David Sessions explains why he is going to vote for Obama this Fall, even though Sessions believes the Whole Thing is put simply an atrocity – that the political system and the security state are sources of evil, and so on. He implicitly describes his own orientation in one telltale phrase: “committed to radical inclusion both domestically and internationally.” A truly “radical” policy of “inclusion” equates with the total dissolution not just of the nation-state but of politics itself. As such, it is also utopian: a radical inclusiveness indistinguishable from radical self-exclusion: uttered irrelevancy except, unless, and only where located or discovered within the prior principle of the sacrificial community – the nation – that the utopian presumes to reject, as though a mental act of negation severs actual bonds: The author is forced to divide his mind between self-gratifyingly totalized verbal gestures and an incremental “humanitarian” return to the real that is little different from anyone else’s relation to conventional politics: sacred imagination, banal adulthood. What would be radical, but remains tantalizingly unavailable, drawing us into its vanishing wake, is to see them at once, and join them to each other.
). Go to our I don’t really know that anyone can avoid trying to have things both ways. What annoys me is a particular mode of self-superiority, as though merely having an idea of something better, or what you believe would be better, etc., actually makes you better, even though all we know for sure is that on this issue you’re mostly the same as everyone else, except in this one way worse.
…Ok, now I get why negation is such a lightning rod. If I routinely saw people make arguments that beg of rejection and revolt only to suddenly go “and that’s why I’m doing what everyone else who pays more attention to Hollywood gossip than the state of the world is doing!”, I’d start barfing at each such appearance too.
David describes all those features of the US political system that he finds terrible, and how they’re perpetuated…and then announces he’ll give it allegiance anyway. Sounds like he wants to give up without sounding like he’s giving up.