Politics is a unicorn #1: Introduction
Hello, patient reader! I talk about many things here, and one of those things is politics. Over the course of the last year or so, I have come to realize that the way I think about politics (which I had quite naturally assumed was the way all intelligent people think about politics) is not exactly normal, to the degree that when I write something coming from my standpoint, people seem confused as to what I’m even talking about. Thus, I thought it might be useful for me (and, hopefully, interesting for you) to lay this out in a little weeklong series I’m calling “Politics is a unicorn,” which is a catchier way of saying “the social construction of politics,” except it allows me to talk about unicorns at length (see below). I’m doing it here because I don’t have to cite sources or do a lot of background work and while that will be eventually helpful and may find its way into my formal academic work, I am an impatient man and thought it might be good to at least have my assumptions and worldview out there. Over the rest of the week I’ll explore the ways politics isn’t rational or real - and why that’s OK - for the public, the government, and the media, concluding with a discussion of what this implies about how we think about and talk about government. I’ll also probably swear a lot.
But first, I want to start off with a sort of overview of the idea, and the best place to begin would seem to be an explanation of how I fundamentally think about politics: as a necessary and wonderful game.
When most people say that politics is a game, this is supposed to be an indictment. By implying that politics is a meaningless contest governed by arbitrary rules and dominated by manipulation and appeals to emotion rather than reasoned analysis of the best outcome, commentators seem to think this condemns political pursuits as hollow and worthless. And this would indeed be the proper conclusion, were the description accurate. And most of it is! The exception, though, and it’s an important one, is the very first adjective: “meaningless.” Let me tell you: politics, though frequently stupid, is almost never meaningless. It has immense and profound effects upon the lives of millions if not billions of people, and sometimes means the difference between life and death. The idea seems to be that, since politics does deal with such weighty and important matters, it shouldn’t be a game; we should always pursue the objectively best solution through honest and forthright debate. But politics is only necessary when we need make decisions for which there isn’t an objectively best solution, a way forward that benefits everyone. When political decisions are made, someone loses, because someone has to lose; this is just the law of limited resources. The trick is to figure out who loses without a riot breaking out.
So how do we figure that out? Again, the whole point of politics is that it matters. And because it matters, it has to be governed by arbitrary rules – or, at least, some rules, and while we try to make them as fair as possible, there are always going to be some that just exist to get the job done. But if there weren’t rules, we couldn’t tell which idea won, and then politics would be meaningless. Think of politics as like the tic-tac-toe match at the end of War Games. Wouldn’t it be ideal if, when two countries looked to be about to go to war, they decided to settle things with a chess match instead, and no one got killed? Well, that’s what politics is: a peaceful and stupid way of working out our differences. We engage in politics because otherwise we’d be killing each other. The federal budget allocates trillions of dollars a year. In any other sector, wouldn’t people be shooting each other for that kind of money? Wouldn’t people be shooting each other for a fraction of that kind of money? Politics involves a lot of bullshit, yes. But it has to in order to not involve a lot of death.
This is what I’m talking about when I say that politics is a unicorn. Unicorns aren’t real and have never been real in a physical sense. But when I say “unicorn” everyone knows what I’m talking about. This is how they’re real: we all think about them more or less the same way. And they continue to “exist” in this sense because the idea of a unicorn is totally awesome, and pleasant to think about (and doodle, and tattoo), so even though there’s no rational reason for us to continue using the brainspace dedicated to knowing what unicorns are, we still keep it lodged up in there. It’s nonsense, but it helps us communicate with other people. Politics is like a unicorn because it’s a collection of unreal things that we all agree to recognize, mostly because doing so beats not doing so. This is most obvious in the case of laws. Unlike natural laws, legal laws don’t actually dictate what we do physically. Gravity is a law in the sense that it’s a definition of something that happens no matter what: whether you want to or not, if you jump off a cliff, you fall down. The laws of men, on the other hand, only have a force because we all agree that they do, because we’ve decided (vaguely, at the back of our minds) that it benefits us more to agree with them than to disagree with them. (We get to be protected from crime, to make our living, to access social services, etc.) But it’s totally voluntary. The ritual of passing a bill doesn’t actually alter any physical characteristic of human behavior. It’s not like when a city council passes an anti-smoking bill that we become physically unable to smoke inside bars. It’s just that the police have decided that they will ticket people smoking inside, and the bar owners have decided that they will post signs saying “no smoking,” and patrons have decided that they will respect what those signs say. All of this is based, ultimately, purely on human volition and what we have all agreed, and it’s easy to imagine (or, hell, go somewhere else and observe) a situation in which this is not true – where not everyone has agreed that the laws passed by a government are worth observing.
