Conor Freidersdorf argues in The Atlantic that politics is not war:
"A significant percentage [of partisans] believe their ideology would prevail more often if only their partisans were more angry, their attacks more pointed, their operatives more ruthless. This is most often expressed via the use of metaphors that draw on the language of war and fighting. Usually it doesn't make any sense. In war, the victor kills as many folks as possible on the opposing side. Political winners persuade more people to join their coalition."
He is right, politics is not war--for a very simple reason. In war, the threat or use of violence is a distorting element by two or more human competitors that creates what Edward Luttwak called "the paradoxical logic of strategy." So what is politics? No one can really agree on an answer, but a common sense one might be that politics is the distribution of power in a given society. Political control grants power over people, although maintaining it requires the consent or at least submission of those under power.
Of course, people also use politics as a means of expressing cultural or political identity or worldview, but that worldview is always directed toward the battle for power. We naturally want to see our own policies enacted and those of our opponents defeated. Without power, we cannot do so. In the more older sense of history, power also grants grandeur (Alexander), safety (the destruction of Carthage by Rome), or material affluence (Great Britain's Empire at the height of its power).
Concepts and political-technical devices that create power over people might be called, for lack of a better phrase, "political technology." I use the term "technology" in the sense of a technological, science-based Enlightenment technocratic view of the world. It was not just superior technology that enabled the European colonizers to create power over the indigenous peoples of the world, it was that a series of policies, strategies, tactics, technologies, and organizations formed a coherent set of practices that were overwhelmingly superior to that of the indigenous--although those practices did not guarantee victory and had to be varied in time and space.
Domestically, a good use of "political technology" occurs when a given party is able to create a limited competitive advantage in time and space over their opponents, through a combination of techno-tactical means. Exploitation of social media, the concept of direct-mailing, or differing political wedge tactics might be combinations of these. In semi-democratic states plagued by political violence (like Greece for a good deal of its modern history, post World War I Germany and Italy, 1930s Spain), political technologies were also augmented by the use of instrumental violence as well.
In 2009 and early 2010, a big topic of discussion was why the Iranian opposition failed to have a lasting political effect. I wrote a paper on this for Small Wars Journal in which I dissected the problem in terms of political technology. The fractured opposition's method of political technology--disorganized protests, flash mobs, and the use of external sympathizers on Twitter--simply was a poor method of converting political enthusiasm into power. The regime, in turn, had a tried and true method of political technology--the use of raw force, network targeting of student leaders, censorship, and coercion of wavering elites that might turn to the opposition's side.
War is a form of political technology, it's just a very unreliable and unpredictable one. One of Antoine Bousquet's key concepts in The Scientific Way of Warfare , summarizing and modernizing Clausewitz's concept of the "paradoxical trinity," is that political-strategic devices are heuristic devices that attempt to impose human reason and instrumental purpose on the fearsome whirlwind of human passions and complex dynamics of action and response that make up conflict. They do not always succeed and frequently fail.
So although war and politics are vastly different, they are members of the same family. And illusions of scientific rationality and technocracy are common to thinkers and practitioners in both areas. Political technology, like any kind of concept or method, does not guarantee success and eventually is countered by the opponent in some shape or form.
Comments