Three Frames of Modern Politics

Self, Others, and Institutions

Daniel J. McCool

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319956473
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319956480
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the centrality of personality in political discourse since the Enlightenment. It considers the theory known as the "politics of authenticity," its counter-discourses, and the ways in which it has degraded or enriched our collective political life. Using three models of politics to understand our current political predicaments—the politics of authenticity, politics of theatricality, and institutional politics—this volume argues that we need to envision a politics based on the best parts of each model: one that incorporates the ability for the oppressed to speak outside the institutional mechanisms of government. With the continuing erosion of public faith in political institutions, we have instead been left with the most troubling aspects of both authentic and theatrical politics. By exploring recent events and trends in American politics, this book ultimately makes a normative case that we need to balance demands for authenticity in our political actors with the equally necessary political values of deliberative institutions, processes, and decorum.

© The Author(s) 2019

Daniel J. McCoolThree Frames of Modern Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Self, Others, and Institutions

Daniel J. McCool¹

(1)

Framingham State University, Framingham, MA, USA

Daniel J. McCool

End Abstract

The ideal of authenticity is one of the most common and powerful standards by which modern public actors are judged. At no time and in no place is this stronger today than in American society. As a culture that values authenticity, we attempt to tear off public masks and costumes in order to reveal the intentions and the characters of the individuals underneath. Public actors, in both government and everyday society, are expected to act outwardly in line with what they “really” feel, think, or intend or else they are deemed illegitimate. Politicians must convey transparency, intimacy, and unity in their characters. These internal traits are seen as more important than the external institutions within which politicians must work in order to actually get anything done. There are many examples of this. George W Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention echoed a theme that was repeated by campaign operatives in order to contrast him with the “flip-flopping” John Kerry to great effect. “In the last four years,” Bush confided, as if talking to a friend, “you and I have come to know each other. Even when we don’t agree, at least you know what I believe and where I stand.”¹ The strategy behind the 2012 presidential campaign of Barack Obama relied on this same standard, as White House senior advisor David Plouffe accused Mitt Romney on Meet the Press of having “no core.”² This constant charge of inauthenticity by the Obama campaign prompted several feckless defenses of Romney’s character, including one by a member of his gubernatorial administration in Massachusetts: “I could tell immediately, just by our interaction, that he is the real thing—authentic! He struck me then—and now—as honest, transparent and inclusive.”³ While this attempt by the Romney campaign and its surrogates proved futile, the effort alone shows how important it is for politicians to seem authentic. And during the 2016 election, the candidate who received the highest score on “authenticity” in public opinion polls was none other than Donald J Trump.⁴

The ideal of authenticity is not one relegated to electoral politics. In non-political matters of public life, especially in celebrity culture, we have been trained to peer behind the words of public actors, into their minds, their souls, their very selves to determine their level of sincerity. When public figures are judged by their authenticity and sincerity, their legitimacy is measured not primarily by what they say or do, but by whether or not they believe in what they say or do. The modern mass public displaces judgment away from outward acts and onto the individual’s character, intention, sincerity, and, importantly, whether such feelings are prideful and self-serving (and thus illegitimate) or humble self-sacrificing (and thus legitimate). Focus on the internal life is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. Indeed, some of the most celebrated figures in Western history have been praised on such grounds. Socrates, the seminal figure in the history of Western political thought, stands in front of the jury in the Apology, without attempting to manipulate their judgment with the presence of his weeping family, and professes that the sincerity of his words are a testament to his commitment to virtues of justice and truth larger than himself.⁵ We see this kind of authentic self-sacrifice play out in the story of Christ and other martyrs from Western history. What is new in modern society is the source from which the virtue of authenticity is seen to emerge and the polity it is supposed to help create. In the ancient and medieval worlds, the authentic self was compelled to be privately authentic and publicly sincere by cosmic forces that governed a well-ordered universe.⁶ Often, this meant creating monarchical or aristocratic societies that had vertically organized power structures. In modernity, the authentic self is supposed to be compelled from within to tell the truth and remain steadfast in one’s beliefs no matter the consequences. Often, this is in service of creating democratic societies, in which people live together in egalitarian ways.

Aloneness, Authenticity, Democracy

The moral standard of authenticity that we apply to public figures, in which the inner self matches the presentation of the outer self, is a relatively new one in world history. It has become a staple of modern life, and is engrained in our politics, art, music, and advertising. In his book Sincerity, Jay Magill gives a thumbnail view of how the virtues of authenticity and sincerity have woven their ways throughout our modern culture:

Over the decades, this ethos of sincerity evolved from seeking the truth of oneself to sharing the whole of that truth with others with unabashed pride, a trait that would come to be called, in modern times, authenticity. This insistence on being who one feels oneself to be at all times eventually found a home in modern art and literature. Artists and writers well into the twentieth century, following Rousseau, declared the importance of the self’s authenticity against the inauthenticity of modern consumer society, which many critics believed had enslaved individuals in a capitalist system and then offered them an illusory freedom through the purchase of its products. The line of criticism and rebellious self-expressiveness has rolled into our own time, of course, through art, music, fashion, and literature—through Beats and hippies and punk and rap—and eventually through the messages of some of the world’s largest advertising agencies and corporations ….⁷

Why did this ideal of authenticity become so ubiquitous in the modern world? Many have answered that it stems from the phenomenon of aloneness. With the breakdown of the family, the onslaught of capitalism, the promise of the emancipation of the self from social bonds, and the radical centering of religious life on the self, individuals found themselves cutoff from ties to external persons and institutions that had given earlier peoples their identities. This type of aloneness created an absence of public politics. As Charles Taylor describes it, the combination of these forces created “a society of self-fulfillers, whose affiliations are more and more seen as revocable” which “cannot sustain the strong identification with the political community which public freedom needs.”⁸ Modern thinkers had to come up with new theories of politics and community that took as a given the atomization of the self.

