Politics and Culture: Style and practice
After the Second World War the idea of politics as an aesthetic or retail process receded. Bureaucracy and party systems took shape globally around, broadly speaking, a Western democratic form or a Communist centralized authority form. Before everyone yells at me for being reductive, I am aware that I am being reductive. This won't be the last post on this topic, I just setting some foundations around what politics and culture mean withing the ecosystem of this website.
Culture, media, and art shape, and are shaped by, politics. Fascism has its militarized hyper-masculinity, Labour has its worker aesthetic, Conservatism its house-and-home imaginary. What's new to me at least, as an Elder Millennial, is the idea of a politician as an embodiment of culture, media, and art. My baseline for a politician was set in the 1990s, a comparatively sane time. In my memory politicians in the U.S. like Chuck Hagel (Rep. Sen. Neb.) and Terry Sanford (Dem. Sen. N.C.), among others, practiced a kind of politics that was professional and cloistered. They served in and propagated a system - even politicians as dedicated to the dirtiest and most racist retail politics like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms were still part of the system. They weren't 'terminally online' because there was no 'online' at the time (this makes me feel old).
Well, for better or worse, there's an online now. It's not that politicians in the Bretton Woods pre-online era couldn't be cultural or media icons. Helmut Schmidt, the SPD Chancellor of West Germany from 1974-1982, was never without his signature cigarette, and had "drip" as they say. The TV format famously ruined Richard Nixon's chances at the presidency in the 1960 presidential race when he took part in the first televised presidential debate against the handsome, youthful John F. Kennedy. Politics in the online era however, defined in the most deranged ways by the emergence and consolidation of Trumpism, goes beyond politics being iconic or politicians being media savvy. Unlike their more refined forebears who were constituent components of the political system, politicians in the online era are cultural and aesthetic artifacts in and of themselves.
Politicians these days are podcasters, posters, and foodies. They are embedded and embodied in the culture, none more so than Donald Trump. While Trumpism may fade or collapse, as most personalist regimes do, the idea of politics and politicians being part and parcel of a culture is probably a permanent feature of an online world. This raises the question: How do we do politics in a world where online culture and aesthetics are central to a political project, but do so in a way that improves the collective state of the world? The answer isn't to wish for the days of Hagel, Sanford, and Helms to return - I also don't know exactly what the answer is, so we'll use this website to find out.