tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25490880468756093942024-02-20T00:42:42.049-08:00Sounding RhetoricPaul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-3108969665947288672020-07-09T16:48:00.002-07:002020-07-09T16:50:07.251-07:00That "Open Debate" Letter<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Remember Milo Yiannopolous? You might not because deplatforming works. But, this isn’t a post about that. This is a post about the recent affair in <i>Harper’s</i>, occasioned by the signing of an open letter which defended open values, the necessity of debate, and free speech. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But first: Milo. Milo, before he was the poster boy for the Alt Right—a name for trollish White nationalism that has become fashionable in the last half decade but in truth mostly just works to describe conservatism in a way that helps plenty of people disassociate that movement from White nationalism, which is not doing the nation any favors—wrote online about things that some young White men tend to be really passionate about: namely, video games, using slurs for no good reason, playing with irony as a way to defend yourself against charges that you are a piece of shit, and making people that break from the masculine norm of treating other people like garbage feel bad for having ethics. He talked about other things, <i>of course</i>, like how it made you anti-racist if you had sex with Black guys. Real John Brown-type, Milo.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anyway, Milo became a bit of a thing, and he would post offensive shit on Twitter, write offensive things in <i>Breitbart</i>, and go to college campuses and say offensive things. His primary goal was to get people mad, keep them mad, and perform in such a way that their outrage served to validate his position: free speech was absolutely a sacred value, it was to be understood as absolute, and if people saying ribald and hurtful things offended you, you were unfit for the robust, Hobbesian world we inhabit, and you needed to either toughen up or the world would trample you for the rest of your life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We’re better off now that Milo is gone, and that’s partially because Milo, while not the first to seize upon it, was quite adept at taking advantage in one of the key glitches in the liberal democratic matrix: that political liberalism, by virtue of its abstract commitments to individual freedom, facilitates an easy asymmetrical disarmament of the not-assholes in any battle with…what’s the technical terminology? Oh, that’s right, <i>assholes.</i> Liberalism celebrates personhood and so proclaims: everyone gets to have a say. Of course, having a say doesn’t mean that society validates you. That’s (supposedly) the democratic side of the equation: you say stuff, that stuff plays around in public with other ideas, and eventually your idea either comes back to you as it was, modified by virtue of its interaction with others, or as a steaming, burned out husk of a notion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We know, of course, that this is far too ideal a model. In practice, those whose ideas comport with the ideas of those who sit in positions of power tend to get a lot more rope to trip themselves up in public, and they often get reinvited to the public party even after having a few too many drinks and throwing a lampshade on their head that has some slur scrawled on it in Sharpie. How do they get invited back? Simple. They keep pressing the “free speech” button. And a combination of people, some who really can’t understand that abstract ideals find particular forms in specific moments, others who consider themselves iconoclastic warriors for exiles, and still others who, more or less, are just trolls and/or like to watch things burn and people be hurt, gather together to affirm that, while they might not approve of the content, it’s a fact of life that you have to let people say some bad stuff.<o:p></o:p></div>
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You know the gag where a person grabs another person’s hand, and then slaps the owner of the hand in the face with it, and keeps saying “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”? That was Milo’s bit, over and over. He would just say screwed up stuff over and over, taunting the world: “Are you intolerant yet, you <i>tolerant </i>liberals? Are you intolerant yet, you <i>tolerant</i> liberals? Oh my god what <i>hypocrites</i>, you claim to like egalitarianism but <i>you’re making me unequal by judging my speech</i>.” And here’s the thing: Milo was <i>right</i>. Liberalism has no abstract rule or principle to stop someone from troll bombing public reason. Instead, what stops these kinds of interventions are responses, acts, and criticism from other people. You know, like people calling him a racist troll, and eventually getting him banned from major social media sites. And telling people who thought his schtick was funny that, actually, it wasn’t funny, it was offensive, it provided no added value to our already-horribly degraded-probably-was-never-functional-only-really-served-white-guys-and-sometimes-white-women public sphere, and that if you thought that the value of open discourse extended to defending the content of what he said—content which mostly added up to negating the personhood of trans-people, feminists, Black folks, and a whole host of people who, despite what you might have read at <i>Newsmax,</i> are nowhere near owning the levers of power in this or most any other Western nation—you were probably on the side of something that, if it ceased to be drenched in irony and performative histrionics, was pretty indefensible.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I say this only because that <i>Harper’s</i> open letter was nothing more than a respectable Milo-style troll job. A statement about the importance of open principles, attached to no content in particular, just an empty, abstract, universal affirmation that everyone should get to have an opinion. But that’s vacuous. Anyone worth their salt understands that everyone gets to have an opinion. The rubber really hits the road when we figure out whose opinion is more likely to be validated and held by those who gatekeep various institutions and power centers. Empty proclamations that all ideas are welcome have long served to legitimate institutions that are built on histories of violence, accumulation, and denigration. Iris Marion Young, a political theorist, observed this years ago with her discussion of the difference between the activist and the deliberative democrat: the former has to press their point because their life depends on it, the latter can point to the infinite possibilities of discourse and just run out the clock while people starve, work themselves to the bone, and die of a deadly disease because there is little substantive recognition of their personhood among the power holders—that’s composed of discourses and people, by the way—in a given system.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some sharp people signed that statement. They got played. Statements of value are articulated to specific cases. Cops are running around tear gassing and arresting people and they don’t give a shit about some open letter in <i>Harper’s</i>. And the people who signed that statement are affirming a filibuster on any idea which the Milo Yiannopolouses and Jesse Singals of the world choose to bring up under the faint guise of “just asking questions.”<o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-52097429451996584412015-11-12T07:24:00.002-08:002015-11-12T07:24:26.290-08:00On Safe Spaces and the Celebration of the IndividualThere's been a lot of talk about so-called "safe spaces" on the internet, especially in wake up the uproar at Yale over the Halloween controversy regarding social sensitivity and the football players statement/hunger strike at the University of Missouri. Yesterday <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/11/11/raise-voting-age-25-yale-missouri-protests-political-debate-column/75577468/">Glenn Reynolds</a>, an influential conservative blogger and law professor at the University of Tennessee, published a Jonathan Swift-style op-ed which argued that since folks on these campuses couldn't act like adults we should raise the voting age to 25.<br />
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There is perhaps no word that better explains the dominant conservative view of the university as "coddling." There are too many examples to link to: a <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/college-is-not-for-coddling/2015/11/10/6def5706-87db-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html">op-ed</a>, an <i>Atlantic</i> cover story last month on "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/">The Coddling of the American Mind</a>," the conservative blog <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2015/11/09/yale-students-faculty-we-dont-want-to-be-coddled-but-create-a-safe-space-from-offense/">Hot Air</a> addressed the issue, and so on. There have been some very able refutations and engagements with these types of views, and I would especially recommend <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123431/student-activism-serious-business">Roxane Gay's</a> effort over at <i>The New Republic</i>. But this post is not a post that tries to wade into this particular dispute. Instead, I want to talk about the number-one coddling menace in America today: the Republican Party.<br />
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What's that, you say? Republicans aren't coddlers, they're like a hybrid of Mr. Burns from <i>The Simpsons </i>and Snidely Whiplash, twirling sinister mustaches while throwing money at things to make the already-bad-off even worse. Look, no one is accusing Republican policies of being particularly easy on people (Well, their tax plans do do a bit of coddling of the wealthy. But I digress: the record of cutting the social safety net, refusing to enact policies that empower the government to fight private sector discrimination, and their general committment to letting the market "solve" problems more than makes up for their occasionally coddling policy <i>bona fides</i>).<br />
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But if you look at Republican rhetoric, it is a 24/7 coddle-fest. Let's head over to the "issues" page of Marco Rubio's <a href="https://marcorubio.com/issues/">website</a>. Well, this is weird: Marco wants to "promote" strong families (very rude of him to imagine they can't do it on their own): he is focused on "protecting the <b>sacred rights</b> of America's gun owners" which to be fair, they don't have anything with which they can protect themselves; he is also into "protecting America's senior citizens" which alright, the elderly have <i>earned</i> their safe spaces, and of course Marco will "stand up for small business owners" presumably because they've been so coddled by the left that they can no longer advocate for themselves.<br />
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Ok, so Marco is a coddler. But what about someone else? Let's head over to Ted Cruz's <a href="https://www.tedcruz.org/">website</a>. Oh wow: right here on the first page, we see that Cruz will appear at a "Rally for Religious Liberty" at Bob Jones University. Americans are "under fire for their religious convictions" and thus in need of higher support and advocacy. Look at the list of other speakers at this event: among them are Joe Kennedy, a high-school football coach who openly continues to violate the Constitutional separation of church and state, and Angela Hillenbrand who was "threatened with jail" for wanting to invoke God in her high school valedictorian speech although who, in fact, was supported by the legal system in the final ruling on her case. On the one hand, someone who is openly violating the Constitution needs our help. Why not just tell him he's wrong? Or do you need to remind him that America is a "safe space" for his beliefs over and against the Constitution? Why bring on someone <i>who won their legal case</i> and celebrate their merits as a speaker on the basis of this legal threat? You don't think the <b>legal victory</b><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>was enough for them? Sounds like in addition to legal support we need political and cultural support. You know, coddling.<br />
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Apologies (a bit) for the tongue-in-cheek tone but this is rich stuff. These days its tough to figure out what the conservative platform is beyond a routine empty populism that demands "the people" be sovereign and in control, and also that their status as victims--of Obama, the state, radical left-agitators, "race hustlers," whatever--is undeniable. The Republican party is coddling the American people in every debate where it repeats stupid, empty truisms and asserts the taken-for-granted greatness of this country without actually having a damn plan to fix the thing. The Republican party is coddling the American people every time it lies and says that we can bring back manufacturing jobs. The Republican party is coddling the American people with unworkable plans to "repeal and replace" (we know its really just repeal) Obamacare, with its bromides against "job killing," and with its belief that we can somehow make massive spending cuts without also taking a huge chunk out of military spending.<br />
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Stop coddling the American people, GOP. Since Ronald Reagan you've done nothing but argue that America needs to be a "safe space" for your constituency. It needs to be safe from Al Sharpton, it needs to be safe from Barack Obama, it needs to be safe from the "homosexuals" or today safe from trans-folks who will rape in bathrooms (as opposed to the reality, that it is <i>they</i> who are likely to be assaulted without gender neutral bathrooms). You want (some) people to be safe from anything but themselves.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-82274838121671220062015-09-14T12:04:00.000-07:002015-09-14T12:04:14.774-07:00Trump, Affective Juggernaut<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Critics of American democracy have
observed that at the heart of our polity is a driving paradox: on the one hand
America was founded in the name of “the people” and the idea of a shared nation
is itself a kind of collectivist ideal. On the other hand, there is the liberal
value of individuality. These two values are irreconcilable, as Chantal Mouffe
observes in <i>The Democratic Paradox</i>
and as a result the goal of democratic politics should not be understood as
that of achieving in an absolute sense both values but instead of fostering a
polity that can productively manage the tension between the two. Mouffe rightly
observes that in the American context, liberal individuality is the favored
side of the dialectic. We might measure this in cultural terms by examining the
extent to which individual choice is valorized in advertising and television
programs, we might observe this in politics by charting the linkages written by
politicians and pundits between concepts like freedom and the idea of
individual achievement, and so forth. This post takes for granted that this is
the case, and I want to connect not the rise but the <i>persistence</i> of Donald Trump, presidential candidate, to recent
public scholarship on questions of victimhood.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But
first: what broke the dialectic? I maintain that the dialectic was <a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2014/04/conservatisms-mid-century-crisis.html">broken</a> by
the populist turn of American conservatism in the 1960’s, a movement which
married the ideology of individualism to a collectivist sense of the “invisible
American” and then later Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.” Up until the late
1950’s what the American political parties stood for can be understood fairly
straightforwardly: the Republican Party stood for traditionalism, in the sense
of defending the inertia of an institutionalized socio-economic elite from
outside, contingent-but-class-directed antagonism. Democrats were more or less
the party of labor and liberation, with questions of race a notable outlier
given electoral self-interest. By the 1950’s, Republicans were on the run as a
seemingly staunch consensus emerged about the necessary, permanent role of large
state spending and programs in the polity. Because opposing massively popular
programs in plain sight is not a ticket to electoral victory, Republicanism
could only find its way forward by constituting new interest groups rather than
working to consolidate its gains within existing constituencies. Moreover, most
Republican voters were either traditionalists along religious and societal
lines, or libertarians with an interest in the emerging economic doctrines of
individual freedom. Michael Lee’s wonderful recent book, <i>Creating Conservatism</i>, details one part of this process, the
production of the concept of conservatism itself and its curation within a new
set of sacred political texts like <i>Ideas
Have Consequences</i> and <i>National Review</i>.
Central to Lee’s work is the idea that Republicans refused to choose a side in
the debate, but instead framed conservatism itself as a concept drenched in
agonism so that battles between the traditionalists and libertarians would not
spill-over to ruin an emerging Republican wedge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This tactic
worked quite well to build a healthy conservative infrastructure for
argumentation, patronage, and print consumption. However, it needed a delivery
vehicle in order to begin to constitute the mass public. This vehicle was
populism, as I’ve discussed in previous posts <insert hyperlink="">. Though
relatively alien to the explicit populism of the late 19<sup>th</sup> century
America, threads of anti-intellectualism that populated—but did not determine—agrarian
populism were useful for conservatives who found themselves on the outside of
the governing consensus and thus in need of attacking those in power on the
basis of their institutional position. By conflating liberalism with what
rhetors like Nixon figured as the “excesses” of the 1960’s—protests, declines
in stability of the nuclear family, domestic unrest—the Republican party began
a slow march towards moving the center of the electorate further to the Right.
While “the people” was a rhetorical figure not yet ripe for explicit poaching,
conservatives could nevertheless link existing unrest to the seeming hegemony
of liberalism. The Great Society, powered by government, ruined the population
via a paternalistic understanding of civic life.<o:p></o:p></insert></div>
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Today,
the dialectic between collectivism and liberal individualism is broken. Recent
populist turns in the Democratic Party have either featured a retrograde,
racially punitive populism tethered to fear of crime as in the case of Bill
Clinton or a populism borne of confusing democracy’s promise of inclusion with
an actually existing policy agenda, as in the case of Barack Obama. Pundits and
voters label Obama a progressive when in fact his theory of government
intervention is routinely one in which government steps in <i>only</i> as a last resort if the market system has failed. Meanwhile conservatism
conserves only the last little covalent bonds that tie together the traditionalists
and libertarians, in between trying to activate the old resentment-laden energy
nodes of the silent majority. Observe, for example, how magazines like <i>The Weekly Standard</i> have mostly stayed
out of the debate over recalcitrant clerk Kim Davis in Kentucky. A decade ago
this would be red meat for a larger segment of the conservative base. Today,
only “values” conservatives like Mike Huckabee or the most opportunistic ones
like Ted Cruz step into the breach to associate with Davis.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What is
considerably more viable is a commitment to a generalized politics of
victimage, and this is where Trump comes in. Adam Gopnik <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember?mbid=social_facebook">observed</a> very recently that the Trump phenomena is nothing new, that from Father
Coughlin to Barry Goldwater America has a long history of incoherent populism.
As he observes, “The ideology is always available; it just changes its agents
from time to time.” Many have wagered—especially on the Right—that the
post-2008 environment’s anger and antipathy was not so much a racist reaction
to Obama as it was a generalized condition fostered by the deep intensity of
the economic crash.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Trump’s
persistence reveals this understanding to be flawed, not only because, as
Gopnik notes, Trump was the most prominent proponent of Birther ideology. In
fact I think Gopnik is a bit wrong to group Trump with Wallace or Goldwater,
because <i>the incoherence of Trump is
exceptional even by very lenient standards</i>. Goldwater’s stand for less
government but robust militarism made little sense, but this is a formula
considerably more successful politicians have embraced. Wallace did not
represent <i>the</i> “people” but certainly <i>a</i> “people,” namely embittered southern
racists. Trump leads the national polls less than a decade after people just
like Trump nearly buried the American economy in a heap of derivatives and debt
swaps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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How do
we make sense of Trump? We must go back to the idea of populism, and the
relationship of leader and constituent. Perhaps the most common thing said of
Trump today is he is popular because “he tells it like it is.” Just google
Trump and that phrase in quotes: you’ll get over 47,000 hits, like this <i>Real Clear Politics</i> <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/26/trump_tells_it_like_it_is_127536.html">piece</a>. Trump is not
the manager who will translate the base’s wishes into policy gains like Jeb
Bush, and he is not the “fighter” whose policy agenda’s sharp teeth represents his
base like Scott Walker: Trump’s ugly, unvarnished masculinity mirrors the
sentiment of a base that, since 2009, understands that they must “take their
country back” from an undeserving, threatening Voltron of a black president, <i>nouveau</i> hippies worried about
microaggressions, the Chinese, and raping immigrants. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is
not, of course, all Trump’s doing. If one takes stock of conservative ideology
in the last six years, whether one reads platforms, policy papers, punditry, or
Rush Limbaugh transcripts, there are two overwhelming thematic notes:
conservatism today in discourse <i>aspires</i>
to conserve the rhetorical figure of “the American people” and also nurture
that old, silent majority-era sentiment of Republicans as constitutive outsiders
to the polity. Why do conservative wonks like Jim Pethoukoukis repeatedly air
their frustrations on twitter? Because a party can only push a policy agenda
that will please their base, and there is almost no policy agenda palatable to
establishment conservatives <i>and</i> the
base. Conserving a victimized identity is not a policy agenda, but it is a
powerful weapon of negativity, particularly when the overarching desire of
conservatism in the last forty years is a principled negative critique of the
state which is the <i>opposite</i> of the
population it supposedly serves. Trump embodies “the people” first, and the
party never. One might perhaps be amused that pundits like Jonah Goldberg <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423607/donald-trump-conservative-movement-jonah-goldberg">lob</a> the same bromides at Trump that liberals threw at the Tea Party in 2010. Indeed,
the structure of the arguments is the same: his/their politics are incoherent,
its pure negativity, he/they have no real agenda. To me, however, it is a real
horror show: the dialectic is broken, populism now, populism forever. We are
now given over to a future of halfwit Lonesome Rhodeses, with half the wit and
charisma and twice the power in a presidential primary. <o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-86776844506798348172015-03-26T13:55:00.004-07:002015-03-26T13:55:50.695-07:00Market Populism at Walmart<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Market Populism at
Wal Mart</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> I'm in the midst of working on a project about the relationship between "the people" in the American political imaginary and how they've come to be selfsame with the product of collective choice i.e. the judgments of the market. </span>My last blog post <a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2014/12/reagans-morning-in-america.html">here</a> looked at the specter of consumerism in a famous Ronald Reagan campaign ad, “Morning
in America.” Some of the dynamics I identified there can actually be viewed today, albeit in a slightly different way in the practices of the Walmart corporation. Indeed, between their decision
to purchase the cheapest good available regardless or labor conditions and
their well-documented mistreatment of their own labor, Walmart is something of
an easy target for progressive activists and political pundits alike, Thomas
Frank repeatedly mentions Walmart repeatedly in his 2005 essay “What’s the
Matter With Liberals?” when he complains that centrist Democrats refuse to
challenge large corporations like the Arkansas-based retail giant, choosing
instead to benefit from the resulting corporate fundraising. More recently,
Walmart came under fire for a few different issues in the spring of 2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A CNBC report from April detailed that
customers were frustrated with their shopping experience at Walmart, as cuts made
to staffing created extensive stocking and customer service issues.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The report also noted that in order to avoid running afoul of labor laws
Walmart was forcing employees to work off the clock in order to increase
efficiency. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Forbes’</i> Rick Ungar linked
these practice to decline’s in Walmart’s profits, suggesting that there was a
correlation between companies like CostCo that pay their employees a living
wage and a positive shopping and consumer experience.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post’s</i> Harold Myerson
picked up on these observations, noting this uptick in criticism came even as
Walmart opened more stores while cutting down on the overall number of people
employed in its businesses. It also uses this business model throughout its
supply chain, resulting in a situation where:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Problem is, the Wal-Mart model of
employment and service not only reflects but also reinforces the declining
economic prospects of the majority of Americans. The nation’s largest
private-sector employer has used its market power to impose its low-wage model
all along its supply chain, leaving millions of Americans with no shopping
option other than the kind of discount, and frustrating, experience that
Wal-Mart provides.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the same time that people like Myerson were issuing high
profile critiques of the company, a disaster at a Bangladeshi factory tied to
the corporation made visible the high costs of its labor practices on the
population abroad, threatening to link American consumption practices to unacceptable violence elsewhere. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time</i> magazine
reported that the cost of Walmart’s cheap products was at least 386 deaths in addition to another 122 at a separate facility just a
year before.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Critics
were taking aim at the negative consequence’s of Walmart’s policies that aimed
to cut costs and increase profits. Offshoring production, playing shell games
with employee hours, and imposing conditions throughout their supply
chain—remember, Walmart is the biggest corporate employer in America—create a
kind of self-fulfilling prophecy wherein Walmart’s low-cost, “no frills” model emerges as a necessary evil for
scores of American consumers. In response Walmart turned to market populism as
a strategy for managing the criticism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Walmart
launched an ad campaign called “The Real Walmart.” The campaign featured three
videos corresponding to three different aspects of the company, including the
benefits it provides for consumers, its employees, and its hyper-efficient
supply chain. Each ad seeks to humanize a different element of the Walmart
business model. The first advertisement called “Real Walmart Shoppers” focuses
on the benefits for consumers. It emphasizes the size of Walmart’s customer
base—60% of the shopping American public—and figures these consumers as
particular representatives of the American whole. Not for nothing does the
advertisement open with a black man who calls himself an “American success
story” before a multiracial and dual-gender parade of bodies get a few seconds
each in front of the camera to run through their occupations: firefighters,
accountant, engineer, teacher. These occupations correspond neatly with those
on display in the old Reagan campaign video, which shows firefighters and
teachers, and of course various generic white-collar workers on their way to
the office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The advertisement emphasizes
the consumer savvy of those who shop at Walmart, locating in the gap between
the Walmart price and the (assumed) higher price from another vendor the
economic acumen of the average American citizen. The decision to shop at
Walmart becomes an expression of the market savvy of the American population,
wherein less spending on one thing creates opportunities for thoughtful
purchasing in others. What Myerson’s article suggests is the effect of
coercion—a reduction in the available options for purchasing—is instead figured as an expression of the popular will. Of course for many Americans they “choose” to
shop at Walmart inasmuch as it’s the only option available for them, and in
many cases this is because they work at some other company who is a subsidiary
of Walmart or works on a similar business model so to call it a choice stretches credulity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While the
first ad establishes the democratic bonafides of the decision to shop at
Walmart, the second ad opens with a young black man who works at Walmart and
who proudly proclaims “I’m the next American success story.” The advertisement
then lays out a host of possible opportunities within the infrastructure of
Walmart: management, engineering, and several other related areas where Walmart
gives its employees college credits. Rather than appearing as exploited labor,
the protagonist says of those who observe him on the job that, “When they see
me, I hope they see someone working their way up.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The present is not a matter of actually
existing injustice but instead is figured as a temporary stopping point before
a future of possibility and professional growth, not to mention financial
enrichment. Not for nothing he notes that he receives a bonus when sales are
good, suggesting that critiquing Walmart and its labor practices is to actually take issue with and threaten the livelihood of "the next American success story."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The third
advertisement focuses on Walmart’s highly efficient supply chain, regulary
drawing on language of eliminating inefficiency. Again using the language of an “American success story” the ad features lots of images of trucks, tractors,
and their drivers, emphasizing the human and machinic elements at the heart of
Walmart. Employing imagery that belies an odd fetish for the mechanical, the
short ad closes with the following statement, that “When you see our low
prices, remember the wheels turning behind the scenes delivering for millions
of Americans everyday.” By encouraging consumers to be semioticians, this third ad completes the equation of market populism set up
by the first two: behind each price lay a in separate elements the fingers on
the invisible hand, where consumer choice, employee labor, and an efficient supply
chain meet in a coincident point. Because there is no temporal element to the
narrative, each of these factors plays into the production of the commodity
equally in terms of their form: at the same moment that the consumer makes the
right choice, they are providing a benefit for the young black employee in the
form of increased sales, at the same time that they themselves are
demonstrating their economic sophisticated by producing savings that they can
move to other areas even as the efficient supply chain in part makes it
possible. At each level the economy is humanized: truck and tractor drivers,
the cosmopolitan and multiracial makeup of the Walmart consumer base, and the
potential-laden black youth demonstrate that Walmart is "people" not some space of exploitation. Not for nothing are we reminded of Mitt Romney's easy proclamation that "corporations are people."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
people” are a rhetorical resource available not only for their use as a
spearhead in an attack of the regulatory structure of the welfare state.
