Retroactively Approaching the 2008 Financial Crisis

The relationship between conservatism and populism is a curious thing. After all, conservatism, such as it was, didn't have a real positive nameable relationship to populism in America until the late 1950's. Before that, conservatism and populism were either tied together with sham political parties who espoused a horridly reductionist status quoism (think of the Whigs, whom Richard Weaver excoriates in The Ethics of Rhetoric) or with a somewhat stable and fairly straightforward class relationship (progressivism emerged as a version of populism which made no bones about positioning the haves of the late 19th and early 20th century actively against the have-nots, and also made clear the state had an affirmative role in regulating those industries).

Barry Goldwater and committed conservative grassroots movement changed all that. By combining a political focus on limited government with literature (like that of the John Birch Society) which positioned Communism as an omnicompetent (and existential) threat to the American way of life, the "American people" could finally be articulated to conservatism in a meaningful and sustainable way. The anger and frustration attached to a 1960's that was full of considerable less economic vigor than the decade that proceeded it came to be felt by a "Silent Majority" primed for small government by Goldwater's unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign but ushered into being through effective plays on affect which relied on articulating linkages between the annihilation threatened by the Soviet menace and the socio-political annihilation of a certain kind of middle class hegemony authored by the agitations of social movements.

One resurgence of conservatism populism in the post Cold War era (taking for granted, as I do, that Reagan's conservative "populism" is not ontologically nameable as such, premised as it was upon summoning a disembodied public rather than an explicitly constituted angered vox populi) can be seen today in what remains of the Tea Party discourse that has been coopted by conservatism. This post wants to make one simple argument: those discourses have their roots in the controversy over the bailouts under the TARP program in late September, 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the general Wall Street angsts.

After Lehman collapsed and it became clear that economic contagion could not be contained, public discourse ran rampant. One of the most common and immediately emergent memes was that of "Wall Street vs. Main Street" which immediately became not just a theme of both presidential campaigns, but also a regular feature of newspapers covering the collapse, who often, following the "Person on the Street" style of interviews and reporting, asked repeatedly what the harsh times on "Wall Street" might mean for "Main Street," presumably an Anytown, U.S.A. where everyone had worked hard and soundly (they thought) invested their hard earned cash in order to achieve the American dream.

The move to WSVMS (as I will call it) I take to be about the reclamation of agency. After all, one thing the popular and media discourses during the crisis agree is that there was a general sense of fear and anxiety tied to the opacity of the economic situation: not even those on Wall Street knew what was happening, but the rapid report of economic crisis was making it clear that the economic interconnectedness which was thought to raise all boats might in fact hoist "Main Street" on its own petard of dreams. With "ordinary America" lacking economic agency in public discourse, reduced to little more than an epiphenomena of broader market trends in a rapidly moving global market, the language of populism becomes an appealing way to reclaim a sense of self: after all, the investment in "the people" treats them, ideally, as an all-knowing and ominscient form of the self, magnified intensely and projected as a powerful political force with good judgment (we may leave our critiques of "the people" as demagogues at the door here: of course, they are, but for the purposes of that projecting act of future imagining, they conceive of themselves as powerful and right, even more so in the context of an American where socio-cultural discourses coach us that individualism is the sine qua non of rightness).

While Obama rode to victory in part on his credibility as an economic reformer, the kind of anti-Wall Street sentiment that he fostered had an element of humility in it: he regularly in campaign speeches and stump stops, like one in Ohio in mid-October, acknowledged that part of the crisis was the ordinary Americans had been spending too much. Contrast this with the emergence of the Tea Party, whose discourse understood metaphorically "real Americans" to correspond with "successful Americans:" rather than positioning ordinary American as fallible folks capable of making a financial mistake (one that turns the financial crisis into a kind of representative anecdote for the necessity of humility in arranging orientations towards the world) the conservative populism of the Tea Party took financial failings as an index of one's meaning as a person: if you were suffering you were, in Rick Santelli's words, a "loser" who didn't deserve to get bailed out. What the effervescent rhetoric of the Tea Party did was to transmogrify a frustration with Wall Street (and also a frustration with a lack of agency) into anger at those whose irresponsibility was harming the American economy.

These are some brief thoughts: more refined ones soon.

The Politics of the "Bain Capital" Slurs

Not long ago, the media world was atwitter with the news that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry (now dearly departed) had decided to break an unwritten rule of conservative politics and launch attacks on Mitt Romney for his role as a cutthroat efficiency maven while at Bain Capital, a consulting firm. Gingrich's attacks prompted a serious outcry from pundits, who either concerned that Romney wasn't well suited to rebutting the arguments or thought Gingrich had a legitimate point that might resonate with an electorate who placed the economy at the top of their list of concerns.

