The Personal as Political
Anyone who says (and I have heard people say), “I’m not interested in politics,” just doesn’t understand how our world operates. Everyone, whether they know it or not, has a vested interest in politics. They care about their day-to-day lives—where they live, how their families are constituted, how their health is safeguarded, how their injuries and illnesses are treated, what jobs they are hired to do and how much money they earn, how many children they have, how safely those children are brought into the world, how and how well those children are educated, and how and what (and if) they eat, how their elderly parents live and die, and how they themselves (and their children, and grandchildren, etc.) will die when they become elderly—and whether or not they will even live long enough to become elderly—and the viability of the planet we live on. And each of these matters is influenced, partially determined, or entirely ordained by politics. The conditions we live within, the laws we live under, are political. The second-wave feminists summed it up: the personal is political. (And, it follows, vice versa.)
The political is not politicians. Theoretically, politicians are people elected to represent the interests of their constituents—to propose, support, and pass laws that enable those who elected them to optimize the conditions of their lives—the health of their families, employment that is safe and generates a living wage, the wholesomeness of their food, and the provision of safety nets that allow them to live decently when something goes wrong.
All too often, however, this is not what politicians do. Particularly in the current climate, politicians are too often trying to assess their constituents’ view of morality and then adopting it in order to optimize their chances of winning re-election. Too often they are engaged in cost-benefit analysis—not the kind that weighs the cost of programs compared to the benefits they provide, but rather the cost of their public stances compared to the benefits to their next electoral campaign and to their own bank accounts. This is what not all, but the majority, of politicians do. It’s not what they are elected to do.
Too many people don’t realize that. Too many people believe that their elected officials are seated so that they can push the world to embody their own personal views of morality. (Alert: one person’s idea of goodness can be another person’s nightmare.) But morality is non-negotiable. Morality can’t be compromised. And both negotiation and compromise are essential to the productive functioning of politics. The theoretical purpose of political activity is the public good, not private interests (economic or attitudinal).
The public good isn’t a belief or a religion or even a concept. The public good is defined by members of the public having adequate shelter, enough to eat, health care when they need it, food that isn’t toxic in either the short or long term, children who are educated in ways that enable and encourage them to support the public good when it’s their turn to do it. Beliefs and religions rightfully rule matters of the home. Politics rules the matters of communal life and individual as well as collective sustainability. How politics play out is everybody’s business. The public good is the result of politics working well. What we see now—paralyzing partisan division resulting in lives characterized by unnecessary hardship and fear, deaths marked by unnecessary pain and trauma, and a planet that is rapidly becoming a place where it can no longer support many species, not limited to but including Homo sapiens. (Sidenote: How sapient, as a whole, are we proving to be?)
The feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were right about a number of things. Most fundamental, however, was their claim that the personal is political. But the personal here refers to personal well-being, not personal beliefs or moral codes or preferences. And anyone who is disinterested in politics is, in effect, disinterested in their own well-being, as well as the well-being of their children, their community, their country, their planet and everyone (and everything) on it. Those who aren’t interested in politics, along with those who miscategorize what is and isn’t political, have pushed humankind to the brink.
There’s no place for apathy or egotism when it comes to politics. In fact, apathy and egotism are killing us.