The closest American politicians come to breathing a word about desire is to talk about hope, as Barack Obama is doing now. And to see the terminal weakness of hope rhetoric you need only recall the refrain of John Edwards's speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "Hope is on the way." Hope isn't much—it's not help, not happiness, not even security—but now even hope could only be hoped for. What happens to a deferral deferred? A depressing question.
Our taboo on desire owes something to the fact that all desire has its libidinal component, and so long as American politics concentrates mawkishly on the family—always working families, never simply working people—desire will seem an intrusive and inappropriate force. The other reason for Democrats to keep quiet about their desires is simply that they don't have any they can recognize; for a generation or more, they have been in the literal sense a conservative party, mostly concerned with maintaining existing institutions of social welfare or moderating the pace at which they are dismantled. The Democrats never know what they want; they do know they'd like to go about it cautiously.
It hardly seems likely that Democrats will soon evolve any frank politics of desire—the desire (it is mine anyway) for a society just, sustainable, creative, and free. And the same goes for the traditional socialist left. Probably a larger portion of the global proletariat consists, today, of the superfluously large "reserve army of labor" than of wage laborers in factories or on farms, and no one can easily imagine a coordinated international movement led by the jobless inhabitants of slums. If we still imagine barricades being stormed, they are stormed by high seas.
~ from The Politics of Fear, Part II: How Many of Us? ~
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