Democrats Need a Divider

We are not all on the same team. Your interests are not immediately the same as your employers’. They aren’t immediately the same as your landlord’s. Pretending that we all have the same interests confuses the nation.

If we want to get to a deeper unity, we need to acknowledge our proper divisions, not pretend divisions don’t exist. If you pretend proper divisions don’t exist, you end up confusing people about their lives, struggles, power and function.

This is why good governance calls for a substantive divider, not a vacuous uniter.

(Doing politics while reading metaphysics is a trip. I spend hours reading Plato’s Parmenides, and then pop online and see people debate, “Are we one or are we many? If we are one, what kind of one? If we are many, what kind of many?”)

If my morning tour in metaphysics taught me anything about politics, it’s that we aren’t one, we are a whole, and there is a difference. If you want a Presidential candidate who is talking about the US as if we are one, your (most likely vacuous) candidate is talking about a thing that doesn’t have any features(because having multiple features would make it more than one) and doesn’t exist in any time or any place.

Now if you think we are a whole, we can get somewhere, but a whole is made up of functional, mutually reinforcing parts, and those parts aren’t identical and are themselves unities, so you need to account for the unity of each part as distinct from other parts, and how they fit together in the unity of the whole.

Here is how that works on a factory floor, for example. You have managers and workers. If the managers think they are workers and the workers think they are managers, everyone gets confused. For the functioning of the firm, we need to acknowledge the division between managers and workers. But on top of that, “workers,” as part of a whole, are themselves a unity, so we have to account for the rules that allow workers to be recognized as a unit that is itself part of a whole firm. This is why you need labor law that secures labor organizing efforts.

If you don’t want to do all of that work, and I don’t blame you if you don’t, just know this:

Democrats need a divider, not uniter.

But a divider has to be able to divide the US in a way that accounts for the unity of the nation. Our divider has to be better than their divider. Trump is a more honest divider than we give him credit for. The entire GOP is better at dividing than we give them credit for. We’ve been through governance by a vacuous uniter (Obama), and it left people more confused than when they started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfWymhy8Wzw

Yes, I very much believe we are a more confused nation now than we were in 2004.

Meanwhile Trump’s rhetoric was not only supported by the fact of inequality, but the fact that these lines are trending IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS.

Trump is out there going, “Look White people, we have a good distribution. It’s not fair, but it’s good for you, and if you want to keep it that way, vote for me.”

He wasn’t lying.

We need to combat him with competent dividers, and we need people who can articulate the difference between incompetent and competent dividers, lest we start celebrating Black men who authorize drone strikes, White women who sell weapons, and transgender folks who design missiles, and working class people who grow up to be wealthy union-busting lawyers.

We need to draw the lines of division in a way that creates a more substantive whole. When Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney stigmatize the unwoke poor as deplorables or takers they are drawing divisions in a way that confuses the fight.

When Sanders draws a distinction between the interests of billionaires and those candidates beholden to billionaires, on one hand, and the interests of factory workers at Amazon, on the other, he draws a proper distinction that clarifies the needs of the whole. He does this through identifying, not muddying, the proper distinctions between the two groups. In this case, the distinction clarifies why the workers need to form an independent union that will bargain working conditions, for the sake of the whole industry, not simply be governed by the partial interests of shareholder profits.

If you want a vulgar analogy, it’s good for the Lakers and the Knicks to understand that they aren’t on the same team, that is, they are two distinct parts of a functioning whole game that also includes referees, a governing body, fans, etc. When the players think that they are on the same team, it introduces collusion and degrades the entire game of basketball because it blurs the distinctions that makes the game what it is.