He went on: “There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or ‘dialogue’); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying.”
He went on: “[This] simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way — as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole — but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community... Implicit in this brief, shrill answer, though, is obviously the idea that at least some political writing should be Platonically disinterested, should rise above the fray.”
You remember reading that, or having someone tell you about it on the plane, or anyway knowing it was there, and you thought: you could be that disinterested voice, that focus for dialogue. That could be your role, your part to play. You had, to be sure, said some things during the campaign that were ideological and reductive, spun, and even demonizing. But that was part of playing the game, moving the agenda forward, contesting the mandate. Now we could move toward justice and the truth, and the hope for change would be justified. But right away you wondered: How would you know? How would you ever know that your dialogue was tracking the truth, moving toward justice, unless you already knew what justice and truth were? And knowing those things, or claiming to know them, would put you right back into the frame as right versus those who were certainly wrong, if not necessarily contemptible, corrupt, evil.
In fact, you thought, standing there, isn’t the idea of Platonic disinterest really a contradiction? Right? Because the Platonic philosopher knows things, he doesn’t just suspect or hope about them. He’s in possession of the truth, about truth and justice and all the rest of it. Possession, knowledge; not hope, not belief. In fact, he’s the only one who does know. That’s what makes him the right person — the one and only right person — to be in charge. And yet you don’t buy that really, do you, even if you do think you’re the right answer for right now? That idea of the transcendental telescope, the possession of the ultimate truth. That was not the command you claimed. You were not a philosopher king, even if some people accused you of believing it, of craving that status. No, your command was over something else: a story, a narrative, a sense of possibility.
That’s why you peppered every speech, every rhetorical moment, with a fistful of mini-narratives, about ordinary people and their ordinary desires. The single dad working two jobs. The mom and pop trying to make their small business grow. The laid-off steelworker trying to learn how to be a daycare provider. You gathered those lives and compressed them into bites and sent them back out into the political ether, and it was good. It was good because everyone said so, everyone agreed, they were uplifting and human and engaging. The way a philosopher could never be. And when people derided you and said you had only stories and no real ideas or proposals, you told them about the idea of justice that was buried in those stories, the hope for change that the narratives carried. The stories were the ideas, the narrative was the justice.
Justice. You weren’t about to define it in terms of some Big Idea, some capital-J vision. Because that would trap you, it would hold you back in your way of playing the game, your strategy of post-partisan pragmatism, a phrase everybody seemed to like, seemed ready for. Also it would risk seeming like a Platonic claim after all, to have knowledge of what justice is. A praised novel of the day expressed the spirit of the times clearly, if a little brutally — more brutally than you would. “After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth. No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view — having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. It’s not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist.”
You liked the idea that the previous century was deceased, making way for a new life, but the language of bad luck was not yours. Instead, after the fashion of your time and place, you spoke of faith. Faith in a providential Lord, and in the wisdom of your fathers, and in the greatness of the nation and its people. But most important, faith in markets and taxes. “The market,” you had said to the man with the notepad, “is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production.” You also said, “There is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” People asked you what your vision of the nation was, and the answer was simple and obvious: people should be free to do whatever the market allows.
But then, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand — which they had over the past few years, everyone now agreed, which they would if there were no constraints at all — you wanted to tax people. Yes, tax them. Everyone, but very rich people more than others. And that taxing would be just, would be all that justice meant. You didn’t like the word “redistributionist,” you had told the reporter, but now growth would benefit everybody again and everybody would be happy. They would be happy because their desires for things could be met, mostly, by the market’s genius at allocating resources. And then the new desires they had would spur them on to more and more things.
What was it for? What was it in the service of? Well, nothing, really. At least nothing beyond itself, nothing bigger than the desires themselves. Deep down, you thought that someone’s having a desire was enough to make that desire legitimate. You thought, standing there, that this was basic. That’s what you meant by freedom, and that’s why you thought markets were so good at doing what they do. That was your vision. In this vision, there is no beyond — that was the point of being free.
Well, there is God, obviously. You couldn’t imagine standing here without talking about God. Not even you, with your many gifts, of hope and charisma and racial novelty, could have been standing there had you not talked about God. This was, it’s true, a God almost entirely without program or demands, without risks or rewards, pretty much without content. This God offered comfort when you had to ask young men and women to kill the nation’s enemies, or when you and everyone else had to confront the finitude of life. Maybe not surprisingly in this land of the game, It or He seemed designed for pointing to after field goals or home runs — the doubled we’re-number-one gesture that defined the era. But that was about it.