The issue was what most called Romney's record of "creative destruction" (Romney's preferred term as well) while working at Bain. Romney successfully eliminated inefficiencies, turned failing companies into successful ones, and also let (made?) companies that were clunkers fail. Romney had previously played on his private sector success as an asset in an election that might come down the economy: this is particularly true when you consider that Romney, as a conservative governor in a very blue state, had to make a number of concessions on liberal issues (health care, gay rights) that wouldn't play particularly well to a base still in the mood for a candidate who could not just mildly differentiate themself from Barack Obama but define themself in an entirely oppositional way. This means that Romney's record in the private sector is absolutely a key linchpin for his campaign: in order to compare himself to Obama, long a man of the public sector, Romney needs to be able to wield a mantle of expertise on all matters economic, based mostly on him "having really done it" while Obama stood on the political sidelines and mettled.

I doubt sincerely whether the facts of Romney's tenure at Bain will much matter for messaging purposes in either the Republican primary (which, btw, Romney will probably still win handily. For the love of God, Newt freaking Gingrich?) or the general election. And I mean that in the following sense: even if the "fact" is that Romney made companies leaner and freed up inefficiencies to both redistribute workers and create more profits (that then flow back into the economy) Romney's narrative will have to first have an awkward encounter with the obverse side of the American dream: that for all the winners in America, there are losers, too, and those losers might either not want to confront their status as such, or might be losers only by virtue of some factor beyond their control (rather than say, their lack of fitness or capacity for certain sorts of work).

To really understand why this matters, we need to go back to the Spring of 2008, when the economy was facing a difficult time, and Phil Gramm said openly that America, during tough economic times, had become "a nation of whiners." Immediately afterward Gramm, who had been a campaign surrogate and adviser for John McCain, took a less visible role in McCain's campaign after withering criticism from pundits, journalists, and ordinary Americans who understood their own dwindling economic prospects as something real, and not just part of a "mental recession." Of course, Gramm wasn't that wrong about the "mental recession" claim: conservatives and liberals alike tend to agree that attitudes (read: consumer confidence) impact the REAL measure of an economy's strength i.e. optimism, willingness to invest given the promise of profit, etc. This didn't matter: by calling those who were struggling "whiners" Gramm tapped into a fear that the typical discourses of liberal individualism in America are effective at displacing: the fear that one might just not be good enough.

After all, Americans are coached that they are special, unique, and exceptional folks, gifted with talents and powers that will help them get to a place of real material and spiritual success. We can find evidence of this either in advertisements (which often hold that the simple capacity to choose the right product makes us special), political discourses (show me a politician who has publicly disavowed the American Dream, and I will show you a non-entity. Moreover, this dream is accomplished by hard work and the application of ingenuity, rather than positioned as an effect of a combination of talent and luck), and plucky cultural narratives about overcoming adversity (Ragged Dick, or choose your superhero). Financial and personal success is an index of one's talent and agency. This accords with how exceptionalist narratives work: if we achieve our City on a Hill through a combination of hard work and good luck, there is nothing to distinguish us from others who work hard other than some kind of beneficial cosmic fortune. On the other hand, if we own that City on a Hill because we mixed our labor with it, it is ours.

This is different from the account of virtue Aristotle gives in the Politics, where talent and hard work are not enough. Chance is preserved as an element contributing to greatness: with talent and hard work but bad luck, one is simply not great. Now this initially seems harsh, but on a second blush it provides a rather appealing account for how to judge success because it installs a kind of ontological humility upon those who succeed: they are never as great as their successes, but they are also (presuming they work hard) never as bad as their failures.

What does it mean, then, for politics to take place on a plane where chance has been eviscerated in favor of an omnicompetent liberal subject who is all knowing, all seeing, and all succeeding? Firstly, it means that those who have not succeeded will struggle to be understood as victims of chance or bad fortune: instead, their status as less materially successful will be read as an index of their competence and effectiveness as a human. (Think of the health care patient facing death lustily booed during an early GOP primary debate: this only makes sense if they are facing a fate they earned). Second, this acts to determine in advance how individuals are understood in a way that tautologically secures one's position in the social hierarchy: not being well off indicates you lack that special something. Instead of the possibility that you have encountered challenges and failed to defeat them, challenges are denaturalized, and thought to collapse easily upon the power of AMERICAN INDIVIDUAL HARDWORKING MCAWESOMEPERSON.

