Reading reports of the Democratic Party National Convention a few weeks ago, the repeated use of one word by delegates and observers to capture the vibe struck me as particularly odd: joy. Don’t get me wrong, I like joy as much as the next person. I don’t want to be like Otto von Bismarck, who one acquaintance described by saying he’d “never known a man who experienced so little joy”. It’s just that experiencing “joy” in response to political events is like experiencing sweetness in response to salt and vinegar crisps, or experiencing profound and heartfelt emotions in response to tying your shoelaces, or taking out the bins.  

The “politics of joy” isn’t just about a gushing, heart-on-sleeve American style discourse. The underlying conditions of it apply here as well, notwithstanding the fact that Keir Starmer is about as likely to invoke joy as a bout of dysentery. Those conditions involve an overstepping of the boundaries of the political, responding to political events in ways which mistake what the political actually is — not treating it as a means to an end, but as the end itself. Brexit derangement syndrome comes to mind as one example. Politics shouldn’t make you despair any more than it should make you joyful. It shouldn’t be that important. 

I grew up in a deeply political milieu, saturated with old school left-wing ideology. When Ed Miliband was Labour leader, I remember watching a documentary about him which talked about the letters he wrote to his father Ralph when he was about 10, involving lengthy arguments about the role of democratic politics in bringing out a Marxist transformation of society, replete with references to Lenin, Gramsci, et al. The documentary’s narrator noted that other 10 year-olds don’t interact with their parents like this. But this was exactly what our house was like. 

The overreaching of the political is … bad because effective politics is about well-managed disagreement

There will always be a small number of people for whom politics is ingrained at the centre of life. They’re people who, for reasons as unknown and mysterious as any other vocation, feel called to enter so deeply into the political sphere that it becomes indistinguishable from their deepest sense of meaning and purpose. Here you’ll find some politicians, though certainly not all, a few professors of political philosophy like Miliband senior or his right wing equivalents, the occasional visionary, and a fair few politics geeks. For such people, yes, okay — they might feel joy or despair at political events, but these responses really shouldn’t be shared by the population at large. 

The overreaching of the political isn’t bad just because it provokes histrionic exclamations of joy or despair. It’s bad because effective politics is about well-managed disagreement. The political sphere should provide a space, like a debating chamber, where fiery disagreements are voiced in a controlled atmosphere in which volatile impulses can be dispensed according to set custom. When the political seeps into the world outside the chamber, these disagreements run riot, without adequately restraining norms of etiquette. Conversely, in the mother of all parliaments, we now regularly see the House of Commons forsaking reasoned political debate for the informal etiquette of everyday interaction — personal anecdote and empty emoting, narcissistic posturing and grandstanding. 

A politics of joy and despair takes this contradictory scenario into the culture at large, so the political and non-political become indistinguishable, and cease to genuinely political or non-political respectively. The political is then not nearly political enough. It is no longer a realm for the measured assessment of how best to proceed in concrete matters, in pursuit of the common good and amidst meaningful ideological differences. Similarly, everyday life and culture are then far too political – where the glue of human society, interpersonal encounters and relationships, are increasingly measured by ideological differences at the expense of just getting on with life – enjoying the good which is held in common.    

When the political saturates life, politics is indistinguishable from identity. If you grow-up in a hyper-political household, you know everyone else’s politics when you’re a kid, because your elders tell you who’s on the right side of history. This can encroach into the innermost circles of family life — “your uncle voted for Thatcher in 1979” / “your grandmother reads the Daily Mail”. Later in life, I realised that you shouldn’t really need to know another person’s politics in the vast majority of circumstances. Secret ballots are a good thing. The person you know should be separable from their political commitments, a person in their own right and not a cipher to be evaluated by your ideological preferences.  

The loss of this basic prioritising of the person over their politics is surely one of the most divisive changes of recent years. Many factors have contributed to it, including social media, obviously, and a political climate in which competing constellations  of interlinked causes separate the population into two sharply opposed groups. Putting flags next to one’s name provides one particularly vivid expression of it. Having or not having pronouns in your email signature means it’s almost impossible to escape from if you work in an office. At worst it can lead to genuine family breakdown — siblings not speaking or offspring forsaking their parents over matters which are surely trifling compared to what’s important in life. As if someone voting Reform, or another person boycotting Gail’s Bakery, is really more important than fraternal bonds and friendships. 

Political saturation seeps into the built environment. Ideological flags aren’t meant to be displayed all over the place in a healthily functioning society, especially not on public buildings. Zebra crossings similarly aren’t repainted in ideological colours when democracy is functioning as it should. We can’t pretend such things are genuinely totalitarian, because we really don’t live in totalitarian conditions. Yet neither can we ignore the fact that seeing flags all over the place, and the ideological re-colouring of the built environment, are typical hallmarks of totalitarian regimes. What the two situations have in common is how supporters of the regimes respond to their critics in both cases — “this isn’t ideology, it’s the necessary march of history to which any right-minded person will fall-in-line”.   

Of course I’m as saturated by the political as the next person, if not more so. Some will be reading this and thinking that we’ve reached a point where the matters at hand are so grave and serious that simply abstaining from politics is irresponsible. I’m inclined to agree. The matters at stake in The Discourse are things as fundamental to life as understandings of human nature, community, religion, and the very ends of life itself. But this fact is another case in point — day-to-day political decision making shouldn’t be impinging on these primordial coordinates of meaningful human life. When this happens, something has gone horribly wrong. 

Perhaps the only answer is to dial down on the political

The job of the political sphere is to get out of the way so people can actually live. Like tying your shoelaces or taking out the bins, politics has got to be done, but it isn’t an end in itself. Everyday politics should function boringly, and go largely unnoticed. It should be like a laptop: something only a small minority of oddballs choose to understand the details of, and which to most of us is just a tool to enable us to do far more meaningful things. Or, the body politic should be to us like the human body. The digestive system is something we can’t ever do without, but we only become acutely aware of its functioning on a regular basis when something has gone so horribly wrong that it is interfering with life itself. 

Perhaps the only answer is to dial down on the political, to correct those ideologies which led to this acute malfunctioning — but then this is like a surgical intervention, an exceptional aberration with specific ends in sight, namely demarcating a space for people to respond joyfully to those things in life which actually warrant such a response.