Reactive Politics: Moments and Their Men
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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Out of character: debating Dutchness, narrating citizenship van Reekum, R. Publication date 2014 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): van Reekum, R. (2014). Out of character: debating Dutchness, narrating citizenship. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:26 Sep 2021 6. Reactive politics: moments and their men Already for some time before 2000, discourses dealing with Dutchness articulated the idea that, in politics, there are ideals that demand too much of people, that stretch their tolerance for the other to a breaking point (Duyvendak 1997; Prins 2004; Schinkel 2007). When support for such ideals are demanded of citizens without sufficient consideration for the burdens that such ideals imply, a backlash against these ideals – even if citizens agree with them – comes to be inevitable. Such a diagnosis presents an understanding of politics in which reality and particularly the reality of people’s lived experiences of stress and exhaustion bounds the possible and the reasonable. At a certain point, there is only so much one can ask of the people. At a certain point, the demos strikes back. Political ideals may be praiseworthy and highly attractive, but they can also cloud one’s judgement of what, in reality, is happening and clutter our considerations of the costs at which ideals are realised. Seen through this lens, political realities here and now trump political horizons of idealised futures. If it is correct that this conception of politics has been important for the ways in which positions become articulated in debates on national citizenship, then I think we should at least concede that this understanding of politics makes a lot of sense. That is, it is doing a lot of work for people in their engagement with public issues. Indeed, it is certainly not just a lay conception of democracy. It also exists as a staple of much political philosophy and science when the ‘preferences’, ‘interest’, ‘attitudes’, or ‘grievances’ of the electorate are used to explain the structure and dynamics of the electoral landscape and the tensions between representation and represented. This landscape is delimited precisely by what the voters are willing to put up with. By saying that this conception of politics makes a lot of sense, I also mean to say that it presents to us a crucial problem of democratic politics and cannot simply be regarded as ill-conceived, ‘reactionary’ thinking. There are some pertinent questions here: how does the relationship between represented and representative work? And what is and isn’t possible in this relationship? How do representatives gain support for their ideals and what will be the boundaries of legitimate decision making? Such questions suggest that the relationship between represented and representative cannot be stretched 147 indefinitely; that democratic legitimacy is dependent on popular support; that political parties should or, at least, need to take into account the ideas, grievances and ideals of the citizenry. The governmental and political elites should seek to mirror – at least to some extent – the concerns of the people. There are limits to the sacrifices that citizens are willing to make in order to achieve certain ideals. This conception of politics stubbornly refers to the lived frustrations of citizens, who experience in their daily lives the true costs of political manoeuvring. Especially when decisions by representatives are deemed necessary or inevitable will it entail an unmasking of political rhetoric: representatives are then said to mistakenly or deceivingly act as if there are no alternatives. What we might call reactive politics – the politics of those representatives who speak for citizens that “will not take it anymore” – defines itself through this goal: to effectively demonstrate that there are alternatives, that the burdening weight of misconceived ideals can be lifted after all. Reactive politics, then, may also be understood as a particular brand of political populism (Canovan 1999). The malaise of democracy and the dissolution of legitimacy is then explained by the fact that representatives have neither been attentive to nor expressive of the troubles and burdens experienced by the people. In this form of populism, ‘the people’ is precisely that segment of society that feels and knows the true costs of public policy and it is they to whom representatives should (re)turn their attention. These people are not merely ‘normal’, ‘average’, ‘simple’ or ‘unpretentious’, but also specifically burdened and threatened. Their burdens are sacrifices for public goods that they are not able or willing to partake in. This enactment of politics brings forth ‘critical outsiders’ who – ahead of the politics to come – warn, criticise and scold the inattentive elites who are isolated and isolate themselves from the costs of their own idealism. We have here at once a way to understand the relationship between representative and represented at the heart of democracy, while also creating a division of political labour. There are the ‘overburdened citizenry’, ‘the critical outsider’, the ‘self-isolating elite’ and the ‘representatives who speaks for a victimised and neglected people’. Together, this role division helps explain what is happening in politics by suggesting that representatives will have to be brought back in line and curtail their overheated idealism. Moreover, this narrative helps justify the interventions of critical outsiders who are warning the governing elite for an impending backlash. Finally, it enables the role of the populist forerunner who speaks for the people and against the elites. 148 The moment of reaction The conception of politics just described is nothing new (see for instance Robin 2011), nor is it in anyway specific to the kinds of discourses through which contestations over Dutchness were articulated after 2000. In fact, a model of reaction is – as we have already seen – part and parcel of problematisations of national identity right from the early 1980’s onward (Van Reekum & Duyvendak 2012). The drama of failing integration was always already conceived to be taking place ‘in the old, urban neighbourhoods’ where conspicuously normal people are confronted with the fall-out of political decisions on a daily basis. This is also true for the worries surrounding on-going Europeanisation: normal, rooted people were said not to identify with the European project in the way cosmopolitan elites did. What is striking, however, is the way in which the political events of 2000- 2002 would come to be conceived as the rupture that would open up the possibility and the need to finally and conclusively bring political ideals back to people’s reality. That is, key events and contestations emerging between 2000 and 2002 came to figure as the backlash par excellence at which popular reaction – finally – materialised and could no longer be denied appropriate recognition. So, even though the motif of popular backlash had been crucial for articulating the problematic of national citizenship and had been enacted recurrently in the years preceding 2000-2002, the explosion of this political moment gained a higher esteem as it appeared to effect democratic legitimacy as such. The events and developments of this period were not only highly disruptive and transformative in hindsight, they were also explicitly and ostensibly articulated in terms of a watershed moment while they were taking place (see also Van Reekum 2012c). In other words, it was not with the passage of time and the possibility of historical distance that the period of 2000-2002 would become remembered as a turning point in Dutch politics. Rather, as events were unfolding they were accompanied and inflected by an articulation of rupture and displacement. The ensuing events of those years were being canonised and endowed with national significance in the moment. Public discussion on these events thereby enacted a commemoration of the national present. The on-going present now instantly became memoire. Strikingly, Pim Fortuyn, who is arguably the central figure of commemoration during these years, would be chosen as the ‘greatest Dutch person’ by the viewers of a televised election show in 2004.13 13 De Grootste Nederlander was aired on October 14 2004 by the KRO. The format for this program was taken from German and British examples. Brits chose Winston Churchill in the BBC-show Great Britons, while the German audiences elected Konrad Adenauer during the ZDF-show Unsere Besten. 149 To conceptualise this commemoration of the present is certainly not to suggest that these events are in actual fact unworthy of such nomination or that it is only their constant reiteration in media coverage that granted them the status of transformation. The evocative power of the 2000-2002 watershed cannot be reduced to an escalating media-hype manufactured through the self-referentiality of solipsistic, horse-race media coverage. However, all events are in some way mediated and all events carry in their mediation narratives about why and how such events matter (Wagner-Pacifici 2010; Stengs 2009).