After a primary season and a general election that forclosed anything really radical happening, you might wonder what’s the point of talking anymore about self-annihilation in a political context. As it turns out, the psychoanalytic observation that nobody really wants to be different from what they are is also a good way of predicting people’s votes: democracy is incompatible with really revolutionary, self-destructive change.
That opposition seems to be written into the DNA of Anglo-American, “representative” two-party democracy, where the parties in a kind of pas-de-deux decide what political conflicts can be salient to the formation of our egos. Because the eruption of new alternatives actually reflecting people’s desires is basically impossible under this duopoly, parties are for the most part insulated from their own policy accomplishments and failures (e.g., G.W. Bush won re-election in 2004 even though anyone could see by then that the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster). They reap electoral rewards for creating and stabilizing the personal identities of their followers, a process that has grown faster and more intense as social media increasingly replaces Actual Life.
This formation, in which polarization of identity maps onto polarization of political loyalty in a self-reinforcing and self-stabilizing way, produces an actual political stasis – and in a way that shows the semantic overlap between modern and ancient senses of the term. In the language of the Ancient Greek polis, stasis is a standing-apart, the formation of opposed parties, to be dreaded because of the violence it produces but also because, despite the apparent flurry of activity that composes civil strife, the city “stops working.” We, like the Greeks, grind to a halt when we stand apart.
In this sense – that stasis is part of its normal functioning rather than, as in the Greek case, an abberation – American democracy is profoundly conservative. A conservativism of the ego, sometimes even compatible with progressivism in the sphere of policy: a conservatism commited, first and foremost, to making its citizens sick, to engendering a nation of withered souls addicted, first and foremost, to the dopamine rush of victory.
To continue that contrast, ancient Athenian democracy could well be interpreted as part of a therapeutic culture, designed to cure citizens of their unhealthy enthusiasms. For Athens, tragedy is law is politics – a series of homologous arenas in which citizens can see their desires represented, can see the beings they want to be come into being and pass away, can even transform themselves. Athenian democracy is a Dionysiac spectacle of self-destruction, which probably explains Plato’s opposition to it. Because Plato is an early and thoroughgoing advocate of governance, but a democracy of the Athenian sort is basically opposed to the notion of governability.*
American democracy, by contrast, is all about ensuring a continuity of governance. Commitment to the winner-takes-all electoral contest is (or at least has been) part of identity formatino on both sides of the aisle, and that contest is only winner-takes-all if we agree to act like the winners are our legitimate government. We shout our desires into the void; in exchange for not having to live those desires, we pledge our lives and loyalty to a government that ignores them.
Yet all this takes place against the background of an increasingly dionysiac culture, one where the claims of being over becoming seem more and more dated. That’s the deep connection between fluid gender identity and the equally-fluid susbtance of QAnon conspiracy theories, two forms of belief and praxis that otherwise seem not to overlap. It might seem, then, that the democratic model of governance is nearing the end of its shelf life. But what comes next? I’m afraid that we’ve only put off, not obviated, the necessity of answering that question.
* but, looked at from another perspective – that of the free/slave division – Athens does bear comparison with modern American ego-preserving conservatism. It bears asking whether true democracy really can extend to every plane of social struggle.