The danger of the word “politicization”

[phantom power]

Nowadays, however, the verb “to politicize” is used, 90% of the time, to suggest that politics and government are silly little trifles that shouldn’t be involved when something really serious is on the table. That’s how the word has been used in the past week, by right wingers trying to deflect criticism of their very serious actions by suggesting that this massacre is too serious to involve politics. But you see it a lot, and sadly not just from the right---I’ve seen liberals argue things like health care reform and abortion policy shouldn’t be “politicized”, though literally the only way to leave politics out of it would be to take ourselves out of the game and lose completely. But certainly, the right is eager to use the term in an attempt to bully liberals away from speaking up on important issues at the right times. Thus, burying a politician is something where you should never be “political"---though only if they’re liberal, of course---because remembering a person’s life all of a sudden became the wrong thing to do when mourning that person. And now, of course, we’re being told not to “politicize” the shooting of a politician. We’re told that a huge social problem---in this case, mass shootings that happen on average 20 times a year---is simply too grave to be handled through politics. You know, that attempting to stop mass shooting is an insult to the victims of them, because of the politicization. (By the end of the decade, we will have right wingers take offense at the idea anyone who voted Democrat should be permitted to attend a funeral for a loved one.)

The implication is that politics is basically a government-funded sport that has no meaning outside of whose team is winning or losing. And that, just as we cancel sporting events in the wake of major tragedies that make game-playing seem insufficiently somber, we should cancel politics. This view helps the right, and should never be reinforced on the left, even if we can catch the occasional rhetoric advantage in the short term with it. That’s because it’s the right that benefits from the idea that politics is a sideshow created for entertainment, and that actual policy that actually does something sullies the nation.

Look, if there was one message that right wingers have been trying to drill home for decades now, it’s that government cannot ever be considered a legitimate tool with which to solve social problems. Now, the leadership of the Republican party doesn’t believe this. They feel government does and should exist to serve the wealthy. They’re all for courts existing so they can solve their disputes, military to help exploit the resources of other nations, police to protect their property, and central banking that serves the interests of Wall Street against the people. But they know damn well that the issues that tend to capture the public imagination are those that directly affect most of us, and that is where they’d prefer that we imagine government as being nothing more than a taxpayer-funded spectator sport that has no real meaning and should therefore have no real power.

You really see how much this belief that government doesn’t and shouldn’t have power to make laws and policy has caught hold in the debate over gun control. There were the usual pro-gun folks freaking out all over the thread at my Guardian piece where I basically did nothing more than support extremely mild restrictions on guns that can take dozens of lives within the time it take a TV show to have a commercial break. And I argued with them a little, but the whole thing gets super frustrating within minutes because it doesn’t take long to get to the point where you’re explaining that the purpose of government is actually to solve social problems.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/the_danger_of_the_word_politicization/

[ladjf]

1. Very good point. Thanks. nt