When Phil Gramm complains that America has become a nation of whiners, it is exactly the last thing that anyone who is poor off wants to hear. After all, they've been coached and told and encouraged to think that they are special, talented, and that if they just worked hard things would work out. And yet sometimes, they don't. Without chance, we get a nation of whiners instead of nation of folks facing some hard luck. Without chance, we understand a health care bill that rewards people who have bad market acumen. Without chance, we understand a social safety net to be a form of social Darwinism rather than insurance against fortune's worst.

But without chance, Romney's acumen at diagnosing businesses' flaws and inefficiencies enables him to straightforwardly personify the reasoned decisions that displace many within the economy. Quick reminder: subjectivity works through processes of negative definition and scapegoating, rarely trending towards the positive and/or processes of mortification which humble the subject. Folks without jobs are unlikely to understand their bad situation as something which they have entirely earned themselves. One person's "inefficiencies" are another persons livelihood. If Romney's professional legacy becomes understood as personifying and embodying what the conservative principles of "increased efficiency" mean then in an election where the economy matters, his professional success will become a millstone around his neck. "Efficiency" and other such buzzwords work effectively as abstract concepts, but have a more difficult road to hoe when people can place them in a context that ensures a personal identification against them. Put it this way: you can repeat over and over that a rising tide helps all boats, but when some boats aren't doing so well, they might not give a damn about the narrative.

Political Theory, Representation, and Economic Crisis

Both political theory and economic theory must account for the question of representation: how to make a government or a market into an effectively functioning quilting point for a political imaginary without becoming so powerful that the emptiness of such institutions of peoples threatens a legitimation crisis. At least one way that Rousseau managed the crisis of representation was, as Honig notes in Democracy and the Foreigner, was through the introduction of a "Foreign Founder" who could sidestep the democratic crisis threatened by having a politics defined purely by a people. If there is is nothing external to the people, then there is no such thing as politics (Schmitt, Arendt, what have you). The figure of the foreign founder created a not-entirely-natural yet not-entirely-mythical figure that could permit decisionism, and in so doing would interrupt what would otherwise be a troubling negative feedback loop of popular sovereignty. The American founders could not resort to myths of foreign founders, since they were in fact foreigners in their own space. Instead, they articulated republican institutions as the mechanism to interrupt this feedback loop: the roots of decisionism came to be known in the split between government and people that inaugurated the people at the same moment that it sabotaged their totality, or full democratic being.

Similarly, Adam Smith-style capitalism was capable of sidestepping crises in representation that might otherwise boggle or make a mockery of market prediction. Because their remained certain services and functions for which the market was thought incapable, the danger that economics might become incapable of recognizing itself was minimal: the state served as a regulatory bulwark capable of repeatedly reminding the market (and marketized subjects) of its limits. The aggressive increase in class consciousness, characteristic of American identity through the founding period and heightened first during the Civil War and then again during the Progressive-era political responses to the heightened perils of the Industrial Revolution, further served to stabilize not only a "political" people (because the state could be captured for use on either side of political struggle for and against various peoples) meant that the market was effectively politicized by calls to government action on social, political, and economic issues.

The sixties signified a very serious sea-change in how American political identity thought about the relationship between government and people: those who boosted and organized for Barry Goldwater beginning at the end of the 1950's operated under the assumption that an ideological war between government and market had been waged and that government had won: the overweening presumption, even for Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, was that as long as the government had the capacity to intervene into a market, that market could not be trusted to provide to maximum efficacy the products and promises it had made. The Goldwater organization, as Rick Perlstein among others have pointed out, lost the battle in the 1964 presidential election but one the war by producing a vision of "the American people" constituted not through internal oppositions between peoples but instead by producing the liberal individual as the natural (one might even say ontological) contrapuntal opposite of the state. The result was that governmental interventions into the market could now be taken in one of two ways: they could either be read as governmental intervention to fix problems where the "market" had failed, or they could be understood as distortions of what would otherwise be a perfectly natural economic outcome. Because "the people" now took on an ontologically oppositional position versus the government, presumption lied on the side of an interpretation which, because discourses repeated reify and reconstitute in familiar rather than challenging ways identities, governmental intervention tended more often than not to be read unnecessary rather than pointing to inefficiencies in the market in which "the people" by virtue of being the market all would share participation in.

