Dimensionality

Guest Post by The Zman

Politics is often described as a dispute over a set of issues or maybe a dispute between groups with some stake in an issue. This is the simplest and crudest form of politics, the sort you get at the town meeting or a social club. In reality, political divides are much more complex, often tangential to the issues. Trump, for example, would love to spend a trillion dollars on roads and bridges. The Democrats have talked about it for years, but now they oppose it, because they hate Trump.

That’s one of the dimensions to politics. The opposition to Trump is entirely personal, often stemming from class identity. The more candid anti-Trump people come right out and admit that they oppose him because they don’t like his style. The personal dimension to politics plays a much larger role that it should, but democratic politics always attracts small-minded narcissists. The system itself rewards this sort of behavior, so even the more mature fall into the trap of personal politics.

This gets into another dimension of politics, one where you begin to see the divide between the camps. One side thinks people are the problem that politics must fix and the other side thinks the system is what needs fixing. Scott Alexander did a post on this a couple of years ago. One side sees politics as a war between groups, while the other side sees politics as a result of systemic failure. The left blames Trump or Putin for their woes, while the Right blames “the swamp” for everything.

The interesting thing about this is the two sides will flip when it comes to specific topics like crime or regulation. The Left thinks crime is the result of defects in society like racism, while the Right pins the blame on criminals or maybe judges, who allow criminals to walk free. This conflict versus mistake dimension of politics has a situational dimension to it as well. When it is convenient to blame the system, both types will blame the system. The same is true with personalizing issues.

Of course, on this side of the great divide, people tend to look at politics as war and focus on specific people as the trouble. That’s the nature of outsider politics, as it by definition opposes the system and the people in it. There’s also the fact that dissident politics is immature at this time. There’s not a lot of theory to hold it all together or even a common set of definitions. People call themselves dissidents, in some cases, because they think it sounds cool.

This gets into another set of dimensions that Greg Johnson has covered. Politics involves ideas, events, and people. Small-minded people focus on the people, while average minded people focus on events. The higher minded will talk about ideas, but at the top, all three are part of the political discussion. The cable chat shows are not going to spend time discussion theory, for example. Instead they cover the events of the day and the people involved in those events.

This is another reason why dissident politics remains focused on people. It is not that dissidents are stupid or ignorant. The issue at this stage is that most dissidents are politically immature. For generations, Americans have been conditioned to operate within that very narrow space of official politics. One side wants tyranny by government, while the other side wants a tyranny of corporate power centers. You get to choose who rules over you, but not how they rule over you.

One sign that dissident politics is beginning to grow up is the appearance of books and articles looking at events and ideas from outside the system. Chris Caldwell’s recent book, for example, is a serious treatment of the forces unleashed by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. Caldwell is not a dissident, although he could probably feel at home on this side, but he is clearly aware of what’s happening on this side. When intellectuals take dissidents seriously, the movement is maturing.

That’s another dimension to politics. There is a lifecycle to all political movements, whether they are driven by events or ideas. We live in an age in which the ideas of the Enlightenment have largely run their course. We are also at a point where the American Empire is coming to an end. Then there is the political order within America that co-evolved with the empire. The current turmoil is due to the confluence of several cycles coming to an end at the same time and place.

That’s why dissident politics remains immature. The start of the new must wait for the old to reach a stage when it can no longer retrain its replacement. For several decades now, the old system could keep dissident politics bottled up, but the cracks in the walls are obvious to everyone now. Like a landslide waiting to happen, there is a lot of energy stored up in the status quo. What will cause that energy to be released cannot be known, but it is just a matter of time.

That may be the most important dimension to politics. Time is not a constant in the political world. Often events move quickly and uncontrollably, while at other periods, time feels like it stops. Right now, we are in an interregnum, where stuff happens, but not much has changed. We are in the period between when the old falls away and the new rushes into replace it. Time stands still, but at some point, it is going to take off like rocket and things will change quickly.

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