Exercises in Thought: Election Edition

Sweeney: A Heavy Difference

If we ask ourselves why we care about politics, the answer we come to might at first embarrass us. Often when we talk about our reasons for holding political beliefs we are inclined to make reference to a fine abstraction — some concept of reason, or truth, or what is good. It is obvious, however, that the most immediate value of any political belief is a relation to other people, purchased at the belief’s more or less easy price. There is no small number of people who believe in strong borders, or abortion rights, or draconian import tariffs merely because they want the approval of friends or family or colleagues. Or perhaps this overstates the case — it would be more accurate to say that there is no small number of people who, believing any given thing, would believe something very different if only there was a different group of people they sincerely wished to get along with. In this vein we might offhandedly suggest that the reason the contemporary divide in bipartisan politics is so vehement is at least in part owing to a dim, embarrassed, universal intimation of the sense in which we are not divided — namely, a shared unreasonableness of belief, contingent on where we grew up and where we work and where we live, which has always had its place in political life but which in our modern situation is now — and this is the reason for the vehemence, the bad air — at all turns pressed to explain itself.

So this immediate value of our political beliefs might at first embarrass our sense of principle, insofar as it is impossible to determine the extent to which you hold to a principle simply to impress a certain group of people. But if we are embarrassed, we should recognize that the nature of our embarrassment is strange. For though political belief, framed as a means of fitting in, seems remote from political belief as an abstractly conceived principle concerning what is reasonable and true and good, the two are brought near to each other when we seek what must be the ultimate grounding for any abstractly conceived political principle, that is, a certain kind of relationship it brings about among people. Ostensibly the reason you would want strong borders is because you want to protect citizens’ political privileges and economic prospects. Ostensibly the reason you would want protections for abortion rights is because you want people to have control over their body and over their future. The point is to say that these particular political goals are determined by a more general sense of what certain people should have and how they should relate to others.

A certain — let us not say “ideal” — relationship between people, which further entails a certain way of relating to the world, is therefore the sticking point of any political belief. It follows that the embarrassing disjuncture between the immediate value and principle of political belief only comes about in the strange situation where I myself am not implicated in the ends of my political belief — that is, when the people for whom my principle of correct relations is conceived are not the same people whom I am desperately trying to impress and live among and laugh and sob with and be near to. If we imagine the social value and principle of belief as somehow apart, you might accuse me of only wanting to be near someone and I might blush. If, however, social value and principle are inseparable, and they are, upon making the same accusation of only wanting to be near I will respond and say of course that is true.

It is well and good to want the good of other people. To want, on the other hand, the good of other people for only yourself, to claim living well among people as the mode in which your imagination of the good is essentially mediated, is the sign of political courage. In other words, the courage of every political belief depends on the presumption that its function is to make you loved or liked by someone, and, in turn, that it will compel you to love or like someone.

If this is our presumption — but perhaps I have not convinced you to share this presumption with me, and so I should speak for myself. Very well: This is my presumption, and, on this presumption, it is not at all obvious to me that politics should be guided by reason, or truth, or what is good. Rather it seems that the politics I desire will come about when I discover a mode of relations which in all instances brings me to people I genuinely admire, and whom I am capable of admiring and who are capable of admiring me. If I cannot imagine such a politics, it is perhaps in part because I have not received a sufficient education on whom I should admire and how I should admire them.

But I have an idea of whom I should admire. The person I admire will possess a unique sense of their own limitations. Moreover, I have an idea of how I should admire them. I should listen for when they speak in two voices at once.

Here’s someone I might admire.

Frederick Douglass goes to Baltimore at the age of five, when his grandmother dies, to be a house slave for the Auld family. Mrs. Auld takes to him immediately — he is intelligent, sensitive, delightful. She showers him in small affections and, through daily instruction, teaches him to read and write.

In the middle of one of these lessons Mr. Auld comes home from work. He walks over to his wife and takes the book — a Bible — from her hand. Quietly he explains to her that slaves cannot be taught to read because education will make them unfit for their position.

Even here the injustice is striking. Douglass asks what possible justification there could be for a role which, upon learning to read the Bible,  would not be right for any person to hold. And how is it that something so outrageous, Douglass asks, can lay claim to the cool quiet reasonableness with which Mr. Auld approaches, takes book from hand, makes his explanation and retires to his study.

