If "The Personal is Political," Why Are You All So Fucking Sensitive?

once you erase the line between politics and personality, it stays erased

The idea that “the personal is political” has proven to be one of the worst intellectual developments in the history of the left. I would argue that, more than any other ideological influence, this idea has underpinned the social justice turn in American liberalism, which has transformed the language and norms of contemporary left-of-center people and briefly the politics of the Democratic party. That famous little nostrum has ruled over a period of time in which any sense of politics as an exercise beyond and outside of the self has collapsed, leaving us with generations of progressive people who think that doing politics is all about feeling and not doing, who mistake posting black squares on Instagram and liking Frank Ocean for doing politics. “The personal is political” is why people think that crying until the other person stops talking is an appropriate way to debate, why the representation of Black woman in the next season of Love is Blind is treated as a bigger deal than lead in the drinking water in Black communities, why autism and ADHD have become lifestyle trends with vague activist connotations, why an entire generation of culture writers churn out pieces about how Inspector Gadget is propaganda for white supremacy, why left-of-center American politics is so horribly immaterial, why feelings have utterly eaten actual material oppression as the concern of the left. I’m not a fan.

The other thing, though, is that when you erase the line between the political and the personal, you end up with these weird social prohibitions against openly and frankly debating elements of politics that must be debated. If you say that your politics are who you are and that who you are is your politics, then criticism of certain elements of your politics will inevitably be represented as impolite and aggressive personal insult. For example, disability activists have fought to make simply having a disability an inherently political thing, a politically defining attribute, and yet when I point out that many people adopt certain disorders because they’re trendy, I’m told that this is an unforgivably personal assault. But of course if you’re saying that having a disability should bring all manner of political affordances to you, you necessarily invited consideration of who is really disabled. If the activists got their way, we would have no capacity to debate their politics, which is surely part of the goal. In this way, “the personal is political” both includes and excludes too much from political discussion: it insists on treating meaningless personal ephemera as freighted with personal meaning, and then in doing so erects barriers to debating those things openly. And I know of what I speak, as I am someone who is constantly accused of being personal when I’m simply trying to meet this era’s politics where they are by interrogating where the personal and political meet - where people insist they meet.

And, for the record, “People adopt disabilities they don’t really have in an effort to farm sympathy and attention” is near the top of the very long list “Things Many People Quietly Agree with Freddie About But Feel They Can’t Express Publicly Themselves.” So, so many silent supporters, on that one.

Ah, but the personal is political, and so if you criticize someone in this domain, you’re being personal, uncouth. Marianne Eloise is a writer who has made the public choice to express her relationship to her autism, including in explicitly political terms, in her memoir. And to considerable professional effect! She’s recently been nominated the face of autism by The New York Times and Jon Oliver, who collectively seem not to understand how ugly it is to pick one of the least-afflicted people with the disorder for that role. Eloise has said that she was personally “euphoric” when she was diagnosed; is that really who you want to put ahead of people struggling under the burden of a condition that can be truly debilitating? She objected to my review of that memoir, and in doing so called down a great deal of anger on me for supposedly attacking her for her disorder. But it’s Ms. Eloise herself who has held her autism out as core to her identity for public attention and who attached political valence to that identity. Indeed, she writes about almost nothing else. That means it’s fair game for political critique. Eloise, for her part, shamelessly lied about the contents of her own book in response, and has a tendency to respond to any public criticism of her work with the claim that the critic is inappropriately fixated on her, to which I can only reply that when you professionally publish books and pieces in the New York Times you invite criticism, sorry. That’s what being an adult means.

This is exactly what I hate about “the personal is political.” It invites bad analysis (“how I feel about autism is more important than the material conditions of the average autistic person”) that leads to bullshit rules of propriety (“no one can criticize what I say about autism and its meaning in society because to do so is to attack me personally for having autism.”) Modern identity politics insist that various identity categories are inherently political, and in fact imply a particular political identity, but also build up a prohibition about subjecting any given argument about one’s identity to criticism under the theory that to do so is personally insulting, an affront to identity. It’s a perfect trap for making broad political claims and then declaring those claims off limits.

To come at it from another angle, consider Chris Hayes of MSBNC. Hayes is one of many media figures who people think I have personal animus towards when I don’t. I have followed him for several decades because he can be an example, at times, of something like the best contemporary liberalism can offer. As I’ve said many times, liberalism in the late 20th American is an ideology that expresses a very attractive vision of how society should change and then forbids doing any of the things that would ever make that change happen. Hayes is trapped within those usual constraints, an arch institutionalist who seems to know that the institutions can’t give him what he wants, an incrementalist who often appears all to aware that the world he wants can’t be built incrementally. This is frustrating, but I don’t want to blame Hayes for it uniquely, as it’s such a common condition among this country’s left-leaning people. I do however find him to be fascinating in a way that is, I think, perfectly legitimate for a public political figure but which necessarily involves considerations that are “personal.” I see Hayes as an avatar of the American left of the turn-of-the-century generation, my generation, and its abundant pathologies.