What is distinctive about American politics

Is American political life today too polarized? There is much reason to think so. Yet:

In fact, the United States has a weak party system which is relatively disengaged from politics in the sense of ideology. Instead, it tends towards patronage and representation not of ideological positions or even the interests associated with them, but of people by demographical social group. This is why we have gerrymandering. This is of course a consequence of our legislative systems being based on geography rather than party lists, which may be the most important difference from other models. It also is why politics in this country are unusually run by interest group lobbies, on whom politicians are dependent for financing of their expensive campaigns. Most of these interest groups are corporations or sometimes groupings of them; others are ideologically based, and solicit donations from a public which they then use to try to influence legislation. The political parties do represent each of them an intelligible range of positions ideologically, though they in fact converge on a wide center. They need to be ideological enough to attract enthusiasm, which can lead to donations as well as voting majorities, but they also need to be un-ideological because they represent people by geographical demarcations and demographical specifications. America's unique multicultural identity politics, and the social justice warrior intersectionalism, is part of this. Every European and Latin American country is more ideological and less 'representative' in the depoliticizing (but also politicizing, often to the point of fury) way of the American system. I doubt it would be improved by measures to depoliticize the parties. How would they maintain their identities then? They need to seem more different than they are to get votes and financial contributions, and the energies of activists working for non-profit organizations that hope directly or indirectly to influence policy.

America's political culture is based on the need for a certain assertiveness, which can be loud, aggressive, implacable, exclusionary, and, in the oldest of American political traditions stemming from English Puritanism, moralistic. The intensity, affectively and otherwise, of the assertion of will tends in fact to substituted its militancy for a radicalism that adheres to some relatively extreme position on the spectrum that defines political opinions and actions intelligibly by being constructed as a line extending between left and right. So angry militant self-assertion of political will tends to present itself as stand-in for the implacable commitment to some relatively marginal ideological stance, and these therefore are often misread, and may be more conservative and normal than they are recognized as being.

It is little wonder that these stances tend to identify the expression and enforcement of will in terms of both ideology and the representation of the oppressed or marginalized social group that one is part of. In fact, ideology and group identity are linked in just this way. And on this dual basis, the most characteristic stance is not just "Don't tread on me!" but also Luther's "Here I stand, I can do no other."

In other words, our political traditions, from left to right, are essentially Protestant.

The most curious thing in all this about America politically is how deeply politicized and depoliticizing our political culture is.

Maybe all important political gestures are at once both of these things, since the character of the political as such is partly to define and redefine, and determine and regulate the stakes of, what is and is not political, or subject to public decision based on the will of the sovereign, which is of course theoretically the people. Politics is contestation and decision about the political; it consists of actions and gestures that are always at once politicizing and depoliticizing.

Carl Schmitt said that the political is the sovereign's decision on what counts as exception to the rule; but in a democratic republic, it is more accurate to think of politics as essentially outside all regulated spaces and sites of regulation. Politics is contestation, and what is most contested is precisely what can and cannot be; it is thus exceptional to management or governance (which the Greeks called economy) by definition. Heidegger thought art is political because it tells the people of a political community who they are and what they are like, or what matters to them. But he was still conceiving this monarchically. The political is contestation and decision on what matters; in a democratic society, which I define as a republic willing itself as a democracy, what is represented or disclosed and what is chosen and also contested are the same. This is why much political contestation has migrated to aesthetics, with its constitutive identity with ethics, considered as questioning of the audience's form of life, a questioning that inseparable from a showing.

Republican politics also depends on factions, a discovery of the Renaissance of Italian city-states, with Machiavelli. The contrary idea is that of a system of governance based only on the excellence of leaders, who work together to solve problems while avoiding controversy. This is the Chinese model of government today. It works remarkably well. It promises an affluence based on utility and convenience in exchange for an absence of much liberty. The emerging system will no doubt owe something to the American and European models, though there are troubling questions of how; it will certainly combine managerial surveillance of the world's populace with access to tools that inform, entertain, and improve people's individual ability to manage their own lives so as to get the things they want.

For this reason, it is likely that the surveillance state is here to stay. Freedom will either have to be redefined, perhaps in the way that European-language philosophy has been doing, particular on the European continent, since Spinoza, Rousseau, and Kant, or there will be a lot less of it, which on the English model that bases liberty not on uses of language and powers of thought (reason and imagination) but on property and privacy, begins to seem like an impossibility sustainable only in imagination. This undoubtedly is the reason in philosophy for the recent Hegel revival.