We might quibble with critics of neoliberalism, but if we accept as a starting point their thesis that more rather than less of the system and lifeworld is today given over to internal self-regulation by the invisible hand of the market, we can see that what is at stake in times of economic turmoil is a crisis of representation of the sort political theorists like Rousseau most feared: if the market amalgamates more and more political and social life (and indeed, while there remain material zones of un-capture, one need only to closely read the transcript of a single GOP debate to find a near-consensus as to the IDEAL and therefore "real" extent of ideology in this case) then there is no space for a politics (that is, the ability to define a people) because the market is the beginning and the end of politics as such. A "people" defined tautologically by their status as people (that is to say, a collective identity ratified by nothing less and nothing more than its being a people over and against the existence of a government whose existence in an imaginary sense is democratic but in a real sense is ontologically opposed to that very identity it authorizes) do not really exist, except insofar as they are not coterminus with the government. Economic crises threaten a crisis of representation, in which the true culprit for the crisis is unrepresentable (because if the crisis is the market, and the market=the people, the market cannot be taken as the source of its own failure, as it is not judged in neoliberal discourse through its success or failure but instead by its existence as a market) and the inability to produce (we might say embody) the market speaks to what Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics as the kind of shadow chasing game of individualized market economics: a market always chasing its own non-existence, always making, retroactively, a kind of invisible hand that never quite lives up the sum of its judgments. It is in this vein that we should read discourses that respond to the economic crisis: many of them, it seems, want to embody and make real the villains behind the crisis, whether they be Wall Street fat cats, irresponsible homeowners, sinister loan officers, or a government incapable of reining in its own spending. Because the market remains unrepresentable, however, something in these scapegoatings will awesome seem to miss its mark.

On Frank Luntz and Word Choice

Interesting new article over at Yahoo News on the GOP's messaging response to Occupy Wall Street. As is customary, media guru Frank Luntz has been brought in to massage the conservative message in order to blunt the impact that OWS is having on the national conversation. Luntz is something of an interesting character, especially to those of us housed in communication studies: rhetoricians tend to have a love/hate relationship with him, and this is particularly true of rhetoricians with a progressive bent. For many, Luntz represents the worst kind of vision of communication: dupe the masses with the right kind of word and frame, and to follow up on Carl Weather's infamous proclamation with a difference, "you've got yourself a stew" of conservative messaging. Luntz's semi-regular appearances on Fox News, especially during campaign season, feature audiences responding to debates in real time with clickers that allow them to voice their happiness or displeasure with the goings on. For all the groans that Luntz is nothing more than a charlatan, however, there is often a sense of envy for his abilities. Whether its his invocations against "climate change" rather than "global warming" or his move to rename the estate tax the "death tax," progressives often wonder where "our Frank Luntz" is in these discussions. (George Lakoff, not an elephant, comes to mind as a potential counterpoint here.) To put it shorter: the response to Luntz is "Hey, I can't believe he's doing that! I wish WE could do that!"

Well now, Luntz is advising the GOP how to handle the Occupy movement. That Luntz is thinking about this messaging is important, and it indexes the extent to which Occupy has actually influenced the national conversation. Luntz indeed declares his terror that Occupy might actually begin to change the national conversation and opinion about capitalism. Some of his proposals:

-Don't say "capitalism"

-Say "takes" not "taxes"

-Replace "middle class" with "hardworking taxpayers"

-Replace "jobs" with "careers"

-Call "government spending" waste

-"Cooperate" but don't "compromise"

-Elicit empathy by identifying with the "obviousness" of inequality

-"Job creators" not "entrepreneurs"

-Don't ask folks to "sacrifice"

-Blame Washington for everything

What's remarkable about these suggestions is that, in comparison with Luntz's previous moves like reframing the estate tax as a death tax, these suggestions are actually somewhat banal. I think they index the extent to which the conservative position's discursive pivots have been eroded by Obama's relatively centric political discourse. To some degree Luntz's moves also reveal something of a poverty in conservative political discourse as well. Lest you think I'm just some sort of Lefty "concern troll" speaking flippantly think about it this way: A MAJOR CONSERVATIVE OPERATIVE JUST TOLD PEOPLE THAT CAPITALISM IS NOT A STRATEGIC WORD IN AMERICA. IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN. QUITE A WHILE AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION.

That's quite a thing there. See, the brilliance of Luntz's previous moves, like replacing the phrase "global warming" with "climate change" was his ability to move away from or into words and phrases with a sort of polarizing power: "warming" signals heat, "estate tax" doesn't generate the same emotional resonance as "death tax" etc. In this case, however, Luntz is unable to move either away from or towards more polarized terms. I mean, "job creator" instead of "entrepreneur"? Are we just back to bashing the French? And I'm pretty sure "Blame Washington" was already on the conservative messaging menu.

