What Is the Point of Politics?
A DM exchange between Rep. Eric Swalwell and a random death-threatening stranger reminds us to consider what politics is even for.
The world if our politics was actually, simply, for common betterment, instead of the cesspool we allow it to be now (Season 4, Episode 21 of the Simpsons).
The internet moves quickly. Tweets come and go, Characters of The Day cyclically enter and exit the cultural stage. Being online largely boils down to gracelessly sitting in cyberspace’s peanut gallery, hunched over with the posture of someone spending too much time on their device, swiveling your head back-and-forth watching a perennial drama of content. Each scene brings new but largely similar exhibits that assure us we’re a member of the audience, the club who gets to finger-point rather than be pointed at. We’re invited to gawk, but only for so long before the next act.
But these instances online, these cultural moments often hold deeper complications – issues lying beneath the internet’s sensational artifice, the hollow apparatus that drives our impulse to unconsciously click and scroll and engage with these moments in the first place. Rarely do we actually even half-heartedly spend the time or effort needed to even see these complications, let alone give a second thought to them.
This sort of dynamic can be seen, for example, in a story of a man named Dave Morris, whom I wrote about last year. Morris, a cafe owner from Portage, Michigan, went viral after he interrupted a live newscast being filmed outside his cafe. It was a segment about COVID’s impact on local businesses. As he emerged into the shot, Morris berated the government’s lockdown strategy, describing it as ineffectual and tyrannical. He used just enough catch-all phrases to be propped up by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh within the week.
There seemed more to Morris than solely serving as a right-wing cultural warrior, but that’s much of what ran about him in the following days and weeks. After getting in touch with him, I actually found much of Morris’ world views and politics to be aligned more along the lines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and less congruent with the right-wing media personalities saluting him. Indeed, there was much more to Morris than the initial online-induced typecasting of him.
At the turn of the new year, a similar momentary online spotlight shined upon another individual. The context was different, but the pattern was familiar: another Character of The Day, shallow parties scoring their points, and no real reflection on the part of many of us watching it all go down.
On December 30, Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) posted a DM exchange he shared with Jeremy Marshall, a contractor from near Vancouver, Canada. Marshall was incensed by right-wing conspiracies surrounding reports of Christine Fang, a Chinese spy who had worked around an array of American officials. One of these officials was Swalwell, who cut ties with Fang immediately after being alerted of security concerns regarding her. Nevertheless, the right-wing conspiracy machine persisted, provoking Marshall to message Swalwell “Traitor hopefully u get hung one day,” and that he “should be shot.”
Not the best way to start a conversation! Somehow though, the threatening start quickly evolved into a considerably candid discussion. Swalwell seemed to genuinely level with Marshall, prompting Marshall to express remorse and reflect on how he lost himself down online rabbit holes, and how he ought to engage with other sources.
The online response to Swalwell after he posted this exchange on Twitter varied. Many applauded Swalwell for his ostensible rhetorical and conversational chops. Others criticized Swalwell for siccing the cancel culture mob on this supposedly just misguided, disgruntled man. Some were ambivalent, addressing both the threat of violence yet still approaching the situation with some level of empathy or nuance. Some mused that the whole conversation was fake. All the same, the interaction received massive attention through tens of thousands of retweets, likes, and replies.
At first, the exchange does resemble a model conversation of how a politician can actually do the work of bringing people (who perhaps even violently disagree with them) closer to their worldview. This didn’t actually seem to be the case.
Swalwell himself tweeted that he chose to engage with Marshall solely to learn as much as he could about Marshall’s identity to then share it with law enforcement. Swalwell misled Marshall throughout the exchange, making false claims about how he had family residing near Marshall, and how he’d be eager to get coffee with Marshall the next time he visited the area. Swalwell described this all as “stringing him a bit.”
I was able to get in contact with Jeremy Marshall myself. He initially didn’t want to speak long (fair, I suppose), but proceeded to chat with me for a bit anyway.
Marshall is remorseful about how the internet ensnared him, echoing what he suggested to Swalwell. “I was wrong, I definitely owed an apology,” Marshall tells me. “I shouldn't have become so polarized. I didn't think that would happen to me. I thought ‘oh you know, I know what's going on, I can read between the lines.’”
What strikes me is that, weeks and weeks after the DM exchange, Marshall still didn’t know Swalwell was lying. Throughout our conversation, Marshall drops allusions: his surprise that Swalwell had family nearby, how they may share a cup of coffee someday. It was remarkable how a man who appeared so impacted by this conversation had no idea that the conversation itself occurred under false pretenses.
Marshall’s sincerity is accompanied by good-humored self-admission. To Marshall, it’s a matter of accountability and integrity, of owning up. “If I’ve done something wrong, I need to apologize and I need to explain why, because otherwise I'm just another idiot out there,” Marshall says. “Yes, I am another idiot out there,” he continues, “but I would like people to know you shouldn't do things like that.”
It remains to be seen whether the thousands who initially engaged with Swalwell’s posts will also see and internalize this more reflective, grounded side of Marshall. There was certainly no shortage of people Marshall personally tried to explain himself to. “I was overwhelmed with the amount of people who were messaging, I couldn't keep up with apologies,” he says. “I was like, ‘I'm sorry, I know what you saw, I was wrong, I need you to know I realize I'm wrong,” Marshall found himself confronting both those who deplored him, and even those who cheered him on or stood to defend him. He felt some obligation towards the former, but no real affinity with the latter.
But what is an individual’s sincerity against masses of visceral reaction online, where we abandon so many of the principles that anchor us to treating our fellow human beings with at least some semblance of generosity? “It was just too much, and it just kept going, more and more,” Marshall sighs. “And then other stuff comes out, they’re photoshopping stuff and they're like, ‘is this your text?!’ and you're like ‘what?’ And I defend myself with what I said to Eric [Swalwell], that what I did was wrong – but this stuff is not even me. And then you just give up because you're defending stuff you don't even know about.”