In the modern world, aloneness has been the problem with which we each grapple while authenticity has been the state of being to which we each aspire. While in some ways we wish to be left alone to develop our unique lives and personalities from within, we also seek community in which that uniqueness can be displayed. This combination of an authentic self with an intimate community is a quintessentially modern one that found its highest expression in the twentieth century. At the height of “the 1960s” in America, political theorist Marshall Berman wrote about “both the dignity and agony of aloneness” in connecting the personal trait of authenticity with the political system of democracy:

The way to democracy that the Enlightenment developed, and that millions of people in the 1960s experienced anew, was a distinctively modern way. It meant people coming together from a matrix of solitude, people breaking out of an existential loneliness. This loneliness was completely missing from the culture of ancient democracy. But it is a central modern experience … Two millennia of Christian domination have not only legitimized aloneness, they have sanctified it and given it an aura; this aura touches everyone, Christian or not. One of the Enlightenment’s main tasks was to establish a secular foundation for a right to privacy. The eighteenth century, like the twentieth, produced generations deeply and often happily immersed in private life that demanded new, democratic forms of public life. From Rousseau, above all, we can learn both the dignity and agony of aloneness, and the yearning for a new form of community. What kind of community should it be? A community that instead of absorbing and crushing the self will recognize and affirm it; a community where everybody will be open about their identity and welcome—eagerly, even—the opportunity to confess who and what they are; where every individual can ‘expand his being and multiply his happiness by sharing them with his fellow men.’ Some thinkers argue that these values are contradictory and incompatible. ‘The politics of authenticity’ makes the impossible demand to realize them all at once.⁹

Berman, by employing his prized example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, makes links between achieving one’s authentic self and a democracy in which that self is able to be expressive.

Elsewhere, in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Berman employs the early modern tragedy of Shakespeare’s King Lear to create a seamless web between authenticity, humanity, empathy, and ultimately democratic community. After King Lear is stripped of political power (and significantly, the royal vestments that go along with it) and thrown out into the street to face “the naked truth [of] what man is forced to face when he has lost everything,” he

recognizes a connection between himself and another human being. This recognition enables him to grow in sensitivity and insight, and to move beyond the bounds of his self-absorbed bitterness and misery. As he stands and shivers, it dawns on him that his kingdom is full of people whose whole lives are consumed by the abandoned, defenseless suffering that he is going through right now … Shakespeare is telling us that the dreadful naked reality of the ‘unaccommodated man’ is the point from which accommodation must be made, the only ground on which real community can grow.¹⁰

While Americans do not consciously search for revolutionary correctives to our existential problems of aloneness, what Berman describes in Lear is what we expect today from our politicians in return for granting them political legitimacy: that they disrobe from their veils, vestiges and masks of office, title, and social distinction to—as was famously repeated in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign—“feel our pain.” The politics of authenticity holds that only with this transparency between politicians and the people, and then among the people themselves, do we have a true democracy.

Other modern thinkers have railed against the politics of authenticity, believing that politics ought not be a reflection of the inner life at all. While we often equate democracy with the protection and promotion of individual realization within the self, it has not always been thus. In an essay in which she lauds the freedom of ancient Greek citizens, political theorist Hannah Arendt harkens back to an ancient conception of freedom not as a private or personal matter, but fundamentally as a public one, constituted outside the individual self in “the world”:

[i]n spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, non-political freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves. Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word. Freedom needed … the company of other men who were in the same state, and it needed a common public space to meet them—a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could assert himself by word and deed.¹¹

The Loss of Self

Normative political models differ on the relative importance of private and public life. But most modern political thinkers have been concerned with the same anxieties: the disintegration, the colonization, or the simple loss of “the self,” as they conceive it. They have feared that instead of defining themselves, men and women would blindly follow the opinions of others and other social forces that demanded group cohesion and destroyed individuality. During the rise of the “common man” in Jacksonian America, for example, Tocqueville warned that the rising power of democratic public opinion would crush individuality. The fear of being alone would compel individuals to become conformists:

Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed [as it used to]… It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stinger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.¹²

A half century later, Nietzsche was already writing the postmortem on the possibilities for modern individuality. A modern culture that valued it so much paradoxically tended to do away with it:

The modern spirit, with its restlessness, its hatred for bounds and moderation, has come to dominate every domain, at first let loose by the fever of revolution and then, when assailed by fear and horror of itself, again layin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Self, Others, and Institutions
• 2. The Politics of Authenticity
• 3. The Politics of Theatricality
• 4. Henry David Thoreau’s Conscientious Performance
• 5. Institutional Politics
• 6. How the Right Co-opted Anti-institutionalism
• 7. Conclusion: Our Crisis of Authenticity