Indeed, “the people” authorize attacks upon those who would seek to criticize
the existing arrangements of power as they exist within the economy itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This market populism makes each part of a
commercial transaction—production, sales, and purchase—into human moments that
express the competence and value of the American public. To take issue with the
product of these judgments which in this case is the central position in the
market held by Walmart is thus to disagree with the marvelous product of the
American “people.” As a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Forbes</i>
article that reported on the campaign said in its headline, “Its About Time
Walmart Waged an Ad Campaign Like This One” people need “to understand
the tremendous net positive that Walmart remains for the American economy.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In
a way this move seems unnecessary: shouldn’t the very public who “decides” to
shop at Walmart already know the facts that the advertisement wants to
disseminate? The need for the campaign itself demonstrates that the trappings of populism are cynical indeed.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> Moreover, the</span> Walmart
campaign suggests an update to Patton’s thesis discussed previously about the threat posed to the
silent majority by the racial and sexual Other and the State. It is not just
the figure of the queer person or the black male who threatens to “penetrate”
the silent majority, but in fact it is the generalized threat of the
possibility of there being some judgment external to “the people” and,
seemingly, external to the economy. In the same way that the state threatens to
distort the truth of the market, so too does external criticism of the market
threaten "the people's" integrity by indicting their choices as complicit in injustice. Where
we are generally led to believe that what the market is good because it is a
reflection of a complicated aggregation of choices that, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">on balance</i>, tend towards the better, what does it means for this
tacit economic populism if its results are actually net negative? While the
advertising series does not engage in a proper rehearsal of objections and
their refutation, certainly its routine insistence on pointing to an abstracted
but positive existence enabled by Walmart—whether the future career of the
young black worker or the other savvy consumer choices of its customers—suggests that these complaints with
Walmart are temporary while the future of both customers and employees lies
elsewhere, with a future in engineering or the adjustment of resources into
more vital areas as told by a sovereign American <i>vox populi</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
individuated collective is made manifest in this campaign. Elsewhere I have attempted to show that the individuated collective is a modern rhetoric of conservative populism wherein the collective element of appeals to "the people" is maintained while in <i>practice</i> the only shared element common to the population is the fact of their individual differentiation from one another. While there are a
variety of human inputs into Walmart, each of them arrives at one shared point
which is the moment of consumer choice. Whether teacher, firefighter, trucker,
or Walmart employee, what holds “the people” together is that they can each
express themselves equally through their choice to either consume or work at
Walmart. Their right to do is established through defenses of efficiency,
choice, and ultimately competence: shopping or working at Walmart maximizes
utility and efficiency. In this way a typical paradox of political
populism—namely that “the people” by being multivariate and many do not possess
any kind of unity that would come along with a collective name—is displaced if
not resolved through the suggestion that the shared element is participation in
the choice that is reflected in where the market settles. Hence to attack
actually existing arrangements of economics is to attack “the people” in their
one moment of supposed appearance within the realm of the public, insofar as “the
people” can be found not as an entity in the world but instead in these moments
of judgment that reflect their will. Hence market populism’s hostility to
claims made on the basis of labor and social justice is a move to insulate the naturalized economy from criticism on the basis of that criticism's emergence from a site outside the place of populism. Given our tendency to emphasize the democratic rather than republican elements of our politics in our political discourse, this explains in part the staying power of these version of market populism despite the "contradictions" pointed out by Thomas Frank and other critics who wonder loudly why Americans continue to "vote against their interests." They are not, it seems voting against their interests: they and the economy are inseparable in the rhetoric of modern market populism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/04/17/walmart-pays-workers-poorly-and-sinks-while-costco-pays-workers-well-and-sails-proof-that-you-get-what-you-pay-for/<o:p></o:p></div>
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Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-64505071848333313262014-12-29T13:44:00.002-08:002015-01-06T11:56:26.035-08:00Reagan's "Morning in America"<div class="MsoNormal">
Critics
have identified the short campaign ad “Morning in America” from Ronald Reagan’s
1984 presidential campaign as one of the most effective—and
influential—campaign ads of all time. No doubt the ad stands out for not only
the context, which was one the most successful presidential campaigns of all
time, one that saw Reagan crush his challenger Walter Mondale by taking 49 out
of 50 states, but also for its content, which presented a bucolic and peaceful
view of regular American life, one that Reagan compared favorably to the social
upheaval of the 1960’s and the economic difficulties of the late 1970’s.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reagan’s
appearance at this juncture, positioned neatly between the upheaval that ushered in and
undermined Richard Nixon but before the end of the Cold War, has been the
subject of considerable scholarly attention. I want to here meditate on several
different readings from critical scholars that often focus on one aspect of
Reagan: his status as a simulation. Diane Rubenstein reads Reagan’s presidency
as a kind of Baudrillardian simulation <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par
excellence</i>, a president who seemingly stood for nothing and in so doing
could be the concept of America itself. While other leaders like John Kennedy
or Dwight Eisenhower could draw on the kingly residues of the nation’s higher
office with either reference to bodily charisma (Kennedy’s sexuality) or
military prowess (Eisenhower’s role as Supreme Allied Commander), the trappings
of the old sovereign understanding of the king also constrained and threatened
these leaders, subordinating their charisma and power to the Ego-Ideal of a
perfect, universally powerful (and religiously designated) leader.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While I am often loathe to draw on
his work, Rubenstein’s deployment of Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal
wherein signs serve not a representational function but instead a
self-referential one, ushers us into<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an
era where “territory no longer precedes the map but is generated by it” (p. 584).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This concept explains Reagan’s success in a
way purely semiotic theory cannot: a representational account of language is
often frustrated by a figure like Reagan precisely because the presence of
“objective” indicators of his flaws as president—scandals, wars, an interest in
astrology—did not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in practice</i>
collapse Reagan’s presidency. Suspended between the subjective understanding of
Reagan’s failures as a policymaker and his enormous symbolic political capital
is this self-referential status of the Reagan presidency: Reagan and the
America he was a part of were separated tautologically from the crisis and
disasters that attended to his time in office. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In this way Reagan can admit to the
arms-for-hostages deal while remaining distant from any responsibility for it,
as Rubenstein notes that Reagan’s statement “’I told the American people that I
did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me
that it is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.’” (p. 587).
Even when there is a real problem, Americans continue to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> as if everything is ok. “Morning in America”
produces—anticipates even—this sense of good feeling even in the face of still
troublesome conditions. Hence Rubenstein’s point about maps generating
territory; much the same could be said for political space, drawing a
connection to theorists working in the area of publicity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Michael Warner focuses on how
Reagan’s image made him the “champion spokesmodel for America” in Warner’s
words (p. 173). The phrase “spokesmodel,” seems intentionally gendered here: a “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spokesman” </i>pitches a product while a
“spokesmodel” is feminized, simply displaying , gesturing, and pointing to a
desirable object, generating a symmetry between their own sexual desirability
and the object. Reagans capacity to instill identification with his audiences,
even where this identification was not selfsame with popularity in the public
polls, was such that he could be said to have an immense amount of political
capital in the sense that those who insulted him found themselves constrained,
and those who opposed him politically found themselves the subject of public
ire. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like “the people” Reagan does not
have speech, he simply stands in to point to America’s self-referential
goodness, in much the same way that people simply living their lives in “Morning
in America” provide the proof that America is a great nation. In having
seemingly little agency or persona, Reagan mirrored the impotence of the public.
Warner’s reading works similarly to that of Joan Copjec, who argues in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Read My Desire</i> that Reagan’s impotence
was constitutive of his authority rather than evidence of a lack. Identifying
with Reagan did not threaten one’s sense of self in the way that embracing a
charismatic John F. Kennedy or a geographically-specific George W. Bush might.
As an added bonus, such signifying does not invoke Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory
of royal power, producing a president capable of living up to symbolic
expectations, ones that merely ask for a president to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like</i> “the people” rather than one who is above and rules them in a
manner guaranteed to activate that traditionally American robust ideology of
individualism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Citizens,
Warner says, long for “privileged public disembodiment” (p. 176).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abstraction is the key technology for
producing the modern public sphere, and where consumerism substitutes for civic
participation, citizens seek to consume in a way that reduces that anxieties
associated with existing. Reagan’s befuddlement made him one of the citizens.
Reagan could thus witness disasters with the citizenry. Moreover, he could,
like cititzens, admit to some rational level of culpability for a disaster or
scandal, but maintain his emotive, human distance from them. In line with
Warner’s work, this model of present distancing from politics explains how
citizens might routinely cathetic to a political system that rarely, if ever,
serves their interests: they “rationally” know it to be true but feel
otherwise, and feeling trumps.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is
telling that “Morning in America” includes no disasters, no threats, only a
happy and bucolic nation rising to meet the day. It also includes no persons of
color. The ad opens in the morning hours, showing people either working or on
their way to it. Amongst the various occupations depicted are paperboy, farmer,
firefighter, and white-collar work. The first twenty seconds of the advertisement
are dedicated to commerce: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>folks either
go to or are at work, or engage in acts of commerce: a voice over mentions increasing
volumes of home purchasing while the ad shows some presumably new homeowners
marching a large, just-purchased rug into their new house. Meanwhile the
voiceover reminds that “more Americans will go to work this morning than ever
before in the nation’s history” while commenting on the remarkable drops in
interest rates, contrasting the Reagan recovery with the difficult days of Jimmy
Carter. These are not just the conditions that facilitate prosperity: they are
prosperity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Following these displays of
commerce, the video transitions into the scene of a smiling, elderly woman watching
a young, heterosexual couple getting married, while the narrator adds that
today “6500 young men and women will be married.” The narrator then notes that,
with today’s lower inflation rates, these married couples can anticipate
economic prosperity will remain stable. Out of 53 seconds of content in the
advertisement, fully 15 seconds are dedicated to the events of this marriage,
which include not only the walk down the aisle but the smiling procession into
wedded bliss: not to mention, a prosperous future. The closing embrace between
the grandmother and her newly-married granddaughter, both clad in white, transforms
into the US Capitol building in a screen transition, symbolically producing
these ordinary Americans living their life with a prosperous future,
emphasizing how the center of American life is the population itself, rather
than the government. In fact, this appearance of the Capitol—along with a brief
shot of a firefighter schoolchildren, and some soldiers raising the American
flag—are the only shots of government agents in the entire commercial until
Reagan’s face appears at the end. It is of course notable that the shot is of
the Capitol: the building that houses a multitude of, rather than one, of
America’s leaders, creating a kind of relay of multiciplicity that reinforces
Reagan’s version of populism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Indeed,
after this brief shot of the Capitol we repeatedly see American flags, being
raised in the morning in a variety of different contexts like schools and
military bases. This, we are told, is the daily life of America: marriage,
work, learning, symbolic acts of patriotism. We see a carpool taking someone to
work, the hug from grandmother to granddaughter, people smiling and waving. The
message is clear: the American people are doing very well, very well indeed.
And this happy shared living mirrors the economic prospects of the nation. If Reagan’s
“Time for Choosing” could manufacture anxiety our of prosperity, and if Nixon’s
silent majority gave Americans a way to make sense of the chaos of the 60’s
without indicting themselves, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Morning
in America” made the fact of living, of going about one’s quotidian business
into tactile proof that America was on the right path. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Indeed,
this calm morning exists in part because of one major absence, the absence of
the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though the ad is for
Reagan’s presidential campaign, Reagan himself does not appear until the last
few seconds of the advertisement. While there are agents of the government
present, it is almost always figures who represent either local
government—firefighters and schoolteachers—or civic necessities, like the
aforementioned firefighters or officers of the military. Government here is
mostly absent, present only when there is threat to life and property (fire,
war) or when so localized that it can be directly connected to the community
will, as in the schoolhouse. Otherwise the life of the community is defined by
their own acts: commerce, labor, love, with no government present.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It bears
noting that this population is industrious, virtuous, hardworking, and finding
fulfillment in their relations with one another. The absence of inflation and
the reduction of other economic negatives, combined with the felt positivity of
the Americans living their lives in the ad campaign suggest an America where
prosperity of the population mirrors the economic prosperity generally. That
these are achieved in the absence of the state is no accident. After all, the
idea that the default character of the American “people” is that of a peace and
prosperity is a very old notion, but politicians have maneuvered around in it
in a number of different ways. Nixon’s silent majority worked by producing
peace and prosperity as the desire of most Americans, and used the appearance
of instability, protest, and dissent throughout America to confirm and reassure
those who felt anxious and troubled that what was occurring was not the “real”
America. Nixon, of course, was fighting a pitched battle against a more-or-less
openly legitimate social welfare state. By Reagan’s time, this consensus had
begun to crumble, and so Reagan’s production of calm as the appropriate
character of the movement works to suggest America is on the right path.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Establishing
that the American people were in the process of returning the nation to its
greatness helped to create conditions felicitous for American conservatives to
rewrite American civil space as a site for pitched battles between on the one
hand a peaceable, hardworking and family-driven—and flatly, white—majority of
Americans one one side against “political” individuals who attack and threaten
to undermine “traditional” American cultural mores by pointing out asymmetries
in power and existing injustices. Cindy Patton argues in “Refiguring Social
Space” that the new right articulated a neutral concept of “civil rights” as
the simple right of individual—here conflated with cultural—existence. In this
way groups begging for “special rights” like the Equal Rights Amendment were
fracturing and violating American civil rights by watering down the “real”
struggles of the Civil Rights Movement through particularizing identity
maneuvers that performatively eradicate the consensus even as they testify to
the attraction attendant to the fantasy of a smooth and consensus-ridden
democratic public. Conservatism needed these particularizations to threaten something,
and that something was Morning in America. The other step in this process was
for conservative rhetors to matriculate state-phobia from its Cold War context
into a more useful mechanism for understanding domestic politics, a theme I
will soon return to at length.<o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-88571296207022663422014-06-11T10:45:00.000-07:002014-06-11T10:45:00.436-07:00A Response To Douthat: On the Incommensurability of GOP Economics and Populism
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Eric Cantor’s shocking <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-eric-cantor-upset-what-happened/">primary defeat</a> last
night dealt a blow to the conventional wisdom that this would be the year of
the Republican establishment. Cantor, a key and visible voice on the right, was
not the sort of politician who falls victim to a primary challenge. His
position high up in the Republican leadership structure should have implied
that he was almost untouchable, certainly in a year where midterm elections
would mean major gains and victorious consolidations amongst Republicans,
rather than defeats. And yet Cantor lost.</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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For those of us keeping our eyes in the levels of partisan
intensity in Washington, this was not reassuring. Certainly, David Brat’s victory
came as good news to many on the populist right: Cantor, despite his
conservative bona fides, is certainly an “Establishment” figure, while on the
left, many progressives took to social media to crow about how Cantor, who
often comes off as unnecessarily snide, got what he deserved. Yet, Cantor’s
record as a voter was solidly conservative. His primary challenge owes more to
the generally totalizing character of the conservative base over the last few
years than any real policy decisions. Cantor was a big-time conservative, he
acted pretty conservative, and his flirtations with immigration policy were
<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/eric-cantor-poll-immigration-lose-107704.html">overblown</a>. So, what does his defeat mean?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Ross Douthat writes in today’s <i>Times</i> in a <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/after-eric-cantor/">piece</a> titled “After Eric Cantor” that Cantor’s loss suggests
a problem Cantor the politician, no conservative politics <i>per se</i>. Perhaps Cantor just couldn’t bridge the gap between the
populist <i>sentiment</i> driving Obama-era
conservative politics and populist <i>policy</i>
that aims to enrich the “middle class” of America’s Main Street rather than
those much reviled fat cats on Wall Street. If only, Douthat holds,
conservatism could coalesce around a “good” economic populism rather than a
“bad” populism. Douthat outlines what these dynamics are in an earlier op-ed,
where the good populism consists of channeling Rand Paul on anger at government
surveillance and security overreaches alongside tax plan’s like those of Utah
Senator Mike Lee, which encourage increased tax relief for families. This also
includes some kind of policy of real regulation to punish Wall Street for
cronyism, corruption, and financial loss.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Douthat <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/good-populism-bad-populism-revisited/">opines</a> that, perhaps this victory is a good sign
that the Republican Party is moving in the right direction. Or, at the very
least, he hopes that it is. But I think Douthat’s assumption, which holds that
there are two kinds of potentially agreeable populisms that are fighting for
the soul of the Republican Party, is wrong in my estimation. In fact, it is a
battle between the real populist sentiment of a conservative base (who take as
their animating <i>ethos</i> anger and
resentment at the 2008 financial collapse and the resulting bailouts (and who
have, to some extent, matriculated some of that intensity to President Barack
Obama and issues like Obamacare and the stimulus package) versus the
traditional economic wing of political conservatism which focuses on generating
freer markets by having a presumption against thick regulation in many areas of
policy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What these factions don’t necessarily share are goals. For
example, Mike Lee’s tax plan aimed at boosting and stabilizing the American
middle class might, in fact, do so, but at the expense of the deficit. . Lee’s
goal is economic stability in the sense of making things easier for households.
Rising budget deficits are, of course, a total non-starter for many on the
traditional conservative side, who see the need to control spending as a
political cudgel that can be used to facilitate connections in the minds of
voters between their own economic anxieties and federal budget issues. Others,
who come from the trickle down school, certainly claim to want to increase the
economic welfare of the middle class as well but set certain federal baselines
for this: hence the need to protection against budget deficits at all costs,
demands for balanced budget amendments to the Constitution, and what have you.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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None of this discussion within the realm of economic policy
even begins to address cultural conservatives, who were already alienated at a
formal level by the Tea Party’s insistence that they focus not on cultural
issues but only on economics. While in practice the Tea Party’s broad
opposition to government still allowed traditionalists conservatives to align
themselves with the movement, what their role is in the current legislative
majority in the House (and soon, lets face it, probably in the Senate) remains
murky. Are conservatives angry about legalized gay marriage going to be
placated with a tax credit for families?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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In sum, the choice is not between good or bad populism. On
one side is a populism, as <i>The Weekly Standard </i><a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/great-upsets-brat-2014-and-bell-1978_794862.html">hopes</a>, that might offer various economic benefits for middle
Americans by tax breaks on the middle class, the preservation or perhaps mild
extension of social safety nets, and real regulation of white collar and
financial crime. On the other side is a conservative populism of negativity
which rages against Obamacare, budget deficits, and the denigration of the
Constitution, but offers little in the way of a governing strategy to pair with
these frustrations. Indeed, it is these conservatives who most often seem prone
to engage in language about “makers and takers” or “economic losers,”
suggesting the remedy comes not at the policy level but instead at the level of
individual behavior. I do not think this gap between various conservative groups
can be bridged, but instead will require some kind of at least medium term
movement that will alienate the latter to strengthen the former. Cantor’s
defeat signals prolonged partisanship, not a new political dawn with more
action at hand.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-9190200917808974872014-06-05T13:12:00.001-07:002014-06-05T13:13:09.165-07:00The Proliferation of Emptiness: Indexing Politics in Party Platforms<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>This blog post is third in a series of posts focusing on looking at conservative messaging and ideological documents from 2009-present.</i><br />
<br />
Pundits and critics tend to regard party platforms with
something between and eye roll and a vague nod of the head. During every
presidential election season the major political parties in the U.S. refine and
produce their platforms but these documents are often thought to have little
consequence. Willard Oliver and Nancy Marion, for example, pick up the work of
Murray Edelman to suggest that these platform statements serve symbolic rather
than practical functions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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The standard line goes something like this: party platforms
are empty pabulum, stuffed chock full of the least controversial and most
conventional set of beliefs possessed by a party. In turn this suggests that
one might find in a platform are a set of no-brainers pitched to the party’s
base: policies and ideologies that are, for the party membership, easy points
of consensus. Given that the role of the party has intensified in American
politics, especially since the end of the Sixties, it should come as no
surprise that these documents tend to be full of red meat for the base. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Of course things might also change given whether or not a
particular party holds a position of leadership in government, especially the
presidency. When a party is outside of power, there is a tendency for party
leadership to craft a platform that contains criticism of existing policies,
and promises to roll them back. Negativity is easier than positivity: criticism
is simpler, and less politically fraught, than criticism combined with a policy
alternative.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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If one looks at the 2004 Democratic political platform, one
might begin under the presumption that the document might be full of negative
criticism of the administration of George W. Bush, whose foreign policy
adventurism was the chief issue in that year’s presidential election. However,
a read through of this platform shows a number of specific policy proposals on
matters foreign and domestic. Ranging from increased fuel efficiency standards
for cars to eliminating federal subsides for predatory college lenders, and all
the way to more Arabic language training for military translators, the 2004
platform is full of policy prescriptions. While the document is certainly
critical of the Bush administration it pairs this criticism with many specific
policy proposals.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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An examination of the 2012 Republican platform, then, is a
study in contrasts. The stage of course is a bit different from 2004. Following
the 2008 presidential election and the legislative victories of Barack Obama,
including the passage of a stimulus bill and major health care reform, a wave
of conservative populism exploded onto the American political scene. Marking
the first explicitly populist conservative movement in America (contrasted with
the implicit populism of Nixon’s “silent majority” and Reagan’s “Morning in
America,” the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement rode a wave of economic
anger and existential anxiety to a robust showing in the 2010 midterm elections.
Of course, the visibility of this movement belied one of its origins:
demographic concerns. The 2008 election results foreshadowed what Barack
Obama’s non-white figure underscored: the changing makeup of the American
electorate might push politics further and further from the field of the
familiar for many conservatives. The anti-Obama sentiment animating much of
conservatism thus diverges from what Charles Krauthammer identified in 2003 as
“Bush Derangement Syndrome” not because of the different figure chosen: indeed,
cults of personality manifest themselves in many ways. Instead what is key is
the stylistic difference in the response, that is, the response to Bush took
the form of a political campaign routed through the organs of the Democratic
Party along with traditional anti-war protests (albeit on a much smaller scale
than during, say, Vietnam) while opposition to Obama took the form of highly
visible protest movements framed in a language of populism (“the people”) rather
than a language of humanism, as was the case with much anti-militarist
agitation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The 2012 Republican platform has four striking
characteristics indicating its roots in oppositional negativity. First, the
document contains more than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sixty</i>
references to the figure of “the people” or “the American people,” and
especially includes a vast number of references to their intrinsic value as
workers, thinkers, and producers. This is an enormous number of references. For
comparison, there are roughly 10 such references in the 2004 Democratic
platform, so it is not simply a matter of anti-incumbency politics. Second
there are over fifty references to the values of the American constitution. Third,
the platform contains an abundance of references to issues that are so common
sense that they perhaps lose all sense of partisan meaning. For example on page
43 there is a reference to ensuring that the votes of troops serving abroad are
counted. No doubt, the votes of America’s soldiers are important. Military
voting issues, however, are rarely the subjects of political sniping, so why
list them here? Similarly, the domestic policy section supports “a national
registry for convicted child murderers.” Well, who doesn’t? Who even knew that
was a thing? Fourth, the document at many moments simply asserts Republican
support for various economic and societal institutions, as opposed to recommending
policies in regards to them. They say, for example, that the mortgage interest
deduction taxation credit must be defended. No one is threatening it. They
state their support for English as the nation’s official language, and
emphasize with regards to immigration that the government intensify its
enforcement of existing laws rather than creating more comprehensive reform.
Indeed the “enforce existing laws” trope reappears often through the document.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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The platform’s focus on reassuring its audience that it has
faith in the American “people,” fealty to the Constitution, a commitment to
common sense policies, and a commitment to enforce existing regulations rather
than promulgate new ones suggests a document in search of a very broad
audience. Indeed, these four bullet points, reframed as rhetorical questions,
produce what one might call an almost universal audience of American voters.
Politicians almost never question the rationality of “the people” in either
explicit or implicit terms. Many regard the Constitution as an unimpeachable
document. Laws are made under the assumption that they will be enforced.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Audiences, and their identities, do not exist in a vacuum.
To have a sense of who one is politically also requires one to have a sense of
who one is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>. When writers like
Michael Warner talk about how audiences are created over and against
negativity, they mean that there are supposedly opposed audiences who do not
share the interpretive frame, or perhaps ideology, of a text’s “main” audience.
