Talking Past Social Structure

Graham Platner, Hyperindividualism, and the Ethic of Personal Responsibility

It’s no accident that the social sciences have been under attack. Any habit of mind that illuminates the levers of power is a threat to those who pull those levers.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

— Desmond Tutu

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also understood the prophetic call to restructure systems of injustice in his speech “A Time to Break Silence” (“Beyond Vietnam”), written by Vincent Harding, and delivered on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before King was assassinated. He transformed the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Christian scriptures (Luke 10:25-37).

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The Maine Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Graham Platner, is having his character assassinated by legacy media, at the behest of the oligarchs and the establishment, for advocating the very same thing.

At times like these, I think of another “embarnacled” character, the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who in his book The Sociological Imagination (1959), railed against the “abstracted empiricism” (50) that prevailed among many sociologists of his day. As a young graduate student, I accidentally happened upon a poem in a sociology journal.

I like to share this with undergrads in my introductory sociology and social problems courses, when introducing Mills’s concept of “the sociological imagination.” I balance the seemingly flowery and to them, antiquated, language of his expression with his colorful character. But witness how resonant Platner’s analyses are with Mills’s statement of “the problem” addressed by the sociological imagination.

Nowadays men [sic] often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel (1959: 3).

Platner could well be talking about this in his town hall comments about his campaign travels around the state.

Substantively, as a matter of a general policy perspective, Graham Platner upholds the work of Frances Perkins, who worked briefly with Jane Addams at Hull House.

The Sociological Imagination removes the individualist lens that has resulted in what I’ve termed “the twilight of the public.”

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, mthe welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions .Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.

The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of man’s capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of ‘human nature’ are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.

Questioning character is an old GOP trope. More recently, analyses of the media vitriol unleashed upon Platner on the basis of “character” focus on the oligarchy and its algorithms, the pundit class, the consultant class, AIPAC, and establishment Democrats.

While all of this may be true, it obscures a deeper truth. Just as the “law and order” frame rhetorically and strategically disempowered the civil rights movement,¹ the ethic of personal responsibility obscures the structural argument that Platner so finely puts in simple words. Across the board, “personal responsibility” is the hyperindividualist trope that personal troubles are not public issues, but individual moral failings. You don’t need a social safety net; you just need to give up avocado toast and lattés. You don’t need subsidized child care; you need better financial planning. You don’t need a union; you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You don’t need universal healthcare; you need to hang out with RFK, Jr., lift weights, and shine infrared light on your nethers.

What makes Platner threatening is all of the above, that he accepts personal responsibility for his past actions, and that he changes the conversation to public issues. As he has the ear of Mainers, he has the very real possibility of changing the conversation nationally, to finally make a dent in the “character” trope, just like the “big, beefy Texan” who changed the course of sociology.

1. Doug McAdam 1983 “Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency,” American Sociological Review, 48(6 ) (Dec): 735-754 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095322 Accessed: 29-08-2016 00:17 UTC