Anyway, the point of this post isn't to clown on Frank Luntz (who is quite smart), but instead to make one point: the rather tepid options available for reframing the national conversation in the wake of Occupy indicate that the movement really has put the idea of inequality back on the table. Obama's jobs speech also helped: he didn't shy away from marking differences either, talking about class in a rather meaningful way. This may be because the economy "seems" different to people than say global warming: its effects are experienced regularly every day. Once you can no longer deny the existence of a problem with a tactic like an epistemic filibuster, you are left to debate the causes. The acknowledgement of inequality forces Luntz and others to double down on the figure that makes so much conservative politics possible: the hardworking, right thinking, and infallible citizen whose good work and effort affirm at every turn the political commitment to limited government. So long as economic problems persist, alternate interpretations of events can be subjected to more scrutiny through choices made by rhetors whether in sloganeering or in political speech.

Candidate Whack-A-Mole

The current crop of GOP candidates is characterized by one constant: it is a two-person race between Mitt Romney and someone else. The parade of figures thought to be capable of challenging Romney's hegemony (shall we say "Romgemony"?) has been a cavalcade of characters: first Michelle Bachmann, whose commitment to the base for a while allowed her to evade showing her warts: then Rick Perry, who took Bachmann's base but whose campaign has been so disastrous that "Hindenburgesque" would be an understatement: then Herman Cain, who ended up on rocky shoals not because of the incoherence of the 9-9-9 (now just 9-9) plan but instead from a combination of foreign policy blunders and accusations ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault: and now we have Newt Gingrich, the zombie politico of the last great anguish of the angry white male, who is in most ways more accomplished as a politician than any of these other potential Romney enemies, but has considerable personal and professional baggage himself, having overseen the government shutdown in the mid-Nineties which was regarded as a catastrophe for the GOP.

To what do we owe this parade of prospects, each one opposing Romney before being hoisted on their own petard? It has to do with the sincerity of the demands for freedom, liberty, and smaller government emanating from the Tea Party, and the relationship that does demands have with the ideology of conservatism. One does not need to venture too far into the world of political and national identity to know one key precept: people define themselves through an imaginary relationship with other people. In the case of American politics, this mechanism for identification cannot shake free of a central recalcitrance: American political culture and discourse so thoroughly value the idea of the free individual that opposition to individualism manifests itself in any number of ways. Chiefly, support of the managerial liberal state (here I refer broadly to statist basics, like social safety nets, which by reductio the Tea Party and conservative base oppose as anathema) is coded as an intrinsic opposition to the power of the liberal individual, because it operates enthymematically by following that assumption that, freed to act, the liberal individual will do good. The other end of this proposition, which is that for some to rise others must fall, tends to be disavowed with the deployment of particulars that undermine the legitimacy of those participants in the system without challenging the aegis of liberal individualism itself: the failure of some is a result of their intentional choices, but the overall primacy of the "idea" of individual choice is not challenged.

We are only slightly more than a year removed from a midterm election cycle at which the belief in the goodness of this sovereign individual was thoroughly supported at the ballot box. Indeed, while progressives were quick to jump on the failures of figures like Sharon Angle in order to chortle that the Tea Party had undermined itself, such rumblings were of little comfort to those who saw the historically unique shift in the 2010 midterm as, if not a paradigm shift, at least a serious retrenchment in American politics.

Recently, New York Magazine had a little bit of Point/Counterpoint fun with two articles, one by Jonathan Chait and another by Bush-era conservative stalwart David Frum. Chait retroactively rereads Obama's election not as some major paradigm shifting signal in American politics, but instead the business as usual result of practicing a palatable-to-the-mainstream liberalism. Frum agrees by way of a critique of the new-radicalism of the conservative base: the remaining strains of Rockefeller republicanism have been evacuated, he argues, in favor of a new conservative strain which virulently argues for small government at all costs, even at the expense of reason itself. Frum of course is no progressive hero: he made his bones as a neocon under George W. Bush, but he is unique amongst conservatives in his stalwart repudiation of the shift in the conservative base following Obama's election. As he points out, Obama passed a health care bill modelled after a conservative proposal from the 90's: and the response is "down with socialism!"

