Can passion be stronger than power? Do we want it to be? We have lost our capacity for political rage. We need more anger (in another essay Judt suggests we need more fear). I would say special poignancy, but that would be to concede that such moments are gone for ever. What has happened to collective purpose in the West? As a feminist, who lived through and was in many ways formed by one of feminism’s most inspired moments, in the 1970s, the question has special resonance for me. With no apparent awareness of the irony, we will save the banks before – or rather instead of – saving the world. Action on climate change seems to be in freefall. As the last 18 months have so brutally testified, the anti-globalisation movement, though it is testament to something of what Judt is calling for, has had no effect on the clout and corruption of international finance across the world. There is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the people and those who claim to represent them. One million marched against the war in Iraq (I think it was one, Judt says two, I loved the inflation): it made no difference. 1 Where there has been such mobilisation in recent years, it has fallen, ineffective, to the ground. In an interview with Kristina Bozic in this paper, he laments what he sees as a failure of political vocabulary, the absence of a language that could inspire ‘collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour’. As Tony Judt has eloquently argued on several occasions over the past year and in his new book, Ill Fares the Land, the sense of mass belonging which characterised European and American politics from the late 19th century well into the last, doesn’t seem to be there any longer. For now, our era seems only rarely to be capable of marshalling collective affect in the direction of the common good. Which of these public sentiments will prevail? Only time, as they say, will tell. And that is not to speak of the lethal counter-enthusiasm, the ugly, race-tinted hatreds also provoked by the election of the first black president, the dogs baying on the White House lawn. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the realities of political power.
But the enthusiasm he roused, the very force of his rhetoric, so one argument runs, has at moments appeared to be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel.
ALFRED DREYFUS SIBLINGS REGISTRATION
His election was of course inspirational, notably in terms of collective life: the mass registration of black voters was close to what might be called the forging of a new political constituency across generation and race. The election of Obama would be the exception. What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious and disabling atrophy or disaffection.
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