Unrequited Love

Here is a bit from J. M. Bernstein writing in the NY Times blog Opinionator. The essay attempts to understand the Tea Party phenomenon. I liked this bit:

...all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing.

This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.

In politics, the idea of divorce is the idea of revolution. The Tea Party rhetoric of taking back the country is no accident: since they repudiate the conditions of dependency that have made their and our lives possible, they can only imagine freedom as a new beginning, starting from scratch. About this imaginary, Mark Lilla was right: it corresponds to no political vision, no political reality. The great and inspiring metaphysical fantasy of independence and freedom is simply a fantasy of destruction.
In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. Lilla calls the Tea Party “Jacobins”; I would urge that they are nihilists. To date, the Tea Party has committed only the minor, almost atmospheric violences of propagating falsehoods, calumny and the disruption of the occasions for political speech — the last already to great and distorting effect. But if their nihilistic rage is deprived of interrupting political meetings as an outlet, where might it now go? With such rage driving the Tea Party, might we anticipate this atmospheric violence becoming actual violence, becoming what Hegel called, referring to the original Jacobins’ fantasy of total freedom, “a fury of destruction”? There is indeed something not just disturbing, but frightening, in the anger of the Tea Party.

The above strikes me as an interesting analysis of the Tea Party movement. It opens up a viewpoint different from any other that I've heard and it makes some sense. I wouldn't run too far with it, but I like it.

I took a peek at his web site at the New School for Social Research. I generally like the academics there because of their left wing tilt. He self description sounds interesting (Philosophy for me means interrogating the foundations of our life together, how we make sense of the world, and how we fail. Philosophy profiles the human as upright and as failing, as knowing and as blinded, as world-making and as suffering, as flourishing and as dying; and how those competing images are bound together in our morals, politics, art, and ordinary life.), but he is into the nutty left school of philosophy, e.g. his latest book is Against Voluptuous Bodies and his above essay cites Hegel as if that thinker had anything useful to say about the world. (My personal prejudice: all thinkers descended from Hegel were/are dangerous lunatics: Marx, Heiddeger, Husserl, Lukács, ...)