Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Or, There Are Weasels Under the Coffee Table: Or, Is 19th Century Liberal Imperialistic Utopianism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Before I get finally and totally buried in the depths of the Dissertating Lifestyle, I present to you, my dear, long-suffering readers, the long-promised, oft-longed-for Deep Space Nine Mega-Post. This is my favorite of the Star Trek series, and so I have, as you might imagine, a fair bit to say.

American National Politics and the Justice Casino

American national politics makes more sense when you realize that, while shouting about urgent justice issues is an important element in how American national politicians get people to vote for them, American politics are in no way actually about justice.

As matters stand now, giving out "Justice party-favors" is an essential element in the tit-for-tat of economic-managerial, interest-based coalition politics, but these party-favors bear little or no relationship with any consistent theory of justice, or even the most gradualist, incrementalist idea of how to achieve it. They correspond, rather, to a predominant theory and practice of politics as a system of managing clashing group self-interests through an a-moral exchange of favors and patronage mediated by electoral machinery. Some of these favors are purely self-interested, i.e. they represent direct benefits for the group itself; some represent concessions to that group's purported theory of justice or at least their commitment to a particular justice-issue. From the standpoint of the larger political system, though, there is little fundamental difference between the two.

When you vote for a political party based on a justice-issue, you're essentially gambling that your interest-group will receive, in exchange for its support, political favors that will in some indirect way translate into a tangible but incremental movement towards justice as you see it. This isn't necessarily irrational, since there's always the chance in our political system that your interest-group really will win big (the Supreme Court being the big unpredictable slot machine that occasionally gives crazy Jackpots in the larger Casino of American political life)--but what you're doing when you direct your pursuit of justice towards national politics is still essentially gambling, not working toward justice in any clear, rational manner.

The real issue with this system, though, is not that such gambling occurs, but rather how much sheer energy is directed towards converting every single justice-issue, however urgent or life-and-death, into a ready-made political interest group ready to play long games of cards with the big boys, and what effects this has in the long run on those causes and the societal conceptualization of justice in general. A people trained to see justice, in the end, as a set of interchangeable tokens in a game of Blackjack is going to find itself relating to justice in a manner fundamentally incompatible with any philosophical or moral theory of justice since Plato, and therefore with a fundamentally incompatible idea of politics as well.

Whether this justice and this politics is remotely coherent in itself, or remotely able to *actually* manage the clashing interests of different interest groups and thereby prevent political division and violence, is another question entirely, though one our political system seems to be working very hard to put to the test at the moment. We shall see.