Vice Presidential Debate Primer

What to Watch For: Biden

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.

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.

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?

What to Watch For: Ryan

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.

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.

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.

What to Watch For: Both

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.

A Retrospective On the Tea Party

Its important to distinguish between agonism and antagonism in a democracy. The former mode is a form of political and argumentative contestation which understands there to be a shared space between interlocutors. In the latter, the drive to win an argument outweighs the necessity of preserving a shared argumentative space: conflict happens but without recourse to any kind of shared space. For argumentation theorists, what anchors agonistic conflict are "facts:" a set of agreed-upon propositions that make possible the exchange of disagreement between different points of view, as distinguished from disagreements between different places, thought of in terms of political space as a discursively instituted and performatively calcified zone.

America has to do away with the permanent campaign if it wants to promote a politics of agonism rather than a politics of antagonism. As I begin to finish up my research project on new American conservatism, I was drawn again to the events of February 2009. Remember when Rick Santelli freaked out on CNBC's Morning "Sqwawk Box" with the rant that launched the Tea Party?  Commentators at The Weekly Standard and National Review fell all over themselves to praise Santelli's defense of productive and active Americans a "new Silent Majority" that was a "pretty good cross-section of America." The seemingly spontaneous nature of Santelli's rant captured the conservative imagination, something I have written about elsewhere.

But I also want to note something else: Santelli's rant happened less than a month after Barack Obama was officially inaugurated. And it seems Santelli's speech was an effort coordinated by right wing organizing groups (I apologize for the unfortunate title of the linked article). Once the Tea Party exploded, there were droves of articles calling the movement a grassroots, organic expression of disenchantment with the presidency of Barack Obama. Now, I admit to having an awful lot of faith in the power of democratic protest. But the idea of a mass, spontaneous movement emerging almost overnight (before the president had hardly done anything) strains credulity. That said, once started, the Tea Party did draw in a lot of people who were legitimate and sincerely concerned about the direction of the country. Whether or not their reasons for concern were based on good arguments will be the subject for another post, but suffice it to say I take their world that they believed it.

Making a populist argument is a version of blackmail. "The American people believe this..." is a loaded argument, because disagreement from it creates a presumption that one is NOT a member of the American people. One can of course make a counterargument: "Actually, the American people believe this and that..." but what this overlooks is that there is no single sovereign judge or jury to pass comment on the "Americanness" of certain arguments.

A quick glance at the current party platforms is revealing: the Democratic platform references the "American people" around nine times. The GOP platform refers to the American people that many times in its first two pages, and includes innumerable more mentions throughout. The Democratic platform shows a persistent unwillingness to beat up their opponents with what Jeremy Engels has called a "demophilic" argumentative strategy, preferring instead to assemble their political coalition through particularized rhetoric which inductively proves their status as the political party of the American people (or we might say "persons.") The incentive to promote a permanent campaign led the GOP to begin a massive campaign on a populist basis less than 30 days after the new president had been inaugurated. Now there was a good deal of bellyaching on the left following Bush v. Gore, but it would be a stretch to say that it produced the kind of political resistance engendered by the current Republican leadership: and that was after someone won the popular vote but lost the election.

Party of the people? Methinks the GOP doth protest too much.

Expectations for Tonight's Debate

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

ON THE LEFT

1. Class warfare: its revisionist history to recall the Barack Obama of 2008 as a class warrior. That Obama talked in almost equal turns about the necessity for individuals to be responsible as he did of punishing white collar Wall Streeters. But following the visibility of the Occupy movement last Fall, a funny thing happened on the way to the neoliberal forum: discussions about wealth inequality picked up steam. While most search trackers find that explicit discussion of inequality has returned to pre-Occupy levels, the Obama campaign has certainly capitalized effectively on the population's sensitivity to economic disparities effectively arguing (or demagoguing depending on your perspective) about the impact of wealth stratification on the middle class. Romney's 47% comments caught on tape at a fundraiser have been grist for the mill. Obama has to have one wealth-related haymaker prepared: look for when and how effectively he lands it.

2. Romney's entitlement: Americans tend to have little issue with wealth. Indeed, polling numbers reveal that many Americans still remain skeptical of heavy taxation and regulation of the wealthy because they project forward an idea of themselves as one day belonging to the upper class. Americans do, however, have a negative reaction to the combination of an affect of entitlement and excessive wealth. Any defensiveness regarding wealth on Romney's part has to come off as a calm and reasoned response that highlights his giving to charity and the necessity of providing appropriate incentives to those capable of exercising good financial and economic judgment.

