What is the point of politics? From a certain perspective, the answer to that question has always been obvious: self-preservation. That orientation is obvious in slogans of the paranoid style of right-wing politics, from “Purity of Essences” and anti-fluoridation to the 14 words of modern white nationalists. The point of those pitches is to create insecurity about self-preservation where none had existed before, a disease to which the snake-oil salesmen of fascism can offer their cure.
As those examples suggest, politics as self-preservation isn’t always (or even usually) about fending off an existential threat. The aim is rather to fend off the threat of a threat, to remove a source of anxiety in the political subject. What masquerades as defense of biological life turns out to be nothing more than a kind of therapy, a public soothing for those incapable of soothing themselves. The subject is preserved, not from dying, but from having to live in different circumstances: in short, from change.
On that interpretation, it’s possible to learn to see this politics of self-preservation as characteristic not just of the paranoid right, but of much of America’s political center, too. When Joe Biden’s presidential campaign promises a return to normalcy, what that means is that you, the political subject whose inner life has been destroyed by Trump’s presidency, don’t have to change. If you like your ego ideal, you can keep it.
Biden has staked an awful lot – in some sense, the country’s whole future – on the widespread appeal of that promise. As Trump overturns aspects of “normalcy” upon which more and more Americans had been depending to feel sane, that decision may prove prescient. If so, and even if Biden wins, this will put many of us into an uncomfortable bind. Because the alternative to Biden is the complete destruction of our psychic reality, we will have identified with and voted for Biden essentially at gunpoint. The Democratic machine will have learned a bad lesson about the utility of creating monsters, because monsters hold our dreams and ambitions and sense of what’s right hostage to mere survival.
There’s a parallel problem in psychoanalysis, when the ego is suffering because of what it is – because of neuroses or addictions or nostalgia or other structural flaws – but refuses to change because change means passing through non-being, or death. This is one compelling explanation of the failure of the psychoanalytic logos to suffice for transforming the psyche: you can tell someone what’s wrong with them, you can give them a detailed and correct explanation of the structure of their illness, but that (as Freud discovered, to his puzzlement) won’t make them well. A self wants to go on being what it is.
The junction of these two fields in a teleology of self-preservation leads me back to a process that I more and more feel is at the center of our current political nightmare: the direct insertion of the ego at the center of our political deliberations. White people are increasingly encouraged to identify themselves with a set of easily-sloganized values, or even with a particular authoritarian individual, which they can for the most part only “successfully” defend (and therefore occupy) by constructing fantasy scenarios in which they tell off a racist or shoot a protester (I’m not drawing equivalences here – shooting protesters is evil, telling off a racist is harmless at worst). We’re now seeing these scenarios acted out with increasing frequency, the actors drawing vicarious (and, in the case of Kyle Rittenhaus et all, deeply vicious) participation on the part of an audience enraptured by what it imagines to be a mirror.
As a slur, “identity politics” is best used not of political movements emerging in communities of color (who, as the primary object of republicans’ political sadism and Democrats’ less-than-useful pity, really do have gains to make by organizing around a racial identity for which they will anyhow be targeted) but of white peoples’ appropriation of politics as a way of ego-construction and preservation. That kind of identity politics makes white people feel important and gives them the feeling that they’ve been recognized while, simultaneously, freeing national politicians (with the exception of a number of left-democrat senators and representatives) from any obligation to respond to the actual needs of their constituents. The arrangement (in the building since 1980 and finally perfected in 2016) is a convenient one, but we pay the price every four years in ever-intenser paroxysms of psychic antagonism. That’s the predictable result when you wager your soul on something as transient as a presidential election.
How much better would it be if we could learn the lesson, insisted upon by every serious revolutionary movement from Christianity onward, that the only way to work towards a better (or even tolerable) world is to give up on self-preservation? You can accept that change means annihilating yourself, or you can hold onto your ego and keep having more of the same – or, as it happens, the illusion of more of the same, projected in front of your eyes at an ever-greater off-stage cost.