I am not sure what politics is exactly. Nonetheless, I know it’s both important and largely unrelated to the topically clean-cut and morally innocuous picture seen too often in political science. This is the model that hunts empirical terrain for motives, rationales, and explanations. It is also the model that has brought us such gems of nonsense as rational choice theory. All institutions, no heart.
Here’s the thing:
Politics is pathological. It is is far prior to economistic vote preferencing that it is fair to call the latter a distraction. Above all, politics is deep, unsettling, and almost unbearable to face.
Julia Grønnovet, a reporter for the Associated Press, makes this bewildering journey in a piece she wrote for the magazine N+1. She offers her personal diary as she covers the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the man who carried out the unthinkably horrific July 2011 Norway attacks
Grønnovet, through courageous empathy and rigorous self-awareness, mills about this impossibly dark trial, which lasted an interminable series of months, probing for an idea as to the point of the whole proceeding. It is in this most stark of situations, the application of criminal penalty to a man so overwhelmingly guilty, that the very degree of starkness becomes disorienting, providing in fluorescent detail the deep ambiguity of our own political self-understanding.
Julia Grønnovet – Letters from Oslo