So while one might support concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” one does so
operating on the presumption that, somewhere out there, there are people who do
not share this presumption, and their existence warrants one’s own need to
commit to a program in defense of such concepts. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Many have commented on recent reports like those of the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2012/06/04/partisan-polarization-surges-in-bush-obama-years/">Pew Foundation</a> suggesting that partisanship is at historical
highs. I want to argue that the hyper-general content of documents like this
platform indicate that at least one cause of the intensity of said partisanship
is the relative emptiness of political discourse at the moment. Where one sets
out to affirm seemingly universal precepts like “the people” and the
Constitution, one also images opponents who do not share in supporting these
concepts. Rather than splitting constituencies on the basis of policy
differences, such imagination splits the constituencies on the basis of
community membership: one is against “the people” or the Founders.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Where
a gap between support for say, a single payer health care bill or a market
oriented solution might be bridged, the gap between individuals who consider
themselves part of a community and those who constitutively are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> part of the community is much more
difficult to traverse. This is double true in the case where one confirms one’s
membership of the “in” group by imagining that those who are outside of said
group (or nation) do not share ways of living or thinking with those who are
included. To build a public around empty concepts such as “common sense” or
“the people” still exiles those who do not share these beliefs but marks that
exile as a natural outcome of the two populations being different rather than a
product of rhetoric and identification.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In sum, while party platforms might be thought of as risk
free statements of basic philosophies, they are worth examining precisely
because they attempt to pen these basics. And where one finds a document such
as the 2012 Republican platform, which is laden with platitudes, ideals, and
concepts rather than concretizable policy goals, one also finds evidence of a
political party in the midst of a crisis. When a document has to first start by
reaffirming that those reading it are committed to the taken for granted parts
of national belonging, the authors of that document see that there maybe a long
way to go before stating completely a political vision for achieving what are,
almost definitionally, empty ideals. The document affirms to an audience primarily that they exist, and does not tether this existence to a set of realizable political goals. What this implies is that the mission of politics is precisely coincident with the identities of the actors hailed by the platform. If one sees in contemporary conservative populism a kind of positive feedback loop wherein people participate in politics to confirm that they matter, documents like this may play a role in the inwardly focused and repetitive political demands emerging from the Right: less taxes, less government, more Constitution.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The document is not content free, I want to mention. The section addressing energy
policy makes some noise about ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s “war
on coal” and smoothing the runway for Keystone XL along with opening more
federal lands and waters for drilling and resource exploration. Environmental
policy compared to economics and social policy is not generally a huge driver
of turnout, and thus might stick out as an area where more substantive policy
proposals might be enunciated.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Clearly I should note that there are many who are quite skeptical of the
Constitution and “the people.” These tend to be people who produce and
subscribe to theories that are heavily skeptical of the American nation on the
basis of its creation through structural violence. There is merit to this. I do
not think Republicans are targeting such voters.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-21262453473876852292014-05-31T06:16:00.001-07:002014-05-31T06:25:47.515-07:00A Reading of Some of Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black, Contra/Pro Giorgio Agamben<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This blog post is the
first in a series of posts examining Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black</i>.
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The next essay in this series will
hopefully address his reading of Jacques Lacan that he undertakes early in the
book</i>. <i>This reading is heavily indebted to readings and conversations with others, not to mention debate performances I have witnessed. Special acknowledgments go to Amber Kelsie, Damiyr Davis, Ben Crossan, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Syndey Pasquinelli, David Herman, Terrell Taylor, and many, many others.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Frank Wilderson opens the first chapter of his study in
racism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red, White, and Black: The
Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema</i> at what seems to be a common
starting point for many academics, especially those who tend to locate their
scholarly conversations in houses that go by various names like
“post-structuralism” or the now mostly out of vogue “postmodernism:” the
Holocaust. Alighting on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose
ruminations on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Muselmann</i> serve as
a kind of stand in for Western philosophy’s fixation on the intelligibility of
the event of the Holocaust if not, as Wilderson will claim, the intelligibility
of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">suffering</i> that renders it as a
thinkable event. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This blog post will
interrogate Wilderson’s use of Agamben as a point of departure and argue that
contemporary dynamics of international violence suggest a reading of affinity
between the two.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Starting at
the Holocaust as a point of academic reference enables Wilderson to undermine
it by pointing to the ways in which its historical uniqueness should be
regarded not as a taken for granted fact but instead as a political status that
serves to write over or perhaps frame out other modalities of suffering,
especially in the Middle Passage of American slavery and Native American
genocide.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Why, Wilderson asks, are scholars comfortable with situating the Holocaust as
the central tragedy of Western existence when the dynamics at play in Europe
from 1939-1945—in which sentient beings were stripped of their humanity,
physically segregated, systematically used for labor, and gratuitously murdered
for no reason—have been witnessed not only elsewhere but also chronologically
earlier? Scholarly uptake of this particular Eurocentrism effects a positioning
of “the German/Jewish relation as the sine qua non of structural antagonism,
thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological—and not just
social—significance to the Jewish Holocaust.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To further
unsettle this fixation, Wilderson turns to the work of black theorist/insurrectionist
Frantz Fanon, drawing on his description of the Holocaust as a “little family
quarrel” to suggest that the Holocaust was a moment when Jewish bodies occupied
a position of “Blackness and Redness” rather than heralding the dawning of some
new, ontological regime of life management. Key to this analysis is Fanon’s
distinction between social and structural versions of violence, which Wilderson
frames as the difference between “oppression” and “suffering.” The Black
“suffers” while the Jew is “oppressed,” suggesting that suffering functions
ontologically to structure reality while oppression is a contingent state of
violation that may be recognized and interrupted by actors in civil society. To
give one example, today nostalgia reigns supreme for the America of “The
Greatest Generation” that is said to have liberated the concentration camps and
defeated fascism. Evidence for this is easy enough to find in the rhetorical
archive of presidential address given in the conduct of the war on terror,
where we find analogies throughout that conflate Al Qaeda with Hitler and
robust American citizens with G.I.’s rolling across Western Europe.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
For Wilderson, the fact that we can mark a starting and stopping point of the
Holocaust suggests its social rather than ontological character: no such
judgment is yet warranted regarding the treatment of the Black body.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
language of positionality in Wilderson’s reading is a point of interest. How
can the Jew, for example, occupy the position of the Black and remain the Jew?
As Wilderson argues, “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews, Africans
went into the ships and came out as Blacks.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The structure of his argument indicates that during the Holocaust Jewish people
did occupy the same position of abjection, violation, and invisibility that Blacks
occupy. No doubt Wilderson’s argument regarding positionality serves as a
strong rebuttal to critiques, on both left and right, of typical “identity
politics” characteristic of especially the “culture wars” of the 1990’s in
America. Multiculturalism, political designs scripted for inclusion,
affirmative action, and demands for “positive” representation of Blacks in
media and cinema: this conglomeration of social policies all mistake the
absence of robust Black participation in civil society to signal a contingent
failure of the political regime of liberalism rather than a deeper, structural
issue with how a regime of political life actually demands a negation of the
sentience of some beings so that others might live in society as what Aristotle
called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">politikon zoon</i>, political
life.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Indeed, my
reference to Aristotle is no accident given how operative definitions of life
circumscribe the political economy of argument circulation. In the same book (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Politics</i>) where he gives this
definition of life he also offers a philosophical justification for slavery, in
holding that there are simply some beings that are suited to rule and there are
other beings that are suited to being ruled. Wilderson would hold that this
line of reasoning has yet to be interrupted in the West, and the insistence by
many on marking moments of “liberation” like the Civil War, legislation for
Civil Rights, and victories in war elides or, to say it more precisely,
produces the ontological continuity of existence as a thing possessed by all
but Blacks. Perhaps no better example exists in Wilderson’s book than in the
introduction where he refers to James Baldwin’s failed friendship with Norman
Mailer, who “wrote about ‘the terrible gap between [Norman Mailer’s] life and
my own.’” Mean that “His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the
extent that Mailer was able to say<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Me,
too” in response to Baldwin’s own stories about the depths of his experience of
exclusion and abjection in a society constituted by racism.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What Wilderson is suggesting is
that ontological violence structures communicative exchanges so that Black
arguments never enjoy the force of presumption on their side. I say Black
arguments rather than “Black arguments from experience” because I hold that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> argumentation is characterized by
the argument from experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
hierarchy of arguments, from best to worst, is not decided upon by some
objective external arbiter of rightness and wrongness. Rather, familiarity tethers
arguments to subjects, who mistake the inertia of intelligibility for a token
of “right” argumentation instead of as a mark of their own ideological affinity
for the given performative argumentative practices. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baldwin attempted to traverse the gap between
his world and Mailer’s, and failed, repeatedly, because much of what he lived
was simply incomprehensible to Mailer. Wilderson holds that racial antagonism
structured the gulf between the two in such a way that it cannot properly be
called “misunderstanding” but instead should be understood as
“incommensurability.” Baldwin came to realize that he was articulating his own
existence on a communicative plane that was structured in such a way that only
to the extent that his life experiences could be made to conform to existing
matrices of intelligibility possessed by White society would his life be
recognized. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Where external authority conditions
life on that life’s capacity to behave in a manner intelligible to said
authority, that life cannot be said to exist except as the conditional fuel for
the authority of the community which, by virtue of presumption, stands in
judgment of what communicative acts or are not worthy. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Civil society’s authority, embodied by those who take its existence for
granted in their acts of judgment and communication to judge, comes from a
double movement of, “Me too” but mostly, “Not me” that simultaneously confirms
the capacity of the mass public to render judgment over the appropriateness of
argumentation while at the same time consigning that which is not intelligible
i.e. Black argumentation to a separate sphere</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Wilderson’s
argument has far reaching implications for those in communication studies who
remain interested in rendering accounts of how deliberative practices and
institutional action do or do not succeed in achieving certain goals, either
thought of in terms of constituting material benchmarks through traditional
metrics (legislative change, changes in legal interpretation) or in a more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Between Facts and Norms </i>sense of moving the
needle in terms of expanding the repertoire of forms and practices of
argumentation <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that civil society is
capable of recognizing as “political.” Wilderson has no compunction about
aligning himself with the academic movement of what is called Afro-pessimism
because in his view, the structural exclusion of the Black from society ensures
that efforts at expansionary inclusion emanating from the mass public serve
only to confirm the authority of that public to judge while at the same time routinely
failing to address the structural conditions of exclusion. I am cheating a bit
here by splitting them into two functions, actually. It is really the case that
the confirmation of the mass public’s capacity to judge perpetuates the
structural conditions of exclusion. Despite Wilderson’s decision to place
Giorgio Agamben in his crosshairs in the opening of his book, I believe that
Agamben’s account of the distinction between bare life and political life
offers an elegant supplement that explains the rhetorical mechanisms for the
production of the process Wilderson identifies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</i>
Agamben outlines his case for how the dispossession of populations comes to
function structurally as opposed to contingently. Working from the Aristotelian
distinction between life with the capacity for political speech, political
life, and life which is incapable of signifying, bare life, Agamben suggests
political actors utilize a rhetoric that elevates “the good life,” that is,
life which exists above the realm of pure biological existence and into the
realm of shared speech, politics. Elevating political life, however, requires
that political life be defined against some other version of life, and that
other form of life is bare life. Political philosophy has defended Western
political institutions on the basis <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i>
of their capacity to protect a Hobbesian social contract, that is, the basis to
secure bare life, but instead on the basis to provide for the good life. Michel
Foucault engineered this turn in thinking politics in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The History of Sexuality Vol. 1</i>, where he identified emerging tendencies
on the part of the government to rationalize interventions as means of enabling
populations not just to live, but also to live well and in a certain way. Such
rationales represent racialized thought because they discriminate between
various and sundry populations to the extent that some ways of living are
valued and prioritized over and above others.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By the time
he wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">State of Exception</i> Agamben
was applying his thesis to the conduct of internal politics and especially the
war on terror. It should be noted that he does not think the war on terror is a
unique example of the politicization of bare life, only that it is one among
many available in what he says is now, following Walter Benjamin, a state of
permanent exception in which populations find themselves “bare” and thus
vulnerable to management, dispossession, and extermination at the hands of the
sovereign. These bodies suffer the violence of sovereignty, included only to
feel its force, but are otherwise excluded from participation. In this way a
simple topographical distinction between inside and outside is not enough, but
a threshold, “a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude
each other but rather blur with each other.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let me give
an example of this process. Many of George W. Bush’s speeches in the wake of
September 11<sup>th</sup> spoke of the Al Qaeda and the nations that harbored
them as barbaric threats to Western civilization. At the same time that these
populations were described in these terms, America continued to conduct a
campaign of vigilant military attack on these nations, attacks which created
and intensified numerous political and infrastructural deficiencies faced by
countries which were often already struggling with developmental deficits that
indexed not only the legacy of colonialism but also their position on the
periphery rather than center of the global order. Existing cultural
differences, especially religious and ethnic, were played up in media accounts
of the condition’s facing women in nations like Afghanistan. At the same time
that political rhetoric emanating from the West suggested that these nations
were politically bereft and thus in need of Western military intervention,
sanctions, international scorn, and that military intervention worked to verify
the rhetorical account of these nations as backwards and outside of the world
of Western “political” life. They were inside sovereignty only to the extent
that they faced the exercise of sovereign violence but constitutively excluded
in all other ways.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So the
question: would Wilderson recognize the strife between Western Europe and the
populations in the East as a “family quarrel” following Fanon’s analysis of the
Holocaust? Would the position of Afghanistan be contingent in his view, i.e.
occupying a position of the Black but only until there comes to be a
recognition of something shared between Afghanistan and the West? Would this
recognition depend upon what Wilderson, building on the work of Sadiya Hartman,
would call the “fungibility” of the idea of violence as applied to the black
body? Those who are both geographically segregated from the West and also
marked ethnically will probably not be permitted to symbolically “enter” the
West anytime soon. And if the soft, permanent electronic euthanasia of drone
strikes is any indicator, civil society’s capacity to perceive the bodies of
those like the son of Anwar Awlaki is seriously denuded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While some Western theorists, chief among
them Agamben, are capable of ascertaining similar characteristics in the
Holocaust and the ongoing war on terror, one would be hard pressed to identify
this analogical mode of thinking as anything approaching dominant or ascendant,
which suggests a level of permanence to the position of bare life in the war on
terror as constitutively excluded.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
example emphasizes that Wilderson and Agamben have strikingly similar accounts
of suffering. Both suggest that for certain bodies the difference from other
bodies is one of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kind</i> rather than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">degree</i>. That is, for Wilderson the slave
is ontologically distinct from the body that is included in civil society.
Similarly, Agamben holds that bare life is in a position of abjection, subject
to the vicissitudes of violent sovereignty by virtue of an inclusion whose only
index is the body’s subjection to violence. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But there
is one important seeming distinction: while Wilderson and Agamben both render
the violence as ontological in the sense that it absolutely denies the humanity
and agency of those upon it is visited, Agamben reads the emptiness of
sovereignty’s authority—here I would say its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rhetorical</i> basis—as a sign of hope rather than the pessimism that
Wilderson suggests. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he says in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">State of Exception</i> the lack of a
“substantial articulation” between violence and law, that is, the fact that the
relationship is established through tautology rather than through appeal to
some kind of external authority, suggests that the inability to distinguish
between violence and the law is itself a resource for political action, one
that could demonstrate that emptiness.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Wilderson
on the other hand believes that the investment in authority for authority’s
sake is evidence that there is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no chance</i>
for the slave to exist in the world because the slave’s existence is what makes
the world possible. As he says it, “No slave, no world” because of both how the
physical labor of slavery makes our existing world possible and also how the
symbolic figure of the slave secures, through various and sundry means, the
intelligibility of civil society itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Above I
mark the distinction as “seeming” because I think the attitudinal difference
between the two thinkers is much less than the shared explanation both give for
the way in which political action sediments hierarchies to the detriment of
bodies that have no access to those political worlds. Both Agamben and
Wilderson indicate that the authority of civil society is generated by
tautological exercises of sovereign power the ground themselves in their own
assumption of authority. Agamben suggests that sovereignty anticipates its own
success to close off alternative perspectives while Wilderson argues that anti-blackness
works as a paradigm by rendering a constitutively impossibility arguments and
actions which might testify to its own self-investment in authority. Wilderson
and Agamben both outline theories of political exclusion that argue some forms
of life are given priority over other forms of life, and the unintelligibility
of those other forms of life is the grist for the mill of civil society and
politics, respectively. Wilderson’s point regarding Agamben’s focus on the
Holocaust is a necessary one, but contemporary situations of global violence
also suggest that there may be a level of permanence to the state of exception
that argues more for a reading of affinity between the two rather than a
theorization of their opposition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
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<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
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<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> I
am excited to interrogate further how Agamben is read by Jared Sexton, Achille
Mbembe, and others. I have not yet had a chance to do that. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Frank Wilderson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red, White, and Black:
The Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema</i>, Durham: Duke University Press,
(2010) p. 36<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ibid.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
For more see David Noon, “Operation Enduring Anslogy” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhetoric & Public Affairs</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Wilderson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red, White, and Black</i> p.
38<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Aristotle, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Politics</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;">
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Wilderson 11<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Giorgio Agamben, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">State of Exception</i>,
p. 23<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">State of Exception</i>, p. 87<o:p></o:p></div>
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Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-57483091887039683912014-05-28T13:22:00.000-07:002014-05-28T13:22:45.936-07:00A Return to the Hudson Institute Symposium on the Prospects for Conservative Populism<div class="MsoNormal">
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<i>This is part 2 in an
ongoing series of blog posts analyzing key ideological and messaging documents
in American conservatism from 2009-present.</i></div>
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2010 was a heady time for American conservatism. Not only
had it seen the election of a Republican, Scott Brown, in a special election to
replace the recently departed Ted Kennedy, but conservatism had a certain
energy and momentum not seen since at least since the 1994 Congressional wave,
which saw a crowd of Republicans elected alongside the promise to produce a new
“Contract with America.” Of course, what distinguished the activity of 2010 was
that where Newt Gingrich and others used an implicit theory of American
populism tethered to slogans intelligible to an audience stuck in the midst of
what were then called the “culture wars,” fought primarily over topics like gays
in the military, affirmative action, and abortion, to name a few.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Amidst the rise of the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party and
small electoral victories that portended a very successful November for
Republicans, the Hudson Institute hosted a symposium bringing together key
conservative pundits and politicians to discuss the supposed paradox at the
heart of the Tea Party’s rise: if conservatism seeks to “conserve” institutions
and morals, how can one reconcile a populist movement with conservative ideology,
given that “the people” are often and unpredictable mass who threaten to
undermine established institutions and orders?<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have already examined some of this dialogue on the
<a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.fr/2010/07/thoughts-on-hudson-institute-symposium.html">blog</a> in the past, but today I want to look at a different passage, one that
focuses most directly on the air of “authenticity” that surrounds emerging
social movements. After a lengthy discussion between Jonah Goldberg, Michael
Barone, Dick Armey, Mike Pence (R-IN) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Weekly
Standard</i> editor Bill Kristol, the panelists get into audience questions,
and one member asks about the Tea Party’s relationship to a certain kind of
populist libertarianism represented by Ron Paul:<o:p></o:p></div>
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: Here was an
interesting political poll where they actually went and asked Tea Party people
who showed up to rally—that’s different than calling people on the phone and
asking whether they support the Tea Party. They asked them with which
politician they most identify. Half said Sarah Palin, which makes sense for the
point that you made, Bill Kristol, but the other half said Ron Paul. I was
actually interested to hear the panelists’ thoughts about how Ron Paul has been
kind of caught up in the Tea Party movement, and the extent to which
lower-case-l libertarians are part of the Tea Party movement.<o:p></o:p></div>
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RICHARD ARMEY: This point was
raised earlier. There is a word that you used that binds. There is a symbiotic
word between Ron Paul, the Tea Party activists, and Sarah Palin. The word is
“authentic.” And that’s why they’re feared. They’re real. They’re not plastic.
They’re not manufactured. They’re not staged. They’re not choreographed.
They’re who they are. Ron Paul is who he is, bless is heart. He’s unique;
there’s only one like him. There’s one who is similar <sic> Not quite the
same. You know? And Sarah Palin is authentic. This drives the left nuts. They
believe in a world where ceremony triumphs over substance. Scenario over
science. And authenticity? It’s like Jack Nicholson said; they just can’t
handle the truth. They’re all truth, whether you like them or not. They are
what they are. What you see is what you get. And it’s authentic. They have a
certain affinity for—why do we grassroots activists find Ron Paul and Sarah
Palin attractive? Well, they’re real. We just really don’t know how much we can
say that about most people holding or seeking office. Are they really real, or
are they staged? We don’t like staged; we’ve had enough of it. So I would say,
“authentic” is the (inaudible).<o:p></o:p></sic></div>
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What really sticks out here in Armey’s comments is the
insistence that the Tea Party is a natural and organic movement. Indeed, this
sentiment is found throughout the document where appeals to “authenticity” or
“the grassroots” come up around every other page or so. Armey suggests that Tea
Partiers are animated by the same kind of energy that fuels Ron Paul supporters
and supporters of Sarah Palin: that is, some kind of gut feeling that something
is wrong, and that they are right to be fed up and frustrated with the way the
world is. Indeed, the audience member’s question directs a reader to this
interpretation, with the framing of how actual interviews produce a response
different from that which can be gleaned from phone polls. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As Armey says of the Tea Partiers “They are what they are.
What you see is what you get.” For Armey, liberal concern and anxiety about
what the Tea Party means indexes the importance of a visible and agitative
conservative presence: its existence cannot be denied. “Realness” and
“authenticity” as key criteria also explain why what sometimes seem idiosyncratic
or folksy characteristics of figures like Paul or Palin do not, as their
critics hold, undermine their fitness for national office. Instead, they
testify to the ease audiences have with identifying with these figures
precisely because they represent a kind of style or persona that is not typical
to “insider, D.C.” style politics. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was an especially important argument in the 2010 political environment because
it was this disease of crony insiderism that many argued caused the government
to unfairly bail out the big financial institutions that had caused the 2008
financial crisis.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I and others have <a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.fr/2013/04/the-people-as-none.html">argued</a>, conservatism won a
number of victories through managing to not “appear” explicitly in public as an
interest based political formation but instead as a more or less disembodied
cultural formation that worked to conserve an existing body of traditional
practices and political beliefs.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Reports framed the 2008 presidential election as a momentous moment in
nation-making, in which America finally broke through the color barrier at the
presidential level. At the same time, many headlines after the election
portended doom and gloom for a rapidly shrinking conservative demographic of
mostly older and white voters.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Armey’s insistence that one cannot deny the existence of the
Tea Party cannot be disarticulated from this political context. Nor is it for
nothing that the forum hosted by the Hudson Institute was about populism. Populism
is not so much an ideology as a political style according to works like those
of Michael Kazin and Michael Lee.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Populist argumentation is characterized by the central claim that the
population of a nation is better positioned to determine its policy direction
that a policy elite. “The people” tend to be summoned as a counter-hegemonic
force, emerging to speak with democratic legitimacy against outrages or
transgressions that the nation’s population can simply no longer tolerate. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This document represents one quite typical of conservative
thought from early 2009 to at least 2011. There is a focus throughout on the
resentment derived from bank bailouts, and the authenticity of the public’s
fury against them. There is a palpable sense that conservatism is a people’s
movement. (Elsewhere in the transcript, Jonah Goldberg is appropriately wary of
this claim). “The people” are mostly articulated to two values: limited
government and the Constitution. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When looking for guidance about the extensive policy
gridlock and partisanship that has accurately described the last four years in
Washington, D.C., a document like this tells a very clear story. The animating
principle of this particular version of populism is negativity: “the people”
are against bailouts, against government, against cronyism, and against
overreach. There are no real clear singular policies which can serve as the
means to concretize the demands of the movement. With the bar set through these
negative demands for an “authentic” movement that establishes its truth simply
by virtue of its opposition to the existing system, one begins to see at least
one cause of conservative policy decline: the expectation is not that they will
engage in particular modes of governance but simply that they will, as a matter
of principle, oppose governing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
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<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
For more see Michael Warner’s “The Mass Public and Mass Subject” and Lauren
Berlant’s wonderful book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Queen of
America Goes to Washington City</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Michael Kazin <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Popular Persuasion</i>
and Michael Lee “The Populist Chameleon” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quarterly
Journal of Speech</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-20502351859348671782014-05-27T11:57:00.002-07:002014-05-27T11:57:49.525-07:00A Rhetorical Analysis of “Reform Restore, Modernize—An Agenda to Restore the American Dream”<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>I’m beginning a project over the next month or so to analyze key
conservative policy documents, manifestos, conference proceedings, and white
papers from 2009 to present. The hope is that I might generate some sense about
the depths of what some have alternately theorized as a demographic and/or
policy crisis in conservative politics. My working hypothesis is that existing
discrepancies between conservative political programs for specific policy
change and those of progressive organizations reflect conservatism facing a
difficult choice. On the one hand, conservatives managed to squeeze 40 years of
governing dominance out of the post-64 political landscape, crafting a
political alliance around shared feelings of marginality and anxiety, taking
Nixon’s “silent majority” and letting it speak with policy dominance by the
time of Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Triangulation by entities like the DLC
and Bill Clinton testified not to enormous Democratic success but instead to
the power of this conservative rearrangement of what Cindy Patton calls
“political space” in America. The 2008 and to a lesser extent the 2012
presidential elections, however, find conservatism trapped between rehashing
its same tired appeals to a shrinking demographic base or embracing policy
changes that might alienate members of either its fiscal or social policy base.</i></div>
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I begin today by examining a very
recent statement regarding the core values of modern conservatism, entitled
“Reform, Restore, Modernize—An Agenda to Restore the American Dream.” The
document comes out of recent meetings of top political conservatives like Ted
Cruz (R-Texas). A recent Jim Pethokoukis <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/262104/what-conservatives-dont-understand-about-the-modern-us-economy">column </a>in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Week</i> did well to analyze the document from a Right economic
position: he bemoans the “time-travel tale” of the document which, he argues,
the only thing holding us back from a new moment of American dominance is a
return to Reagan-style economics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pethokoukis’ argument is insightful,
but I am not here to comment on macroeconomic virtues and vices. Instead, I
want to examine this statement for the type of appeal it crafts, what sort of
audience it imagines. After all, conservatism faces a historically unique
challenge at this moment to hold together a coalition commentators tend to
divide into social and fiscal conservatives. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social policy claims about the necessity of
defending traditional institutions of family and society are withering as
support for gay marriage reaches historical highs. At the same time, real wages
have stagnated against inflation, creating an opportunity for economic appeals
to carve out broader new constituencies. The post-2008 bailout fury created an
opening for economic populism, one that was seized on by a coalition of
political organizations and motivated individuals to crest in the wave of
political organization that found its greatest gains in the 2010 midterms. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Actual economic populism,
however, is of limited political utility for conservatives (and perhaps
Democrats, depending on how strongly you view the capture of the Democratic
party by corporate interests). Economic populism does not discriminate, its
advocates work by sketching Manichean lines between those at the center of an
economic hierarchy and a virtuous “people” unjustly positioned at that
periphery. Uncorking economic populism, as many did after 2008, did a lot of
important work to guide intense feelings into political action at the polls.
