We live in a political time in U.S. politics where public officials propose non-solutions to non-problems (a border wall is a good example), while actively working to make real public problems worse (failing to renew CHIP funding is a good example).

Meanwhile the idea that the purpose of political life is to solve collective problems of the body politic seems to have vanished.  Well, not vanished.  But it is hard to find in the midst of all the shouting.

I wrote a book about citizenship.  It’s about sexual citizenship, so you might have missed the citizenship part, what with the sexual part, but I argued, following a number of smart scholars, that all citizenship is sexual citizenship.

The book focuses on specific policies that engage in sexual regulation.  These policies were also intended not to solve actual public problems, but to reinforce and valorize powerful political entrepreneurs’ and public officials’ ideas about families and family life. The policies especially serve to distinguish between those who are deserving as citizens, and those who are not. Each of the policies–the 1996 welfare law, abstinence-only sex education, DOMA–target specific groups for punishment. Each of these policies was a non-solution to a non-problem.

Reality is more complex.  Usually, simple solutions to complex public problems are not very effective.

Then, there are times when simple solutions really might work-like giving people who don’t have enough more: more money, more food, more shelter, more education funding, more medical care-but we find lots of reasons not to use these simple solutions.

The mechanism for deciding who is deserving is an ideal form of family-in the book I call it the “white hegemonic heteronormative family ideal”, a mouthful to be sure-is sexuality and sexual “responsibility”. But certain groups, by nature of their very identity, their very being, are by definition not deserving. Thus we find reasons to punish these groups, rather than to give people what they need.

Once your book is published, you don’t expect it to become more relevant or timely, but it seems to me that the points that many scholars have made, and that I make about deservingness and inclusion, are becoming more and more relevant. The circle of the deserving is narrowing, and the circle of the undeserving has broadened to include just about all of us.

This is surely a sign that we need a better politics.  But that politics won’t just appear:  we have to fight for it. We have to, along with our neighbors, build the power to create a better politics.  It has to be a politics where all of us have the ability to be human, to act as members of the polity, together. And where we are all deserving.