3. Shooting the gap: Obama has a tricky task in that he has to admit that the economy is still in a bad place, but also that he has earned the trust of the people to continue to try and fix it. Obama of course cannot come right out and say what he is probably thinking: "If I had looked at the American people in 2008 and had said that we had little hope of returning to a halyconic economic era during my presidency, I would probably not be elected." Of course an alternate theory, pushed in a recent spate of articles, is that Obama and his advisors simply did not grasp the depth of the economic crisis. Obama would do well to have America remember its anxieties during autumn 2008; a return to this feeling makes it feasible to IMAGINE that Obama shared the depth of fear about the economy of most Americans, while allowing them to conveniently overlook how his administration may not have responded aggressively enough to the crisis.

On the Right

1. Any Libya questions: while this debate is ostensibly about domestic policy, this will not stop Mitt Romney from bringing up the assassination of Amb. Chris Stevens in Benghazi. If the debate runs off the domestic rails and into foreign policy territory, its a dangerous spot for Obama for two reasons. A) When an American representative is murdered, simply crying "Wrong Forum!" will not do as an appropriate response, and B) emerging facts indicate that the embassy attack might have been predictable. While we are nowhere near "Bin Laden to Strike U.S." territory, the administration's spin on how security was being handled at the embassy has yet to coalesce into any kind of cohesive narrative, leaving some meaningful questions about the administration's handling of the incident and its aftermath.

2. Diminishment of the office of the presidency: the challenger has inherent difficulties when attacking the incumbent president in a debate. Specifically, the challenger must prove capable of undermining their opponent without being seen as diminishing the dignity of the office of the presidency itself. Many common conservative complaints about the president fail to generate an audience outside of the negative feedback loop of conservative political commentary because when it comes to the presidency audiences reason deductively from the status of the office rather than inductively from the character of the person without it: i.e. the American people wouldn't elect a communist president, the presidency is a part of the nation, etc. Romney should return to his prior campaign theme that the president is a well meaning but overmatched and underskilled manager. Such arguments can diminish Obama the man without diminishing the office of the presidency, to which Americans have strong symbolic and mental fealty.

3. Connecting with the middle class: Romney certainly has policy arguments that he thinks will capture the hearts and minds of middle class voters. In the abstract, the issue is not connecting the policies themselves: calls for lower tax cuts and smaller government often prove persuasive, and the more complicated policy canards related to how long term budget shortfalls might necessitate raising taxes on the middle class are (sadly) probably going to be too far out to be discussed in detail in the debate. But as far as personas go, Romney has yet to connect his persona with an audience. It's not that people don't respect competent managers, its that they aren't all that fond of bosses, and Romney's discourse of necessity and management comes perilously close to triggering an American imagination suffused with skepticism towards one's professional overlords.

What Not To Watch For

1. Gaffes: these are entertaining and the cause of much chortling, but short of Ford-in-76 style errors, its difficult to imagine a gaffe really swinging things. Moreover, their immediate mega-circulation through social networks is cause for insanity and fury. So please, don't watch for them.

2. Talk about the poor: because it won't happen. Both parties talk longingly of the middle class while penning them the most effervescent of love letters, at the expense of the poor. Don't get your hopes up.

3. Mentions of the Daily Caller "bombshell" video last night: what a dud.

The "Bombshell" Obama Video

The process of constructing Barack Obama as fundamentally un-American has now come almost full circle, into the naked and explicit realm of race baiting. But first, some backstory:

Barack Obama ran for president in 2008. On the campaign trail, his opponent had to actively defend Obama from questioners in the audience who openly wondered about whether Barack Obama was a Muslim. John McCain had the decency to say that he was a good man, with whom he had disagreements, and was a Christian. And yet, rumors of Obama Islamic faith (preying effectively on a populace sensitized to the supposed Otherness of Islam to America in a post 9/11 world) continued to circulate.

Then Obama was a Communist. He told Joe the Plumber he wanted to share the wealth. He favored "redistribution." Taking from the workers, giving to the parasites. While this argument proved to be unpersuasive during the 2008 campaign cycle (radically so) it did not stop this theme from insisting upon itself, as the Randian tenor of the Tea Party and the "53% Tumblr" cried out, that the makers would not be befuddled by the takers. Now there are 47% of the American people who do not contribute to America. Real Americans earn. Real Americans produce. Obama wants to take from those who produce. The Cold War might be over politically, but the Cold War of our mental colonization is dogged and determined, indeed.

Obama might not even be a citizen! Some people held out that Obama was born in Kenya, not America. At least one article argued that the birtherism was a "screen for partisanship." This dismissal is of course terrifying: what sort of mere "screen" make thinkable the possibility that the president was not born in America, even with prior official documentation available? Even after Obama revealed his birth certificate, fizzling out the "controversy," Dinesh D'Szoua's Obama 2016 continues to advance a separate theory of Obama's "citizenship" based not on his formal membership in the polity but on his civic committment to strains of anti-colonialism. He may be formally of this nation, but not politically of it.

And now we have this "bombshell" video from Sean Hannity. On his show tonight, Sean Hannity brought up three major attacks against the speech:

1) It was raced on the basis of content, as Obama accused the federal government of racial discrimination against New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

2) It was raced in a purely basic manner, that it was not colorblind, and spoke of the existence of black communities.