But it also intensified rather than alleviated the political crunch facing
conservatism, namely: the principles behind economic populism draw on feelings
of marginalization and victimage that often appear in public in exactly the
kinds of statements and images that might be most off-putting to emerging
demographics to which conservatives will have to appeal to survive in the
political long term. So when Rick Perry focuses on a narrative about the
“Makers and the Takers” in his presidential campaign in 2012, and others like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red State’s</i> Erick Erickson engage in the
rhetoric of the “53% vs. 43%” with reference to those who pay taxes and those
who don’t, economic populism shows its seedy and, demographically
counterproductive, underside.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the same time, conservatives
tend to favor policies that include less regulation, fewer taxes, and more
freedom for enterprise. Unsurprisingly, these policies are generally favored by
large businesses because of the way they enable freer commerce and impose fewer
restrictions on businesses. It is in the short-term electoral interest of
conservatism to thus cultivate rage against economic injustice, but absolutely
fatal to its long term interests, unless one believes that there is more blood
to be squeezed from the turnip of trickle down economics. Complicating matters
further are emerging demographic issues: economic populism tends to appeal to
xenophobic elements of American political culture, meaning that the “people” of
economic populism will often be defined narrowly in ways that eliminate
economically beneficial proposals like comprehensive immigration reform from
consideration. Thus economic populism might well be aimed at the core
constituencies of the GOP rather than at the opposing party.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Documents like the one I am about
to analyze, then, emerge on difficult terrain. They increasingly try to do the
impossible, threading a needle between maintaining rage about current economic
circumstances while also encouraging political fealty to ideology that
encourages fewer, not more, regulations and restrictions on the very large
entities to which much of this blame is directed. “Crony capitalism” is a key
term used by conservatives to try to massage out this political knot, as it
offers a way to conflate governance and business to politically productive
ends. However, the concept has to do an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">awful
lot</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of legwork </i>to maintain the
conservative constituency. I want to suggest in this post that at least one
section of the document fails to do so.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The document opens with a
reference to the American founding. This reference to the founding is an
exceedingly common reference in post-2008 conservative political materials. No
doubt, the reference to the founding, a supposedly neutral point of origination
of the nation, serves as a place around which all conservatives should be able
to gather. The Founders themselves are then described as figures that “sought
to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish
true religious liberty, and maintain a flourishing society of republican
self-government.” One especially interesting note in that passage is the phrase
“republican self-government,” which is seemingly redundant. Is not all
republicanism governance from within? After all, governance from without is not
considered governance, per se, or at least is certainly not regarded as
legitimate. Going out of their way to frame the matter as one of republican
self-government suggests this document will in part attempt to continue to
constitute its audience in a populist manner that focuses on the importance of
self-government as a concept.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The document then moves on to use
the term “fusion” to describe the marriage between economic and social
conservatives. The reference to fusion no doubt calls to mind the ideology of 1950’s
conservative Frank Meyer, whose “fusionism” sought to bridge the gap between
traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-Communists. The framing here is almost
one of chastisement, as it argues that Constitutional conservatism “reminds
economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social
conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government,
and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government
is the key” to a healthy America.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At least one issue the authors of
these documents are confronting is that Meyer’s “fusionism” probably always
fell short of the name. It is more proper, in fact, to speak of something like
“covalent bonds” produced by mid-century conservatives rather than the act of
atomic reconfiguration suggested by the metaphor of fusion. The interests of
“national security” conservatives (then anti-Communists), economic conservatives,
and social conservatives were linked, yes, but more by the careful cultivation
of certain attitudes rather than the production of a philosophical schema
capable of resolving what might prove, logically, to be fatal contradictions.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
What they held in common were not political ideologies, per se, but instead
shared positions of political marginality. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It comes as little surprise,
then, that the document then uses a fair amount of combative language to
describe the “restoration” of America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The authors are “fighting to retake and resolutely defend” American
principles. Metaphors of conflict and battle tend to suggest an antagonistic
situation wherein the stakes of the political battle are themselves
existential. These are not matters of disagreement, but instead survival. Rather
than resolving the messy debate about fusionism, one which the 2008 and 2012
elections emphasized represented a crisis for conservatism by way of
demographics, conservative political documents like this one have to double
down on principles of union through persuasive concepts of popular unity and togetherness
instead of tangible policy proposals that might offer a way forward only at the
risk of fracturing the base.<o:p></o:p></div>
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After priming the audience both
for a fight but also suggesting that what is to come is a reminder about what
America “really” is, the document moves into its elucidation of areas of policy
and specific recommendations for the achievement of goals in this area. The
areas are “An Agenda for American Recovery and Growth”,” “An Agenda for a
Stronger and More Peaceful America,” An Agenda for Cultural Renewal and the
American Family,” and “An Agenda to Hold Government Accountable by Preserving
the Constitution.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Under the section entitled “An
Agenda for American Recovery and Growth” one finds a call that reforms should
“reward hard work” while also creating “ a level playing field for everyone.”
The document also animates this vision with the idea of the “who” that should
benefit from this recovery. The “middle class” appears twice in this section
along with “ordinary people” and “hard-working American families.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are also four references to either
“taxes” or “taxpayers.” And for good measure, there are five instances of
reference to “everyone.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The population that
deserves this playing field is positioned almost exclusively in opposition to
the government. In each of the four major captions the actor preventing
Americans from realizing their potential is “excessive regulations,”
“Washington’s fiscal mess…government spending,” “ineffective government
programs,” and “ Obamacare.” When it comes to the economy, the effervescent
powers of all Americans, it seems, would shine if only the government would get
out of the way.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When the document then moves to
the specifics, suggestions remain somewhat generic. Under the subheading
“Restore a Fiscally Accountable Government that Works for Everyone, Not Just
Washington” for example, there are seven bullet points six of which represent
somewhat empty or impossible demands. They do, however, articulate to a set of
political subjects that many conservatives have taken on as pet projects during
the Obama administration.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first bullet points reads “Pass
Congressional rules that require balanced budgets, responsibility and accurate
accounting.” This point touches on several important political nodes of
interest. It connects to public anger and resentment over the bailouts of in
the fall of 2008. which many thought represented “irresponsible” spending. It
also connects to a series of common talking points raised against the stimulus
bill, namely that it was implicated in corruption (hence the reference to questionable
accounting practices as implicitly problematic) and was also charged with
running up the deficit. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The second bullet point reads
“Pass spending levels that adhere to discretionary limits already promised in
law.” This point touches on common claims about the problematic lack of a
budget during the Obama administration and also taps into general resentment
against government spending on social service programs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The budget argument has been well documented
by Dave Weigel and others: with political gridlock at historical highs (link to
recent Atlantic article) following certain ordinary points of budgetary order
is not a practical option for a government that has to keep operating.
Moreover, “discretionary spending” is a term of art that refers to moments
where the Congress utilizes its power of the purse to fund the actions of
federal agencies. This is the precise kind of spending that continues without
authorization in a new specific piece of legislation in lieu of passage of a
robust and full budget document. At the same time that the call appeals to
those who follow the ins and outs of budget disputation, the term
“discretionary” itself might signal otherwise to a less wonkish audience.
“Discretion” implies a strong agent-centered notion of choice. Hence the
government is in the business of exercising its discretion to decide what does
and does not receive funding. Where parts of conservative communities are
caught up in discourses fueled by images of “makers and takers,” where the
latter vote Democratic just for “free stuff,” the idea of reigning in
“discretionary” spending might mean something quite different for many
different conservative audiences of this document. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The next statement reads “End
fraud and overpayments that send taxpayer dollars to those who abuse the
system.” Such a statement connects directly to a number of budget and spending
controversies as well as debates over health care. Indeed, one of the primary
talking points in favor of the Affordable Care Act was that it would lower
health care costs. A key rebuttal to this point was that simply tightening
screws on waste and fraud in government programs like Medicare would achieve
substantial budget tightening. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similarly, ideas of fraud circulate intensely
in debates over federal spending on social services like food stamps/programs
like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as myths like the “welfare queen”
refuse to die. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The next statement about ending
“direct payments to private companies based on connections instead of the best
product” wades into a retroactive debate about the stimulus bill (less well
known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Solyndra controversy, in
which the government invested stimulus funding into a solar panel company that
went belly-up, constitutes a key political talking point for many
conservatives, who argue that the result of a cozy, cronyist relationship
between the Obama administration and Solyndra officials resulted in a bad
investment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course the notes
about paying companies “based on connections” also serves to generate a
connection to frustration with the bank bailouts, which were perceived to have
emerged in part due to a cozy relationship between federal financial regulators
and large financial entities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The next claim is that the
government should refuse to authorize the Export/Import bank, an entity that
guarantees loans to foreign entities that purchase U.S. export.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Ex-Im bank finds itself the convenient
target for “cronyism” which seems to target any relationship between government
and business, and in this case the fact that the bank guarantees loans to
foreigners makes it an easy target because (ostensibly) the entities it
benefits are not American, although on balance the bank represents a net gain
for American commerce.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The document then turns back to
2008, arguing that the government must “Stop pumping tens of billions into big
banks at the expense of average Americans.” The clear reference to the 2008
bailouts reflects abiding discontentment with the financial crisis and its
management as a key factor animating conservative politics. Especially given
the language of “average Americans,” the statement not only works by stating
that the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">present</i> is a moment when the
government is pumping billions into large banks, but also positions these large
corporations as the opposite of “the people,” indicting the government for its
decision to side with them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The next statement reads “Reform
financial and banking laws that enshrine permanent bank bailouts in law.” This
statement works through a version of sleight of hand and refers to the
Dodd-Frank banking reform legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 crisis. In
fact, Dodd-Frank does not legally codify bank bailouts in law, it only says
that banks which are valued over a certain amount are “systematically
important” to the economy and thus eligible to receive federal assistance. By conflating
a legal o<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bligation</i> with a legal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">option</i> the statement makes it seem like
Dodd-Frank, which in many senses restricted large banks, actually benefited
them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
At this point, it makes sense to
pause and take a breath. I have analyzed only one of a total of sixteen
different subheadings within the document. I probably return to analyze a few
others at some point. But it is fair to say that the economy has been the
dominant political issues for the GOP over the last 5 years, along with
Obamacare. Indeed, a large percentage of the rhetorical case against health
care reform was tied to arguments suggesting it would harm the economy. One
should expect that this document, representing the statements and opinions of
some key GOP leaders on economics, would have a bit more to it. Instead it
seems much more interested in reminding folks of how they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i> instead of generating proposals that aim at resolving the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cause</i> of that anxiety and fear.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
The various and sundry dog whistles buried in the document, including references to the stimulus, Obamacare, Solyndra, and welfare, just to name a few, suggest that conservatives are experts at referring to certain scandals and crises so long as their audience has already been primed to become interested in them. But, one wonders what sort of broader constituency this document imagines. (Indeed, a look through the other sections does not inspire much optimism). There are zero references to immigration in the document. Issues valued by traditionalists like gay marriage are instead briefly mentioned only obliquely through references to "traditional family structures." </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
A document that tries to be something for all Americans is not a very useful political document. Moreover, a document that fails to bring to the table some positive and active sense of a political agenda suggests that conservatism remains locked in a self-sustaining feedback loop of political negativity. Conservatives oppose Big Government, a weak economy, waste, fraud, and unfairness. With the exception of the first of this quintet, none of these represent meaningful partisan difference out of which politicians make hay. And even the point about size of government seems to have been squeezed within an inch of its life, as debates over the debt ceiling and budget suggest making meaningful inroads into the deficit will require substantial cuts to very popular government programs, including Medicare, the military, and social security. The path forward remains murky for conservatism, at best.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
<i>Next in the series I will examine the transcript of a Hudson Institute symposium on the prospects of conservative populism, and the contradictions therein.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 178.25pt;">
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<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It
might be said that the bond was true fusion to the extent that it could be
manufactured by the unity of skepticism the three groups shared towards black
Americans. I think this description would also apply to numerous Democrats who
switched parties during the 1960’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
a substantial portion of the disorder of the 1960’s was raced by virtue of its
attachment to the struggle for civil rights lends credence to this judgment. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
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Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-39136283899190430442014-05-12T08:49:00.002-07:002014-05-12T08:49:45.798-07:00Tackling the Crisis: A Review of Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste<div class="MsoNormal">
Making sense of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath
is a daunting task. While there have been a number of popular press attempts
like Michael Lewis’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big Short</i> or
the documentary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inside Job</i>, the
latter of which took painstaking details to paint a picture of the connections
and players involved in the crisis, Philip Mirowski asks in his recent book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown</i> why the aftermath of the 2008
crisis did not spur some broad based legitimation crisis in the dominant
channels and organs of the world’s economic and intellectual elite. Mirowski’s
answer is well reasoned but also somewhat depressing: economic intellectuals
take for granted the scientific elements of economic theory, and, reading
deductively, understand the crisis as expressing not some retroactive judgment
of economics as a discipline but instead as expressing a sort of intrinsic
unpredictability with which those interested in markets and economics will just
have to live.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The book proceeds to make four arguments that are of vital
interest to rhetoricians and those studying the intersection between
argumentation and social theory. 1) Demands for “consensus” reinforce orthodoxy
within economic thought, 2) Economics departments and economics faculty suffer
from a feedback loop problem wherein the economic incentives from coming to
conclusions that will sound good to private sector employers in the financial
sector pollute academic conclusions, 3) “Everyday neoliberalism” is sustained
through quotidian vectors of representations and encounter that naturalize
economic decisions as proceeding from some godlike mantra as opposed to effects
of human action, and 4) Public interventions by public intellectuals in the
area of economics like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman were counterproductive
insofar as they reproduced the notion that there were a limited number of
“sides” to the debate over the crash while also suggesting a minor economic
corrective rather than a wholesale philosophical corrective was needed to
explain not only the crash but also the failure of those who helped cause it to
reflect on their role.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I was very taken by Mirowski’s argument regarding “everyday
neoliberalism,” because while it is, in some ways painfully obvious, he does
lay out some compelling evidence worthy of consideration. For example, phenomena
like the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Freakonomics</i> series, which
tries to explain almost every sector of society in economic terms, induce a
certain kind of talking about the economy as something natural. Or, as a friend
and I routinely discuss, the rise of advanced statistics movements in sports,
emblematized by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moneyball</i>, brings
left-progressives over to the side of the market with sexy talk of “market
inefficiencies” and opposition to troglodyte scouts and coaches who just can’t
understand the links between economics and progress. Another good example
Mirowski cites, and one worthy of further study by rhetoricians, is the utter
invisibility of any class outside the “middle class” in the vocabularies of
news media, pundits, and politicians. Again, another rather obvious point, but
stunningly demonstrative: could you go through the roster of leading
politicians in the two major American political parties right now and find a
dozen references to “the poor” or “impoverished” in their speeches and prepared
materials? One wonders if this signals a deep, deep internalization of the
market mantra: don’t mention the poor because those who are impoverished are so
as a matter of their nature as opposed to their will?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The book’s argument with respect to the drive for consensus
as a factor evading substantive engagement with the poverties of economic
theory is also powerful. Mirowski is not only a professor of economics but also
of the history of philosophy. Hence it comes as little surprise that he makes a
claim about the relationship of how knowledge is presumed to work within expert
spheres. Specifically, he argues that there is a tendency to assume that
“expertism” implies “consensus.” Thus where there is absence of consensus, we
do not have expertism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as such</i> but
instead failed knowledge production wherein all claims are suspect. Reading
from the famous Frank Luntz global warming memo which suggested that a
consensus on climate science would force legislative action on global warming,
Mirowski suggests that this thinking has proven especially pernicious in the
case of economics, because while public intellectuals like Paul Krugman lob
bombs at central members of what Mirowski calls the “Neoliberal Thought
Collective” the work this does is often to assure the public that there is no
economic consensus while the existence of a thing called “the market” (in the
public view, I mean: Mirowski is very clear that for mainstream neoliberal
economists “the market” does not exist, but is something which makes its own
way in the world independent of economists) continues unabated. Thus the market
continues to do its work even as what “economists” think comes to be
represented as presumptively uncertain. If the central task for those concerned
with the sustainability of the global system and especially those concerned
with the massive inequalities and injustices that exist in the world is to
challenge the mantra that “what markets say <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>
reality” then minor repairs and rescue operations only emphasize that while
markets <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> know, humans, even
experts, cannot.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If I had to say a couple things critical of the book, they
would be that Mirowski insufficiently theorizes the history of “expertism” as a
concept in American public life and also that he struggles to locate the
argument of the later Michel Foucault found in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Biopolitics</i>, which Mirowski cites extensively. Regarding
expertism, Mirowski assumes that the distance between the deliberating public
and the realm of experts is one made by the confusion and misinformation
circulated in public disputes about the economy. This is, as far as it goes,
correct. But Mirowski could do more to highlight how politicians and pundits
navigate the constitutive distance between “economics” and something like a
fluid conception of “the public” (thought of as a discursive figure as opposed
to a demographic) by pointing to how the existence of things as they are
ratifies them retroactively as expressions of a general economic will. That is,
simply by being, things are as “the market” says they are, which bakes in a
certain level of presumption about the status quo. Mirowski seems, in many
parts of the book, to understand this, which makes it all the more puzzling
that he insists on reading the Foucault of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Birth of Biopolitics</i> as descriptive rather than prescriptive: he insists
that “Foucault…declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by
power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged
epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth.” (p. 100). In
fact, the Foucault of these later lectures provides one of the best possible
answers to the classical dispute about false consciousness that has dogged
progressives, because he argues that the market comes to function <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as if</i> it were the only site of knowledge
to explain the characteristics of a vast set of “non-economic” sectors i.e.
