As soon as it began the Tea Party
was visual. This was a calculated choice. Influential conservative activist and
writer Michelle Malkin, for example, compiled photographs from the first day of
Tea Party rallies, taking pictures from sites as far flung as San Diego, Tampa,
Cleveland, and Shelby, Alabama. Makin, a self-described “mother, wife, blogger,
conservative syndicated columnist, author, and Fox News Channel contributor”
represents a typical type of conservative public intellectual, having gotten
her start as a syndicated columnist but moving on to becoming a conservative
hero of sorts for writing books like In
Defense of Internment, which addressed the Supreme Court’s decision to
allow Japanese internment in World War II. Malkin’s position as a movement
leader in the conservative blogger/activist infrastructure suggests that one
can capably interpret these photographs as an accurate representations of how
conservatives conceived of the Tea Party and its meaning. The post on Malkin’s
website is entitled “Tea Party photo album: Fiscal responsibility is the new
counterculture.” The presentation underscores a key component of the Tea
Party’s configuration in public discourse as formally organized by a logic of social movement that resonates
within an American tradition of civil disobedience and political resistance. Indeed,
the title of the post ”suggests that the majority’s of Americans are
financially irresponsible, untrustworthy, and immature. This statement supports
that worldview, but it also induces a pause: does not the word counterculture
summon images of Abbie Hoffman and yippies being chased with tear gas and rock
and roll music at Woodstock?
Some
might suggest this is just more data in a long running study on the powers of
capitalism to commodify opposition and criticism. In a long form essay in The Baffler that would become a full-throated
book, Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland suggested in “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”
that “our notion about what's wrong with American life and how the figures
responsible are to be confronted haven't changed much in thirty years. Call it,
for convenience, the ‘countercultural idea.’ It holds that the paramount
ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been
described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy,
logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian.”[i] We
have, according to the authors, lost the time where being counter-cultural
meant something, as “its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official
aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial
culture.”[ii]
By coopting “hip” and “cool,” corporate powers have transformed those concepts
into weapons for consumerism in the war on subjects who might attempt to be
otherwise. Frank and Weiland are focused on corporations, but Malkin’s efforts
to frame the Tea Party as counter-cultural suggests that the appeal of being
“against the system” infiltrates even conservative political vocabularies as
well. Though conservatism previously articulated its opposition to the system
through vocabularies opposed to “political correctness” police and government
bureaucrats, the Tea Party found considerable appeal in describing itself as an
anti-systemic and grassroots organization of
“ordinary people” who defined themselves against a system that was
extraordinary in its commitment to greed and irresponsibility. Indeed, those
who attended a Tea Party would hear speeches railing against government
spending, high taxes, bailouts, and a rising culture of American
irresponsibility. At the same time the dark side of counter-culture and the
threat that it posed to order and established conservative hierarchies like
race could also be neutralized through the appropriation of these forms and the
draining of them of their radical content i.e. mapping them onto orderly white
bodies.
A person scrolling
through Malkin’s post would observe, in quick succession, a photograph of a
mass of people in San Diego, shot slightly out of focus so that their signs are
unreadable, another shot of the same crowd featuring white men and women
holding signs reading “Repeal The $Pork$ or Your Bacon is Cooked” and “Proud
American Capitalist”, shots or protestors on a street corner in North Carolina,
one far out featuring the figure of the size of the national debt
($3,000,000,000,000) and a smaller shot of a young girl wearing a t-shirt
reading “OBAMA! Get your Hands Out of my Piggy Bank! Alone .” Then we are
transported to Nashville, where protestors have signs reading “Bailouts=Robbery”
on the steps of the capitol building while they have “Free Markets Not Free
Loaders” signs in the office of Congressman Jim Cooper. Then we move to Portland
where a small group gathers by the river before heading to Shelby Alabama where
six individuals sit out on a glum rainy day with signs reading “No Pork 4
Catfish,” attached to a narrative suggesting the bravery of those went out in a
rainstorm. Other shots follow, from Lansing (“Born To Be Taxed to Death!,”
Cleveland (“No Taxation Without Deliberation,”) Denver (Stimulate Business Not
Govt,) and yes, Chicago, the site of the Santelli inspired Tea Party (“No More
Bailouts.”)[iii]
The self-portrait of a nascent movement painted by these photographs is one of
a restless and frustrated citizenry, one tired of governmental priorities and
spending that are out of touch with the average Americans.
These photos
amalgamated by Malkin represent the first wave of protests, and a second wave
followed on Tax Day 2009. Because many conservatives have complained that the mainstream
media’s selections of Tea Party imagery are tainted by liberal bias, I have
tried to choose a representative sample of photographs that are constituted by
conservative self-reporting to get a proper of index of how the Tea Party imagines itself. To this end I examine
photographs from the three tax day protests, in Cleveland, Chattanooga, St.
Louis, and Des Moines. Three of these four cities are cities in swing states,
and both Iowa and Tennessee have substantial enough ties to rural areas of
America that the sample should prove roughly representative.
The aggregated
photo albums share several characteristics. 1) They are chock full of
photographs which produce a kind of “populist claustrophobia” in which a mass
of people crowd the photo lens, and broader perspective is mostly lost, with
the lens caught up with bodies. 2) There is a standard load of patriotic
images, often constructed in alliance with signifiers of revolution, for
examples the famous “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag super-imposed on an
American flag. Many markers and signs
signal a kind of nostalgia, either for America’s revolutionary past or for a
time of normalcy where ideographs like “freedom” are positioned as lost to the
trauma of recent politics. 3) There are an abundance of signs and images
associated with anxieties about Communism, mostly articulated to Obama, i.e.
the Obama “O” covered with a hammer and sickle. Concerns about bailouts mix in
with this visual miasma.