What seems to be at stake for Chait and Frum is the idea of principle: for Chait the Democrats need to get over worrying about having a pure ethics, and for Frum the GOP needs to have some ability to cooperate and moderate because politics is the art of the possible. What does this have to do with Mitt Romney and "Conservative Candidate X?" Chiefly, Romney appears to be a conservative palatable to folks like Frum: a conservative whose own record (reasonable defenses of gay rights, a statewide health care bill) belies his red campaign rhetoric. This is in contradistinction to say, Bachmann, whose rhetoric and legislative record both play very well to the conservative base. I've long suspected that one of the great achievements of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was the way in which his candidacy moved simultaneously in ways that allowed it to appear both centrist and leftist: centrist to the great moveable "swing voters" while leftist enough to both appeal to the Move.on crowd and goad conservatives into time honored tactics like Communist scaremongering and feting the wealthy.

The constant dance with the "not-Romney" figures in the race to me indexes a certain kind of crisis within conservatism: a legitimation crisis based on attempting to reconcile the intense pseudo-libertarian demands for limited government with the absolute desire to see Barack Obama (and make no mistake: while Harry Reid and more so Nancy Pelosi find themselves as targets of conservative ire, Obama seems to uniquely ignite this fire). I really doubt that the conservative base will throw electability concerns to the wind, (but I don't own a Magic 8 Ball, and posts like this may betray me) because the negative characteristics of identification I referenced earlier are chiefly important in the construction of political identity. To the extent that Obama successfully stands in for "Big Government" its much less about the particular policies he supports (Healthcare, for example, which tends to poll quite well in pieces is one good example. Another is how polls consistently show the public associates TARP with Obama although it was passed by Bush) and much more about how these particular policies serve as condensation points for opposition to Obama. Romney has his warts, but especially given the economy's continued fragility, conservatives will probably remain focused on the "bad" of Obama rather than inconsistencies in their own political advocacy. There is little real drama in the battle between Romney and the "no-chancers:" we seem to have much more an electoral Kabuki theater of sorts than a meaningful primary. But I do think fundamentally that eventual settling upon Romney indicates conservatives will argue by way of the situation rather than by way of principle: they'll attempt to weigh down Obama with his four years rather than producing a charismatic and complex plan of action for the next four years.

Form vs. Content: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

Its fashionable (and interesting) to compare the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. One need not wander too far afield to figure out why: both of them are taking the form (or in the case of the Tea Party when still nascent, took the form) of a sixties style social protest. This form of comparison can, of course, be misleading: as David Zarefsky pointed out in the early 80's in an essay on rhetorical studies's penchant for studying social protest, simply aping the formal characteristics of a social movement (appearing in public, lobbing demands at the state) does not immediately qualify a human gathering as an actual, anti-institutional social movement. However, this point, confined as it was to an article almost 30 years old, seems in some ways to have been lost (if it was ever found) by those comparing the Tea Party and OWS. I too, may prove guilty of this sin. However, I merely plan on assessing how the Tea Party's relevance changes the ways in which OWS can be read by the mainstream media.

To do so requires a reminder about what was truly incredible about the Tea Party: it was a conservative political organization willing to appear in public as an "outsider" organization, that is, as a group claiming to be structurally disempowered politically, and using that status to authorize it demands against the government. Typically, publics theory (especially those who follow closely Michael Warner) understand a key element in discussing political space the identification of those bodies that are marked and visible. Those marked and visible persons, because of their material existence "in" space provide the symbolic resources to construct an unmarked, invisible "mass public" not coterminous with the "marked" public but nevertheless related to them by virtue of the difference they share. But the fact that the Tea Party generated coverage, and was discussed (even in the vein of "are they legitimate?) was key because it established, at a deeper (one might say ontological) level the "truth" of the Tea Party as a protest movement: by virtue of its identification as "not" the public, its existence was certified.

Of course, the underside of this was the Tea Party, by appearing in public, risked marginalizing itself as (to use in an actually relevant way for once) "always already" not the public: by trudging out the white, mostly male, middle aged bodies of the Tea Partiers, they established that they did not belong to the mass public they identified: the progressive, neo-socialist political movement led by Barack Obama. Nevertheless, whatever work the Tea Party did to unhinge a certain version of conservatism from its disembodied position as the structuring possibility of American politics, the Tea Party itself, by measures of either symbolic circulation or policy/electoral success, established itself as a relevant force in American politics.

It was something about the form of the Tea Party that attracted media attention. After all, American for Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich: all of them were demanding lower taxes, smaller government. And its not as if these calls hadn't succeeded: between Clinton-era welfare reform and the Bush tax cuts, such policy positions were riding high. But the combination of electoral victory for Barack Obama and the ardent, energized, and angry Tea Party proved an alluring media target: how was conservatism configuring itself in the wake of the electoral chaos of 2008's repudiation of conservatism? Its actual appearance, that it appeared at all, was a really big deal, because it signaled a kind of refiguring of American political space.

