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The Politics of Inconvenience

by | Jun 29, 2016 | Essay

Steven Salaita is the author of eight books and is currently finishing a memoir about leaving and returning to academe. His book An Honest Living is to be published by Fordham University Press. He used to be an academic, now he does other things.
The system for choosing national leadership in the United States both informs and personifies American exceptionalism. If we don’t analyze how coercion and exclusion influence electoral choices, then we risk sloshing around the system’s self-defeating interior.
 
One might vote for Bernie Sanders, for example, despite disagreeing with his foreign policy—or vote for Donald Trump while disavowing his xenophobic rhetoric. Voting for somebody isn’t necessarily coterminous with supporting that person; the vote can be a struggle against disenfranchisement or a willingness to accept the vague promise of incremental change. It’s sometimes an insurgent optimism or the faithful performance of an obligation. But it always requires a sacrifice. Some of those sacrifices are untenable.
 
Appeals to pragmatism—X is better than Y; voting third party is a waste; not voting abrogates the social contract—are essentially a politics of convenience. They perpetuate a political marketplace conditioned by fear and ennui. There are numerous ways to advocate or participate beyond voting, but elections hold a special place in the American imagination. Their primacy isn’t incidental. What bigger victory for bureaucracy than the transformation of cognitive beings into spreadsheets and databases?
 
Consider how groups with the greatest need for inclusion, and thus the least to gain from commonsensical reasoning, are relentlessly asked—or told—to voluntarily cede their agency. (Nobody actually volunteers the cessation of their agency; doing so is the result of coercion.) The deferral of criticism is supposedly for the common good. We oughtn’t inconvenience a revolution with nagging demands from the periphery.
 
It’s easy to hear echoes of remonstration in these appeals to goodness. The common good? Eat bombs until we manage an antiwar movement. The common good? Black lives are contingent on presidential magnanimity. The common good? We’ll get to you later. The common good? Fuck the Palestinians.
 
The common good ignores what might be good for the uncommon. The common good is neither neutral nor universal. The common good is but a majoritarian impulse to govern.

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“The common good? We’ll get to you later. The common good? Fuck the Palestinians. […] The common good ignores what might be good for the uncommon.”

 

What happens to the political and intellectual traditions that aren’t manifest in US electoral discourse? They don’t actually disappear, but become vitiated objects of resentment. Blackness can only shade the mythology of US freedom. Indigineity darkens a vision of cosmopolitan grandeur. Landscapes of debt and drones and displacement—redolent of deterioration, decomposition, dolor, depletion—must be mitigated through the altruism of democratic intervention. We elect to ignore the origin of these problems.

 
The wretched will achieve much-needed succor according to the incremental timeline of radical capitulation. Numerous communities in the world are thereby made to inhabit a profoundly ungenerous reality. Doyens of pragmatism all but demand that recipients of colonial violence exist as insentient creatures devoid of agency, waiting quietly for the grown-ups to finally make the process work.
 
So much of this discourse treats the dispossessed as a nuisance. The guardians of minority well-being tsk-tsk and tut-tut that the wretched refuse to vote correctly. They perform ghastly analyses never proclaiming but always conveying their disappointment in the ungrateful masses. The assumption underlying the disappointment is that gratification would be so much easier if weren’t for those pesky dark people.
 
The results of this patrimony are bleak. When people cheer Sanders for affirming Palestinian humanity, for instance, they unwittingly reaffirm the same discourses that ordain the dehumanization. Challenging what it means to be human according to this supposedly dispassionate schema is inconceivable. Critical thinking and dissent abdicate democratic responsibility.
 
Yet the issue for Palestinians isn’t having their humanity recognized. The godfather of Likud, Vladimir Jabotinsky, readily considered the Arab to be human, as did Moshe Dayan, Abba Eban, David Ben-Gurion, and hundreds of other pallbearers of the Palestinian nation. An acknowledgment of humanity does not inoculate the native from violence; it often facilitates inequality and colonization. If we can see the human as inhumane, then we can also affirm the possibilities of the unhuman as a site of analytic intervention.
 
Judging presidential candidates against one another isn’t always useful. The approach works for people who limit their consciousness to the workmanlike sensibilities of civic obligation, but it can erase the dynamism of domestic and international liberation struggles, which necessarily supersede the minuscule dimensions of electoral provincialism. If presidential candidates are to discuss Blacks and Palestinians, in other words, then Blackness and decolonization, not the predictable tableau of electoral posturing, should provide the context.
 
What happens in the US has severe consequences for the rest of the world. It seems a straightforward proposition that in selecting US leadership, a set of worldly concerns should play a significant role. Those concerns, however, usually appear as a perfunctory appendage to establishmentarian fantasies. Those in the world who suffer the mandatory brutalities of US capitalism deserve so much better than what American voters constantly give them.
 
Instead of submitting to the drudgery of pragmatism, we should cultivate a politics of inconvenience. To request compliance as a gesture of convenience is to imply some kind of debt to those who govern; no matter how much it pretends otherwise, the gesture of convenience constitutes an acquiescence to the pageantry of exclusion. We owe the political system nothing. Once we internalize this value, we are free to think inconveniently.
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“Instead of submitting to the drudgery of pragmatism, we should cultivate a politics of inconvenience.”

Thus unburdened from the need to accommodate colonial prudence, we can raise the banner of disaffirmation, inhumanity, disrepute, impracticality, unreason, insensibility, incivility, and irrationality.
 
Blacks, Indigenes, queers, Palestinians, the indigent, the destitute, the impoverished—they are often told, if only through the convenience of insinuation, that the leftward side of the corporate spectrum is as good as it gets. But even the meager derivatives of this pitiful goodness are beyond their reach. It helps nobody but the elite and its intellectual security contingent to put a finite limit on our political imagination.
 
It’s a terrible idea to defer criticism of a would-be ruler. In fact, we should make it as inconvenient as possible to run a presidential campaign.
Steve Salaita
Steven Salaita is the author of eight books and is currently finishing a memoir about leaving and returning to academe. His book An Honest Living is to be published by Fordham University Press. He used to be an academic, now he does other things.