Amid an avoidably ludicrous period in democracy and politics, a little wisdom from Hitchens and Havel can’t hurt.

Lisa Van Dusen

January 19, 2022

Dear X,

By the mere fact that you self-identify as a young political junkie in the year 2022, three things can be discerned about you: One, that you are blessed with superhuman intestinal fortitude; two, that you possess an unhealthy fondness for the chimerical that your parents and possibly your shrink or Adderall supplier warned you about in high school; and, three, that you may have already succumbed to the system of anti-democracy subterfuge that has transformed 21^st-century politics into a tangled web of Faustian bargains with predictable results in otherwise inexplicable behaviour and counterintuitive outcomes.

In any event, welcome aboard!

Whether you’re an imbecile who fell in love with politics despite the orchestrated revulsion of the Trump era, a sado-masochist who fell in love with politics because of it, or a rebelling political romantic, let’s start with some perspective.

Once upon a time — and not so long ago as to have necessarily been before your first beer or even your first kiss — politics was a field of endeavour that many people found easy to love. It was exciting, it was endlessly interesting, it contained all the unpredictability and drama of sports without — most days — the sweat or the injuries. Most of all, because of the accountability feedback loop of functioning democracy, its outcomes impacted the lives of real people in real ways that determined or influenced their education, their wages, their health, their rights, their freedom, their recourse to justice, the fiscal repurposing of their tax dollars, and their relationship with their government. Once in a while, like during a once-in-a-lifetime campaign, politics felt more like music than just sound or noise.

In those days, the term “political junkie” wasn’t a contradiction in terms. It wasn’t necessarily for everyone, but it was entirely respectable as a profile entry.

By the twilight of the last millennium, politics was something whose practitioners could be broadly divided, among other distinctions, into two groups: those who viewed it as a means to an end for changing the world for the better (with disagreements on the definition of “better” within reasonable margins) by enacting policies that enhance human quality of life by every measure, and those who viewed it and every human being associated with it — from elected officials to consultants to journalists to pollsters to voters — as a means to an end for amassing power.

In America — more precisely in Washington, D.C., where I spent nearly a decade during that era as first a diplomatic spouse and then returning to journalism — the balance of that division was roughly 80 percent to 20 percent. Sure, there were ruthless political actors who managed their tactical priorities through the dark arts of triangulated retaliation, covertly executed narrative manipulation and de facto censorship by ambient intimidation, but they were contained in their transgressions by the exigencies of maintaining electability in a functioning democracy with an independent media. Most people involved in politics were law-abiding, fundamentally patriotic policy wonks and political professionals who were in it for the right reasons, and who viewed truth as a feature, not a bug, of democracy; as a value to be upheld and protected rather than an existential threat.

When the Fourth Industrial Revolution born of the internet (what kids today call “life”) arrived with the Y2K welcome wagon of the new millennium, that balance began to shift as the hypercorruption possibilities of instantaneous global connectivity — including and especially the power-consolidation applications of clandestine, wireless surveillance and hacking — became apparent to institutional, political and geopolitical early adopters. When people over 40 tell you that 9/11 changed everything, that’s not quite true. The internet did, including through the mass migration of intelligence practices such as narrative engineering, deception operations and propaganda warfare to mainstream politics.

Politics has recently become an off-putting, frequently chaotic, meat-puppet orgy (with apologies for that visual…btw, never go to a meat-puppet orgy, especially during a variant surge).

So, what you’ve been witnessing as #politics for the past six years of the post-Obama era in the democratic superpower that sets international standards for the political culture is really the hacked version of politics transformed by the shifting of that 80/20 balance in the other direction; riddled with lunacy-producing quid pro quos, degraded by manufactured intractability, hijacked by the covert weaponization of individual humans who happen to be in a position to catalyze high-value outcomes. Because politics anywhere is defined by the relative health of the democracy that hosts it, and democracy has been the top item on the operational target list of rampaging, now-unhinged power consolidators for more than two decades, politics has recently become an off-putting, frequently chaotic, meat-puppet orgy (with apologies for that visual…btw, never go to a meat-puppet orgy, especially during a variant surge).

Which is not to say door-knocking can’t be fun! As the late Christopher Hitchens — with whom your correspondent disagreed on many things but whose expertise on the subject of political activism was always entertainingly expressed and frequently useful — wrote to a generic young contrarian in Letters to a Young Contrarian (his 2001 twist on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet), we have a template for surviving regimes that leverage strategic corruption and political absurdity to repel democracy and induce submissive despair. Václav Havel, the late Czech playwright, poet and president, proposed living in such situations “as if” we are citizens of fully functioning democracies; to essentially counter organized insanity with conscientious normalcy.

In collective terms, it means relentlessly holding governments to their constitutions (one reason constitutions are also a tactical target of anti-democracy actors worldwide), to the human rights and freedoms they’ve enshrined, and to the rule of law. The fact that the purveyors of the narrative warfare extravaganza currently besieging our content feeds aren’t unacquainted with this approach neither eliminates its effectiveness nor neutralizes its therapeutic value. At the very least, if crazy is as crazy does, the same applies to counter-crazy.

In personal terms, Hitchens’ advice of two decades ago applies today. “All I can recommend,” he wrote, “is that you try to cultivate some of this attitude. You may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving ‘as if’ they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.”

As Havel himself personified, history is cyclical. Once every few generations, a catastrophic alchemy of innovation, deranged score-settling, motive, opportunity, moral perversion and strange bedfellows (not necessarily in that order) conspires to make human events — including politics — many things they should never be.

This is one of those moments. You’ll need a compass.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.