Josh Gunn (whose blog should be mandatory reading) points out in a recent TP/OWS comparison post that there was a pretty substantial "lag time" in the way the media responded to OWS, owing to the difference in the movements form. Josh argues that the Tea Party was a mostly virtual movement, while OWS was fairly "spatial" in that the actual Occupancy of a physical space near a site of injustice matters. I don't disagree but I want to add a supplement: I also think that the history of social protest in America (Full disclosure: I recently read Nixonland and can't get away from it), especially the dominant narrative of the sixties as a battle between authority and hippies/protestors, helped to overdetermine how the form of social protest was itself a kind of content: one that harkened back to the old battles between cops and Yippies, trials of the Chicago 7, civil rights marches in the South, and so on. The Tea Party, however, as a conservative insurrection, produced the possibility that social protest could not be coded immediately as "liberal" on the basis of form alone. So while the right continues to circulate the old "bunch of smelly hippies" arguments, they are finding a lot less circulation in mainstream political discourse than did say, the WTO protests (also, to the Occupiers credit, violence from movement members has been very, very low). Occupy Wall Street may well persist because objections to the movement on a purely formal basis may be difficult to sustain. Instead, content based arguments about the movements demands (or lack thereof, to read the papers of the day) signify that the form of the protest might matter a lot less for deliberation purposes, and that space for meaningful disputes on the basis of policies is posible (though perhaps not likely.)

In sum: the gambit of the Tea Party was that they could appear as outsiders, aping the protest strategies of progressivism to capitalize on the way the symbolic environment on American seemed to be marginalizing them after the 2008 election. However, by legitimizing "appearance in public" as a protest strategy in form alone, one of the most effective conservative arrows used to delegitimize liberal protest politics (the linking of social protest as a "form" to a history of the "loud minority" cataclysms of the 60's) was taken out of the argumentative quiver. To the extent that OWS makes successes in the future, it owes these in part to a conservative belief that social protest could be coopted in the name of conservatism.

More Thoughts on the "Mere Attention" Thesis

As is the custom, I read a great deal of conservative media coverage. This is in no small part because I agree with a lot the sentiments in this piece today by The Nation's Eric Alterman. I am discovering that reading the conservative coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement shines some lights on one of the driving theses in contemporary political study: namely, Michael Warner's observation in Publics and Counterpublics that "A public is constituted by mere attention...The cognitive quality of that attention is less important than the mere fact of active uptake" (p. 87). I follow this, and perhaps tend to agree more often than not. After all, existence is kind of a big deal in a world where political discourses opt to deny the existence of a political "Other" with demands. Take, for example, the constant play of patriotism (this is a tactic of Right and Left, although the Right is better at it) introduced by arguments about the "Americanness" of a particular candidate, party, or political demand. Such arguments circumscribe opposition in such a way that the argument/opponent is thought not to even exist by being outside the space of "America." However, even these arguments are forced to grapple with the possible legitimacy of such claims: in and of itself a minor victory. Conservative strategies of "colorblindness" work by even denying the existence of a "marked" racial subject: their effectiveness is in their actual denial of the possibility of "attention" given to the relevant marks, by denying the existence of a racialized public sphere in the first place.

Its with this in mind that I survey three conservative responses to the OWS movement: Mark Steyn's "American Autum" at NRO, Robert McCain's "DIE YOU COWARDLY COMMIE SCUM!" on his blog and Matt Labash's eyewitness take at The Weekly Standard.

One common thought to all three columnists is a focus on the cleanliness of the protestors. McCain calls them "unwashed," while Labash calls it a "hygenic disaster area," even as Stein implies that the protestors do not know how to bathe. Now I'm not a rally planner or a master of logistics, but if your plan is to occupy a large swath of territory for a long time with a critical mass of people, many of whom are not from the area, it is unclear what options for washing exist: moreover, as these folks are in many cases people who find themselves on the wrong end of the current economic bargain, they probably could not afford hotel rooms. If we are to take these complaints at their face value, we have a standard for social protest: no social protest without regular showers! Of course it seems more likely that this argument circulates because it serves to generate a connection between the image of the unwashed longhairs of the 60's with the contemporary protests: and as those protests also rose up in the face of a Silent Majority, so to do these protestors so revel in their opposition to the establishment that they care not at all about hygiene. Or perhaps: the propriety of public space dictates no unwashed masses protesting! Please, only locally found protestors capable of showering every evening!

