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Opinion | The new face of ‘the personal is political’ [1]

['Paul Waldman']

Date: 2023-01-23

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When feminists began arguing in the 1960s that “the personal is political,” they sought to persuade women to see the conditions of their lives as the product of deep social and political structures. Collective action was the key: To change your life, join with others to exercise political power.

Today, the “personal is political” ethic is all around us, even though the phrase isn’t as common. Except now, the action moves in the other direction: Alter your consumer decisions, many believe, and you’ll change the world.

Or at the very least, make a big show of how you’re sticking it to the people you hate with what you do and don’t buy.

Witness the wave of asinine fist-shaking from Republicans and conservative media that ensued after a federal official’s offhand warning about indoor pollution from gas stoves. “COME AND TAKE IT!!” tweeted one GOP congressman about his stove. “God. Guns. Gas stoves,” said another, the point apparently being that gas stoves are now foundational to conservative identity.

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The demands placed on conservatives’ performative identity politics are unceasing: Cook with gas, burn your Nikes, stop wearing Carhartt, don’t see “The Little Mermaid,” boycott Velma! Owning the libs is so much work.

Liberals think about the political symbolism of their consumer choices, too, of course. Just look at the changing image of Tesla, which used to communicate both social status and social conscience. Today, with company CEO Elon Musk doubling as the world’s most destructive right-wing troll, the company is slashing prices in response to slowing demand, which some attribute to liberal car buyers deciding they no longer want to be associated with Musk.

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Still, they’re not organizing a boycott, a tool that used to be mostly the province of the left. These days, the right is as heavily invested, if not more, in whether people are making the proper consumer decisions. And while there are conservative brands out there (RIP, “Freedom Phone”), conservatives are mostly told what not to buy. Fox News viewers and followers of conservatives on social media are bombarded by constant market surveillance, where signs of “wokeness” in candy, comic books and sporting events are hunted down and held up for a combination of ridicule and anger.

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Why is all this happening? Partly because backlash is the default mode of political engagement for conservatives today.

Megan McArdle counterpoint Environmentalists have a blind spot in the debate over gas stoves Whether its manifestations are serious or whimsical, the routine is familiar. It begins with liberals, or some corporations, seeking to show how inclusive they are, doing something that conservatives can react against. That reaction is as flamboyant as possible, sometimes with anger (parents shouting about pornography at school board meetings), and sometimes with a wink (look at me defiantly cooking on my gas stove!). The goal is as much to enrage the left as it is to organize the right.

The gas stove controversy, to be fair, does involve a genuine policy debate with real-world consequences. Some cities have banned new gas hookups, and Republican state legislatures have responded with “preemption” laws forbidding municipalities in their state from enacting such a ban.

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But most conservatives don’t experience this as a genuine debate about indoor air pollution they’re trying to win. It’s just one more way to express their identity, a way to say: “This is who I am. And if you don’t like it, you can go to hell.”

That second part is important. Contemporary conservatism is organized around grievance, both proclaiming victimhood and asserting one’s agency with a gaudy belligerence. The question that animates the right on a day-to-day basis is not “How can we best organize the world for human flourishing?” but “What’s making us mad today?” One sometimes gets the sense that changing anything is beside the point. Anger is its own reward.

Conservatives have plenty to be mad about, because they are always being told that the world is spinning out of control, that everything they hold dear is under assault and that we’re moments away from catastrophe. Because the outrage machine needs a constant supply of fuel, few if any distinctions are drawn between things that are really important and angst over whether M&Ms are too “woke.”

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For the conservative media, there is an endless supply of pseudo-controversies to get the audience mad about, because what gets conservatives angry is change, and change is a constant in the modern world. Commerce inevitably reflects that change. Ads no longer show a husband spanking his wife for bringing home the wrong brand of coffee, but you can now find the occasional same-sex couple in a TV commercial, and that gets some people very distressed.

Yet when Fox News starts railing at the latest supposed outrage they’ve found scouring the aisles of the supermarket (“Next on Tucker: Is your toilet cleaner woke?!?”), liberals should be thankful. Let the right worry about consumer products; the left would do better to focus on thinking broadly and working strategically to make meaningful change that improves people’s lives.

That doesn’t mean liberals shouldn’t buy electric cars (even if they want to choose a different brand than Tesla). Going electric really will make a difference, and the more people who do it the more impact it will have. The personal will always be political. Just don’t be fooled into thinking the market is the only place you should act.

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/23/personal-political-tesla-gas-stoves/

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