The Limits of "Everything Is Political"
Sometimes we need to agree not to disagree right here right now
I’ve made a couple of dismissive references to the idea that “everything is political” in recent pieces, in uncited response to seeing a couple of new rounds of the “everything is political” dance in my various feeds. It’s maybe worth taking a little while to unpack the problem I have with the idea and more specifically with the way it’s often deployed, rhetorically.
What I refer to as the “everything is political” dance is that some person or outlet whose normal purpose is the promotion of something that isn’t directly related to politics— STEM outreach, pop culture, etc.— will publish some kind of explicit political advocacy— an endorsement, an editorial, whatever. This will draw a response of the form “Can we please keep this apolitical?” Which, in turn, gets the response “Everything is political!” And things often degenerate from there.
My issue isn’t with the claim “Everything is political” per se, as there are a couple of very clear senses in which that is (or at least can be) true. But it’s often used in a way that tries to rhetorically leverage that truth in ways that both aren’t actually justified, and more importantly miss the point of asking to keep politics out of whatever.
There are a couple of senses in which “Everything is political” is true. One of these is just the trivial observation that any enterprise involving more than one singular human will inevitably include an element of politics, because the process of making collective decisions to coordinate the actions of multiple people is what politics is. As those activities increase in complexity, the degree of politics involved necessarily increases, as well— expensive science research may rely on public funding that’s allocated through a political process, social-science research inherently speaks to social phenomena and may have policy implications, art will necessarily reflect the social and political conditions in which it is produced, and so on. I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that all of these activities are “political” to at least some degree.
The problem comes in with what I’m calling rhetorical leveraging, which is the jump from “This activity has some political valence because it’s carried out by human beings in a particular social context” to the advocacy of specific political policies or positions. In its more extreme forms, it continues on to “Because you participate in this activity, you must agree with this specific political policy/position.” I don’t think either of those is really justified, but the second one is especially problematic.
The thing about specific policy positions is that they reflect not just material facts but ideological premises and priorities. Which means that different people can look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions about what policy should be implemented in response, simply because they give more weight to one factor thanks to their ideological positioning. Policy disagreement does not necessarily mean that one of the parties is reasoning incorrectly or arguing in bad faith; they just don’t start from the same place, politically, so it’s shouldn’t surprising that they end up in different places.
The (unjustified) hidden assumption that drives a lot of the “Everything is political” dance is “Of course, everybody shares my ideological premises and priorities.” That’s not always true, even in massively polarized environments like academia. Which is why jumping from the uncontroversial observation that human activity takes place in a social and political context to the advocacy of specific positions or policies is a problem, particularly when it happens in the context of a larger organization.
Which brings us around to the point-missing portion of the “Everything is political” dance. Which is that, often “Can we please keep this apolitical?” is not, in fact, a misunderstanding of the fact that whatever activity has political valence. Instead, it’s a polite and indirect way of expressing political disagreement. What’s really being said is “I do not accept your conclusions about the policy or position being advocated, but I do not want to argue about that in this place at this time.”
And that very often is a perfectly reasonable position to take. Everything may be political in the sense described above, but that doesn’t mean that everything needs to be a giant political fight all the time. There may well be a fascinating political argument about whether NBA free agency rules imply that capitalism must be destroyed, but sometimes I just want to watch a basketball game, y’know? The fact that a political conversation could be had doesn’t mean it has to be had at any given moment, and sometimes the most appropriate action is to save it for a different occasion.
There are obviously levels and degrees to this, depending on who’s speaking and what the positions are. If the forum in question is an individual blog about science, the bar is pretty much on the floor in terms of what level of advocacy is appropriate: it’s your space, you can share whatever opinions you want. I might stop reading if I disagree or think you’re being needlessly dickish, but I’m not going to suggest that any individual has an obligation to be apolitical in their personal expression.
If we’re talking about something like a professional society that is supposed to represent many thousands of individuals, though, the bar is a lot higher. The chances that all of those people would sign on to any particular political position drop off as some high power of the distance from the core activity of the profession. If the American Physical Society wants to put out a statement saying “Physics research should be funded more generously,” that’s going to get really wide agreement, and thus is a reasonable and appropriate position for them to take. If the APS wants to come out and say “Capitalism must be destroyed,” though, that’s not going to go over nearly as well with the membership, even if there’s a fascinating argument about how a post-capitalist system would lead to a better environment for physics research. That’s a level of political advocacy that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask them to avoid.
And, you know, there’s a big middle ground between those extremes, where the arguments about what is and is not appropriate get more complicated and sometimes muddled. Is it appropriate for the APS to advocate moving to a less carbon-intensive system of energy production? Is it appropriate for a 15-person physics department to issue a statement calling for the destruction of capitalism? And so on.
The key things to remember, though, are 1) that “Everything is political,” while it may be true, does not oblige any particular person to agree with any particular political position, and 2) that “Can we please keep politics out of this?” is often a request to not have a particular argument at a particular time and place, and should be considered in that light.
There you have it, my statement on statements. If for some reason you want more of this, here’s a button:
And if you want to point out that my statement against the staking out of political positions is itself a political position, I’d rather you didn’t, but the comments will be open:
Where I tend to say "everything is political" is when someone is anointing themselves as rational, objective, disinterested, in advocating some position, policy or choice. One of the professors I worked within graduate school used to say this to a group of us: you guys have a politics, I just have the facts. When in fact he was *quite* political both in the kind of history he wrote, the sort of research he valued, and the general way he worked within his university and across his field. That is a bullshit move and I am always comfortable calling someone on it. It's the opposite of what you describe, which is "I don't want to argue about this right now, but I do want you to understand that I'm not comfortable with what you're advocating"--the person who says "I'm objective and disinterested, you're biased and political" is just trying to hit the "win" button on an argument, sometimes consequentially so.
But I think you're right that there are times where it's just a polite demurral that is actually politically important in the sense that the person who is being political might discover that their position isn't as popular or accepted as they think it is. Or it's a warning that if the strong advocate persists in their advocacy, they're going to flip someone into opposition--"can we please keep this apolitical" is the equivalent of a brightly colored tropical frog saying "I'm just going about my business, but if you try to eat me, I'm going to poison you".
Sometimes it's also a polite way to say, "Given your politics, there are more important things for you to be focusing your finite energies on, so the fact that you're in my face about this suggests that the issue is not your politics but your disdain/dislike for me personally and if so, get the fuck out of here". E.g., the dude who sits next to you during the NBA championships and wants to argue with you about capitalism is either strategically stupid about his politics or he's trying to be an asshole to you in specific.