This might also support the "attention" thesis. The media can no longer afford to ignore the protests (unlike say, the Malachi Ritchser self-immolation in 2006) in part because the coverage of the Tea Party produced an expectation that protest action was a legitimate form of political behavior. Because the conservative opposition can no longer say "Don't bother with those clowns!" (far too many, it seems, ARE bothering with those clowns) the next step is a denigration of the actors involved: some protests might be ok, but probably only the ones where people are dressed as Colonials rather than as sixties radicals.

McCain points indirectly to this problem in his own commentary, where he complains that while the media went out of their way to find associations between the most "radical" members of the Tea Party crowd, they are not commenting upon statements of global solidarity from organizations like the Workers World Party. Of course, it took almost two weeks for major media coverage to settle upon occupy Wall Street. Counterpose this with the immediate almost universal recirculation of Rick Santelli's "Rant Heard Round the World" that launched the Tea Party: consciousness of that rant a scant two days after it happened (a rant by one person, who just happened to have an institutional megaphone) as opposed to a fairly well attended protest taking a few weeks to make it into major media narratives.

Labash's piece operates by a logic of reduction, focused on attempting to manufacture representative anecdotes for "proper" workers opposed to the protestors. Labash spends some time interviewing someone named "Spooky," and while Labash concedes that the approach has a real organic root, he finds in Spooky (a fellow who is unemployed and unabashedly trying to milk his time at OWS for food and profit) the zeitgeist of the protest: free riding for profit. Pizzas, blankets, they have it all. Labash's focus on the agency of Spooky (and those he represents) occludes the reader from asking the question about how Spooky got where he is today: why is someone so resourceful unemployed? Maybe, Labash notes, he just isn't interested in working: Spooky is homeless by choice and came from Orlando because they are not generous to panhandlers there. Labash's anecdote about Spooky takes up roughly half of his column. This allows Labash to imply his major premise: those who "choose joblessness" like Spooky so they can "come and go as they please" make up the vanguard of the protests.

Labash contrasts Spooky with a black man named David Harvey, who is well dressed, and working as a flyer distributor, who says that we ought to "Complain all you want--but on your way to work." This again, begs the question: what about those who do not have a job? The implicit rebuttal is, of course, that these people should go get jobs. Whether or not one is employed is resulted to a simple matter of individual choice: choose (wisely) to get a job or choose (irresponsibly) to not work and simply float.

Labash also quotes a magazine poll indicating that 37% of the protestors think capitalism is immoral. I must admit, given the way the conservatives describe these protests, I rather expected that number to come in at roughly double. Only slightly more than a third...meaning, what, the 0ther 63% are good red blooded Americans who also happen to have legitimate gripes?

McCain's tactic is to ask, with an even/or style, are the revolutionaries mainstream/relevant or are they wacky Communist psychopaths? McCain posits this as a forced choice, buying off and eliding another possibility: that the protests might turn out to be both radical AND popular! Such would be radical politics: a meeting between radicality and general publicity that reconfigures the political.

Mark Steyn's column advances one central argument: that the youth of American are lazy, and want to enjoy a Western lifestyle without earning it. They only like an open border policy because it brings in cheap immigrant labor to do the jobs they don't want, and they are apolectic over having massive amounts of student loans and no career prospects. The question begged is: if Americans have a trillion dollars in student loans, how is it that every individual's judgment is so woeful that they all got a student loan? And in fact if it is woeful than what good comes from reducing individual's agency in making choices (they can't be trusted to make educational decisions, obviously)? Once again being bad off is understood as a choice, with luck, misfortune, and the actions of other individuals and institutions eradicated.

All the responses manifest an anxiety about what Occupy Wall Street means. I mean that in the following way: the discursive performance of all three works acts to A) reduce the protestors to exceptional rather than representative actors, B) locate their status as unemployed/economically disadvantaged as a result of "bad judgment" or an inability to make the right choice, and C) to imply that a concern about economic status is revolutionary rather than sincere and legitimate. The "mere attention" received by Occupy Wall Street, combined with the newfound legitimacy of political protest as a form (in the wake of the Tea Party's rise) necessitates these discursive maneuvers, because the sensus communis can not be trusted to ignore the protests so long as they are receiving attention. Part of the anxiety of communication is the anxiety of interpretation and its multiples: this condition is accentuated under the conditions of liberalism, where individual judgment's sovereignty is encoded in a powerful web of social discourses. We might double down on this proposition in a democracy: the terror that a set of individual judgment's might reign sovereign, and thus reconfigure political space itself, is somewhat terrifying indeed.