cultural, familial, etc. Nothing in Foucault says it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has</i> to be this way, only that it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Overall, this book was very helpful for pushing one to think
about the aftermath of the political crisis. It’s also very accessible:
Mirowski has taken pains to write in a manner accessible to more than just
theory-minded academics. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for the
more academically inclined he makes a host of interesting points, like his
ability to connect the influence of Carl Schmitt to the Chicago School of
economics. I would recommend it to anyone interested in neoliberalism, the 2008
financial crisis, social theory, or the rhetoric of science/rhetoric of
inquiry.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
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Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-32557315883924283292014-04-16T20:18:00.001-07:002014-04-16T20:18:22.029-07:00Conservatism's Mid-Century CrisisRecently, it has become <i>de riguer</i> to argue that Barry Goldwater's political loss in the 1964 presidential election was a tactical loss but a strategic victory. Rick Perlstein argues in <i>Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Political Consensus</i> that while Goldwater lose the election by a sizable margin he ultimately settled on themes and policies that would resonate for years to come for Americans of all stripes, setting the stage for conservative hegemony in the last thirty years or so of the twentieth century. So, what was the general situation leading up to the start of the eventual conservative renaissance in 1968?<br />
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In Jonathan Schoenwald's masterful book on sixties conservatism, <i>A Time for Choosing</i>, he argues that there were three main kinds of conservatives in America that emerged out of the post-war consensus. There were traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists. Traditionalists favored a normative family structure, remained committed to religious observance, and argued for the maintenance and preservation of institutions. They were mostly conservatives in the traditional Edmund Burke sense of supporting the conservation of long lasting institutions following the premise that what had been made and stood the test of time had some intrinsic value. Libertarians were persuaded by works like Barry Goldwater's ghost-authored <i>The Conscience of the Conservative </i>that the new key value for conservatives was small government, which could liberate the genius of the individual from the yoke of government control while at the same time evading the ills of centralized government on clear display in the Soviet Union and other sites. The third type of conservative, the anti-communist, bought into a more negative <i>ethos</i> of opposition to communism as opposed to a positive believe in the power of either time-tested institutions or the resilient individual.<br />
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At the same time that these conservative elements emerged, America was in the midst of real economic advancement. The middle class was rapidly expanding. Substantial government investments in infrastructure and the military were providing the basis for extensive growth. Post-war GI Bill grads found higher education attainable. Yet these heady economic successes were not mirrored in the realm of politics for conservatives, who found themselves on the outside looking in. Joseph McCarthy's virulent anti-communism had made red baiting into a counter-productive political tactic. Robert Welch's accusation in 1959 that Republican Dwight Eisenhower was a closet socialist further stigmatized the public brand of anti-communism. Of course, Welch's accusation represented a natural outcome for conservatism that public policy consensus had painted into an increasingly small corner. The post-war and New Deal consensus took for granted the necessity of a large and bureaucratic state apparatus. Dwight Eisenhower, after all, built the interstate highway system. A Cold War consensus made foreign policy a difficult policy arena to create separation between the now-dominant Democratic party and Republicans.<br />
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Further complicating matters was that economic advancement itself posed a subtle threat to traditional institutions. Real economic progress meant less leisure time for some, but more capital to use during said leisure time. As Lisbeth Cohen writes in <i>A Consumer's Republic</i>, modes of conspicuous consumption came to function as a certain kind of citizenship. But with less free time for some, consumption itself had to substitute for other kinds of community life and vibrancy. And consumption and commerce are poor substitutes, lacking the shared and non-ephemeral characteristics of shared public life.<br />
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It was not as if all of this happened in a vacuum, of course. A number of conservatives saw the threat of the liberal consensus. Richard Weaver wrote in 1947 in <i>Ideas Have Consequences</i> that the rise of a technocratic political/state apparatus threatened to elide humanity, replacing the human "generalist" who could speak to multiple areas of interest. Weaver feared the sovereignty of the individual posed the greatest threat to traditional institutions; where the individual was lionized above all else, America would become a community of individuals defined solely by their differential existence and not by any sense of shared issues and common interests. Others, like William F. Buckley, sought to organize a conservative intellectual bulwark to counteract what they saw as the progressive technocratic consensus embodied by the emergence of the statist consensus and reinforced by thinkers like Richard Hofstader. to this end, Buckley funded <i>National Review</i> and kickstarted the Young Americans for Freedom. Other thinkers, like Russell Kirk, contributed to Buckley's publication, seeking to constitute a kind of conservative vanguard that could produce arguments opposed to the rising liberal consensus.<br />
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However, there was no evidence that shared interests would cause a natural coalescence between these disparate conservative elements, nor that well-crafted essays in magazines would be able to paper over these divides. Libertarianism posed a potentially fatal threat to traditional conservatism because its ideological commitment to individual choice threatened to open up institutions to attack by way of individual achievement and critique. At the same time, traditional institutions operate to hamper and constrain individual choice. Rabid anti-communists who could not go so far as to call the hero of D-Day a red were lost as well, confident that their interests were not represented by the mass public but unsure why.<br />
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By the early sixties conservatism faced a crisis. There was on the one hand a critical mass of intellectuals who had thrown their weight and money behind developing a conservative "ideas industry" to act as a counterweight to the liberal consensus. There were also emergent constituencies hungry to identify against the liberal consensus, even as they in many cases benefited from the largesse of government spending. However, no one had yet succeeded in translating the work of the conservative intelligentsia into a set of digestible political idioms, in no small part due to the apparently constitutive rather than contingent ideological divides within the set of potential conservative voters.<br />
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Barry Goldwater emerged as the presidential candidate who would attempt to make the first public case for new conservatism. Goldwater, a robust libertarian and anti-communist, was famous for ignoring the needs of his audience in favor of going into partisan screeds against welfare cheats and communist subversives, according to rhetorician J.C. Hammerback. However, Goldwater's seeming extremism was the exact opposite of what conservatives needed in 1964. After all, conservatives were already anxious about their marginal political status. And, many conservatives (and Americans generally) were wary of radicalism in any form, left or right. This was due not only to the persistent political labeling of socialist and totalitarian governments as "radical" and "extremist" but also because the intensity of European fascism did not float far from the American imaginary. Goldwater's comments, like "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" uttered at the Cow Palace in San Francisco during the 1964 Republican nominating convention, did not so much work as effective utilitarian arguments as they did serve to accentuate conservative worries about appearing to be political outsiders instead of legitimate democratic interlocutors.<br />
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To united the disparate groups of conservatives, one could not simply hammer home ideological points about welfare cheats and communist plots, as Goldwater was inclined to do. His hard hits against government programs alienated many voters who were consciously benefiting from them. And his hardcore anti-communism raised the specter of at least foolish red baiting or at worst, resurgent McCarthyism.In short, when your political party is struggling to maintain political relevance, making political arguments that call out the obvious problems with the existing consensus not only fail to gain traction because folks are already disposed towards that consensus because of institutional and identitarian inertia, but it also reminds the constituency that <i>might</i> be friendly to your argument that they are in fact marginalized, and produces a distance between them and your claims based on their perceived radicalism.<br />
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In short, early sixties conservatives were certain they <i>existed</i> and had a <i>cause</i> but they were somewhat unsure of what that cause might be, or at least, how they might articulate it in a way that could build a coalition rather than further exacerbate tensions between the factions. In an earlier <a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2013/08/1965-reagans-increasingly-mainstream.html">post</a> on Ronald Reagan I in part addressed how conservatives navigated themselves out of this pickle, and I will hopefully return to that point at more length.<br />
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<br />Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-92199214521956490162013-12-18T07:42:00.003-08:002013-12-18T07:42:41.467-08:00On Discussions of the Democrats and PopulismTypically the readers of this blog encounter a number of posts about the prospects of a conservative populism. A recent <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115942/democratic-schism-over-bankers-vs-reformers-real">Noam Scheiber</a> piece at <i>The New Republic</i>, however, got me thinking about where the idea of a progressive populism is at the moment. Scheiber's piece is an insightful read on what populism offers for the Democratic party at the moment. I am not as sanguine about the prospects for a leftist populism as Scheiber is, for reasons I will outline.<br />
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Scheiber structures his argument by contrasting the economic populism of Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren with so-called politically "neutral" positions from advocacy groups like Third Way. Visiting their <a href="http://www.thirdway.org/about_us">website</a>, one notes that they describe themselves by noting that, "Third Way represents Americans in the “vital center” — those who believe in pragmatic solutions and principled compromise, but who too often are ignored in Washington." Third Way's recent decision to put economic populism on blast, then, disturbs Scheiber, who assumes that there is more common cause between Third Way and economic populists than daylight. Indeed, he even notes that Third Way's co-founder Matt Bennett, is willing to admit as much in a piece by <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/12/progressive_change_campaign_committee_third_way_and_elizabeth_warren_how.html">Dave Weigel</a>. What seemingly confounds Scheiber is why, exactly, Third Way would create such a kerfluffle when they have so much common cause with the policy agenda of the economic populists. Weigel suggests in his piece that the explanation for the kerfluffle is related mostly to the ability of a certain set of financial interests to maintain a delicate balancing act between maintaining political influence amongst the politically strong Democrats while at the same time being able to oppose policies that would necessitate higher taxation and more corporate regulation, like entitlement expansion.<br />
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Scheiber goes on to argue that opposition to populism might be best explained by the way that populist rhetorical and political strategies induce action where playing the insiders' game results in less change. As he says, "when you actually try to reform the status quo, any approach that relies on courting insiders (lobbyists and businessman, often regulators and Washington think tankers) rather than ginning up public support typically stalls out before long." He notes that because of the power accumulated by special interests, only appealing to "the people" can offer a way to break up the regulatory and legislative gridlock in Washington. Scheiber's warrant for this claim is not only recent empirical data from the legislative record, but also the assertion that the old split between producerism (late 19th century style populism as represented in groups like The People's Party) and progressivism (think voting rights plus temperance plus labor rights plus Protestant <i>ethos</i> plus regulation) is vanishing, if not vanished. For Scheiber, the rise of the 1 percent as a political and economic class has played the role eliminating the classic schism between producerists and progressives.<br />
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I appreciate Scheiber's piece but I think he has fallen into the trap of equating a rise in economic inequality with an absolutely corresponding rise in consciousness about the given political situation. Before we had the 1 percent (and Occupy Wall Street, natch) there was the Tea Party, an economic populism that is not entirely different. Scheiber's view of an economic populist like Elizabeth Warren is that she endorses a political platform that plays well: punishment for big banks, defense of entitlements, and financial regulations. Research actually suggests that all of these talking points merge nicely with the beliefs of those who are Tea Partiers (for more see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Remaking-Republican-Conservatism/dp/019997554X">this</a> very helpful book by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson). The Tea Party emerged out of real and palpable anger about how big banks escaped from 2008 almost scot free, many Tea Partiers were defensive about entitlements (notably, <i>their</i> entitlements not necessarily the expansion of them to others), and wanted to combat the special interests that had let the financial sector run free. If we learned anything from the 2010 midterm, it was that the feeling of anger and frustration was itself populist, even if it could be channeled and pushed towards political interests which might do relatively less to address these sentiments through policy proposals.<br />
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Historically, one might point out that the producerist/progressivist split was never actually eradicated. Instead, a combination of economic prosperity following the second world war and its convergence with a regime of robust statism combined to paper over what might have otherwise been antagonistic tensions between producerists and populists. Of course, after a while rising economic prosperity actually exposed potential schisms between the two groups, most notably because of the ways in which increased affluence threatened to replace Protestant morality with crude consumerism. This schism, among others, was played to by conservatives who launched their first populist campaigns of the 20th century under the sign of individual freedom, which allowed them to stitch together business interests that disagreed with the existing strength of the regulatory state and more properly "populist" elements of the nation struggling to reconcile their existence with the pace of innovation, change, and transformation in the country.<br />
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Scheiber's claim that unified resentment for the 1 percent can drive Democratic populism seems overly rosy. Invoking "the people" never occurs for just one political side: claims for "the people" are made on a complicated terrain where the rhetorical power of populism is always subject to capture and use that evades the intent and scope of the claims of those who initially deploy it. While it is appealing to imagine that claims against the economic elite intuitively warrant a move to support Democratic politicians, this is not a given for several reasons. First, previous and current Democratic administrations, from Clinton to Obama, have not shown the willingness to be appropriately harsh and antagonistic to business interests to demonstrate that they place the interests of "the people" over established political "facts" in Washington. Second, "the people" functions as a sign of collectivism but in America collectivism runs into the competing grammar of American individualism. Even if collectivism sometimes wins out to suppress the individualistic elements in American identity, this is most often true in matters of foreign policy not economic matters where a fevered imaginary stoked by modern-day Horatio Algers well versed in the work of Ayn Rand seems fit to run free. Third, the argument ad populum operates as a rhetoric that draws on the position of "the people" as fundamentally outside the position of power in order to establish its claim. Specifically, "the people" are enunciated just as much <i>if not more so</i> as positioned <i>against</i> the government rather than only corporate interests. To the extend that these two blend, all the better for conservative forces. Finally, with a Democratic firmly ensconced in their second term in the White House, it is unclear that a populist rhetoric will intuitively work for rather than against the Democratic Party, as the 2010 work of the Tea Party shows.<br />
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Scheiber is right that the Democratic Party should focus on putting together a meaningful policy agenda based on fighting back against corporate common sense in the federal government. However, attaching this effort in advance to the figure of "the people" risks more harm than good, as the public sphere will get caught up in debating who "the people" really are and that fight will be fought on terrain friendly to conservative interests. Better to craft a policy agenda that actually speaks to a broad swatch of interests gathered along shared points of interests than to place the populist cart before the horse.<br />
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<br />Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-27885308677544282512013-10-13T23:14:00.003-07:002013-10-13T23:14:47.901-07:00The Last Stand of the Greatest GenerationYesterday in Washington, D.C. the "Million Vet March" set upon national parks in D.C. to raise visibility about the ills caused by the goverment shutdown. Building on some modest momentum from early October <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/world-war-ii-vets-storm-shuttered-memorial-washington-article-1.1472716">incidents</a>, in which veterans scheduled to visit the monuments could not get in owing to the shutdown, this October 13th march aimed to focus and recirculate this outrage. To this end, conservatives, led by Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, gathered to storm major national parks in D.C. A focal point of these protests are the "Barrycades," the name given to the small portable metal fences set up by the National Parks Service to block off museums and memorials from the public.<br />
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These "Barrycades" were central in the visual and textual representation of yesterday's protests. Take this photo, which I found at conservative blog Powerline:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJcUqTiXqw-LnW9IbHzuFNYg75tt4juUQF5RsmGy5bX4a_z2EgisImhYSNn9fsbUyjnmpPyDQQGL2EsKgmY9at5LTpsC6_ZO_7n1kKXXtnZZ_bc4GnVDCgopTroMnqYKaFD6kphAkmA1tU/s1600/tea+party+tear+down+wall.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJcUqTiXqw-LnW9IbHzuFNYg75tt4juUQF5RsmGy5bX4a_z2EgisImhYSNn9fsbUyjnmpPyDQQGL2EsKgmY9at5LTpsC6_ZO_7n1kKXXtnZZ_bc4GnVDCgopTroMnqYKaFD6kphAkmA1tU/s320/tea+party+tear+down+wall.webp" width="320" /></a></div>
This image does considerable historical work, some at the surface and other at depth. The callback to Reagan, whose demand that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down" the Berlin Wall is considered a high point in the conservative imaginary, if not that of much of the nation, suggests not only a moment of parallel historical importance but also a geopolitical frame of friends and enemies, where the "wall" (which we tend to conceive of as suggesting deep political divides instead of the perhaps more appropriate permeable imbrications of political life) structures the nation in a manner which implies divisions themselves are the problem.<br />
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Applying this implied attachment to unity to domestic politics, however, offers challenges that underscore the disparate nature of foreign and domestic policy. In foreign policy political rhetors face powerful constraints when they use rhetorics of unity and cosmopolitanism: namely, not only does the appeal of the Westphalian nation state system remain power (and routinely indexed by the inability of media and experts to read international politics through anything beyond Manichean frame) but foreign policy still involves the "foreign" and so rhetorics of us and them, however noxious, at least fall on tried and true targets: other (and different) nations and populations. The effects of this rhetoric are predictable and the difference between "us" and "them" functions to stabilize American identity over and against those external identities. Even if it doesn't totally stabilize such identities, these rhetorics of us and them do provide predictable routes through which argument to be joined.<br />
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In the context of domestic politics, the dynamic is different. If, following the work of Jeremy Engels, Jennifer Mercieca, and others, we live in a <i>demophilic</i> political culture, that is, one which fetishizes ideas of unity and harmony over and above agonistic values of conflict and struggle, then a rhetoric of "tear down this wall" constitutes a demophilic call for the <i>abolition</i> of politics, the destruction of difference in the name of unity and togetherness. The "Barrycades" represent the divisions that have poisoned and ruined our politics. That the figure in the photo is a wheelchair-bound veteran is also double significant. First, the image of the veteran summons up a Brokawian "Greatest Generation," notably a generation of Americans that lived before the "senseless wars" of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, not to mention the salient historical notion of a unique political division in the Sixties and the madness of Watergate that followed. American democracy was ok until the "walls" of the Cold War and walls between "people" and government were drawn. Second, a figure in a wheelchair invariably summons up a well of sentiment attached to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is widely known for being one of the most able "movers" of the federal political system. With a political system deadlocked and economic catastrophe looming, the reappearance of a physically disabled figure summons the template for political action (and, not very subtly, implies the "action" is so easy even the disabled can do it!)<br />
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This image suggests a continuation of the political strategy employed by the Tea Party: investment in empty ideas of unity and togetherness paired with feel-good pablum that angers no one. After all, who could be against national monuments? Moreover, war veterans are some of the most universally beloved figures in the economy of public discourse. As <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/veterans-protest-closure-of-monuments-and-memorials/2013/10/13/adaf699c-342e-11e3-be86-6aeaa439845b_story.html">reports</a> indicated, however, the protest was poorly attended. This might suggest the well of "empty" anger based on the valorization of unity is running dry.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-32676108525990266322013-09-29T21:22:00.001-07:002013-09-29T21:22:15.864-07:00The Redemption of Walter WhiteTonight's finale of <i>Breaking Bad</i> seems to be generally well received in the instant-information world of Twitter and Facebook, although like many of you I eagerly await tomorrow's write-ups at <i>Time</i>, <i>Grantland</i>, and Hitflix.com, among others. In general, I expect the ending to be heavily praised for three reasons. First, unlike the somewhat controversial ending to <i>The Sopranos</i> this ending focused on the resolution of loose ends: there were no Russians left running in the words or Members' Only jacket-related assassination speculation. Secondly, the show left Jesse Pinkman alive and (somewhat, at least) free not only from the Neo-Nazis but also Walter White. Thirdly, the structure of the episode allowed viewers to explicitly disavow themselves of any positive connection with Walter White related to his deluded convictions that he was "helping his family."<br />
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It is this third point I want to explore in this blog post. Walter's actions in the episode, while nominally gesturing towards a recognition of his own intense egotism, Lockean fetish for individual ingenuity, and an ultimate acceptance of his fate (and destruction), actually create conditions for the audience to once again root for Walt as a hero of sorts.<br />
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Take, for example, Walt's encounter with Elliott and Gretchen at the home of his old Gray Matter partners' home. When they discover Walt, Elliott holds a small kitchen knife at him, flinchingly. Walt looks down condescendingly at the knife and says "If we're going to go that way, you're going to need a bigger knife." Not only does this serve as an excellent <i>Crocodile Dundee</i> throwback, it also gives Walt a moment to act as a Heisenberg-esque action star, one who acts calmly and cooly in the face of violence. And one would be remiss to not note the phallic relevance of suggesting that the man who took his one-time girlfriend from him needed to get a "bigger knife."And of course Walt comes out of this showdown having "persuaded" his old business partners to start a nine million dollar trust for Walt Jr. with his meth money.<br />
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And what about Walt's almost superhuman ability to dodge the police? They miss him in the snowy car at the New Hampshire bar. They hear rumors of him all over town, so much so that even Marie knows, but he nevertheless manages to sneak into Skyler's house. And while the show has certainly established Walt's criminal capacity, just how easily can a cancer ridden man dodge massive police surveillance? (I understand the false flags Marie refers to in the phone call but, still, Skyler's house?).<br />
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The scene with Walt and Skyler is the most pivotal of the episode. As Walt finally begins to make his peace with her she says she's tired of hearing about how he does it all for his family. In this moment she is a cipher for many in the audience who have grown weary of Walt's hoary self-serving moralizing that has served to displace his own culpability under a regime of attachment to the idea of the nuclear family. But in a turn, Walt admits that he was doing it for himself all along. His selfishness admitted, Walt gets one final chance to connect with his daughter (THAT HE ABDUCTED!) by coming clean about his real motives all alone.<br />
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From this point on the episode becomes a series of moves by Walt to atone for the crimes of his selfishness. Enraged that Jesse is cooking again, Walt plots to kill him and the gang of Neo-Nazis, not knowing that Jesse is now toiling in the Giorgio Agamben Bare Life Meth Basement (All Rights Reserved). In the show's final bit of grim homage to Mr. Wizard's World, Walt erects a remotely-triggered pivoting machine gun. Confronting Todd's uncle's gang, Walt realizes that Jesse is not willingly serving them but instead their slave.<br />
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The set up whereby Walt discovers that Jesse is enslaved rather than a willing partner certainly strains credulity. King Neo-Nazi, after Walt accuses him of partnering with Jesse, claims that Walt has sullied his honor and demands that Jesse be brought in so that Walt may see his broken and finished state. Certainly, this is near Bond-villain territory stuff. In the past Todd's crew has made no show of morality or principle, killing easily for pragmatic or economic reasons rather than on principle. In this case however Jesse's appearance enables one last element of Walt's redemption: seeing Jesse's state, he tackles him before he sets off the remote gun, holding him down while the gun blasts the Neo-Nazis to death, save Todd. Following the shootout, Jesse chokes Todd to death, avenging his meth slavery. This entire scene is certainly gory, but also has more than a hint of action movie flavor in the way it is shot: stylized blasts from a cannon that paint the outer wall of the building red, an unleashed torrent of seemingly infinite bullets that hit the Neo-Nazis who seem to be <i>just so</i> grouped closely enough together.<br />
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Once Jesse kills Todd, Walt and Jesse are left, with Walt holding a gun which he puts down and gives to Jesse, urging Jesse to kill him. For once, Jesse is free of Walter White's power and refuses to do so, instead hopping in the car and taking his leave. Walt, meanwhile, in a scene set to some musical stylings of Badfinger, dies surrounded by the cooking equipment in the Neo Nazi meth lab. Splayed out on the floor of the lab in a Christ-like callback to "Crawl Space," Walt dies, having given himself to rescue Jesse and murder a gang of Neo Nazis, not to mention the morally bankrupt Lydia whose Stevia-laden tea he so carefully poisons with his now highly Chekhovian-ricin. At the end of the show, Walt's ledger is clean: he has provided information to Skyler that will allow her to barter with the police, Walt Jr.'s future is provided for, Jesse is free, and the Neo Nazis are dead, along with Lydia. Despite the fact that over the course of the show Walt is a rapist, a murderer, and a drug maker, the structure of the narrative continues to suggest his heroism in an almost tragic fashion, rather than a polemic condeming Walter White.<br />
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In her recent book <i>Washed in Blood</i> Claire Sisco King examines three periods of American masculinity and their relationship to traumatic cinema, looking at Cold War America, the 1990's, and the post 9/11 period to argue that various films index the changing nature of American masculinity, trauma, and national identity. Whether thinking through cinema as a response to military defeat (Vietnam), various and sundry culture wars (the 90s), or a newfound ineradicable vulnerability (September11th), King argues persuasively that cinema tracks these moves by suggesting how the masculine action hero who heroically gives themself transforms what could be understood as a tragic flaw into a heroic or even laudable trait. I think it is impossible to separate the popularity of <i>Breaking Bad</i> from the contemporary political context of American politics, specifically thinking about the show as emerging at the very moment that America's polity faces increasing demographic changes that, from a political standpoint, put the white male, not to mention the nuclear family, very much on the run at both a demographic and symbolic level. After all, America has its first black president. Gay marriage is increasingly visible at the state and federal level. Traditional relationship structures are undermined in public discourse at rapid rates (Think about how many useless "Girls in college are hooking up more!" stories you see in <i>The New York Times</i>, and then think about how Walter White would feel about his daughter, if he had one).<br />
<br />
The show, however, is rarely understood in this political context, with critics instead praising the transcendent performances of the actors and actresses, especially Brian Cranston, and many insist that it may be the best show in the history of television. But I think it is fair to ask: what is the source of this praise? One response is to praise the show's formal characteristics: the cinematography is excellent, the direction crackerjack, and the acting superb. This is all true enough, although were are also in the midst of a television renaissance of such heights that one could credibly say that these things are true about any number of television shows.<br />
<br />
I want to suggest that the show appeals by turning Walt's pathological egotism into a relatable character trait rather than a tragic flaw. To wit: <i>simply admitting that his ego was the root of it all convinces Skyler to let him see his daughter again</i>. Or another point: up until this week many would be at pains to distinguish Walt from the Neo Nazis, suggesting that the only real difference between the two of them is that Walt's racism is sublimated through his own (unearned) sense of self-worth while the Neo Nazis bear the markers of "conventional" (and thereby less threatening) racism. <i>But the show's finale features Walt slaughtering a bunch of Neo Nazis</i>. And then, most troubling of all, Walt humanity is found in his recognition that the treatment of Jesse at the hands of the Neo Nazis is too much even for the rather evil Walt to tolerate. But consider what Walt has done to Jesse over the course of the show, not only that he is responsible directly for Jesse's enslavement but also an unlistably long set of violences to Jesse, including Jane's death (murder? Probably murder.)<br />
<br />
In a nation still in the throes of economic doldrums and a political scene where demographic shifts are rapidly outpacing the capacity of political discourse to manage difference, Walter White offers a fantasy that simultaneously suggests the legitimacy of feeling victimized and aggrieved <i>so long as one simply owns up to the selfishness of such feelings</i>. This is not too far off from the unreflexive celebration of Going Galt and valorization of "job creators" that permeates contemporary conservative discourse: selfishness is a virtue, and pride is a reflection of one's ability to apprehend the market's brilliance (and of course the brilliance of one's own recipe for pure blue crystal meth). Personally, I think a darker ending was necessary to hammer home Walt's evil, to give the viewer absolutely no place to hide. But instead we are left with this redemption of Walter White.<br />
<br />
Twenty five years ago, Oliver Stone made <i>Wall Street</i> and was surprised to discover that viewers came out of the film not skeptical of the ills of finance capitalism but instead in love with Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Gekko, the rapacious financier whose charisma and attraction made Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox seem a pale and tiny human in comparison. Oliver Stone is not known for his subtlety and so one might easily believe that he had simply, accidentally, produced the opposite result. On the other hand, interviews with Vince Gilligan suggest that he understands the element of Walt White that might lie within all of us (or, certainly at least, within the public realm where discourses of masculinity and victimhood circulate together to generate praise for <i>Breaking Bad</i> as a show that demonstrates "complexity" rather than the pathological actions of a brilliant but blowhardy chemistry teacher). Much of the praise heaped upon the show, and the extra acclaim will no doubt be piled on this finale, might derive from a very troubling source: that is, our capacity to identify with the very worst of Walter White but disavow that identification by praising a set of formally impressive but politically problematic narrative structures.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-79547551290498587382013-09-07T14:43:00.001-07:002013-09-07T14:43:40.088-07:00ObamaCharisma<div class="MsoNormal">
The recent debate over Syria has highlighted a clear
political dynamic of the Barack Obama administration: the tendency of the
opposition Republicans to oppose almost any policy simply because it is
associated with Obama. This is certainly not unique, at least in simple terms
to the Obama administration. A multitude of American progressives remember the
Bush administration more for its foreign policy boondoggles that they stridently
opposed than the social policies (like Medicare Part D) that ran counter to a
number of conservative political positions. Going back further, one might
remember the attacks on Reaganomics, a name similar to Obamacare in terms of
its ability to reduce the understanding of a set of policies into a metonymic
expression of a president’s worldview rather than a more rote unpacking of the
content of said policies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When critics, politicos, and citizens conflate policies with
presidential personas we are in the messy realm where politics and charisma
intermix. Max Weber offers a popular and influential understanding of charismatic
authority as “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or
exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order
revealed or ordained by them <sic>." Weber’s definition acknowledges
a difficult problem for those interested in the study of political authority: a
leader may not be selfsame with “the people” lest the distance that sustains
their authority be abolished.” At the same time, there must be relays of
identification between a leader and “the people,” lest the gap between them
spawn a legitimacy crisis that weakens or even deposes the leader. Charisma is
the bulwark of ether that suggests an unpopular decision by a leader should be
read by the populace as evidence of the leader’s character rather than an
indict of the leader’s judgment. Alternately (or perhaps simultaneously), a
charismatic leader elevates themselves above the people, as a hero of sort,
claiming exceptional status as earned.<o:p></o:p></sic></div>
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Naturally, many thinkers are suspicious of charisma. Some,
like Kenneth Burke, find in the charisma of a figure like Adolph Hitler the
poisonous medicine of tragic unity, where the leader’s charisma blended with
their naturalized affinity with their population in a way that created a
nationalist feedback loop. Going back further, Plato worried that too much
charisma might ruin the Republic, with the charisma-laden rhetor lying not far
away from the demagogic despots who might lead “the people” astray. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The most interesting question about charisma, however, lies
not with the rather futile debate about whether or not to ban it from the
Republic. As numerous scholars of emotion and affect remind us, “feelings” are intrinsic
to our democracy and we cannot banish them from the world of politics without
constructing a somewhat tragic relationship to an ideal and emotionally
purified politics that never has and never will exist. Instead, as Joshua Gunn
suggests in his excellent piece in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Western
Journal of Communication</i> on Huey Long, we can understand a leader’s charisma
as having at least two possible structures. In one, the leader maintains a kind
of distance from the audience, routinely offering them most of what they want
while denying at least one important emotion and/or policy item, producing a
desire for the leadership of the rhetor even as the relation between speaker
and audience remains split. On the other hand, Gunn’s reading of Huey Long implies
there may a second rhetorical kind of demagoguery, more prone to rhetorical
burnout, where the leader and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vox populi</i>
merge into one avatar, a fiery figure of populist bluster that offers the
intense satisfaction of popular sovereignty but is also left without any
rhetorical firehouse to put out the intense burning passion ignited for a pure
populism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the case of the Obama presidency we see a similar but
somewhat opposite dynamic: the flight <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">away
from</i> any policy associated with the president regardless of its content, or
even its legitimate connection to President Obama. Take, for example, the
“Obamaphone” a racist meme circulating extensively in the conservative
blogosphere, Based on a short video clip of a black woman flashing a new cell
phone and saying “I got an Obamaphone!” the meme circulated to suggest that
Obama had created a program for anyone to get a free phone, working in tandem
with the argument that Obama secured his electoral majority by promising (in
2008) and delivering (in 2012) “free stuff” to his constituents. The video
suggests a racial animus underlying these claims, not unlike the (mostly white)
figures who do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> benefit from
welfare in a 2012 campaign ad put together by Mitt Romney’s campaign team.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A second, more obvious example that came to mind when having
a chat with a colleague the other day, is Obamacare. Rather than referring to the
bill by either its official name (The Affordable Care Act) or even the shorter
acronym (ACA) there is by now a more or less bipartisan consensus that the bill
is to be called Obamacare. Despite the fact that hundreds of legislators (and
lobbyists and citizens) contributed to the passage of the ACA, media critics
and scholars all seem more or less resigned (or is it excited) to define the
bill through the Obama administration and vice versa.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A third instance I will not dwell on long, but it is the
continued assertion of Obama as central to the political imaginary. Whether
found in the hilarious references to Obama in Louis CK’s television show
whenever something goes wrong (“Fuckin’ Obama.”), the various anti-Obama
iconography popularized by Tea Partiers, or the circulation of racist Obama
images in various conservative counterpublics (the “witch doctor” image, for
example), the ubiquity of Obama is at once a reflection of American political
culture’s fetish for the presidential but the racial element also exceeds that
element. (This may be true of most difference that threatens the normatively
white and masculine office of the presidency: anyone remember Hilarycare?)<o:p></o:p></div>
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The recent Syria debate suggests again a move by
conservatives on the basis of opposition to the president’s authority in and of
itself, that is, his charisma. The particularly opportunistic nature of
Republican oppositions suggests this. While some, like Rand Paul, may have
familial and historical backgrounds that suggest their decisions are more
principled and less opportunistic, for a number of rank and file Republicans
who supported previous military interventions, its difficult to read this move
as anything less to another knee jerk reaction to deny Obama something just
because he wants it rather than on serious policy grounds. (Note: I don’t want
to be construed as saying the Obama administration is on the side of principle
here. It is a depressing fact that foreign policy, much more than domestic
policy, tends to reveal similarities rather than differences in the parties.
