The politics of futility

On one of his many post-presidential speaking tours, Barack Obama told a 2017 summit on food innovation in Milan: ‘People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don’t work, but as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve.’¹ He bemoaned the low voter turnout and leftist apathy that facilitated, he believed, the election of Donald Trump. ‘If you don’t vote and you don’t pay attention,’ he told the audience, ‘you’ll get policies that don’t reflect your interest.’ We might counter that his eightyear term was characterized by a set of policies that did not reflect the interests of the majority who voted for him – from the bailout of corrupt financial institutions to the escalation of drone warfare and US imperialism. We could also suggest that his extension of a largely neoliberal agenda throughout his term could only lead to political apathy. Even the extension of healthcare provisions to millions of uninsured US citizens under the euphemism of Obamacare – the major political victory of the Obama era – reinforced the marketization of healthcare and further enabled insurance and pharmaceutical companies to capitalize on the ill-health of millions of Americans.² The fact that parts of the Affordable Care Act were written in collaboration with these very companies was a warning sign.³

If Obama represented hope, as his initial 2008 election campaign promised, then his decision to reinforce the very economic and social system that engenders hopelessness undoubtedly helped stoke the rightwing anger and leftwing apathy that permeated the 2016 US presidential election. Also, if voter turnout was the real problem with the 2016 election, then the huge turnout for the 2020 election showed that Trumpism is built around a sizeable anger against, and deep desire to move beyond, the neoliberal status quo in the US. While Biden won the presidency, the Democrats will have to reckon with this reality sooner rather than later.

But, more significantly, Obama was talking of a kind of mythical democracy, where there exists a direct connection between the people and their representatives, and where legislation straightforwardly reflects the will of the majority. This imagined democracy of universal inclusion, participation and unity is the holy grail of contemporary liberal politics. We all have a say. Every voice matters. The danger in promoting this simplistic democratic vision is that it bears no resemblance to the actual reality of contemporary democracy. Governmental politics is increasingly influenced by a whole host of unelected players – from PR gurus and lobbyists to choice architects and nudge theorists – and legal and bureaucratic systems routinely silence voices through modes of exclusion and punishment. Moreover, Obama’s mythical democratic image obfuscates the fact that contemporary democracy is routinely used to cement neoliberal hegemony – especially a US democracy that has legalized corporate bribing of political parties – endlessly reinforcing the interests of the wealthy and reducing the role of the demos to the capacity to vote every few years. How could we possibly get the politicians we deserve in such circumstances? The more pertinent question being: what have we done to deserve this?

Emily Apter provides an indirect answer to this question in her book . Apter locates a disconnection between the relentless expression of the political in everyday life and the institutional practice of politics. Here, she makes a distinction between ‘small p’ politics – what might be described as micropolitical expressions that anticipate large-scale political action – and ‘big P’ politics, which deals with analyses of power, governmentality, capitalism and the like. Apter argues: ‘The abandonment of “small p” politics to pundits and members of the chattering classes risks putting “big P” politics out of action.’ In the spirit of Apter’s focus on ‘small p’ politics, I inspect micropolitical events to emphasize how ‘emancipatory politics’, where politics routinely takes on a futilitarian form that consolidates neoliberalism. Futilitarianism is the term I use to describe how, in the neoliberal decades, we are trapped in a cycle of utility maximization that leads to the worsening of collective social and economic conditions. In some cases, political expression mirrors capitalist behaviour; in others, capitalism is relegated to the background and the responsibility of individuals is foregrounded. But what ties the various examples of the politics of futility together is a negation of emancipatory politics and a retreat into the safety of political forms that do not threaten the status quo.