Towards the end of this old thread about David Cameron liking The Smiths ( http://www.morrissey-solo.com/threa...ons/page6?highlight=the+personal+is+political), we got into a debate about the adage "all politics are personal". We approached that as an 80s phenomenon. However, I'm just reading Christopher Hitchens' memoir "Hitch 22", which contains the following passage that I am unable to resist sharing:
As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "the personal is political". At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference", to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be neccessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" left: We earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. There are many ways of dating the moment when the left discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
That to me perfectly expresses many of my own misgivings about the concept, but more to the point fixes the late 60s rather than the 80s as the moment of its rise to prominence. Doesn't it rather change things that it grew out of the requirements of late 60s radicalism, rather than as a forced response to an 80s reaganism that was culturally ascendant?
As 1968 began to ebb into 1969 however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "the personal is political". At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference", to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be neccessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" left: We earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. There are many ways of dating the moment when the left discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
That to me perfectly expresses many of my own misgivings about the concept, but more to the point fixes the late 60s rather than the 80s as the moment of its rise to prominence. Doesn't it rather change things that it grew out of the requirements of late 60s radicalism, rather than as a forced response to an 80s reaganism that was culturally ascendant?