This is in part why the second Iraq war is such an outlier: it was a real
moment where party affiliation really mattered on foreign policy, though many
Democrats were complicit in authorizing the war).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
These opportunistic moves are very short sighted, however.
Which of these arguments about the “cult of Obama” will carry over when the
Republicans have to campaign against presumptive 2016 nominee Hilary Clinton?
Being against Obama on principle is not only nihilistic, it will be
counter-productive for the GOP in terms of generating a party identity that can
argue its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">policy differences</i> with the
dominant party. The tendency to reduce all Democratic actions into reflections
of Obama may hoist the conservatives on their own petard, as they scramble for
a set of Hilary-specific charisma attacks rather than carving out meaningful
policy differences.<o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-48447509943531251702013-08-23T17:15:00.001-07:002013-08-23T17:24:06.973-07:00So You're Still Rooting for Walter White...And so, apparently, is Skyler. I've already gone through why Walter White is a wholly objectionable figure <a href="http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2010/06/politics-of-breaking-bad-or-how-i.html">elsewhere</a>. But I wanted to talk a little bit about why viewers and critics remained attached to the show, finding it continually praiseworthy. I don't exempt my own judgments from the dynamic I am attempting to analyze: I remain invested in the show as well, and think so far this seasons two episodes have been excellent. But there are at least two strains of fandom that I want to talk about. First, those who are invested in Walt as the Heisenberg "badass" and view Skyler as some kind of killjoy, and second, the more sophisticated arguments about how Skyler is the moral center of the show, serving as a sort of cipher for the audience to participate in the narrative without being corrupted by Walt.<br />
<br />
Representatives of the first view have become scarcer as Walt's naked ego-driven ambitions have become clearer, rendering less and less credible his claims that he "Just wants to provide for his family." Comments like those of popular twitter character (and AV Club commenter) @ZodiacMotherfucker (who is known for his all-caps tweets) suggest a masculine identification with Walt, as in this example: <br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
BREAKING BAD: WALT NEEDS TO DROP HIS DRIPPY WIFE AND CLIMB ALL OVER THAT LYDIA CHICK<br />
— ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER (@ZODIAC_MF) <a href="https://twitter.com/ZODIAC_MF/statuses/243795902693789697">September 6, 2012</a></blockquote>
<br />
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
While one might roll their eyes at this (its a comical account, clearly) the comments sections at any number of websites that do recaps of <i>Breaking Bad</i> like Hitflix or the AV Club have sections of fans who do root for Walt a somewhat surprising amount. For example commenter "HISLOCAL" on Hitflix says that "I'm getting a little tired of Jesse moping around, for the same reason I got tired of Skyler's attitude towards Walt. I understand that any of us would, in reality, act like Jesse or Skyler, but it's just kind of a buzzkill to watch on TV." The commenter understands the relation between the fantasy of television, but nevertheless admits that the charge of the show is the connection to Walt and his survival/success.<br />
<br />
Similarly the most popular scene from the first episode of this season was the showdown in the garage between Hank and Walt. Even though Hank has the physical upper hand on Walt when he punches him, Walt maintains a mental edge with his gruff "Tread lightly" comment that finishes off his soliloquy about his own power and capacity for dread. This phrase was all over twitter following the episode, and even showed up on fan paraphenelia and imagery, permeating Gchat statuses and social media discussions of the show. They belie a certain kind of admiration for the badass side of Walt's "Heisenberg" persona.<br />
<br />
Even articles that take a distanced and critical view of Walt depoliticize the grid of identification that sustains the relationship between the viewer and show. For example this Slate piece <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/09/skyler_on_breaking_bad_final_episodes_skyler_white_is_the_show_s_best_character.html">argues </a>that Skyler is the best character on the show because "she’s the one who reminds us that it’s necessary to loathe Walt. She is our moral grounding." All well and good, but the last stanza of the article claims that it is easy to get sucked into identifying with Walt because of "the show’s narrative logic—Walt must overcome obstacle A to achieve goal B—to the point of blinding oneself to the evil of the particulars and their endpoint. We root for Walt because we want the show to continue." I disagree with that assessment because the formal characteristics of a show do not necessarily guarantee our investment. No matter how many Dick Wolf procedurals are put it, the level of intensity between the viewer and say, Jerry Orbach's Lenny Brisco is often less intense than that between them and Bryan Cranston's Walter White.<br />
<br />
In her recent book <i>Washed in Blood</i> Claire Sisco King examines three periods of American cinema wherein shows featuring sacrificial male leads have helped America to "work through" difficult national traumas in a manner that reified and stabilized rather than undermined the hegemony of white masculinity. King examines cinema from the period of Vietnam, the nineties, and post 9/11 America to make her claim. The critical supplication permanently attendant to the drama of Walter White suggests his suitability as an avatar for another American trauma: the first period of the nation that sees a black man in the White House. <i>Breaking Bad</i> saw its critical star really take off during its second season in 2009, where the adrenaline pumping tales of a science teacher who "finds himself" when he is confronted with the threat of cancer. This despite the fact that very early on in the show many of Walt's "struggles" are coded as such only by a misogynistic masculinity: we have no context to determine whether Walt's feelings of restriction within his marriage are legitimate gripes or results of his own small minded selfishness, as later seasons might suggest. What Walt is "finally awake" to is not his objective status as a victim but instead the <i>legitimate possibility</i> that his situation might be able to <i>count</i> as a situation of victimage in need of redress.<br />
<br />
In this way Walt's "break bad" authorizes itself to take a position typically denied in the "mass public" according to Michael Warner: Walt may operate simultaneously as both the righteous agent of his own professional/marital vengeance and also take a position that satisfies the need to matter (be seen) attendant to a public where the cost of white male privilege is also the denial of the subtle pleasures involved in relaxing and "being seen" rather than constantly gazing. One describes these as subtle pleasures only on account of Walt's whiteness and maleness: that it takes the trauma of cancer to push him into the exercise of his agency suggests in part the sinister capacity of the subject to interpret trauma not as a sign of something gone wrong but instead evidence of the correctness of what has been, driving them, in melancholic righteousness, towards the pursuit of control and mastery that has only appeared as a horizon rather than a reality. That it took many viewers many seasons to realize Walt's horrible and empty center suggests this reading has more than a little merit.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-34660815547625983392013-08-08T18:30:00.000-07:002013-08-08T18:30:01.786-07:001965: Reagan's Increasingly Mainstream Moves<div class="MsoNormal">
Scholars like Kurt Ritter suggest that Ronald Reagan had to
moderate his strident anti-Communism as he attempted to mainstream himself for
political purposes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The necessity of
this move became apparent to Reagan after his bosses at GE, for whom he was hired
to do a long-running series of corporate talks, fired him because he had moved
too far too the right.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Moreover, if Reagan was going to appeal to a broader electoral center, he needed
to move away from meaty redbaiting and enthusiastically appeal to a broader
segment of society.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Following
his very well received delivery of “A Time for Choosing” in support of Barry
Goldwater late in 1964, Reagan began to campaign and speak even more in
earnest, branching out from his old GE circles and speaking more in support of
other candidates around the country. In Granville, Ohio on June 8 1965 Reagan
came out to speak for Rep. John M. Ashbrook at a dinner gathering. Examining
the text of this speech suggests how Reagan’s moves following his 1964 speech
maintain many similar and somewhat radical themes in his speaking, although the
move away from an explicit reliance on an existential rhetoric of annihilation
is striking.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reagan
opens with a typical series of pleasantries and references to Ashbrook before
he transitions into his speech, which was entitled, “A Moment of Truth: Our Rendezvous
with Destiny.” Reagan’s first reference to any sort of policy matter comes in
the second paragraph, noting sarcastically of the Voting Rights Act, “I think
it’s wonderful that they’re going to have a voting bill. If tombstones and
empty warehouses, why not people?” This reference, almost certainly referring
to the suggestions that John F. Kennedy among others had repeatedly benefited
from election fraud, does double duty for Reagan: not only does it position
Democrats cannily on the side of undermining democracy, but it also diminishes
the ongoing debate over the VRA (which sought to expand the electoral franchise
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in practice</i> for blacks) by suggesting
with its sarcastic tone that voting itself was a relatively empty practice given
that corruption had soiled it. Moreover the structure of the joke relies on an
equivalence between the explicitly described “tombstones and empty warehouses”
which are inanimate objects signifying death and decay and the implicitly black
bodies that are to inhabit a parallel place in the structure of the humor.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reagan,
having rendered suspect the most visible of democracy’s traditions, elections,
then turns to the general notion of democracy itself, suggesting that the real
threats to democracy come not from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without</i>
but from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">within, </i>suggesting that,
“while Rome’s barbarians came from without—your barbarians will be engendered
by your own democratic institutions.” Reagan’s warrant is the work of Alexander
Tyler, which suggests that democracy “can only exist until the voters discover
they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” These comments
set up Reagan’s later pivot to discuss the dangers of the Great Society, and
its placement just a few stanzas after the denigration of the VRA suggests that
the ultimate ruin of democracy comes when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everyone</i>
can vote, with the implicit charge that giving blacks the right to vote will
ruin democracy. The very next paragraph substantiates these threats by providing
data, in the form of rising national debt, a diminished gold supply, and a
rising crime rate, suggested relays or relationships between these phenomena
and democracy’s decline.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reagan then
suggests a rhetorical inversion in the two parties’ relationship to the idea of
the “status quo” which he says is “Latin for the ‘mess we’re in.’” The last
Democratic campaigners had portrayed conservatives as “radicals who’d bring
about some drastic upheaval” where “here we had a peaceful and prosperous
America.” Reagan continues a maneuver suggested in his earlier “A Time for
Choosing,” where he had argued that “the people” would be corrupted not because
of their intrinsic failures but instead by the power of Big Government to ruin
their good civic sense. The status quo, characterized by government expansion
that threatens to corrupt even the most well intentioned citizens, becomes the
warrant for a new conservatism. Reagan implicates this struggle by suggesting that
“Freedom is very fragile; it has flowered only a few moments in all of…history
and most of these moments have been ours.” Reagan not only taps into a well of
American exceptionalism, he positions this freedom as perilous and permanently
threatened. While sounding fewer explicitly militaristic notes as in “A Time
for Choosing” and his earlier more radical speeches for GE, the general threat
to freedom could speak to a large audience of people, especially whites,
concerned about what socio-political gains of people of color could mean for
them.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reagan then
pivots to discuss the perils of inefficiency and bloated bureaucracy, pointing
out the difficulties the federal government has in competing with the private
sector in terms of services provided for cost. This threat is coupled with
claims that “the ultimate goal” of federal employment is meant to make it so
that “there will no longer be a need for private government agencies.” This
point combines with a series of data points about the government gathering more
information about citizens. While Reagan does not explicitly at any point
suggest what the government will do with data, this allows listeners to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">infer</i> something sinister: he is,
presumably, not worried that the boxes of data will end up somewhere next to
the Ark of the Covenant. And with the specter of Big Government run rampant not
only in Reagan’s speech but also in the latent content suspicious of
totalitarianism’s European form, these claims do not need much to do their work
on the audience.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Importantly,
however, Reagan makes a good show of agreeing with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intentions</i> of his opponents if not their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">results</i>. Good intentions should not be conflated with good
outcomes, which Reagan hammers home when he tells the story of a motorcyclist
who, wearing his jacket backwards, is “rescued” from a crash by an emergency
response team that turns his head to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">front</i>
of the jacket. Reagan repeats this refrain as he acknowledges that problems
with education, housing, and other issues are salient, but emphasizes his
disagreement with government-based solution to these problems. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Government control of education,
for example, risks making education political, and “What if one day, that
pressure is of a political nature not to our liking. Education is the bulwark
of freedom. If you remove it far from the community…it becomes the tool of
tyranny.” These claims set up his historical arguments about the nature of
freedom, which he suggests, “comes but once in the history of nation” and at
this crucial moment where “we face a world that’s half slave and half free.” The
result is a world that raises the question of “whether mankind itself can
survive.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The speech finishes with many
apocalyptic tones. Reagan speaks of a “pathway of history” that is “littered with
the bones of dead empires…Every time, history tell us, that a cultured,
advanced society has met the less cultured, the barbarians triumph.” Reagan
then summons a future where “our failures will be recorded in a book yet to be
written called the Rise and Fall of the United States of America.” Reagan’s
Manichean themes of Good and Evil, which were more explicit in the original
“Time for Choosing” speech, reappear here, though they crescendo near the end
rather than being peppered throughout. The structure of the speech mirrors the
sense that one would have of perceiving the real threat to America as an
internal rather than external one: creeping realization as opposed to constant
terror.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In an earlier post I suggested that
“A Time for Choosing” exemplified Reagan’s ability to engage in affective
conflation, wherein the bodies attention to threats becomes a manner for
flattening out dangerous phenomena and articulating them to the same set of
existential anxieties. Here one can see evidence of a more sophisticated use of
this strategy, one that stakes out its distance from the bombastic rhetoric of
Goldwater but maintains a similar set of sentiments suggesting that Americans still
have to worry about existential threats to the polity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a very telling passage near the end Reagan
speaks of <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Truly forgotten Americans—unsung
heroes who get up in the morning and send their kids to school and pay their
bills; contribute to their church and their charity and their community. They
believe in God as the Creator of all our rights and freedoms and they’re
disturbed because their children can’t ask His blessing on a lunch in the
school cafeteria.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These “forgotten Americans” preview Richard Nixon’s silent
majority, not only suggesting how their disappearance (and silence) indexes
their marginal position relative to the status quo that Reagan spends a great
deal of time indicting, but also preying on their anxious worries about their own
relevance in a moment where institutions of privilege (the Church, a white
ballot box, economic self-sufficiency, and a relatively stable domestic circumstance)
were threatened by the “barbaric” forces outlined by Reagan. The American
government has created these barbaric forces by inserting itself into matters
best left to the social rather than political spheres. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reagan’s implied solution is a shrunken
government, one that poses less of a threat to the virtues of America’s
citizens. Without a smaller government, only the “barbarians” will be
remembered as those whom clamor loudest receive the most notice and acclaim. In
the context of “Great Society” programs that were premised on singling out for
improvement sectors of society, Reagan’s call about the “forgotten Americans”
transformed these Great Society programs from benign initiatives into actions
that signaled who did (and did not) matter in the eyes of the government. The
“extermination of mankind” references by Reagan creates a kind of sympathetic
relay with the disappearance from society of these “forgotten Americans” and
their replacement by poor and racially-marked barbarians who lacked the civic
sense to see that good intentions and right actions did not always meet at a coincident
point.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[endif]-->
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Ritter, “Reagan in the South.” This happened in 1962, although Reagan continued
to give versions of “The Speech” like “A Time for Choosing” and the speech
under examination here for some time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Another crucial matter was that Reagan threatened not only ideological
embarrassment for GE, but also financial: he spoke out against programs like
the TVA which benefited GE immensely.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> As
explained in an earlier post, despite the rapid gains in the standard of living
and the white middle class through the fifties and early sixties, gains and
losses tended to be experienced relatively rather than absolutely through
competitive rather than cooperative logics. This suggests a pernicious element
of individualism that even robust rhetorics and logics of republicanism
struggle to snuff out.<o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-42202024557183936022013-06-27T20:10:00.000-07:002013-06-27T20:10:09.894-07:00A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class<div class="MsoNormal">
The 2008 financial crisis shook America’s attitude and
generated widespread anxiety. When Obama took the podium on October 13th, 2008,
he was already in a favorable position in the presidential race. Capitalizing
on the financial chaos resulting from the failure of the venerable Lehman Bros
financial firm, Obama had built a healthy lead in the polls over John McCain on
the basis of two factors: a calming political demeanor cautioning resolve and
deliberation in the face of economic disaster, and a persistent recourse to
effective scapegoating through by juxtaposing the American “people” (represented
through the figure of Main Street) against irresponsible and selfish
capitalists (figured metonymically as Wall Street). Speaking in Toledo, Ohio,
Obama delivered an address entitled “A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My contention today is that this speech
embraced a hybrid populism which came close to encouraging meaningful
collective responsibility for the September financial crisis, but ultimately
created an opening for the conservative economic populism that emerged in early
2009 by advocating for a democratic fantasy capable of remedying economic
strain. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Obama opens the speech with a
flurry of collective pronouns that alternate between establishing his
consubstantiality with the audience but also the occasional reminder that the
demands and insecurities present are those of the “people” not of the
government. “We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic
crisis we face is the worst since the Great Depression.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obama then moves to the second person.
“You’ve got auto plants here in Ohio…closing their doors…You’ve lost one of
every four manufacturing jobs…the question isn’t just ‘are you better off than
you were four years ago’, it’s ‘are you better off than you were four weeks
ago?’” referencing the famous Ronald Reagan slogan even as he made clear the
issues Americans were facing. Immediately after setting the table for disaster,
Obama presents the election as part of a moment for a transformation in
American politics. “We still have the most talented, most productive workers of
any country on earth…It won’t be easy, but there’s no reason we can’t make this
century another American century.” These workers and their existential economic
concerns are then juxtaposed with the comments of a McCain campaign staffer who
had been quoted as saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to
lose.” “Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but I’m worried
about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life
savings…they can’t afford four more years of the economic theory that says we
should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that
prosperity trickles down to everyone else.” By tapping into the
still-circulating “Wall St./Main St.” trope, Obama establishes a unity between
governmental elitism and private sector elitism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By then
offering a five point plan for recovery that includes tax relief and mortgage
support, the contrast between existing Washington ways and Obama is made clear:
his rescue plan for the middle class is a bailout for the “people” not for
economic elites benefiting from the cronyism of their partners in Washington.
The repeated emphasis on first person language solidifies this effect. “We
should also change the unfair bankruptcy laws,” “We just need to act quickly
and decisively” “We should also extend and expand unemployment benefits” “We
should fast track the loan guarantees.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such measures will be paid for by “scouring the federal budget,
line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do work
more efficiently and cost less.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
explanation for the how of payment makes easier a transition into the second
part of the proposal: a call for Americans to become more financially responsible
in their own private lives. “We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which
we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead
of save.” “Allowed” and “encouraged” are verb choices which imply that the
decision to spend beyond one’s means was not one taken with a full knowledge of
the risks involved: such spending is the effect of a previously undetectable
cultural malaise. Obama goes further to trade on a rhetoric of individual
responsibility while also undermining it, framing more spending as “not a choice
but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home
equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed for China.”
