word has been rendered banal. The banalisation of crisis-rhetoric means that after a while, it becomes difficult to retain a perspective regarding the real problems that confront society.
There is only so much global extinction that one can take. Yet when the media devotes as much attention to the trials of Andrew Tate as it does to the threat posed by stagflation, you have to think hard about whether or not there is still a war in Ukraine. Gaining a sense of proportion between the endless instances of mini-crises and faraway conflict becomes challenging to anyone reliant on the mainstream media for information.
Did Covid really happen? It probably did because we are now informed that there is a 1 in 4 possibility of a repeat performance during the next five years. Competitive crisis-mongering has become habitual – leading to the normalisation of the conviction that the next crisis is just around the corner.
Unlike previous eruptions of crisis consciousness, the representation of crisis and its response becomes effortlessly transformed into a Culture War issue.
Climate is a Culture Wars issue, wrote The New York Times commentator Paul Krugman. Krugman is worried that millions of climate sceptics believe that ‘green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life’. Cultural polarisation also afflicted and continues to influence people’s response to Covid, the Lockdown and the mass vaccination programme. But while this polarised response highlights deep divisions in society – to a greater or lesser extent, all sides of the Culture War have internalised an outlook predisposed to crisis consciousness.
The polarised response to how a crisis is presented in the 21st century is very different from previous times, where, as in the 1970s, the question at stake was whom to blame for the crisis. There was a clear consensus about the reality of a major economic crisis; the issue was who was responsible for all the damage it inflicted on people’s lives.
Survivalists' mode of public life
This banal sensibility of crisis encourages a survivalist mode of being. The cultural validation of the term survivor and survivor identity – ‘I am a survivor’ – underpins the belief that crisis is a permanent feature of life. ‘We’re living in an age of permanent crisis – let’s stop planning for a “return to normal”’, argues a commentator in The Guardian.
The claim that there is no return to normal – how we lived our life – is rarely coupled with the promise that the New Normal will be anything like normal. The New Normal is a round-about way of legitimating inertia and stasis. The world of the new normal is not of our own making – it has been imposed on us, apparently, by forces beyond human control. It suggests that all we can do is suck it up and survive. What remains normal is the paradigm of human vulnerability.
The sense of powerlessness becomes the defining feature of the normal state of being. The contemporary sense of powerlessness, or what I referred to as the diminishing of subjectivity in my previous writings, is, in the first instance, a result of the unravelling of modernist ideologies and setbacks and defeats of various projects that have sought to alter the world. An awareness of these developments gained traction in the 1970s. It was also then that the ruling classes in the West lost faith in their own story. Their loss of confidence percolated downwards and eventually afflicted all sections of society. It encouraged the ascendancy of the outlook of survivalism.
In his superb study of this important cultural shift, Christopher Lasch highlighted the prominence that Western societies, in general, and America, in particular, gave to the question of survival from the early 1970s onwards. One symptom of this obsession with survivalism was the normalization of crisis and a tendency to perceive every issue, no matter how ‘fleeting or unimportant’, as a ‘matter of life or death’.
A tendency to inflate risk and danger was paralleled by the idealisation of safety and survival as values in their own right. Survivalism even influenced those who struggled against what they perceived as unjust or wrong. In his analysis of the 1970s peace movement, Lasch explained that it was motivated not simply by hostility to an unjust war but by any demand for personal sacrifice. ‘This attitude reflects a widespread reluctance not merely to die in an unjust war but to die for any cause whatsoever’.
Since the 1970s, the reorganisation of society along a survivalist mode has led to a regime that encourages low expectations. Within this cultural context, the subordination of public life to a technocratic imperative was accomplished. It is worth noting that during the first decade of this century, politicians and their advisors were still looking for the next Big Idea. Today that quest has been abandoned. Now and again, there are half-hearted attempts to invent a Big Idea slogan like The Great Reset, but in practice, politicians self-consciously avoid the ‘vision thing’.
Returning to the politicisation of the personal and the subjugation of public life to a technocratic imperative, its most significant outcome has been the growing separation of the political and cultural establishment, its institutions, and the media from the rest of society. These institutions have successfully insulated themselves from accountability and pressure. Almost everything that matters and is declared newsworthy is determined by a ruling network of different types of elites.
At the same time – either wittingly or unwittingly – their policies and interventions have undermined traditional forms of solidarity. They have worked towards turning citizens into supplicants and have gone some way to establishing a role for themselves as the protectors of vulnerable people. Their project of colonising people’s life world is constantly in search of new targets for intervention. One of the most regrettable consequences of this development is the usurpation of the idea of citizenship. After decades of experiencing the politicisation of private life, it becomes difficult to recall the meaning of citizenship.
This has civilisational consequences – cause in different ways the colonisation of the lifeworld challenges the traditional view of what it means to be a human. The erosion of the boundary between private and public coexists with the attempt to undermine the border separating man and woman, adults and children and ultimately humans and animals. Laying siege on our life world constitutes an assault on the classical notion of what it means to be a human.
The assault on our humanness coupled with the marginalisation of the ideal of citizenship violates the possibility of democratic decision-making.
Thus, we have a curious situation where we have formal democracy and, in principle, opportunities for democratic decision-making. However, due to disenchantment with citizenship, what is lacking is a serious level of cultural support for democracy.
This raises a serious question for us because democracy is all we have if we are going to find our way out of the present political stasis.
On all sides of the Culture War, democracy tends to be regarded instrumentally as a means to an end. Democracy is rarely avowed as a value in and of itself, and the truth is that there is a lack of serious commitment to engage with the demos. Liberals and many Conservatives regard populism suspiciously and possess a selective approach to democratic decision-making. Yet populism is the most reliable and potentially powerful force for fighting the Culture War. And it is only through securing the civilisational values associated with Western culture that the current state of standstill and stasis can be overcome.
Effectively challenging the anti-populist consensus is the most important challenge facing democrats. The spirit of democracy encourages all of us to take each other seriously. The more that people feel that their voice counts, the more likely it is that public life will come alive and enhance the quality of our political imagination. It is at that point that we can move on and leave our stagnant public world behind.
Check out my defence of democracy
