Why Politics and Purity Don't Mix

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It really depends. Criticism from the left that's constructive is useful. . . . But some left criticism comes from a perspective that I call, not politically correct, but politically precious. It becomes kind of an aerobic event -- how many mistakes of what kind can you find? -- and it tends to deny to literature the sort of heterogeneity of opinion and the contradictions and complexities within literature that make it literature as opposed to a polemic. I've always been disturbed, at any left function that I've attended, by how much competitiveness and envy are snuck in under the guise of . . .

Revolutionary rigor?

Revolutionary rigor, exactly. I've been incredibly moved and changed by the student-led antiglobalization movement, but I'm also extremely concerned because there is a kind of performance art aspect to it. There have always been people for whom the rejection of the state is essentially an opportunity for an expression of personal feelings, but I don't know what that builds and I don't know where it goes; if you reject the notion of law and state, I don't know where you wind up.

What would you recommend that they do instead?

I would recommend that they work for the Democratic Party. That's the hard thing to say right now. To me, the antithesis of throwing paint at a Starbucks -- which is not to say that the Starbucks [stores] don't deserve to have paint thrown at them, that what these people are pointing out and what they're accomplishing is not valuable, because it absolutely is -- but the fact of the matter is, all of us Americans are caught up in a system of luxury and privilege that's immensely difficult to move beyond, and little gestures of ridding your own life of impurities and sins may be refreshing on some level or interesting as a way of experimenting with your life, but these little gestures of personal refusal don't actually alter the structures of power. The question is, if you believe in the absolute moral necessity of resisting something that you see as profoundly evil, and you're not just playing a game, then what is our best bet for making an alteration?

And what do you think the answer is?

I think it's realpolitik. The principle of realpolitik is that politics isn't an expression of your personal purity. Politics is about compromise. People need to understand that politics is very much a matter of the lesser of two evils, or three -- however many evils, but you choose the least evil one. Al Gore was a horror and the most untalented politician on the national scene in many a year, but if anybody actually thinks that Al Gore would not be an infinite improvement over what we have now . . .

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