For this is what it does. It lays its claim. The consequence of that claim is confusion. Mrs. Auld doesn’t know what to do. She knows by her husband’s quiet words she has done wrong. Her feelings had misled her. The daily lessons cease, along with the small affections.

By the time Douglass writes his memoir, what happened has become more or less clear. But the claim of confusion unsettles and is unsettled. There will always be the time — then it seemed for no reason at all — that one was no longer made to feel intelligent, sensitive, delightful. The quiet words and the quiet turning away.

Here, then, are two voices. The first is the shout of absolute moral clarity, against slavery and against quiet words and for the country and people Frederick Douglass believes in: “It can never be right!”

The second is a low murmur, which is the claim it lays to the quiet turn beneath quiet words: “It can never be right.” It is for Mrs. Auld and for the young Frederick Douglass and for anyone else that will never hear it.

To want the good of other people for yourself is the sign of political courage. The sign of political wisdom is to want the good of other people precisely because there is a nearness to other people that you need and will never have. In other words, the sign of political courage is to want to be somewhere, and the sign of political wisdom is to know where you are. To speak this yourself or to hear it in anyone is the precondition for admiration.

(From these premises, it is fairly conclusive that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and JD Vance are not people I can admire, though perhaps not entirely owing to their own faults. If I were, however, to temporarily suspend these premises, I would be most inclined to say that JD Vance seems pretty chill.)

Carroll: In the Event the Other Side Wins

“Space Highway”

My middle school English literature teacher occasionally read aloud to us from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” From what I remember of the novel’s opening, a man in his bathrobe lies down in the mud, attempting to block a bulldozer from knocking over his house. (Perhaps the state claimed eminent domain, or perhaps the man could not pay his mortgage and the bank decided to redevelop the lot?) For a moment the bulldozer stalls, unwilling to run over the man making a desperate last stand in front of his home. The bulldozer operator is overcome with sympathy looking at the man’s pale shins as they peek out from under his robe, shining against the dirt, eyes staring up at him from twenty feet below. Or maybe the bulldozer operator was just concerned about the attendant headache of legal liabilities associated with pressing on the gas pedal at that moment with the man right there, even if he had given ample warning. While all this unfolds, a woman somewhere far away has just figured out the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and she rushes to a telephone booth to tell someone. At that exact moment, an intergalactic species blasts Earth into nothingness to make room for what is effectively a Space Highway. (Perhaps the Galactic Federation claimed eminent domain, or perhaps Earth didn’t respond to the standardized Galactic Notice to Vacate).

Either way, there was no stopping the big laser clearing out the debris from the space highway. Things move too quickly and on too large a scale for a man in his bathrobe lying in the mud — or even a woman who has figured out the answer to life, the universe, and everything — to halt the flow of goods, services, and information. The space highway moves faster than the speed of light.

Highways as we know them don’t (yet) but as you look out from one, objects in the foreground become blurs of color, while the only objects in clear sight are the monumental, looming in the distance. But even a mountain passes by quickly at 80 miles per hour. What is a conversation at eighty miles per hour? What is a dream at 80 miles per hour? What is a man in his bathrobe lying in the mud at 80 miles per hour?

“Panel featuring ACVotes, ACDems, and ACFascists.”

“In the interest of moderation, would we want the head of the Klan to speak at Amherst?”

That hasn’t been a question we’ve asked ourselves, but we have asked ourselves whether we wanted Jeff Sessions to speak at Amherst, and the answer was yes, but no. Accounts describe students protesting on the First Year Quad while Sessions spoke inside Johnson Chapel. Students also apparently bought tickets knowing that they would not attend the talk, with the intention of reducing the audience that Sessions would address.

I guess we don’t know what the purpose of having a speaker at Amherst is. Are we afraid that what he will say will offend? We cannot handle hearing what we think of as hateful speech on our campus. (We don’t tolerate it in the real world, either?) Are we afraid that what he will say will inculcate false beliefs? If these beliefs are so ridiculous, then why are we afraid of their strength? Are we afraid that what he will say will be right? Certainly not! For even if what he says is wrong, and if his speaking at campus only serves to show us how wrong he is — as a great British philosopher once remarked —  there is value in seeing a false argument defeated because it reminds us of the vivacity of its true counterpart. Someone else once said that they attended KKK rallies as a Black man because “people fear what they do not know.” At the end of a long and unlikely friendship between this Black man and the head of the local Klan group, the wizard hung up his robe.