Marshall’s willingness to reflect is fairly admirable, given the magnitude of what he faced. It’s not difficult to imagine how someone could wall themselves up and shirk responsibility outwards, instead of meaningfully looking inwards, while facing such intense scrutiny online. This is not to excuse Marshall’s threat to Swalwell, as much as it is to acknowledge the distinct openness exhibited by someone who would likely be deemed ‘unreachable’ or a ‘lost cause’ in making such a threat at all.
Nevertheless, Marshall hopes at least some who engaged with the interaction will pay as much attention in the aftermath. “Hopefully people will read what I said and they'll take it to heart, and they'll understand that we're all people,” Marshall says. “I didn’t even consider him a person, because he was just somebody behind a screen. And that’s what leads to polarization, there’s no face to it, you’re not talking to them.” He describes how much more mindful he has felt since about what he says and why he says it. “It took such a shitty situation to get me to that point, which kinda sucks.”
It’s very understandable to lie out of self-preservation. But even after seeming to genuinely level with Marshall, Swalwell’s charade continued. After what appeared a substantial de-escalation with Marshall, Swalwell still insisted on Twitter to “let the law hold him accountable.” So while Swalwell focused his thread of posts on the dangers of radicalizing extremist media, here he seems disinterested in not simply calling out that media, but actually offering people an alternative pathway. One could imagine Swalwell’s motives being to genuinely connect with this seemingly unreachable person, and to attempt to meaningfully advocate for seeing the world differently. Instead, his motives were self-admittedly for the sake of punishment.
Power relations are crucial to note here. Of course, we should be concerned with any threat of violence. All the same, not all threats are equal – an aggressive DM that quickly turns into an ostensibly sincere conversation is not the same as repeated or patterned threats. That a U.S. congressman still called for legal action after such de-escalation, and revelation that the threat itself may have been hollow, is notable.
Henry Williams, co-founder of the Gravel Institute, is keenly aware of these dynamics. “Political actors like [Rep. Swalwell] come from a place of so much more public attention and power,” Williams says. “They actually have a moral responsibility to, on one hand, be aware of that, and on the other hand, appreciate the asymmetries that exist between them and other people.” Williams empathizes on a human level with what it feels like to be threatened online, but sees Swalwell’s supposed rhetorical skill as limited. “This guy really is opening up to him, but it's not like Swalwell really empathizes with him at almost any level. He really is sort of interrogating him.”
This moment too holds some resonance to Swalwell’s earlier proposition to kick Russian college students out of the U.S. in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here too, Swalwell seems more interested in punishment and political points than any genuine concern with the well-being of people – especially if they may instead serve as proxies for his opposition. So, at least in these instances, we catch a glimpse at a revealing brand of politics the Congressman embodies, one that is certainly not limited to him alone. Given the tens of thousands who engaged with this twitter thread, it’s prudent to not let this moment simply exist as a momentary speck on the endless timeline we perpetually scroll through.
We then face a very basic inquiry. What is interaction (online or not), social life, politics itself even for? Are we simply just passers-by watching political and cultural flash points unfold, before subsequently turning our faces away? Is politics a sphere where we reap vindication when something affirms or validates us – or is politics the vessel in which we place our hope to actually advocate for a better world, where we meaningfully work to bring us and our fellow human beings closer to one another?
Questioning what politics is for is inextricably linked to what we think we are for. And so, while many of the cogs and gears of our world turn, with or without our consent or even awareness, it becomes easy and perhaps even culturally justifiable for one to turn away from politics itself. To see ourselves as insignificant blips, among a universe of blips. “We as human beings were thrown into this world,” Williams orates to me. “And we're faced with this incredible problem of action, particularly when we live in mass societies that are huge, that involve so many people and moving parts.”
But even if we do have an impact on the world, it’s hard to discern what that impact is. Williams finds inspiration in part from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, where he derives a sense of mass politics as the solution to this problem of action, this feeling of insignificance. “She almost thinks this is kind of what gives human life meaning at all – the ability of us to come together and act collectively,” he explains. “It's easy to feel nihilistic and meaningless and depressed. But if you recognize that history is something that's made by people and can be made collectively, even when we fail we engage in a project that gives our lives meaning.”
Williams’ ardent belief in the possibility of politics coupled with Jeremy Marshall’s own sincerity may strike a chord. It may all also just ring as naïveté, as wishy-washy idealism. Accepting the latter, however, contributes to where we are now: a sitting congressman, an elected political actor mistreating a moment of possibility to meaningfully interlock with another human being. It contributes to many of us welcoming, if not passively tolerating, these kinds of conventions at all.
Instead, we could embrace the possibility and promise of politics that Williams believes in. The way politics offers us the chance to genuinely act, to change the world.
Of note is that Marshall was never contacted by authorities. That Swalwell made these appeals to law enforcement, only to ostensibly not pursue them further while also not following back up with Marshall himself, displays an almost worse cynicism. It expresses an indifference in actually pursuing punishment, yet still an apparent calculation that expressing the desire to do so is popular, or at least generally accepted as the normal response. Our collective reaction to moments like these will determine whether we allow this calculus to remain conventional – where callous punishment or simple indifference, and not radical sympathy, is the naturally expected response.
So we may do well to ask ourselves: what is politics for? Are we fulfilling that purpose? If not, where can we change, where can we reflect – just as Jeremy Marshall has – in order to ensure that we do accept, and pursue, this possibility of politics?
The answers are in our collective hands.
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What Is the Point of Politics?
Thanks Prem! Brilliant as Always!