When I suggested on this blog that "all politics is tribal," Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Larison, and Andrew Sullivan all slapped me down like I’d talked about their mothers. Which I suppose, in a way, I had.
Their argument was that, by comparing politics to family, I had degraded politics—settling for a contest of muscle when I should have aimed for real dialogue and eventual consensus, sacrificing conservatism’s ability to be self-critical for the sake of movement loyalty, wanting to be strong when I should want to be right. Now, between the lines of Reihan’s post on Animal Collective, I detect the other objection to "All politics is tribal": When we compare politics to family, we degrade family.
Politics can’t look like family, because family is our refuge from the political—Reihan puts this argument in the mouths of Animal Collective and Rod Dreher, but they’re certainly not the only ones who have said so. When cultural conservatives threaten to withdraw from politics—the right-wing equivalent of threatening to move to Canada—they talk about going out to the sticks, raising a family, and pulling the white picket drawbridge behind them. For them, family is the opposite of politics.
But this idea, like the latest Animal Collective album, is awful. Something is lost when we put a double yellow line between our Getting & Spending and Having & Holding. Consider this model as an alternative to Reihan’s: Someone who spends every workday sweeping floors can hold onto his manly dignity by coming home to a kingdom of his own—family as a different kind of refuge, one that depends on regarding home and hearth as a playground for power and authority. I can imagine a world in which fatherhood (or motherhood) is simply a matter of love and tenderness, but do we really want to relieve parents of the burden of leadership?
I can understand wanting that particular relief. Leadership means putting on the mask of command, and, if we can’t drop all our masks at home, then where can hope to?* Good old Richard Sennett thinks this is a dumb question that only someone raised in a nuclear family would ask:
The nuclear family simplifies the problem of order by reducing the number of actors and thereby the reducing the number of roles any person in the family must play. Each adult need have only two, spouse and parent; with no grandparents in the house, the child will never see them as someone else’s children. The child himself will have only one image of adult love and adult expectation before him; he will not have to sort out what is different about the way you are supposed to behave in front of parents from the way you behave in front of grandparents or uncles.
Authenticity is not a family value.
I would be interested to hear someone weigh in on the relationship between the Reihan/Animal Collective/Crunchy Con model of family and smaller family size, so, to that end, I’ll quote a friend of mine: "I only want one or two children—I don’t want them to have to compete with each other for my love." A fine sentiment, but one that ignores the helpful side of growing up with eight siblings and struggling to find your own place in the family hierarchy. And then, of course, struggling to keep it. (Call it the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape model.) The give-and-take of political negotiation could be seen as a burden from which we periodically escape, or it could be second nature. Politics, like charity, begins at home.
*Um, at prayer?
UPDATE: Consider this quote from the First Provincial Council of Mexico (1555), as cited by Claudio Lomnitz in Death and the Idea of Mexico:
The Indians shall be brought together in towns to live politically. . . And because in order to be true Christians and political, like the rational men they are, it is necessary to be congregated and subjected in towns, and in convenient and accessible places, that they not live dispersed through the sierras and jungles, and that they be congregated where they can live politically, like Christians.
"To be true Christians and political"; we cannot love except politically. Read it twice.
January 26th, 2009 | 5:13 pm
In the words of a friend who grew up with two siblings, “People definitely need to have at least three kids. You know, so there can be factionalism.”
January 26th, 2009 | 5:27 pm
“Never have more children than you have car windows.” — Erma Bombeck
January 26th, 2009 | 5:38 pm
By referencing Christopher Lasch in the title; you beg bringing him into the conversation.
“The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.” Christopher Lasch
This seems to be at the heart of the upper-class anomie, that delays family formation & childbearing. This in turn strips the ruling class of the moral authority to demand responsible childbearing from the middle and lower classes.
This in turn lead me to this by Chesterton.
“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.” Chesterton, Gilbert K.
Yes; with birth control and women’s increased economic power we have given ourselves the freedom to delay or abandon the family. The fact that we wont develop the self discipline, settled minds, and clear moral conviction to counter these impulses is a direct result of the dictatorship of relativism. Nothing more.
January 26th, 2009 | 5:38 pm
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid- necessarily goes to the root of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
January 26th, 2009 | 5:58 pm
It is a sub-subject, but family political structures may or may not look like “regular” politics since they can take different forms: monarchy or tyranny (rule by an all-powerful one), aristocracy or oligarchy (rule by a partnered two), and polity or democracy (in which parents permit children to wield some degree of power). And I suppose type will determine how much of a training ground for (or a refuge from) politics a family is.
January 27th, 2009 | 11:52 am
Helen: bravo for hefting the gauntlet. I’m going to do a bit of reading between the lines, here, which hopefully is not too ungenerous. It sure does seem like you want to erode the “public / private” distinction so central to classical liberalism. But in so doing, are you also undermining what we all now might have to confess is the aristocratic idea of the family? A family as a proto-polis is one thing; but taking the relations within the (nuclear) family as an incomplete or instrumental lived metaphor for the whole city of man is another. How would you prevent us from understanding family love as but a premonition or portion of the abstract love that conscripts politics, a la the Obama inaugural poem?
January 28th, 2009 | 1:59 pm
I don’t know how pertinent this story is to the question at hand, but I think Ms. Rittelmeyer would like it.
It is said that St. Thomas More, whenever he approached his father (even when St. Thomas was the Chancellor of England, and his father was yet a mere barrister) would kneel before him and receive his blessing.
January 29th, 2009 | 4:35 am
I hate to rain on the parade, but I think you might be giving the words of sixteenth century Mexicans a bit too much meaning. It’s quite possible they were, in part, just thinking that it would be easier to administer diocese if the indigenous people weren’t so spread out. Plus I believe “like Christians” was, in sixteenth century Spanish parlance, similar to saying “like civilized people.” And civilization concerns cities, politics, etc.
The Carthusians, Camaldoese, and religious hermits often did not live in towns. In the case of hermits I think it’s doubtful they even lived “politically” in any sense. Christians may live politically or they may also live in contemplation and solitude. It depends.
But this is maybe being a tad churlish.
January 30th, 2009 | 11:58 am
Pope John Paul II was once asked how parents should deal with the problem of spoiled children.
His Holiness replied: “Parents should give their children what they want . . . more brothers and sisters!”
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