Why Politics and Purity Don't Mix

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I believe in radical democracy. I believe that democracy has much more growing to do and that there may be other ways of having a representative government. But I also believe that there's immense importance in American political traditions, like a centralized federal government that protects minorities from majoritarian tyranny, that we can't just sneer at and turn our back on because we read in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States that Columbus deliberately gave the Native Americans smallpox. Maybe he did, I don't know. But that's really not the point right now. It's not enough to express your outrage at how badly people behave -- you also have to get power, and that's what started this whole jeremiad.

Do you sometimes have to force yourself to say that action can make a difference?

Of course I do, all the time. It's really hard to have hope right now. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have it. Although I'm frequently a victim of despair, I never believe that these problems are unsolvable because I do believe that they're political problems. Way down the road, when we actually get our shit together, we'll discover which problems weren't political, which ones actually had to do with some irreducible malevolence in human beings. I think there are some real problems in the ways that human souls are constructed. You can take the psychological view that we're creations of trauma and we don't do loss very well and it deforms us, it diminishes us. But when you get to the point that you can really worry about that, you've created a society of immense luxury. If we get to the point at which the whole world is in a position to sit around and worry about existential questions and metaphysical and theological questions about the nature of human beings, dayenu! That'll be great!

In the meantime, we have a lot of political work to do. We have not been told yet that any of the terrible things we do to the planet and to one another are irreversible, and I don't think that they are. So if people are going to pay me to write or to speak, they should get their money's worth. Despair is cheap. Anybody can do that on their own. Pick up The New York Times and read it from cover to cover and kill yourself.

Ultimately, where do you draw your hope from?

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