Must modern politicians have forged identities?

Mark K. writes:

The thing that has come across to me this election season is the issue of forged or manufactured identities. Obama, McCain and Hillary Clinton—all have engaged in creating political personas for themselves that belie their true natures. Whether through personal myths or political reversals, each one has created a political persona that mainstream America has seemingly accepted. Personally after having read several biographies of her, I don’t think that Hillary has changed much from the student who wrote her leftist college thesis. But she won’t discuss on the stump her true ideals. Ditto for Obama who has created a post-modern self that appeals to college students and represents some sort of transcendence (entirely bogus). McCain’s public record totally contradicts his “I’ve been a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution” mantra.

Whichever person gets into the White House, will be our president through false pretenses. This to me has become the most cynical election I’ve ever witnessed. However once a precedent is established—the forging of political identities opportunistically through a form of self-lying—is it ever going to be possible to get an honest man in the White House? Both the public and the media have come to accept that a candidate will create a political and public persona out of a contradictory past and that is categorized as “self development and personal progress.” This worries me because political shysters such as McCain and Obama will now have written the candidate script for future generations.

LA replies:

Notice the common element in these three politicians. They’re all concealing their liberalism/leftism. To understand the meaning of this, let us remember the schizophrenia that constitutes modern liberal society. Liberalism/leftism is its ruling ideology, but practically society requires—and instinctively most normal people believe—in many non-liberal things. These two sides of the brain of modern people must always be kept from coming into contact with each other. So for example: people believe that non-discrimination is the sacred principle of our society that can never be violated. Then they are shocked that a Muslim wants to take his oath of office on the Koran, or that Muslims want to have the prayer call on loudspeakers in Oxford, England, meaning that that they have a particularist, non-liberal sense of society and are alarmed when it is threatened. They believe in a non-discrimination that must result in the Islamization of society, AND they have an expectation that their society is and should be non-Muslim! They cannot allow themselves to see, at the same moment and in relation to the same idea, that they have these two core beliefs that contradict each other, because then they would have to give up one or the other.

Now, if the basic political and cultural beliefs of modern liberal people is schizophrenic as I have just described, is it any surprise that electoral politicians will also be schizophrenic? As successful politicians in liberal society, they would not be where they are if they did not subscribe fully to liberalism. But the realistic, instinctive, commonsensical, non-liberal aspect of the electorate requires that these devoted liberals present themselves as something less than completely liberal. Think of the Democratic National Convention in 2004, with its first three days devoted to celebrations of patriotism and the military, climaxed on the fourth day by Kerry’s salute! So (and this is just one possible angle on a complex question), perhaps we should see this falsity of modern politicians the same way we see hypocrisy—as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should be grateful that virtue (i.e. non-liberalism) is still operative enough in society that the politicians have to pay tribute to it.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

There’s not too much to add to your recent comments (“Must modern politicians have forged identities?”) on the obligatory nod given by contemporary politicians to non-liberal understandings of the world. It did remind me of something closely related, though. Political correctness, it seems, depends upon a similar kind of insincerity—what makes it so dastardly is precisely that it amounts to a compulsion to say things we do not mean, and to affect emotions we do not really feel. No one would object to it, indeed, it would not even have a name, if PC were not so obviously counter to the actual habits of a normal mind.

I took a seminar in college on Polish-Jewish relations in the 20th century. It was a very liberal class taught by a very liberal professor, but it was nonetheless fascinating, because the professor had spent so many years in Poland researching the subject at hand (and also because the subject is a genuinely interesting one). One anecdote of hers involved a discussion she had attended while working as a graduate student in Krakow. One academic on the panel was complaining that in Poland, people were not speaking their minds, and that their silence reflected a suppression of their actual beliefs, rather than a full conversion to liberalism. It was the non-liberal things that went unsaid which were the focus of his concern, not the stultifying effects of PC as such. Another member of the panel—whom my professor quoted approvingly, as a man with “such great moral language”—retorted that hypocrisy was the tribute vice paid to virtue, and at least people no longer felt free to make non-liberal statements anymore. It wasn’t perfect, he said, but it was progress—progress toward a world in which non-liberal thoughts were not only unspeakable, but were actually unthinkable. So for now, he said, liberals ought to rejoice in this kind of hypocrisy, because it represented a triumph of liberal virtue over the unwilling non-liberal mind.

Nothing earth-shattering really, but it was an interesting glimpse at a member of the liberal intellectual vanguard speaking candidly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 31, 2008 12:47 AM | Send