The Gordian Knot of Modern Politics

Politics is the great leveler: It makes even the most inspired and insightful voices sound banal.

In his hurriedly cobbled-together new song railing against “King Trump’s” immigration policies, the supremely talented Bruce Springsteen sounds like a million other angry Blue Sky posters as he lambasted the “occupier’s boots,” brought down against “Citizens [who] stood for justice.”

Accepting her Song of the Year Grammy on Sunday, Billy Eilish offered support to anti-ICE protestors by mouthing the mindless slogan, “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

Artists have every right to express their opinions about current events. But what’s telling is the dispiriting contrast between the imaginative power of their best work and the tired tropes that almost always define their political utterances.

I wrote about this phenomenon in 1998 when the New Yorker magazine asked acclaimed writers to address President Bill Clinton’s problems arising from his sexual dalliance with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Instead of providing enlightening perspective into the sordid story, these writers proved as screechy and partisan as all the other gasbags bending our ears back then.

E.L. Doctorow wrote that Zippergate “is the unseating of a democratically elected president with all the legitimacy of a coup d’Etat.” Louis Begley blamed Monica, a “little slut” who couldn’t keep a secret; Janet Malcolm fingered Kenneth Starr, who, she asserted, is motivated by “some strain of deep-seated misogyny. … To Jane Smiley, the 50-ish president engaged in a year and a half long affair with the 20-something intern because of the all-too-human “desire to make a connection with another person.” Clinton dissembled and covered up, according to James Salter, simply “to save his reputation and to prevent considerable injury to Mrs. Clinton and his daughter.”

It is easy to laugh at such absurdities and dismiss these authors as partisan hacks. But this ignores the more useful question: Why does politics turn even our great poets of the soul into pedestrian mouthpieces of cliché? More importantly, what might this teach we of the madding crowd who are not so gifted in thought and language?

One answer is that original ideas are hard to come by. Most commentary echoes other commentary. What changes is not so much the values and assumptions of belief but the circumstances to which they are applied. We keep pouring old wine into a new bottle.

The understandings that most of us espouse are not so much our individual assessment of a given set of facts, but an echo of what other like-minded people are saying. When was the last time you, or someone you know, said something startlingly original about current events? That’s why it is so frustrating and boring to talk with people across the political divide – you know what they are going to say before they open their mouths. It’s likely that they feel the same about you.

If Elon Musk’s brilliant minions had invented a machine foretelling the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of law enforcement in Minneapolis, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to have predicted who would view their deaths as a crime and who would call it a regrettable tragedy. That opinions on those killings are so starkly divided, even though they were captured on video, underscores the political mind’s tendency to see facts less as pictures of reality than Rorschach tests.

When creative minds like Springsteen and Eilish can’t rise above this, what hope is there for the rest of us?

This dynamic is so powerful because of the nature of the beast. Unlike art, which, at its best, raises questions, politics is about providing answers. Discussion and debate have their place, but they can also slow the gears in the necessary work of acting. That’s why governments often turn coercive.

This phenomenon has become more pronounced in America, at least since the so-called Reagan Revolution challenged the liberal consensus and the nation began splintering into rival groups that increasingly see themselves at war with fellow citizens who won’t agree to their terms. Winning means staying on message.

That’s one reason echo chambers and groupthink have flourished – hence the mania and moral panics of the COVID era, the BLM riots of 2020, the rise of DEI, and the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. It also explains why terms like disinformation and misinformation have emerged to justify the censoring of opposing views.

Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are few daring thinkers during polarized political eras. Who has the time when the enemy is advancing?

There doesn’t appear to be an antidote for this affliction – the stakes of this battle are too high. In the modern world, it’s important to pound one’s message. It may make too many of us boring and predictable but, unfortunately, it also seems necessary.

This is the Gordian knot of modern politics.

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