Again Obama strikes with a parallelism between “the people” and the government
creating an equivalence that makes it easier to admit to one’s own failings as
the enthymeme “if the government can do it, so can I” remains implied. However
for both “people” and government, this turn to debt is dangerous, and our
reliance on such measures is temporary, for “Once we get past the present
emergency…we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires
that we do what’s necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and
encourage personal savings again.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note
again the use of collective pronouns establishing the government and “the
people” as one.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Rather than
delivering a fiery class sensitive polemic about the wrong done to America,
Obama’s speech indexes a moderate view less beholden to scapegoating urges and
more invested in a positive sense of futurity. Obama only mentions restrictions
on CEO pay in passing, but generally passes over populist demagoguing in favor
of his rescue plan for the middle class. The government can work for the people
but not against Wall Street. Michael Lee observes in his study on populist
argument four major characteristics of such speeches: construction of a
virtuous people, construction of a nefarious enemy, articulation of the enemy
to a systemic logic, and the production of an apocalyptic confrontation. By
these standards, Obama’s speech is a tepid, perhaps even non-populist speech,
which continues to advance the virtues of “the people” and locating the
minimization of their agency in culture and circumstances not in a malevolent
enemy figure.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Obama also
gestures towards the possibility of what Kenneth Burke calls mortification, the
possibility that people might suffer for their sins. However, instead of
cultivating such a sense (one which, if directed correctly, might lead to a
perspective by incongruity and a course correction in action) Obama locates the
main causes of irresponsibility in circumstances and culture. Because subjects
are enmeshed in their cultural contexts, scapegoating “culture” can amount to
the worst of both worlds by excusing potentially deleterious individual
attitudes on the basis of their cultural production (hence depoliticizing them)
while providing no discrete vessel to serve as the specific scapegoat capable
of discharging the process of victimage. One result, then, of this halfhearted
move to mortification, is that while there is still a crime or an exigence
(financial disaster) responsibility for this disaster cannot be properly
allocated. As Burke and many theorists of identity are fond of noting,
identification is not a purely positive process but occurs on the basis of
negative differentiation: to square one’s self with an ongoing economic
catastrophe requires the dissociation of one from the conditions that
contributed to that catastrophe, unless the mortification process is pursued to
its fullest extent.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Obama here
explains the economic crisis as an error, something that human agents have
caused rather than a systemic expression or symptom of deeper problems in our
socio-political milieu. This explanation does not demand an adjustment or reassessment
of the relationship between American national identity and prosperity. The
American people have lost their way, but they may once again find it. Obama’s
speech relies heavily on the figure of the American “people” but neither as a
class victimized by elites nor as a criminal class responsible for economic
problems: instead, “the people” exist (though they are victims of
circumstance), the government is their agent (but not to avenge them, only to
defend them), and the current crisis will abate should America return to its
intrinsic values.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As we now
know, the crisis did not abate but intensified: while Obama won the election in
a sweeping fashion, the economy continued to grind and stutter. And by February
2009, an organized conservative populism presented itself as the answer to an
Obama administration that could not stop the bleeding (warranting an
observation about the outsized expectations of the presidency, seeing as we
were roughly only a month into Obama’s term when a new conservative revolt
began). What to make of the rapid emergence of this opposition to Obama? It is
tempting to cynically filter some of the explanation through the thesis that
politics is warfare, and political opposition benefits not from compromise but
opposition. This might be right and might explain part of why Republican
intransigence grew so quickly into the Obama administration. But it does not
explain the emergence and persistence of populist themes in the emerging mode
of new post-Obama political conservatism. What this essay has suggested is that
the populist themes nurtured in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Bros. and
the TARP relief package were not brought out and either resolved or distributed
by Obama’s rhetoric, but instead only partially acknowledged, leaving a
reservoir of anxiety and public discontent as part of a public mood. By
committing neither to a populist polemic nor to a fully introspective
mortification-driven “perspective by incongruity”, “the people” remain a figure
invested in Obama for his steady hand during the early moments of the economic
crisis, but also a figure subject to later capture by conservative forces who
suggested the president had not fully identified with their anger and anxiety.<o:p></o:p></div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-23907544039322190252013-06-23T15:22:00.001-07:002013-06-23T15:22:33.325-07:00Relays of Sympathy: Neoliberalism and Populism<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a unique tradition of American thinking about
economics that holds a more intense relationship to liberalism than that found
in the context of continental Europe, from which much work in political theory
draws. Michel Foucault’s series of lectures on economics at the College of
France from 1978-1979 acknowledge the distinction between developments in
economics in the European context and American. Foucault sets out to argue that
the role of economic reason is not simply to regulate civil society, but
instead to constitute a regime of knowledge that is ontologically inaccessible
to governmental reason. As he puts it, the market, allowed to function
unencumbered, produces relationships that come to represent truths as dictated
by the logic of the market, coding market judgment as the legitimate expression
of a collective will: “ When you allow the market to function by itself,
according to its nature, according to its natural truth…it permits the
formation of a certain price which will be called, metaphorically, the true
price…the market must be that which reveals something like a truth.” The
revealed truth then implies a corresponding set of appropriate and inappropriate
actions by governments, as “The formation of a natural price…enables us to
falsify and verify governmental practice when, on the basis of these elements,
we examine what government does, the measures it takes, and the rules it
imposes.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The result
is that prices (and, correspondingly, social locations) are read as expressions
of a market’s judgment. The legitimacy of this market judgment is further
established through Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” which
functions like “the existence of something like providence which would tie
together all the dispersed threads” and for Foucault the key element is the
inability apprehend from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">where</i> the
hand acts, as “invisibility is not just a fact arising from the imperfect
nature of human intelligence which prevents people from realizing that there is
a hand behind them which arranges or connects everything…It is an invisibility
which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
For Foucault, even Smith, a figure which some have tried to rehabilitate by
reading against some modern market fundamentalists, implies that the world of
governmental regulation and economic action are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incommensurable realms</i>, where the very idea motivation government
(some notion of the common good) renders the government absolutely incapable of
aiding the economy, which realizes its promise only through legitimating the
expressions of pure individual interest.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Crucially,
Foucault recognizes there is a tendency to temporally narrativize the work of
the market. For example one imagines the production of a good, (say, a widget),
that the good is sold (or not sold) at a certain price, and eventually reaches
a point where it has achieved its “natural” or “true” price in the economy,
which reflects the optimal point of its sale for both its producers and
consumers. In practice, however, the process of production and sale is
considerably messier. At the center of liberal economic theory lies a
self-interest human, what Foucault calls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo
economicus</i>, the “person who must be let alone” to pursue “his own
interest.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Their own interest is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> the same as
the collective interest, but, theoretically, the exercise of self-interest will
end up coincident with the common good or common interest. Foucault implies
that there is more than a little magical thinking in this account, as he says
of their interest that it “is such that is converges spontaneously with the
interests of others.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The notion is that the economy works without any kind of outside intervention, with
no external signals or signs as to what the “right” action would, as those
would constitute market distortions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The result
suggests a kind of crisis for economic theory. Or, at least, it suggests a
theoretical problem that arises if individual choice fails to produce
conditions of public stability. This proposition is what drives work like that
of David Harvey who, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Brief History
of Neoliberalism</i>, suggests an inability for us to draw a line between what
he calls neoliberalism’s promise to better society “by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”
and its actually existing products of instability, poverty, and violence. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> On
Harvey’s view, the “theoretical utopian of neoliberal argument has…primarily
worked as a system of justification and legitimation” for the rollback of state
regulation and the upwards accumulation of wealth for elites.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Foucault’s
canny mention of the magic of “spontaneous convergence” of interests suggests
how the promise of individual freedom naturalizes political conditions as
expressions of (legitimate) market judgments. Because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo economicus</i> does not and cannot aim at producing a public good,
what he really is an entrepreneur of himself, “being for himself his own
capital” and with that production comes the capacity to consume.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
By engaging in processes of consumerism, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">homo
economicus</i> “produces his own satisfaction” which suggests that the
classical division between production and consumption as two elements of a
subject has instead been conflated in the proliferation of a more intense
vision of economic liberalism, where labor directly produces satisfaction.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This analysis is especially
trenchant in the case of America, where the function of the market comes to
encompass much more than in other contexts:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
neo-liberalism evidently appears
much more radical or much more complete and exhaustive. American neo-liberalism
still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market.
It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole
of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary
exchanges.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Where in, say, the European context, the failure of the
market to provide certain goods and services might be more readily read as
expressing a gap between the needs of the nation and the needs of the market,
in American the liberal/individual element in the political grammar can be taken
to imply that the failure to provide for a common good is a result of the
refusal to commit more fully to market orthodoxy. This suggestion works in
concert with the appeal of a regime of liberal individualism itself, which
preys on romantic conceptualizations of heroic individuals agency.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Moreover, the
health of the consumer economy itself has become conflated with the national
interest. Lizbeth Cohen suggests that this conflation was particularly notable
in America following World War Two, when this fantasy of national consumption
was tied to existing political winds:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
As Americans lived better and on a
more equal footing with their neighbors, it was expected, the dream of a more
egalitarian America would finally be achieved. Politicians never tired of tying
America’s political and economic superiority over the Soviet Union to its more
democratic distribution of goods.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn10" name="_ednref10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[x]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The capacity to exercise one’s own consumerist agency, to
participate in directing the gestures of the invisible hand, can be taken as an
index of one’s membership of the polity. The importance of these practices
increased as a kind of compensatory mechanism for a decline in the intensity of
attachments to other sources of authority, like religion, family, and social
homogeneity. The market comes to reflect not just the judgments of consumers,
but also reflects the capacity of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">citizens</i>
to participate in the production of values and reality. The channeling of
imagination of agency to these highly individualized and consumerist visions
also dovetailed nicely with the state-phobia referenced earlier in this
chapter: twixt and tween the recent threat of German fascism and the current
Soviet menace, consumerism was not only an expression of one’s capacity to own
their entrepreneurship of the self, but also a method of suggesting that there
were some mechanisms of expression that could not come under state control.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The health
of the economy, then, does not just reflect a string of numbers on the Dow
Jones, an index of consumer confidence, or the amount by which the gross
domestic product has increased or decreased in a given year. Instead, the
health of the economy corresponds with the imagined health of the American
“people,” whose capacity to act as their own entrepreneurs is taken as a key
marker of their fitness and health as a “people.” A bad economy may not only
reflect poorly on political actors or economic elites, but also suggests an
inability of consumers to properly judge their own self-interest and contribute
appropriately to the economy. The special kind of market fundamentalism that
developed as a response to the fifties consensus about Keynesian spending and
government intervention into the market was itself a populism, one that
constituted itself against the government’s separation from not only the
subject position of actors who existed “within” the market but also with a
basic incommensurability thesis at work about the capacity of the government to
pass judgment on the legitimacy of popular reason. Economic crises do not,
then, only suggest crises for capitalism, but they threaten liberalism <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">by indicting the judgment of individual
actors themselves</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So far work
in rhetoric has competently advanced the study of modern economics, either by
suggesting the intrinsically rhetorical elements of economics as in the case of
Deirdre McCloskey’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Rhetoric of
Economics</i> and its familial relations to the Project on the Rhetoric of
Inquiry, or in various studies that generate sophisticated understandings of
the relationship between neoliberalism, citizenship, and economic rationality.
Joshua S. Hanan, for example, connects the democratization of economic
rationality to the housing bubble that was partly responsible for the 2008
collapse, suggesting that neoliberalism’s paradoxical relation to its utopian
promises and its actually existing exclusions means that “neoliberalism
materially uproots the very materiality needed to view the economy as a
representation of reason.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Catherine Chaput concludes that the most nefarious danger posed by neoliberalism
is its capacity to interpret any situation (and thus exert a perverse
presumptive capacity to frame each situation) by moving “from situation to
situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, and
cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at
the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive
power.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Bradford Vivian connects neoliberalism’s capacity to generate intense
relationships to malleable political terms like liberty and freedom to its
actually depoliticizing effects, namely to restrict the scope, character, and subject
of political speech to only safe and apolitical topics.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn13" name="_ednref13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Finally, Megan Foley’s astute examination of the federal mortgage crisis
involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac accurately assesses how the “economic” has
come to crowd out the “political” by positioning citizens as the figures who
have the capacity to make market judgments with a government rendered into
incompetent architects of an<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“infantile
politico-economic apparatus” made helpless in the face of market judgment.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn14" name="_ednref14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Taking for
granted this set of observations about the capacity of the “economic” to both
colonize and confabulate politics, I hope to outline how the conflation of
economic agency and political agency configured the public response to the 2008
financial crisis and the ongoing production of the American “people” both
through the 2008-2010 electoral cycle and the ongoing economic recession. Considering
public discourse both as attempting to perform a triage operation on the
American dream while at the same time disclosing anxieties and fears related to
the state of the economy enables me to suggest that the development of a rather
unique form of individual populism coincident with rather than antagonistic to
market fundamentalism was no accident but instead reveals how America imagines
itself collectively in moments of crisis. Foucault concludes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Biopolitics</i> that one of the
key insights of liberalism is the motto that one must “’Live Dangerously’” as
subjects are constantly experiencing their lives, presents, and futures as
dangerous.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn15" name="_ednref15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
The turn to collective political vocabularies, I hope to show later, can be read as a means
of managing this condition of permanent danger, these anxieties associated with
appearance during times of economic and social crisis. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportEndnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>31-32</Pages><displaytext>Foucault,
<style face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
31-32.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of
Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Foucault, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Biopolitics</i>,
31-32.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>279</Pages><displaytext><style
face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
279.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">The Birth of Biopolitics</span></i><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">, 279.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>270</Pages><displaytext><style
face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
270.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN" db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">The Birth of Biopolitics</span></i><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">, 270.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>270</Pages><displaytext>Ibid.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of
Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Ibid.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[v]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Harvey</Author><year>2005</Year><recnum>278</RecNum><pages>2</Pages><displaytext>David
Harvey, <style face="italic">A Brief History of
Neoliberalism</style><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005),
2.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>278</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">278</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>David
Harvey</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>A
Brief History of Neoliberalism</title></titles><dates><year>2005</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Oxford University
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">David Harvey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Brief History of
Neoliberalism</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 2.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Harvey</Author><year>2005</Year><recnum>278</RecNum><pages>19</Pages><displaytext><style
face="italic">A Brief History of Neoliberalism</style><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
19.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>278</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">278</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>David
Harvey</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>A
Brief History of
Neoliberalism</title></titles><dates><year>2005</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Oxford University
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">A Brief History of Neoliberalism</span></i><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 19.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[vii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>226</Pages><displaytext>Foucault,
<style face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
226.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Foucault, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Biopolitics</i>,
226.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[viii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>226</Pages><displaytext>Ibid.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Ibid.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ix]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>243</Pages><displaytext><style
face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
243.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of
Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">The Birth of Biopolitics</span></i><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">, 243.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn10" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[x]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <endnote><cite><author>Cohen</Author><year>2004</Year><recnum>279</RecNum><pages>237</Pages><displaytext>Lizbeth
Cohen, "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America," <style
face="italic">Journal of Consumer Research</style> 31, no. 1
(2004):
237.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>279</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">279</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Lizbeth
Cohen</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>A
Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America</title><secondary-title>Journal of Consumer
Research</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Journal
of Consumer
Research</full-title></periodical><volume>31</volume><number>1</number><dates><year>2004</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Lizbeth Cohen, "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal
of Consumer Research</i> 31, no. 1 (2004): 237.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xi]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Hanan</Author><year>2010</Year><recnum>280</RecNum><pages>194</Pages><displaytext>Joshua
S. Hanan, "Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in
an Era of Control Societies," <style
face="italic">Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies</style> 7, no. 2 (2010):
194.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>280</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">280</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Joshua
S.
Hanan</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Home
is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control
Societies</title><secondary-title>Communication and
Critical/Cultural
Studies</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Communication
and Critical/Cultural
Studies</full-title></periodical><volume>7</volume><number>2</number><dates><year>2010</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Joshua S. Hanan, "Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real
Estate in an Era of Control Societies," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies</i> 7, no. 2 (2010): 194.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn12" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Chaput</Author><year>2010</Year><recnum>281</RecNum><pages>2-3</Pages><displaytext>Catherine
Chaput, "Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and
the Overdetermination of Affective Energy," <style face="italic">Philosophy
and Rhetoric</style> 43, no. 1 (2010):
2-3.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>281</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">281</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Catherine
Chaput</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Rhetorical
Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of
Affective Energy</title><secondary-title>Philosophy and
Rhetoric</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Philosophy
and
Rhetoric</full-title></periodical><volume>43</volume><number>1</number><dates><year>2010</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Catherine Chaput, "Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism:
Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy and Rhetoric</i> 43, no. 1
(2010): 2-3.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn13" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref13" name="_edn13" style="mso-endnote-id: edn13;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Vivian</Author><year>2006</Year><recnum>282</RecNum><pages>3-4</Pages><displaytext>Bardford
Vivian, "Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative
Politics on September 11, 2002," <style
face="italic">Quarterly Journal of Speech</style> 92, no. 1
(2006):
3-4.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>282</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN" db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">282</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Bardford
Vivian</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Neoliberal
Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11,
2002</title><secondary-title>Quarterly Journal of
Speech</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Quarterly
Journal of
Speech</full-title></periodical><volume>92</volume><number>1</number><dates><year>2006</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Bardford Vivian, "Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and
Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quarterly Journal of Speech</i> 92, no. 1 (2006): 3-4.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn14" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref14" name="_edn14" style="mso-endnote-id: edn14;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xiv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foley</Author><year>2012</Year><recnum>283</RecNum><pages>387</Pages><displaytext>Megan
Foley, "From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The
Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market
Crisis," ibid.98, no. 4 (2012): 387.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>283</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">283</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Megan
Foley</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>From
Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of
Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market
Crisis</title><secondary-title>Quarterly Journal of
Speech</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Quarterly
Journal of Speech</full-title></periodical><volume>98</volume><number>4</number><dates><year>2012</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Megan Foley, "From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The
Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market
Crisis," ibid.98, no. 4 (2012): 387.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn15" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref15" name="_edn15" style="mso-endnote-id: edn15;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[xv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Foucault</Author><year>2008</Year><recnum>272</RecNum><pages>66</Pages><displaytext>Foucault,
<style face="italic">The Birth of Biopolitics</style>,
66.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>272</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">272</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michel
Foucault</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The
Birth of
Biopolitics</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New
York</pub-location><publisher>Palgrave-MacMillan</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Foucault, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Biopolitics</i>,
66.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-72998230616319490592013-05-27T12:31:00.001-07:002013-05-27T12:31:46.515-07:00A Visual Reading of the Tea Party<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In
Defense of Internment, </i>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">formally organized</i> 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?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Baffler</i> 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.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> 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.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.”)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagines</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>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.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In
both shots the people’s dress is casual, with sweaters and sweatshirts and
jackets suggest not only the chilly weather but also informality.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
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.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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 <i>balanced tension</i> 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 <i>appears</i>.
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The scene both
suggests and conceals the opposite of that most modern of terrors,
totalitarianism by big government. Gilles Deleuze suggests in <i>Cinema 2</i> 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.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
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 <i>this</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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 <i>function</i> rather
than a <i>fact</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Photograph 1.2 includes one of the only shots in all the photo galleries of a
person of color.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn2">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Ivie</Author><year>2005</Year><recnum>183</RecNum><pages>14</Pages><displaytext>Robert
Ivie, <style face="italic">Democracy and America's War
on Terror</style><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005),
14.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>183</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN" db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">183</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Robert
Ivie</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Democracy
and America's War on
Terror</title></titles><dates><year>2005</year></dates><pub-location>Tuscaloosa</pub-location><publisher>University
of Alabama
Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->Robert Ivie, <i>Democracy and America's
War on Terror</i> (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005), 14.<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn3">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE <endnote><cite><author>Deleuze</Author><year>1969</Year><recnum>229</RecNum><pages>216</Pages><displaytext>Gilles
Deleuze, <style face="italic">Cinema 2: The
Time-Image</style><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1969),
216.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>229</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">229</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Gilles
Deleuze</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Cinema
2: The
Time-Image</title></titles><dates><year>1969</year></dates><pub-location>Minneapolis</pub-location><publisher>University
of Minnesota Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->Gilles Deleuze, <i>Cinema 2: The
Time-Image</i> (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1969), 216.<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Frank</Author><year>1997</Year><recnum>225</RecNum><displaytext>Thomas
Frank and Matt Weiland, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent,"
<style face="italic">The New York Times</style>, November
30 1997.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>225</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">225</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Newspaper Article">23</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Thomas
Frank</author><author>Matt Weiland</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Why
Johnny Can't Dissent</title><secondary-title>The New York
Times</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>1997</year><pub-dates><date>November
30</date></pub-dates></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New York Times</i>, November 30 1997.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Frank</Author><year>1997</Year><recnum>225</RecNum><displaytext>Ibid.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>225</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">225</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Newspaper Article">23</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Thomas
Frank</author><author>Matt
Weiland</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Why
Johnny Can't Dissent</title><secondary-title>The New York
Times</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>1997</year><pub-dates><date>November
30</date></pub-dates></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Ibid.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Malkin</Author><year>2009</Year><recnum>196</RecNum><displaytext>Michelle
Malkin, "Tea Party Photo Album: Fiscal Responsibility Is the New
Counterculture," <style
face="italic">MichelleMalkin.com</style>, February 27
2009.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>196</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">196</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Newspaper
Article">23</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Michelle
Malkin</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Tea
Party photo album: Fiscal responsibility is the new
counterculture</title><secondary-title>MichelleMalkin.com</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2009</year><pub-dates><date>February
27</date></pub-dates></dates><urls><related-urls><url>http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/27/fiscal-responsibility-is-the-new-counterculture/</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]--><span style="mso-no-proof: yes;">Michelle Malkin, "Tea Party Photo Album: Fiscal Responsibility Is the
New Counterculture," <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MichelleMalkin.com</i>,
February 27 2009.</span><!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-82687491073531639132013-05-11T20:32:00.004-07:002013-05-11T20:32:55.318-07:00The Meaning of Revolutionary-Era GarbDuring the fevered times of 2009, the first explicitly populist conservative political movement, the Tea Party, took flight in America. While this blog has spent much time and effort thinking about the Tea Party, I have up until now avoided addressing one of the clearest signs that marked the Tea Party protests: the phenomena of people dressing up in clothing and styles from the times of the American Revolution. While this tendency has been much discussed (even even mocked on television shows like <i>Parks & Recreation</i>) I aim to ask a modest question in this post: what, if anything, did the move to dress in such a style mean?<br />
<br />
I want to suggest that there is something ineffably non-controversial and intrinsically good about the moment of the American founding in our public imagination. This is of course no bold statement, at least in terms of one's assessment of the relation of America's mythic founding to the "mass public." While there might be disagreements from Charles Beard or race theorists (and these disagreements would have much merit), the mental work that the <i>imagination</i> of the revolution does for Americans today is meaningful. After all, what do desires and needs to return to the past <i>mean</i>? Kenneth Burke observes that such efforts are often attempts to "escape from a grossly mismanaged present." But what was so gross about early 2009?<br />
<br />
There were three factors. 1) The American economy continued to struggle in the wake of the massive financial and housing crises that had begun in early 2008. Rather than being a trying but ultimately manageable political problem, the crisis gestured at an intimate crisis facing the American Dream: the possibility that the liberal promises of a correspondence between individual agency and socio-economic standing might be exposed as a sham. America was thus confronted with a difficult if not impossible to resolve crisis: how to square the circle created by the promises of the dream that could no longer be realized. 2) The American mass public had been significantly reconfigured by the election of the first mixed race president (one who was overdetermined in public discourse as a black man) with the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Because media positioned Obama's race as mattering (but only insofar as it suggested its reaffirmation of a script of America's exceptionalism) the simultaneous promise AND terror associated with imagining a pure meritocracy was produced. 3) Obama's rhetoric had failed to tap into the well of anger and frustration associated with the TARP deals and other bailouts. The result was that while the public was looking for a public mirror in which to see itself (through the avatar of the presidency) what they got were lectures on responsibility.<br />
<br />
For all these reasons, there were substantial questions about just <i>who</i> was responsible for the confusing and frustrating economic circumstances that remained well into 2009. Was it greedy financiers and bankers? Was it people who took mortgages beyond their means? Was it a creeping moral hazard induced by a society grown lazy and too privileged? Had the American Dream been spoiled by the government? Sabotaged from outside by communists?<br />
