The Politics of Approximity

or maybe, The Approximity of Politics?

Round these parts, if April is the cruelest month, August is the most menacing. We are threatened with the beginning of the semester, and with all of the things that we wanted to accomplish this summer (but didn’t). The machine that generates impersonal, organizational emails sputters back to life in August, and for those of us in administration, we get not only that steady stream of employee reminders and responsibilities, but calls from our superiors to contribute to it as well.

When I was in college, the most intense time of the semester was the week or two prior to final exams, and I had the weird habit of shifting into overdrive in my reading. During that time, I would read a book or more a day. Binge-reading like that simultaneously did two things for me: it kept my brain churning on the one hand, so that I didn’t have to “warm up” to study, but it also allowed me to immerse myself in worlds where the pressure of the everyday can lift, however temporarily. So while it’s been a busy week for me, I’ve also been reading a lot.

I’ve dipped into 4-5 books, but the one I’m thinking about today is Anand Giridharas’ The Persuaders, which I picked up on Cory Doctorow’s recommendation, which I’ll further recommend to you as a strong summary of the book (one which I won’t duplicate here). I’ve still got a ways to go with it, but it got me thinking about a few things related to my discussion of approximity last week.

One of those is Giridharas’ discussion of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy. I’ve written a little bit about this before, about the way that Sanders’ team positioned a “throwback candidate” to make him feel “fresher and more contemporary” than most of his colleagues, by taking advantage of social media. Giridharas juxtaposes Sanders with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Doctorow’s summary of that chapter is brief:

Sanders has spent decades refusing to make politics personal; AOC has mixed personal biography with her critiques to make them relatable. Both approaches have persuaded millions of people, and each has changed through their political careers.

Well, yeah, but…what strikes me about this juxtaposition is the history that’s encapsulated there, one that has to do not only with technology but with metonymy as well. It’s more than simply saying here are two different (inverse) styles. And it’s more than a matter of observing that AOC has been successful in part due to her ability to adapt to our current media environment, although that is also true.

There’s a moment that Giridharas details which happened in Nevada, where Sanders had helped a man (Weigel) pay off his medical bills and regain his insurance. On his return trip to the state, the man tried to give him a treasured jacket, but Sanders refused to take it:

Sanders was refusing in that moment to engage in the kind of politics that he perhaps held responsible for Weigel losing his care in the first place. The politics of charm and goose bumps that gives elected officials a way of performing compassion while slashing through an already threadbare safety net. The politics of feeling pain while doing the bidding of corporations.

It’s interesting to see someone consciously pass on the “viral moment,” because (presumably) to take it up would cheapen and exploit the original gesture. Giridharas’ account is descriptive (as opposed to passing judgment), but it’s clear that members of Sanders’ team were frustrated with his unwillingness to engage also in the “charm and goose bumps” that have become so typical of our political culture.

This juxtaposition of Sanders and AOC functions to elide a long history whereby (in this country in particular) we’ve allowed the parasocial to take over our political culture, a history that is marked very specifically by technology/media shifts. I’m thinking at least as far back as the impact that television had on Kennedy and Nixon, although maybe I’d point to WWII era technologies as the start of this arc. None of this is necessarily relevant to Giridharas’ book—I’m not trying to mount a critique here or to suggest that his book should do something other than what it does. Instead, I keep coming back to this one episode because I can feel in myself how normalized it’s become to think what if Sanders had been a little more willing to adapt to the contemporary audience, to make himself a bit more approachable? It was difficult for me in that moment not to sympathize with the team that wanted Sanders to take the jacket (one of them observes that Bill Clinton would have put it on immediately).

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I found myself asking why it takes me so much additional effort to call the situation into question itself. By definition, we’re choosing people to represent our interests politically, but the system where they do so, and the process by which they’re chosen has been overtaken by the kinds of values that I wrote about in association with metonymy. In the absence of any sort of accountability for their ability to perform the tasks and to fulfill their campaign promises, we choose them (and are “influenced” to choose them) based on parasocial criteria like approachability, likability, authenticity, all of which are so highly manufactured as to be all but meaningless.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I’m not saying anything here that we don’t all know. Even our language for discussing politics (red v blue, left v right) has become so metonymized that we’re largely incapable of dealing with complicated issues (climate crises, health emergencies, et al). We fall into oversimplified explanations, half-hearted “solutions,” and performative spectacle. And don’t even get me started on the list of folks, from all corners of the political landscape, who have exploited and abused these circumstances. I hesitate even to call it a “system,” but if I did, it would only be to say that the system incentivizes the very abuses that corrode it further.

I’ve got a bunch more to say, but in trying to do so, I ended up spiraling out into several other topics. So I’ve saved those paras for later, and I think I’m going to put a bow on this one.