The great thing about this is that we can change our minds about what a unicorn is if we want to. There’s no messy physical object to get in our way, no actual unicorn we can reference to check if we’re right or not. For a rationalist, this is troubling. But from a constructivist (or “pro-unicorn”) perspective, it’s freeing. There’s only what you think a unicorn is, and the success you have in convincing others that you’re right. Changing our shared definition of a concept doesn’t change physical, objective reality directly; it does so indirectly, by changing the way people think about, interact with, and utilize that concept. If we all decided that, instead of being a white horse with a horn on its forehead, a unicorn is a three-legged goat with a coffee table for a butt, it doesn’t mean that these creatures will actually appear in Montana (or wherever), because they never existed in the first place. But it will mean that six-year-old girls will be putting puffy stickers of three-legged goats on their notebooks, and tripods with coffee tables for patoots will now be pooping rainbows on the Internet.
This is why the social construction of politics is ultimately a good thing. We can go from all agreeing that blacks aren’t people to agreeing that blacks are people through the ritual of signing pieces of paper. What changed? Nothing! But eventually, we all agreed that one piece of paper was right, and the other was wrong. Magic! That ritual act has a real social force, but not any actual force. So why do we keep insisting that politics is, or should be, a rational business? That would be way, way worse than our current gamesmanship. After all, there’s no objective way to prove that black people should have the same rights as white people. That hinges entirely on what “should” means, and “should” only means what most of us agree it means. If we wait for that to change on its own, we have no control over the situation; we just have to sort of hang around until every white person decides to treat black people as equals, and who knows how long that would’ve taken? (I mean, technically it still hasn’t happened, right?) The game of politics offers a ritual way to enact social change in an organized, collective way. It is a magic wand with the force to alter our ideas of how the world works. And that’s kind of amazing. Who cares if it’s made up?
There’s one more way in which politics is like a unicorn, if you’ll indulge me. When I was little, my parents took me to a Ringling Brothers circus in Madison Square Garden, and the big draw that year was what they called “the real unicorn.” I sat in my seat with an overpriced souvenir and enjoyed the clowns and the motorcycles in the cage and all, but what I was really looking forward to was that unicorn. It would have been easy to have been disappointed. But when the ringmaster emerged from backstage with a leash in hand, I really did think the beast he led was a unicorn. Flashbulbs flashed, the spotlight hit it, and it was a weird kind of magical moment. It was just some sort of mutant goat, of course, but there’s no way in which knowing that would have made the moment better for me. In fact, it would have made it much worse. It was a harmless kind of mass delusion (well, mass for all the dumbass six-year-olds like me, I suppose) that worked because of its charm rather than its appeal to reason. It clearly wasn’t actually real – I must have realized, having been to many museums at that point, that if there was a real unicorn it probably wouldn’t have made its first appearance in a circus – but that somehow made the delusion more enjoyable. And so it is with politics. Knowing that it’s a game doesn’t take away its power, and snottily asserting that it’s “just a game” - which we should know already, if we’re smart – doesn’t help anything. A benign mass delusion can produce magical results that rationalism alone simply can’t endure. It’s too much if you want it to make sense; there’s no way to get so many people to agree on something at the same time unless there’s a little bit of trickery involved. But unless lots of people agree on something, nothing can get done in a democracy. By recognizing that politics is unreal and untrue (and needfully slippery and ambiguous and vague and imprecise), we can embrace the ways in which it is useful. By being honest with ourselves about how things get done, not bemoaning the way reality fails to live up to our ideals (which are, after all, just as made up as anything else), we might get better at accomplishing something real and true, at making an actual impact on the world - that thing politics, for all its unreality, is ultimately so damned good at.