<br />
Indeed, none of these answers alone is particularly satisfying. And debating about which is wrong or right is somewhat beside the point: the structure of the problem is so complex that the debate is realy about what palliative measures of public discourse might buy off the crisis instead of searching for that one single cause. In this sense, the move to return to the Revolutionary moment in America makes sense by virtue of its capacity to map a simple script onto a complex problem. Moreover, the script could tap into a deep seated and well cultivated suspicion of government that had dominated American political discourse starting in the late 60s. By turning the imagination into one of a tyrannous government positioned against a virtuous and hardworking people, the performance of a revolutionary spirit could generate linkages between an American past defined by its capacity to defend the labor of its people against foreign tyranny. The idea of the British government as external (even though of course, the vast majority of Americans were themselves British) is here important because it allows the imagination of a problem that is exterior <i>to</i> the virtues of the people rather than internal to their constitution and disposition.<br />
<br />
So wearing Tri-corner hats and tramping about with Gadsen flags is safe, easy, and comfortable, because it does nothing to disrupt or challenge an existing disposition in favor of the imaginary order of things. Erecting a parallelism between the America of now and the America of then makes writing a script for the crisis relatively easy, and suggests the ability of public performance to metonymically thematize the present in terms of the past through the production of binaristic battles between people and government that just so happen to "meet cute" with the sinister image of Big Government that has driven center-right policy and politics in America since the revanchist moments of the New Right.<br />
<br />
Like any nostalgic performance, it demands history be simplified. There are no mentions of the Articles of the Confederation, few if any technical debates about the nuances associated with the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (despite the fact that much internal Tea Party literature describes the Constitution in religious terms). That history must be as simple as this present. But whether or not it presents an "accurate" vision of history is less important than its rhetorical efficacy in a given moment, and in that moment "Join or Die" still meant something to a lot of American citizens.<br />
<br />
<br />Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-27087597125884631182013-04-17T13:26:00.000-07:002013-04-17T13:26:07.588-07:00The People-As-None?In an influential essay in his tome <i>The Political Forms of Modern Society</i> Claude Lefort remarks that one of the constituent features of a totalitarian society is the primacy of the concept of what he calls the "People-As-One", an entity which is tautologically and self-referentially constructed as the central imaginary concept driving a political society. Where leader and "people" are self-same and mutually substitutable, we see the conditions of totalitarianism, conditions that perpetuate themselves through the inability for a constructed outside, or point outside power, to function effectively in contradistinction to the harmonious fantasy of the People-As-One.<br />
<br />
Lefort applies this concept in his analysis of totalitarianism, but a central premise of both contemporary rhetorical and political theory is that the imagined harmony behind the idea of a People-As-One is a key driver in the problems that face democratic society. John Sloop and Kent Ono, among others, observe in advancing a vernacular theory of rhetoric over and above the global or macro-political views of rhetorical theory that a turn to vernacular voices constitutively excluded from the contemporary "mass public" serves as a necessary remedy to a kind of popular harmonization perpetuated by even supposedly "leftist" theories of interpellation popularized by the translation of European social theory into the body of rhetoric. The force of interpellation, ascribed to discourse, has been essentialized and reduced with ignorance of the "actually existing" effects of these interpellations in democracy, suggesting that critics might observe the activities of non-normative communities to understand the gap between the theoretical understandings of these interpellative forces and the strength of them in practice.<br />
<br />
Similarly, the turn in political theory towards theories of hegemony and agonistic understandings of democracy as a radical rather than consensus-riven enterprise often explicitly use Lefort's work to fight against the fantasies of harmony that structure contemporary political discourse. Rather than waiting melancholically for a singularity of political unity to come, theorists like Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Andreas Kalyvas suggest that theorists might be better analysts of the political scene if they understand conflict and struggle to be the productive and necessary bases of politics. Rather than trying to evacuate conflict and clean up the public sphere (an exercise which might toss productive "arational" demands out with the supposedly less "liberal" conservative political rationalities that are often the targets of scholarly intervention), interested parties should analyze what conflicts might tell us about the positionalities of subjects, the effectivity of certain grammars, and the character of political contestation in a given symbolic political space.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, this Lefort essay (and the psychoanalytic theory that it tacitly and not-so-tacitly relies on) is the basis of one of the centrally influential essays in the world of scholars working at the intersection of discourse, publicity, and politics. Michael Warner's "The Mass Public as Mass Subject" draws heavily on Lefort's work to theorize the dangers of a discursive "tyranny of the majority" that result from the curiously performative features of public space. Specifically, because the mass public, that ideal agglomeration of ideal persons to which many feel called to when subjects encounter moments of difference, is made through moves of negative abstraction wherein a body or action that appears is taken to imply the separation of that body or act from the "real" public, various ideas of the public may sustain themselves for quite some time even in the face of (or perhaps because of) certain contradictions and illogics. After all, if these positive appearances of bodies in public prove the existence of a public "somewhere else" then interruptions of the "real" public will actually <i>sustain</i> the coherence and existence of said mass public, because acts of resistance or criticism of it will not only imply its existence but also ontologically certify the outsideness of those who speak against it, because their capacity to speak against it is circumscribed by their having not been made a part of it.<br />
<br />
The darker implication of Warner's argument is that, say it with me now, "we are all totalitarians" by virtue of our imagination which positions us not as part of an "out there" speaking but instead as part of an interior who "hears" only insofar as the fact of speech itself works to create a kind of presumption against that speech on the basis of its sourcing in the outside of our imagined polity. Warner clearly notes the impacts of this performative democratic majoritarian tyranny: those voices that have come to be positioned outside of the mass public, the queer, the colored, the black, and feminine, are constitutively excluded from the polity on the basis of their demands for inclusion. Because their demands come from the outside, the bar they have to pass in order to receive membership in the "mass public" is inexorably high. The more that these voices "complain" to borrow from Melissa Deem's appropriation of Lauren Berlant's work, the more their position outside the space of appearance works naturally rather than being understood an effect of history, violence, and the economy of circulation that circumscribes the performances that are intelligible to a certain set of privileged subjects.<br />
<br />
To prove his point, Warner chooses an interesting case study: Ronald Reagan. The trick of Reagan, according to Warner, is that while his administration was riven with scandals and incompetences, his public popularity, as measured not in the rough numbers of polls but instead in various symbolic, quotidian, and affective versions of what political scientists call "political capital" remained very high. When readers of <i>The Nation</i> lamented that Reagan was still president despite his "obvious" incompetence this worry served to obscure a very meaningful point also drawn from Lefort: the relationship between a public and there leader is one of identification, and where that bond is strong supposedly objective "evidence" of a representative's failings may not be interpreted as such when the public's attachment to said object would also be threatened by such criticism.<br />
<br />
At least two factors contribute to this relationship. One is the role of the office of the president itself: as the most central and least complex of the three branches of government, the president serves as the nominal representative of "the people" because it enables the reduction of the <i>vox populi</i> into one embodied figure. This is especially important for Lefort who observes that while the Enlightenment may have eliminated the functional form of the divine monarchy, a desire for the simplification of power along those less complicated lines strives against the messy complexity of distributed democratic power. The second role is the content of the figure: many critics have read Reagan, almost all concluding that part of his effectiveness was related to his status as variously, unflappable, a celebrity, "beyond America," and somewhat confused. Reagan is distinguished form say, George Bush Sr., whose competence became a deadweight during the economic struggles of the early 90s: he at least knew enough to know something was going wrong!<br />
<br />
What, then, do we make of a president who actively distinguishes his interpretation of events from the public? In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama persistently refused to take on the mantle of a class warrior (a move that did not become his signature until several years later). Instead, Obama spoke of a general American "responsibility" to suggest a collective overcoming of the economic problems, indicating that the problem was internal to rather than external to the American polity and its constituents. Immediately after his election, again during his inaugural, and again during the debate over the stimulus bill, Obama suggested that an American coming together of harmony, not the vilification of bankers and financial executives, would prove key.<br />
<br />
I suggest that Obama's post-electoral pivot created the problem of the People-As-None. For Warner, the existence of the mass public both makes and weakens individuals: without a mass public there can be no abstraction back to the status of the individual, but the mass public also testifies to the non-universality of the individual. The latter of these facts may be productively managed through sublimated, or perhaps denied through the tragic displacement of the fact in the amplification of narratives about individual agency and power. Ordinarily, presidential opposition to a popular public sentiment would entail a rather straightforward production of identity, where classic populist objections to out-of-touch elitism may be marshalled. However, Obama was not just the president but a recently elected one, during an election which served as a a mass repudiation of his political opponents, not to mention the validation of the American project itself. To constitute a "mass public" against Obama would require that Obama himself not be allowed to be a part of said mass public, a design which his position as the hyper-legitimate head of state would immediately undermine.<br />
<br />
Because of his ambiguous rhetorical status but undeniable structural position in the American imaginary, Obama could not operate either as the Lefortian Egocrat nor could he operate as the proper figure of opposition around which political organizations might coalesce. Here we had a hiccup in the publication of the mass public. It is not incidental that Obama's "Othered" status as, by turns, a racial, foreign, and cultural suggested connotationally that the mass public could be organized against him, but it is a testimony to the power of the democratic imaginary that it took a few months for Obama to be "lowered down" in the words of Kenneth Burke to where these objections could circulate effectively.<br />
<br />
With the mass public printer stuck in a paper jam, we have the problem of the People-As-None. Because individuals owe their existence to the production of the mass public, the difficulty in constituting a mass public inductively indicts the existence of the individual subject: without the technologies of abstraction available as suggested by Warner, the threat to the polity is existential rather than contingent: selves remain convinced of themselves in the abstract following rhetorics of harmony and collective identity, but they can neither establish their coherence through an attachment to the president nor through a contrast with the "noisy complains" of those who remain outside of civil society.<br />
<br />
With the massive presumption and favor given to fantasies of individual action and agency in the American <i>milieu</i>, the struggle for individual subjects to distinguish themselves unsurprisingly contributed to the continued circulation and legitimacy of anger. The aftermath of the TARP bill and the financial crisis generally meant that people were frustrated, and public discourse surveyed in the wake of the crisis suggests people generally felt scared, anxious, and disempowered. Such sentiments exacerbated the crisis of mass publicity noted here. If one is looking for a nominal starting point for the populist resistance to Obama (an explanations for the contradictions that emerged internal to said movement) one should make a note that what was transpiring was not a simple misfiring of expectations between a candidate's policies and the public, but instead the expression of a certain kind of malfunction in the representational apparatus governing the American political imaginary.<br />
<br />
Where the People-As-One finds everywhere confirmation of its status, the People-As-None finds doubt everywhere. The People-As-One are not hyper-paranoid but instead hyper-confident, certain that the relays that bind them to one another and a nominal leader remain strong ideological rocks. On the other hand, the People-As-None are searching for groundings. The result we might expect is that rather than the hyper-specific and choosy energy attached to the People-As-One (selective in the sense of its attachment to the object of the Egocrat) the People-As-None might seek out almost any object around which a sense of identity might be generated. Against Joan Copjec, we might suggest for the hyper-paranoid People-As-None, any object <i>will</i> do.<br />
<br />
This theory might explain the resemblance between the early conservative opposition to Obama and a drunk at a bar tossing darts at a board and hitting, in turn, employees, the wall, the board, and pitchers of beer. The bizarre conglomeration of demands and images attached to the Tea Party (dressing up as Indians, bringing bags of Tea, the affinity for slick-dressing Rick Santelli, opposition to bailouts from Republicans who should "logically" reject other corporate welfare they find acceptable, retro-patriotic motifs, worries about liberty, freedom, tyranny, fascism, Hitler, and a litany of other concerns) is a result of this hyper-paranoia: consistency is no object where subjects proceed from the deductive principle that they do exist, and where this principle must be proved in the space of appearance.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-9165769242786560402013-03-15T10:45:00.000-07:002013-03-15T10:47:02.091-07:00Examining Early Reagan: "A Time for Choosing"Lately historians and rhetorical theorists have alighted upon Richard Nixon's dual move to a rhetoric of the "Silent Majority" and the "Forgotten Americans" to explain some key elements of the reconfiguration of American political space. In the popular press two books by Rick Perlstein have been enormously influential: <i>Before the Storm</i>, his treatment of Barry Goldwater, and <i>Nixonland</i> both focus on how the turbulent 1960's came to be read as an indictment of liberalism rather than an expression of certain structural politico-economic dilemmas facing American society. In the field of communication studies, we have both foundational and contemporary interventions that find Nixon's "Silent Majority" to be key: both the intitial debate about the "Vietnamization" debate between Forbes Hill and K.K. Campbell and the recent <i>Rhetoric Society Quarterly</i> essay on victimization and the "Silent Majority" by Jeremy Engels have proven informative.<br />
<br />
The goal of this blog post is to move back a little bit and closely examine how Ronald Reagan helped set the stage for this move. Conservatism was in a crisis by the middle of the 1950's, facing the very public repudiation of its most virulent anti-Communist wing, and also the public repudiation of much of its orthodoxy in the policymaking of Dwight Eisenhower, whose policy preferences on a number of domestic issues came as disappointments to many conservatives. Conservative anxieties reflected not just a temporary concern over being politically sidelined, but reflected a structural change in the American ideological environment here summarized by Daniel Bell in <i>The End of Ideology</i>:<br />
<br />
"In the long run the problems of the distribution of burdens and the nature of controls cannot be<br />
deflected. The “statist” needs of a semi-war economy with its technical imperatives must clash with<br />
the restless anti-statist attitudes of the corporate managers. The first Republican administration in<br />
twenty years, even though it represents these anti-statist corporate managers, is not able to change<br />
drastically the course of government spending. The international situation imposes the same<br />
imperatives on Republicans as on Democrats, and the semi-war that is made necessary by it<br />
inevitably casts government in the role of controller and dominator of the economy. The real<br />
political question in domestic affairs will then become which of the groups will bear the costs of<br />
added burdens."<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">This shift reflected a major change wrought over time by a combination of influences from Populists, Progressives, and the Great Depression. The great political question of the late 19th century (whether to use the state to extract and redistribute wealth from the private sector) had been displaced in favor of a "to what extent" question regarding the matter of state capture for redistribution. Rendered a presumptive fact of politics, market interventionism became a fact of life rather than an object of political struggle.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">In this way the "state-phobia" within economics that Michel Foucault tracks in <i>The Birth of Biopolitics</i> could easily be taken up as a new constitutive political discourse by the New Right in the middle of the twentieth century. Suspicion of the state articulated neatly to recent and current political struggles against the demon of totalitarianism, represented both in the Axis in WW2 and the contemporary enemy of the Soviet Union. State-phobia made a certain kind of logical sense but there was the challenge of how to institute it as a critical discourse when the presumption of the political field lied in favor of the state (domestically) rather than against?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ronald Reagan addressed this conundrum in his famous "A Time for Choosing" speech, a stock speech of his that was adapted and delivered in support of Barry Goldwater a week before the 1964 presidential election. Scholars mostly hold that Reagan's move here was the first salvo in his attempt to go mainstream and adapt his message from the "hard" anti-Communist right to a more broad political audience. I disagree with this assessment because I believe a careful analysis of Reagan's speech shows a continuance rather than a reversion of a hardline rhetorical trend. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
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</span><br />
Reagan opens by addressing one of the key challenges of his rhetorical situation: the apparent and overwhelming sense of optimism and happiness about the state of the American economy in 1964. Reagan addresses this fact head on:<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“One side in this
campaign has been telling that the issues of this election are the maintenance
of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, ‘We’ve never had it so good.’
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on
which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever
survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37
cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share,
and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than
the government takes in….now our national debt is one and a half time bigger
than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
After addressing the prosperity side of the equation Reagan takes on the claims about peace, pointing to the many Americans dying daily in Vietnam. Mentioning these dying Americans, Reagan then pivots to a broader theme about the cold war, noting “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom or ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2">[ii]</a> One here detects an appeal with some chance of ringing true in light of our observation’s about the immortality offered by “the public,” a moment where death and life become conflated in envisioning a functioning polity put to death by its inability to care. Reagan addresses the existing feelings of optimism while also reminding his audience that the future might strongly disagree with their assessment of the present: like the heat being slowly turned up on a frog in a frying pan, the struggle of war against the enemies of freedom is ongoing, if difficult to perceive. Reagan further exceptionalizes not only the conflict but also the stakes, delivering an anecdote about a Cuban émigré’ who reminds an American of the special relationship American possesses to the world, with its status as a beacon of freedom. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn3">[iii]</a> <br />
<br />
After this anecdote, Reagan then turns to the meat of his appeal, generating a relationship with the audience on the basis of discussing government and “the people”, contrasting the common Americans from “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” that haughtily believes itself a superior manager of people’s lives. Reagan is careful not to construct the American “people” as a mass, which would threaten to activate enthymemes associated with America’s own vibrant demophobic tradition. Instead, it is the government that theorizes the “people” as an unthinking mass. “I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as ‘the masses.’ This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America.” Reagan’s speech cannily distinguishes between a impoverished European peasantry and the vibrant American “people” defined by virtue of their commonly held individuality: a being together by virtue of singularity. Here Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” is understood as a specific appeal made at “vote-harvesting” time, a reference whose agricultural imprimatur is not lost on an audience whom the Cold War has made familiar with the dangers of collective agriculture. Historically, too, one can see the agrarian spirit of the proud Populists at work as well in Reagan’s words. <br />
<br />
Reagan then moves to themes of Big Government, describing bureaucratic bloat, inefficiency, and permanence. “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth…proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant?” In only a couple paragraphs time, Reagan is connecting these violation of liberty with the greater international struggle against Communism, arguing that:<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">We cannot buy our
security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality
so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron
Curtain, “give up your dreams of freedom, because to save our own skins, we’re
wiling to make a deal with your slave masters.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The “soup kitchen of the welfare state” is
transmogrified into grim and dark bread lines, no doubt summoning not only of
projections of life in the Soviet Union but also memories of domestic rationing
during the Second World War. The analogy to slavery also does opposition work
to emphasize the progress made by America in comparison to the Soviets. This
metonymic move allows Reagan to close with a call that “We’ll preserve for our
children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to
take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”</span></span></span><br />
<div>
<span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
Reagan’s speech was moderated from his ordinary stump speech to conservatives, but his speech’s capacity to generate support still derives from tapping into a discursive economy loaded with energy and anxiety. Martin Medhurst observes that a similar pattern can be detected in Eisenhower’s push for the Atoms for Peace program, which contained two levels, an explicit and an implicit argument. The explicit arguments were dispassionate reports about the power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but the implicit arguments were threats directed at the Soviet Union whose nuclear programming had them nipping at the heels of the U.S.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn1">[i]</a> Reagan’s speech operates similarly, with a set of explicitly segregated topoi (foreign policy, over-regulation, high taxes, agricultural creep) connected a second level with the noisy conflation of the causes and impacts of each. The continuing atmosphere of risk in the Cold War, not to mention that rapid changes America had undergone since the Second World War, made citizens sympathetic to arguments that linked the increasingly difficult to understand world littered with threats. In this sense, “A Time for Choosing” was a move away from apocalypticism to the jeremiad in a formal sense, because it privileged a message of American uplift over a traumatic story of apocalypse. However, the continued presence of a set of threats articulated to Big Government, the victory of Communism, and a “thousand years of darkness” give this critic reason to qualify his statements about this move to jeremiad.<br />
<br />
A look at later Reagan speeches shows this conflationary maneuver was par for the course. I name it “threat conflation” (to distinguish it from “threat inflation” in international relations,) an operation which mixes claims, warrants, and data in such a way to prey upon the confused attitudes and affects of a public conditioned by sensitivity to conflict, warfare, and anxiety. When confronting the new threat of international terrorism in the mid eighties, Reagan faced a unique rhetorical situation, wherein the U.S. faced threats both from terrorists who operated independent of the nation state system and also traditional geopolitics threats. Jackson observes that Reagan successfully abolished this confusion by engaging in a strategy of rhetorical conflation, by interspersing and using almost interchangeably rhetoric of “’international terrorism’ and ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ constructs” that “both amplified the danger” and “conflated terrorists and enemy states. Conflating terrorism with certain states allows a ‘war’ on terrorism to be re-targeted at countries which are the focus of American interests.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_edn2">[ii]</a> <br />
<br />
Something similar is at work in this version of “A Time for Choosing.” In a United States that found itself increasingly beset by instability, confusion, and violence, the conflation of inputs and outputs of ear and anxiety was certainly possible. While audiences may not have explicitly generated whole chains of argument linking increased government regulation to a totalitarian horror, Reagan’s shifting in between stories of the horrors of Communism and Big Government overreaches produced an environment where the enthymematic insertions of an audience could have generated sympathetic relays between accounts of the dangers of Big Government and the present and past totalitarian horrors against which an exceptional America had been defined. <br />
<br />
These moves succeeded because Reagan’s vision was able to draw from ground fertilized by earlier traditions of American populism and progressivism. Reagan emphasized the vision of a hard working and virtuous American individual, but refigured this individual not as the subject of elite market forces (or a government tied to economic interests through the practice of crony capitalism) but instead produced the state as the negater and destroyer of liberty and freedom. His recapitulation of the stakes of the American Dream through the lens of state-powered totalitarianism created a mechanism to ally the various forces constituted by the New Right’s cadre of suburban activists and tireless workers. The New Deal consensus, perceived as the exigency driving calls for a new conservatism, ironically threatened rhetorically the very opportunities it nominally sought to defend by investing in the rhetorical power of the government to move and change the world. Because the spirit of American individualism is driven by the fantastic elevation of the individual’s capacity for achievement as a universal rather than a particular one, state intervention came to be understood as a prima facia “no confidence” vote in the American “people” according to the discourses of the right. Fears and anxieties linked both to the existential dangers of the Cold War but also the more quotidian uncertainties regarding moral and virtuous life were externalized upon a rapidly growing state bureaucracy that threatened to “manage” individuality and spontaneity of human life out of existence. Conceptualizing “freedom from” government intervention as a key trope encourages the investment in individual singularity as the raison d’etre of politics. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The Arendtian point about immortality and public space takes on an increasingly prominently role here: the specter of government encroachment, with its attachments to the figure of a mass public that it turns into an unthinking herd by virtue of its moralizing substitution for virtue, can here be theorized through Reagan’s rhetoric as an explanatory mechanism to account for how the new right threaded the needle on a rather difficulty argumentative proposition: how to simultaneously claim the mantle of “the people” while avoiding elements in the American republican tradition that were suspicious of “the people.” Reagan successful resuscitates the old demophobic anxieties about the “people” but positions them as a consequence of big government gone off the rails, articulating the only possibly dangerous version of the “American people” as a consequent of the adoption of policies that translate them into a herd or mass similar to the droning and alienated populations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The only “people” capable of constituting a public that might outlive their conditions is a “people” freed of the domineering force of government. In this way Reagan constructs a populism simultaneously suspicious of the implicit “people” authorizing centrist policies in America while at the same time clearing space for a conservative “people” defined deductively from their status as free individuals rather than derived inductively from their social standing and actual position relative to opportunity.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This speech does not, I think, represent a strong break from the anti-Communism of the 1950's. Instead, the speech mostly carries over those anxiety-ridden warrants for policy action and smuggles them into domestic policy by preying on the difficulties found in distinguishing between sources of various and sundry political anxieties. As a key moment in Reagan's emergence as a broad public figure, this moment deserves more attention, and its a key moment to contextualize the mainstreaming of "state-phobia" that would drive conservative political populism through the second half of the 20th century.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Medhurst</Author><year>1987</Year><recnum>39</RecNum><pages>210-212</Pages><displaytext>Martin
J Medhurst, "Eisenhower's ‘Atoms for Peace’speech: A Case
Study in the Strategic Use of Language," <style
face="italic">Communications Monographs</style> 54, no. 2
(1987):
210-12.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>39</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">39</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Medhurst,
Martin
J</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Eisenhower's
‘atoms for peace’speech: A case study in the strategic use of
language</title><secondary-title>Communications
Monographs</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Communications
Monographs</full-title></periodical><pages>204-220</pages><volume>54</volume><number>2</number><dates><year>1987</year></dates><isbn>0363-7751</isbn><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->Martin J Medhurst, "Eisenhower's ‘Atoms for Peace’speech: A Case
Study in the Strategic Use of Language," <i>Communications Monographs</i> 54, no. 2 (1987): 210-12.<!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <!--[if supportFields]><span
style='mso-element:field-begin'></span><span
style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>ADDIN EN.CITE
<endnote><cite><author>Jackson</Author><year>2006</Year><recnum>40</RecNum><pages>170</Pages><displaytext>Richard
Jackson, "Genealogy, Ideology, and Counter-Terrorism: Writing Wars on
Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr," <style
face="italic">Studies in Language & Capitalism</style>
1(2006):
170.</DisplayText><record><rec-number>40</rec-number><foreign-keys><key
app="EN"
db-id="w5zrtfdpoxp2sreetsp5tsfrvpzepzv2swrv">40</key></foreign-keys><ref-type
name="Journal
Article">17</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Jackson,
Richard</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Genealogy,
ideology, and counter-terrorism: Writing wars on terrorism from Ronald Reagan
to George W. Bush Jr</title><secondary-title>Studies in Language &
Capitalism</secondary-title></titles><periodical><full-title>Studies
in Language &
Capitalism</full-title></periodical><pages>163-193</pages><volume>1</volume><dates><year>2006</year></dates><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span><![endif]-->Richard Jackson, "Genealogy, Ideology, and Counter-Terrorism: Writing
Wars on Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr," <i>Studies in Language & Capitalism</i>
1(2006): 170.<!--[if supportFields]><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span><![endif]--><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div id="edn1">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref1" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Reagan A Time for Choosing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2549088046875609394#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Reagan Time for Choosing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2549088046875609394.post-60764421272958776242012-10-11T16:14:00.000-07:002012-10-11T16:14:04.858-07:00Vice Presidential Debate Primer<b>What to Watch For: Biden</b><br />
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1. He's solid: Biden is actually a pretty good debater. In 2008, he was essentially coached just not to screw up, with the thought being that there was no way his debate against Sarah Palin could be a positive given the extraordinarily low expectations. Moreover, the expectations for Biden are quite low, as Republicans and satirical news outlets like The Onion make Biden a routine target of jokes and ridicule. The expectations game is poisonous for democracy, but I expect it to serve Biden well this time around.<br />
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2. Foreign policy: Did you watch the Democratic primary debates in 2008? Biden was really, really good on major fopo questions. Shockingly so. Ryan, on the other hand, hangs his hat on domestic policy issues related to tax and finance policy. Foreign policy is not one of his strengths. That said, what might normally be "Advantage: Biden" may be nulled as the Obama administration is coming off a tough few days of Libya in the news cycle. If Biden can come up with the administration's salesworthy explanation of why information has been slow to seep out (and I suspect there is one, what with the not wanting to compromise an ongoing terrorist investigation) then its a win, but if Ryan can pounce with some Libya lines, its a danger spot.<br />
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3. "Ordinary People" (not the Oscar winning film): Biden's got his blue-collar Scranton-man schtick down. He'll definitely have opportunities in this debate to turn Ryan's abstract haymakers about the deficit and budget into real policies with real consequences for ordinary Americans. Will Biden strike swiftly on this question a couple times, or will it be a reprise of his DNC performance, in which he informed the American people in about 327 different ways that Osama bin Laden was dead, Obama had done it, and that an American flag had been planted in his corpse?<br />
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<b>What to Watch For: Ryan</b><br />
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1. Its the Bigtime: while Ryan has a national profile, this VP debate is certainly the biggest moment of his political life so far. Ryan has also mostly dealt with chumps in his electoral campaigns, and does not have Biden's record of seeking national office. Look for signs that Ryan is flustered or confused as indicators of the uniqueness of this stage. I expect him to do well if he confines his interventions to relatively abstract pushes on government spending and taxation, which would be an intelligent course of action.<br />
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2. Correct Biden, but Don't Be Mean: This is where expectations matter: Biden has a reputation as the Democratic Party's cranky old uncle or grandfather. On the one hand, this causes folks to not listen to him all that much. On the other, this means that taking unnecessary potshots at Biden could come off extra bad, especially given his personal history of tragedy. Ryan will want to hammer Biden when he gets into one of his riffs about "everyday Americans" but Ryan has to be very careful not to come off like a responsibility minded middle manager when correcting him. Americans don't like deficits, but they also don't like bureaucrats.<br />
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3. Women's rights: The "legitimate rape" flap has created an opening for some discussion of reproductive and gender rights. Biden can throw haymakers on this issue, while Ryan has in the past sponsored some quite right of center political approaches to the issue. Women really came out strong for the Obama campaign in 2008. If Ryan gets cornered into talking about gender issues it can only come at an opportunity cost with other news items (Libya, the economy, deficits) that are far more beneificial to the GOP.<br />
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<b>What to Watch For: Both</b><br />
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Any references to Paul Ryan's ridiculous workout spread. Also, a giant eagle armed with a laser the annihilates budget deficits when it bursts through the auditorium ceiling.Paul Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00841372871906932597noreply@blogger.com1