I've been having trouble, lately, throwing myself into the struggle. I realize that we currently have a massive political battle going on, which will determine our national destiny, but I have been approaching it more as a farce, by which I am entertained, than as a battle in which I am a participant. This is an unhappy state of affairs. I can try to explain why and hope that, instead of being only an isolated exercise in self-introspection, it can also reflect a wider sense of unease a sense of the hollowness at the heart of most political struggle. It might indicate a way of filling that void too, but I make no claims to wisdom.
George Orwell once wrote, "A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards." This is a funny sentence, but it leaves me a little cold. Unlike Orwell, my interests have always been directed more toward how we spend our time after we have met our basic needs. At a place like Dartmouth, this seems to be a pressing question. Surely, one of the things we ought to do is to help other people who haven't met those basic needs, but it seems that there should be something more. And that is the reason why modern politics fails to enflame my imagination: so few politicians are able to look beyond to present a convincing picture of human destiny that lies beyond proper nutrition.
Recently, I was leafing through a collection of presidential inaugural addresses and, on the whole, I found it to be fairly tedious stuff. Only in a few cases (Lincoln, particularly) does the rhetoric rise above listing boring projects the various presidents plan to fulfill, and begin to encompass a sense of national destiny. As Junot Diaz observed in The New Yorker at the beginning of the year, Obama has certainly slid off from being a visionary (like he was on the campaign trail) to being another cataloguer of projects. But the Republicans, despite being largely wrong, have been able to create a crude sense of national history, of national destiny. They can weave a compelling story about how the United States' promise of individual autonomy has been derailed by the encroachments of an evil nanny-state. This might be because the Republicans have a better sense of how the religious imagination of the American people works if not religious ethics.
This story may not be true, but it can capture the voter's imagination (if not his or her intellect though the imagination is stronger). Liberals have, by and large, abandoned that project, the project of creating a national fiction. For them, all histories and all creative representations are lies created to buffer one group's sense of power. This means that the only point to life is to make sure that we all have enough food and sex. This, obviously, isn't the story liberals want to tell but they aren't telling any other story.
So, essentially, my choice in voting is between a story I don't believe in (the Tea Party/Republican story) and no story at all. Because I think that we human-bags should basically remain full of nutritious food and needed medicine, I might vote for the Democrats. But really, where do we go from there? Something is being left out of the equation.
Woodrow Wilson startlingly said, "I cannot be deprived of the hope that is in me that we are chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." This sounds disturbingly close to George Bush's rhetoric, but it irritates less coming from Wilson. It indicates that Wilson saw a purpose to the American experiment, and he fortunately had a massive brain to back that hope up. With Bush it was all purpose, all dream, all God's Plan but without any intellect. With Professor Obama and the Democrats it is all intellect, without any grander sense of purpose, of vision.
In deciding to vote, I will ideally look for a marriage of imaginative energy and intelligence. If I cannot find it, I might simply abstain. But I look forward to the day when those two forces will come into balance with each other. On that day, I will be part of the struggle, and not merely a jaded spectator.
