Is the political war by other means?
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When must the political be said to have war as its paradigm, and when is it much more, irreducible to a civil war by other means, without violence, etc.? Hypotheses:
(1) the political is two things: disagreement, and opposition to (or, since all determination is implicitly also negation, characterization of) "what is" at the present time. An example of the latter without the former is Heidegger's aesthetics of exemplary revelation; an example of the former is social media, as instantiating the 'democratic' tendency in late capitalism for everything to be discussed except whatever is most troublingly important at the present time, excluding the "real" in Lacan's sense for "idle talk" in Heidegger's. Examples of the two together include the (or certain) ideas of tragedy, revolution, art, and philosophy. Revolution is contestation rendered absolute. A dialectical ontology or metaphysics might well be its ideology.
(2) Civil war by other means is the society organized into two opposing political parties, with this opposition considered as totalizing, without remainder.
It can be seen that this actually tends to push both left and right towards the center, though this logic more often affects the left than the right; the American Democratic Party is a veritable machine for processing left-wing desires and transforming them into centrist realizations.
Considered from the standpoint of the political as disagreement and contestation, the problem here is not the idea of conflict but that of totality. In place of social conflict and disagreement as a Many, it appears as a One, and thus a duality of factions contesting a Same that they both lay claim to.
An example of politics reduced to civil war by other means is the Cold War. The Cold War was based on a logic of negation of the negation, and intellectual blackmail: We are right because they, whom we must oppose, are wrong; if you contest the way things are here with us, you are by implication on the side of Them. Reductio ad absurdum, with no need, as in intuitionist logic, to exhibit an alternative; indeed, since alternatives are constructed and determined by a vision of the future, "there are no alternatives" in the present order of things, as Margaret Thatcher claimed. In the logic of intellectual blackmail, as practiced by today's liberal-left, if you criticize anything 'we' are doing you are fascist. This makes sense if all contestation reduces to the terms given by the opposition of the two parties, and if, further, the point therefore is to win, and winning is more important than being in the right about what we want. In the form of intellectual blackmail that was central ideologically to the Cold War (it largely defined it), capitalism at its most extreme is the sole alternative to Stalinism, which excludes liberty; Stalinism is the sole alternative to capitalism at its most extreme, which is oppressive. The protests of 1968 were in part a revolution against the Cold War, refusing to acknowledge either of its factions as justified by what it opposed, in part because at a deeper level the two systems were forms of the same.
(4) We need to reconstruct the evident social value of disagreement and contestation. A starting point is that in a democratic republic, the figures of the citizen and the friend are similar. Partly out of common love of the shared good of the commonwealth, and partly out of a care for both self and other that it generalizes, the one who should most urgently be criticized is not the enemy but the friend. In a republican politics, enemies are less important than friends, even if the ideal state in which there are no friends who have become enemies in fact is unreachable or even undesirable. Of course we argue with friends, and ourselves, partly to realize the good and partly to avoid what is inimical to self, other, and 'us'. An example of a society in which disagreement is very common but also dangerous because dissent is treated as an implicit threat of violence, is of course the United States today.