I’d like to believe that there’s a place in our politics between caricature and indifference — between judgement (ie, praise, censure, etc), on the one hand, and dismissal, flat out rejection, on the other.As an editor of this magazine and as a student, I cherish the writing that avoids these fates: the writers that write about politics without playing politics; the writers who write to help us understand because it matters, rather than to judge or to dismiss or to win.
Harvard students love to write about the Tea Party, but when we do, I’m afraid, we often miss this point. We’re so busy getting our rocks off ridiculing the movement (as Sam does) or praising it (as Raphael does) or weighing its electoral significance (Rajiv) or its relationship to the Republican Party (Paul) or to Massachusetts (Alex Copulsky) or to history itself (Professor Jill Lepore); we’re so busy formulating opinions about the Tea Party as if this blog were a straw poll online, that we don’t step back to some critical distance and ask why the movement matters at all in the first place.
That is to say: Why is this extraordinary anger — which has coalesced into the most important political movement of the 21st century (so far) — roiling around our country at this moment? And what does it mean for America? And what does it say about our moment? Those questions, not DNC talking points or RNC strategy, are what we should be posing when we write. We should be agnostic towards the answers, too; we should be going for truth.
My own personal take is that Professor Lawrence Lessig is correct when he writes the following:
It seems that just about every hundred years (or so, I’m a lawyer; cut me some slack; numbers aren’t my thing), the body politic we call America swells with fever as it fights off a democracy-destroying disease.
American democracy, he says, is perpetually in need of saving itself from the corruption and sclerosis its own institutions. It has done this time and again in the past, and now (and this is the important part) is one of those times once again.
This is not an easy point to make.* It has nothing to do with the midterms or with the policy ideas of any one party. But to understand this point is to understand the basic significance of our political moment, of Barack Obama and of Sarah Palin and of health care reforms and of the Great Recession and of Deepwater Horizon, altogether at once: the corrupted institutions at the heart of our democracy need to be reformed.
As a leftist, I disagree with just about everything the Tea Party believes; but that’s not the point. The point is that in the “body politic we call America,” the Tea Party is what has a pulse. Whether that pulse turns into the fever that saves us from the “democracy-destroying disease” of corruption and sclerosis is what any progressive who cares about this country should be thinking about. It is also — I humbly suggest — what we should be writing about as well.
—
*Though four major magazine ran cover articles this year that tried: #1, #2, #3, #4
Photo credit: Wikimedia