“What if you held a protest and everyone came?”

Would you step away from the people you were protesting so that you could adequately protest them with some more distance? How might you ration out the cookies you baked, thinking only 15 people might come? How would the inflammatory speech you planned on delivering change if your “political opponents” sat criss-cross applesauce on the ground in front of you and eagerly took notes on your every utterance?

Activism at Amherst College lives in the long shadow of the Amherst Uprising. If only we could get everyone to just care in the same way that people did back then. Like that, but all the time, and about everything. Who doesn’t like the thrill of leading a charge onto the First-Year Quad, or onto the Amherst Green? Megaphone in hand, papers overdue, and college bureaucrats scrambling for damage control. Give credit where credit is due: the Amherst for Palestine movement admirably attempted to tap into the student desire to David-versus-Goliath oneself. The little posters which peppered campus around a month ago featured screaming heads, rugged beanies, furrowed brows, and aggressive sharpie writing. The designer scrawled “EMERGENCY RALLY” across the top. This poster, too, attempted to stir up energy for a movement by capitalizing on the desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself, on the image of heroic self-sacrifice in fighting for The Cause, on the valor of claiming that you were on “the right side of history.” One’s body is absorbed into a mass large enough to effect a change. Maybe if we divested we would have truly Made Amherst Great Again. But I guess not enough people showed up? “Maybe we should’ve postponed the emergency rally to another time when more people can come. After midterms?” the organizers said, shuffling their feet.

(P.S., please delete any photos of me at protests which turned out to be for the wrong side.)

“In the Event the Other Side Wins”

Watching the outcome of this election, it is hard not to feel that America has not lost its moorings. We have gotten here through a group of British rebels who argued for their natural rights of freedom while denying those same rights to enslaved Black Americans. We fought a civil war over that fundamental contradiction. We are still dealing with the vestiges of that fundamental contradiction, as is apparent with who it is that will now be swearing an oath to defend the Constitution in January 2025.

We are unmoored, most of all, from the era of the stump speech and the horse-drawn wagon. The written word has usurped the spoken word, and the cited word has usurped the written word, and the saturated word has usurped the cited word, and the empty referent has usurped the saturated word. In a twisted fashion, the spoken word has made a stylish return with the invention of the face filter and the technology of the wide-eyed expression. But this is nothing more than the saturated word’s devolution and its perversion of the spoken word. Politics is not of policy or values but one of Kamala’s being ‘brat’ or Trump’s near assassination and his stopping the Secret Service for the photo op, to raise a fist to the sky.

“2+2=4”

Five tweets is not equivalent to a 1400 word essay. Less so are five Reels equivalent to one tweet. But let’s not forget that 10 1400 word essays are not equivalent to a long evening spent walking down Broadway at rush hour.

“Shortlist of Some of the Worst Things that Happened to Amherst College (in no particular order)”

1. Fizz (by Fizz Social Corp.)
2. Late Night Dining no longer on Fridays/Saturdays

“You Go High We Go Low”

If there is any political value we must hold dearly as we enter the remaining three-quarters of this century, it is a belief in the fundamental goodness of all human beings. I refuse to believe that everyone who disagrees with me is merely wrong and is only in need of my educating them into the right beliefs — which are fully coterminous with my beliefs — and, if need be, forcing my right beliefs on them or in spite of them. (Maybe this is the thing that most makes me old-fashioned, more so than my 10 p.m. bedtime.) There’s something a bit more compelling about this than the alternative image of political interlocutors as brawlers swinging brass knuckles, each one slowly escalating their firepower until someone gets knocked out cold for good. Swap out the brawlers. It’s just a matter of who has a punchier jab-jab right-hook uppercut. And thank God the Allied powers had a stronger left hook, right?

The Amherst Student isn’t a place for politics. (My high school coach called debate verbal fisticuffs.) Val is. I’ve got a table upstairs, where it’s quiet enough to hear. Bring your friends. See you in five.