In “From the Stacks: ‘The Fire Last Time,'” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes that Baldwin was an intellectual that stood apart from the more prevalent model in the 50s and 60s. Gramsci’s organic intellectual modeled the type of oppositional leadership that the left was privileging at the time. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others exemplify the Gramscian model of socio-political leaders who awaken workers’ class consciousness while mobilizing them to action. Baldwin, on the other hand, invoked the older model of the alienated intellectual who, from the near shores on which alert witnesses stand, tells her or his story. Gates notes how Baldwin was the artist who remained estranged from “the very people he would represent” (The New Republic 1992). There is a quality of estrangement that is generally regarded with great suspicion and even contempt in politics. Think of HRC. or BO. or John Kerry, further back. The opposite, such as Bill Clinton’s type of friendly charm, has been embraced and rewarded electorally.
How is it that people have come to distrust and dislike leaders that remain somewhat distant by not giving themselves entirely in public? The perceived distance is quickly interpreted as the leader’s failure to be likable, relatable, and worst, trustworthy. Obama has been often criticized for seeming aloof, too professorial or simply failing to reach out more earnestly Republicans in Congress, who, regardless of any Democratic concession, were entrenched on performing unprecedented levels of obstructionism. HRC has been touted ceaselessly as unrelatable due to her elitism, or is she elitist due to her dearth level of relatability? The causality, as in most cases that matter or don’t, proves elusive in its ambivalence. The demand for emotive proximity between voters and leaders is not exclusive to Democrats. Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush exemplify in recent history political leaders who fail, in part, due to their immediate untranslatability to the popular imaginary of the so-called common fellow.
Where does this need for palpable identification with someone by definition and circumstances so removed as to set to lead a party representing so many different peoples and interests, lie? What is its provenance? Is the provenance cultural, educational, psychological? The points of departures are probably multiple with many intersecting points. Nonetheless, determining where that urgent need to identify with leaders comes from seems rather unimportant now. At least now, it seems sufficient to point out that such a need continues to prove incredibly dangerous for it unravels consequences that time and again endeavor against the basic and long-term interests of the people who demand it. It is a need that brings utter peril at its coattails. And when that needs asserts itself, the rest of us suffer just as equally, if not more.
Did Baldwin have anything to say regarding this irrepressible need for emotive proximity with political leaders? That he remained a detached artist and intellectual suggests a possible skepticism about proximities of this kind: a connection of intimacy with figures who are by constitution public. As numerous historical cases show, many such experiences of personal or cultural identification fall into deceiving or menacing sentimentalism at the expense of sober clarity. When one stands too close, moved by whatever sets of interests or needs, she or he cannot properly see, let alone examine, its object of desire or aspired proximity.
The expectation from this far apart that remains my space of writing is that leaders who have continued to represent my interests with sobering consistency and moral integrity, however imperfectly, will persist by choosing clear, unmitigated distance from this political and ethical aberration and its party.
Thus, I wonder whether we will finally understand that proper political representation can be achieved when adequate, sobering distance, yet one imbued with moral responsibility, is preserved between leaders and followers. Will we, I ask as my looking back in history quickly deflates my hopes that such an urgent lesson be learned. Faintly I wonder whether in one too many moments the next many years the arguably modest victory of enduring will have to represent our indomitable struggle to prevail.