In figure 1.1,
taken from the Cleveland Tea Party, we see a representative of the
claustrophobia typical of these photographs. The only intelligible signs or flags are the
two American flags on the right side of the shot. There is no visible space in
between the crowd and the buildings in the background. The buildings are also
government buildings, part of the Cleveland downtown park dedicated to war
veterans and the space of government offices. In figure 1.2, the people again
crowd the buildings but also face the camera, with a set of more intelligible
signs and shirts, including “Obama Won, America Lost,” and “Stop Bailing Out
Failure.”[i] In
both shots the people’s dress is casual, with sweaters and sweatshirts and
jackets suggest not only the chilly weather but also informality.
The aggressive,
presenced, and activated shot of “the people” brings to mind the classic trope
of demophobia, or fear of “the people.” As old as democracy itself, demophobia
derives from the undecidability that exists at the heart of democratic
politics: the promise of rule by “the people” offers to project the self into
the seat of power, but also raises the darker possibility of a disjunct between
one and the many. Robert Ivie suggests the American founders were mindful of
this concern: they strongly shared it and developed a republican governmental
structure to choke out the various malaises of democracy.[ii]
While the presentation of “the people” by citizen photojournalists satisfies
the desire to find the exact people vicrimized by the financial crisis and
resulting bailouts, “the people” brings these various demophobic fears, however
displaced. The location of “the people” in one spatio-temporal coordinate
corresponds with the evacuation of democracy’s second promise, that of
accepting and embracing heterogeneity. Hariman and Lucaites indicated that
effective public photography should serve to constitute a balanced tension between particularity and universality. These
photographs read like the fever dreams of the imaginary of the mass public, where
the public appears as Warner suggests it has often been imagined: white and
male. Of course, it also differs from the previously mass public of Warner’s
world in another sense: it appears.
This observation is not incidental. It is constitutive of the peculiar paradox
suggested by the photos suggested by these citizen photojournalists. The silent
majority speaks visually. No longer reserved, they crowd and hem in the seat of
government.
The scene both
suggests and conceals the opposite of that most modern of terrors,
totalitarianism by big government. Gilles Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2 that a key development in
modern cinema and visuality was its relationship to the rise of Hitler, which
“gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject but the masses
subjected.”[iii]
For Deleuze, then, “the people are missing” in the Western imaginary to the
extent that they are figured as victims of politics. The public appearance of this people attempts to negotiate that
democratic paradox, that “the people” are both the object of politics but also
its creator. This paradox runs deep, especially given the change in political
grammars generated by the “New Right” of the 1960’s, which sought to define a
collective “people” on the basis of their opposition to the government rather
than to define a “people” against other elements of civil society in a push to
extract more resources vis-à-vis the government. A fundamental element of American political
anxiety and fear is the fear of a government, embedded not only in the
mythology of the revolutionaries, but also in the ties that America has to
opposing totalitarianism, both in the German and Soviet cases. The paradox was
that “the people” were thought to be out of power but of course they are positioned
to make demands precisely because they are “outside” of power. Producing a
people simultaneously victimized by but also resistant to the government pilots
the imaginary through this contradiction: positioning the people as emerging
explicitly in opposition to the convergence of elite power in government
suggests the “people” have agency but also legitimate claims of disempowerment.
Activation of “the people” trades in demophobia to remind us that “the people”
can act and that those actions may be the dangerous or even exuberant
expressions of a “people” that cannot be controlled.
The claustrophobic “people” of these
photographs suggest that the threat of violence found in both the demophilic
and demophobic accounts of politics may actually stem from the same source: “the
people’s” role as a function rather
than a fact in politics. Recall the
Rousseauian paradox outlined in Chapter 4, that “the people” may not emerge as
a whole from either the outside of the political system (for this would locate
their source in an anti-democratic place “outside” the position of “the
people”) nor may they emerge only from within “the people” (because their
emergence would necessitate alighting on one single definition of “the people”
and as a result contradicting a democratic ethos positioned as, in the
abstract, friendly to all difference.) “The people” exist neither as a natural
voice “out there” in the democratic wild nor do they ever attain the hegemonic
force that would render them the invisible structuring principle of the
political. The claustrophobic and crowding “people” call to mind the kind of
mass envisioned by demophobes but at the same time this particular mass
brandishes neither weapons nor bodily anger. The violence they threaten is
actually violence of indistinction, as their almost uniform racial makeup and
lack of radical political markings suggest. It is the dual violence of both a
popular tyranny read into their uniformity but also the violence threatened by
the absence of particularity Public discourse that finds “the people” does not
only threaten the government, it also threatens those outside that image of
“the people” by smuggling in an antagonistic claim under a democratic guise. That
the implicit argument ad populam has an exclusive component is underscored in
Figure 1.1, where the audience does not even look at the lens.
[i]
Photograph 1.2 includes one of the only shots in all the photo galleries of a
person of color.
[ii] Robert Ivie, Democracy and America's
War on Terror (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005), 14.
[iii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The
Time-Image (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1969), 216.
[i] Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," The New York Times, November 30 1997.
[iii] Michelle Malkin, "Tea Party Photo Album: Fiscal Responsibility Is the
New Counterculture," MichelleMalkin.com,
February 27 2009.
