The Personal Is Political

All those who hoped that the Democratic takeover of Congress would elevate the quality of political discussion — you doe-eyed innocents know who you are — have a right to be just a tad disappointed by now, almost two weeks into the new era.What we have seen so far, as the Democrats busily try to raise the minimum wage, jawbone drug prices, encourage embryonic stem-cell research, and derail President Bush’s Iraq policy, is the final triumph of that dread phrase from the 1960s, “The Personal is Political.”Readers of a certain age will remember the phrase and cringe. Once it was a favorite maxim of radicals. Now it’s a maxim for everybody who dares take a political position.At least the radicals had an intellectual case, however rickety. For left-wing eggheads and their gullible followers in the 1960s, that phrase meant that political institutions unfairly limited the possibilities for personal happiness. Without a political revolution, therefore, personal happiness was impossible.It’s a goofball idea, but it had its own kind of logic. In contemporary politics, though, the phrase has come to mean something quite different and much less logical: that your personal experiences can somehow prove the rightness of your political positions.In its present debased form, this idea is no longer an exclusive possession of leftists. Conservatives have eagerly embraced it too. I first noticed this unnerving development in the 1990s. Interviewing Senator Lott one day during the Clinton years, I pressed the then-Republican Senate leader on a fine point of education reform.“Look,” he said in exasperation. “My mother was a school teacher, okay?”End of discussion.His partner on the other side of the Capitol, Newt Gingrich, often argued with the same technique. His case for Medicare reform seemed sometimes to rest on the fact that his father-in-law was in his 80s and both of his own parents were in their 70s. “This is real-world for me,” he would say.Anyone who questioned the link between this not-terribly interesting fact and the budgetary feasibility of “medical savings accounts” earned a steely Gingrich stare.Since then the method of injecting the personal into the political has only become more desperate and degraded. “Disinterestedness” — the ability to weigh options in the public interest, without regard to personal stakes — was once considered an essential quality in public servants and statesmen. No longer.The House debate last week on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research illustrated the point. It wasn’t so much a weighing of the issue’s ethical and political implications — which are profound — as a parade of personal testimonials.Scarcely a single supporter of federal funding tried to make an ethical argument. Instead, one after another invoked a sick child, an ailing parent, an injured friend.A Democratic congressman from Ohio, Zachary Space, told the House his son had juvenile diabetes. He was followed by Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, who suffers from a detached retina; “so,” she said, “I support stem-cell research.” And on it went, with members of Congress lining up to testify as though they were in a queue at a faith healing.The tales could be heart-wrenching — although in my opinion the juvenile diabetes trumps the detached retina — but they weren’t arguments. And they could never, on their own, establish the case for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.The personal-is-political method is also commonly employed in its negative form: Your political position is somehow illegitimate if you haven’t had certain experiences.Opponents of the Iraq war, for example, routinely suggest that any policymaker who hasn’t served in the military shouldn’t send others to fight.Never mind that this notion, by extension, would undo the tradition of civilian control of the military, and never mind that any argument about policy should be judged on its merits, independently of the people who make the argument.The intention here is something else: to remove the issue from the realm of objective argument and plunge it into the realm of the personal, where emotion and passion hold sway.Consider the horrifying exchange in a committee hearing last week between Senator Boxer of California and Secretary of State Rice.Ms. Boxer grilled Ms. Rice in her trademark style, which is notable more for its exuberance than its coherence. She got personal immediately, suggesting that the administration’s plan to send more troops to Iraq was illegitimate because — well, because neither she nor Ms. Rice has children fighting in Iraq.“I’m not going to pay a personal price,” Ms. Boxer said. “You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”Ms. Boxer appeared to be attacking Ms. Rice for being unmarried and childless. And so, in one of those strange inversions that have become increasingly common in contemporary politics, Republicans accused Ms. Boxer of being insufficiently feminist.Ms. Boxer’s questioning of Ms. Rice, said the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, was a “great leap backward for feminism.”But Ms. Boxer’s transgressions against feminism are nothing compared with her transgressions against reason and logic. Perhaps Mr. Snow was reluctant to criticize her for those because they are now almost universally shared.Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

The Personal Is Political

The Personal Is Political

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