On Joining the Party
The danger of political identity.— The moment one begins to identify oneself with a party, movement, or faction, one has also begun to shift one’s intellectual center of gravity from the solid ground of the mind’s own observations and perceived needs to the anxious and ever-shifting social imperatives of remaining a partisan in good standing, imperatives that perforce become increasingly compelling and emotionally self-justifying, until at last belonging as such becomes an end in itself, the “that for the sake of which” determining all of one’s thoughts, judgments, and preferences. The makeshift raft of private reasoning, once unmoored from its proper shore of personal experience and observation, is quickly drawn toward the eddy of group enthusiasm, and then inevitably swallowed in the vortex of “Us,” which in practice is little more than a euphemism for “Our Leaders’ Whims.” The inexorable result of this spiritual drifting — gradual, subliminal, and total — is that one comes to believe, in self-protective vanity, that the positions of one’s faction just “happen to be” essentially aligned with one’s own opinions, and are therefore rational and good, which logically entails that any views different from those of one’s faction are by definition false, irrational, and evil.
The mechanism of political identity.— The incipient partisan has, by his intitial act or impulse toward joining, expressed an implicit willingness, or rather an emotional craving, to be spiritually collectivized, which means he has revealed a susceptibility to viewing agreement as identity — that is, to mistaking the partial and incidental for the complete and essential — with its converse implication that non-identity entails complete and utter disagreement. Hence the unwillingness of the politically identified, to the extent they have become so, to give credence, let alone a fair hearing, to any doubts or disapprovals voiced by “Them.” Any objection or alternative “They” raise will only be seen as a refusal to listen to reason, or even an expression of irrational hatred, once one has accepted the indispensable psychological premise of partisanship, namely that if “We” are right, then our rightness must be total, from which it follows that “They,” insofar as they express dissent, must not merely be wrong, but totally wrong. Thus we find the source of the activist tenor of all true partisanship. For activism, by nature the form of political posturing suitable to the young, but ever adaptable to immaturity at any age, is rooted in an unblinking adherence to absolute certainties: absolute certainty that one is absolutely right, absolute certainty that those who disagree are absolutely wrong, and absolute certainty that one’s certainty itself is sufficient proof that one has grasped the Absolute.
The folly of political identity.— Adopting the indispensable psychological premise of partisanship, as outlined above, i.e., making the leap of faith necessary to the adult quest for the political safety net of belonging, requires evading or ignoring the logical and experiential lessons of human imperfection, namely that: (1) Everyone (oneself necessarily included) is wrong, at least partly, most of the time, and (2) Everyone is right, at least partly, some of the time. From which it follows that to give in to the emotional susceptibility to viewing agreement as identity is, implicitly, to fundamentally identify oneself with much falsehood, and simultaneously to fundamentally oppose oneself to much truth, all in the name of belonging. That is, political partisanship or factionalism is in part an attempt to hide from the adult responsibility of struggling through the fog individually (i.e., the human condition) by wrapping oneself in the comfortingly protective illusion of collective certainty. Hence the need to believe that “Their” motives and principles are essentially evil, as a cushion against any momentary self-doubts about whether “They” might be making a bit of sense. “They” cannot make sense, one must insist, for essential evil can never give birth to truth.
The balm of the moderate middle.— Lest one imagine that any of the above is a call to “centrism,” which is to say a plea for negotiating and embodying a practical compromise between or among the rival political factions (identities), I note only that this supposed third way is merely a lazier way — a more “intellectual” way, if you will — of staking out a position of psychological protection and belonging. The moderate middle, in politics, is just another collectivized identity, though a particularly smug one, in that it finds its “agreement” in piecemeal associations with various factions, confusing such an ad hoc or milquetoast form of collective self-identity with genuine detachment and intellectual independence. In other words, more often than not the person who rails against “the extremes” is merely too squeamish to alienate himself from either end, and thus clings to the absolute certainty of the Half-Measures Party — another collectivizing cocoon, but one which sees itself as superior and more serious precisely to the extent that it allows itself (its “truths”) to be determined or positioned entirely by the rival parties whose identities it supposedly rejects.
