From Paul Krugman to Political Serialism

So Paul Krugman disparages bipartisanship and civility: Democrats and Republicans, he says, should "have a frank discussion of their differences" over the budget instead of a respectful, consensus-building exchange. There is an old joke about a newly married man who's asked by his friend how beautiful his wife looks: 'I don't care for her,' he replies, 'but that's just a matter of taste.' The embedded lesson is that if I must agree with Mr. Krugman, let the marriage still lack something in the way of taste!

Krugman's point is that the 'civility police,' who have been quite ascendant in the media's mainstream as of late, are undemocratic, to which I disagree: they are, instead, democratic to the extreme. That is, it is a maddening principle of democratic government to create an empty, floating space of power to which competing values and interests must vie, the end result of which is an unusual, contracted program accepted by all who chose to compete but loved by almost none. Krugman further suggests, however, that the term 'bipartisan' is actually code for a conservative compromise, which is a far more interesting point to consider.

Bipartisan solutions are paradoxically ideological, and even if right now they theoretically hedge toward the right, our 'post-ideological' era finds everyone with a public agenda battling for the label. It typically works like this: an ideological issue is resolved by the group or persons forward-thinking enough to let the constituency know that now, after all the squabbling, it is finally time 'put our petty partisanship aside and do what's best for the country'. Of course, the resolving act itself is ideological; that is, it is an ideological move in the first instance to suggest that legislative, executive or administrative closure is unarguably in the best interests of everyone involved.

What Krugman should have said was that the cult of civility is dishonest, delusional. Levi-Strauss discusses a set of primitive Pacific Islanders who, when asked to diagram their tribe's social structure, essentially split into two camps: one camp draws a symmetrical relation between the two, and the other represents the division as a series of concentric circles. This account does not merely suggest that there is an unbridgeable, relative gap between the collective consciousness of each group, but that there is an irreducible antagonism, recognized equally across the social (class) division, which spills onto the diagrams as instantiations of the partial perspectives.

The suggestion is not a pure relativism but a move toward an actively engaged ideology, which does not sweep antagonism under the rug. This is, I will suggest, a move somewhat akin to the one between Stravinsky's middle and late periods (or, more accurately, as the Hegelian synthesis of his early and middle periods). Stravinsky once 'escaped' from the experimental phase of Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) and L'oiseau de feu (The Firebird) to found a movement of precise, somewhat more stolid neoclassical works, only to embrace late in life the twelve tone system of his rival Schoenberg. This serialism, essentially a loose systematization of dissonances and chromaticisms arranged in rows, is the musical-theoretical version of a politics that takes ideology seriously. Now, to shudder at the thought that Paul Krugman is to be our Wagner.