Professor Borck's Lecture

The notion of politics is usually one that would be brought into the realm of love and desire. On NPR all of the political talk revolves around the lack of bipartisanship and how the senators are all trying to defy either each other or the president. The desire for power seems much greater than any desire to establish even the premise of friendship. However, Professor Bork was able to merge my ideals between friendship and politics together. Our political system is divided up into factions, especially between Republican and Democrat. I used to think of these factions as exclusive clubs more than any sort of group of friends, but maybe that’s what the party is. Even outside of the white house it seems that if you are a Republican then you have Republican friends. If you are a Democrat then you have Democrat friends. There is very little intermingling unless you want to be looked at as a threat to both sides. Whether the politicians want to admit it or not, our current political leaders have taken a slight turn towards Karl Schmitt’s view of politics. They place themselves with their “friends” because they have similar views and use their “friendship” as a tool to get what they want. The reason why these politicians have these friends is to go against their enemies. Sometimes I see Schmitt’s point of view. The times when I most need friends are when I have enemies. If someone is making me feel bad then I don’t want to internalize the pain, I want to share it with a friend who can help stand against this common enemy.

            Dierda’s ideal of friendship and politics is much more of a fantasy. He feels that we should be friends with everyone and that it should be, “beyond concepts of homogeneity”. This goes against the typical thought where we should hang out with people of like desires because only they will be able to understand us. We usually pick the people we are around due to their agreement towards our thoughts and personality. It would be strange to say that someone is your friend because they make you question your ideals and because you get into heated arguments with them. If someone told me that they were always getting into arguments with someone I would think the pair to be more enemies then friends. Yet maybe this says something about be because Dierda points out that, “naming an enemy says something about the self”. The fact that we have this necessity to have an enemy, our own antagonists through life, says something about our lack of confidence in ourselves. We shouldn’t need these enemies to obtain power and influence. We should be able to live in a world where we can all be friends and still feel like we have a commonality.