3) It was tonally raced, as Obama capitalized on a particular black dialectic. In Tucker Carlson's worlds "This is not how he talks...its a put on, a phony."

A curious tension is at work. On one hand, Obama is not truly black: he is putting on a dialectical show for his particular audience, showing "them" that he knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk. On the other hand, we are to take seriously Obama's statements about the government's treatment of Katrina victims in the storm's aftermath. Happily, Hannity has on a guest (a black gentleman named David Webb) willing to say "this is the REAL Obama." Obama's true persona is the "Derrick Bell" influenced and racially charged one.

Hannity and Carlson go way out of their way to make clear: real Americans are not race conscious. Real Americans do not see race. There are two America's, the colorblind America of Fox News and the color conscious America of Barack Obama and his black audience. The real Obama is angry about Katrina. The real Obama expresses his fury. The real Obama knows that racial injustice exists. The real Obama knows that America still has many bullets to remove.

He speaks tonally like an angry black man. He wants to take away our wealth. He wants Kenya to rise up against colonial capture. He secretly worships Allah. He does not know what it means to be an American citizen. Even though in the speech several times Obama goes well out of his way to mention that the aftermath of Katrina "is not about race" this does not go far enough for Hannity and Co. Everything must be raced. Real America does not tolerate or acknowledge difference. Real America is the abolition of difference. Real America is the absence of dissent. Real America is red America packaged and understood as THE America. Debates over what America means are beyond the pale.

Antagonism without agonism? Just ask the crypto-Marxist Muslim Kenyan Anti-Colonialist who'll turn on whitey whenever possible.

The Ryan Pick

Was driving back from vacation yesterday (this was my first human, serious, and meaningful vacation in the last six years, and I wish I'd taken one sooner) and so I missed a lot of the chatter about Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential pick. Not that I'm a meaningful pundit or anything, but I'd put my money on Portman given the Romney campaign's compulsion for the standard and boring (not a knock btw: remember Sarah Palin?)

The Ryan selection was definitely a bit of a surprise (though perhaps not around the offices of The Weekly Standard) and what's notable is that both Democrats and Republicans seem happy about it. From NRO's editors, this pleased-as-punch declaration:

"Romney could have decided to run a vague and vacuous campaign based on the idea that the public would default to the out party in a bad economy. By selecting Ryan, he has ensured that the campaign will instead to a significant degree be about a conservative governing agenda."

As noted, this idea about Ryan's pick transforming the campaign into one of BIG IDEAStm  is a shared notion: Greg Sargent, in today's Wapo, agrees that the pick expands the agenda items for the campaign from a pure referendum on the economy to a bigger one about entitlements and government spending:

"The Ryan pick is also a break with Romney's previous theory of the race. He had previously intended to make the campaign about nothing more than a referendum on the economy and Obama's stewardship of it. Now it will be a choice between two starkly different ideological visions, one that drags the race onto the turf of tax fairness and entitlements--which is much more in line with the debate Dems wanted."

Dear readers, forgive me for not really understanding a lot of this. Who thinks the Obama administration wouldn't have continued to push heavily the set of arguments about the threat the GOP posed to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements? And who expected the GOP to just ditch the "tax fairness" arguments if Romney had selected say, Rob Portman? These were already going to be major campaign issues. The degree of intensity of these arguments might perhaps be a bit higher, but the GOP's attempt to link higher taxes with current economic struggles has already been afoot since the leadup to the 2010 midterms. And what was the aim of Barack Obama's comments about the shared rather than individual character of economic achievement if not an attempt to indicate that government has an active and meaningful (read: funded) role to play in the lives of ordinary citizens?

Second point: these ideas are already more or less confused in, if not the minds, at least the emotions/affects of the electorate. Previous posts have addressed the attempts by organizations like Americans for Prosperity to create linkages in the minds of voters between the government's debt and the debt struggles of ordinary American households. While such tactics are disingenuous (no American household can rely on the kind of tax base that the federal government can) they can certainly prove effective, inasmuch as the government exists as an easy relay upon which American can project their hopes and anxieties. The feelings related to economic struggles are not do distinct from fears that your grandparents won't have medical care (and fears that you will be responsible for making their ends meet) and these are also not separable from the more conservative sentiments associated with economic anxieties related to a fear that one's own security could be threatened by those who are less responsible (even those who are well off economically do not "feel" economically secure owing to combinations of familial, professional, and social financial obligations, hard as that might be to rationalize occasionally). So a dispute about rising Medicare costs not only threatens the elderly (or those who imagine their futures as elderly) but also those who find those rising costs to be a threat to their own prosperity. This conflation of affects was already at work, though perhaps the Ryan pick underscores its importance.

Third point: racial optics. We now have an extraordinarily white (though not for the GOP) ticket that plans on lecturing a black guy for spending too much money. How is that going to play? We already have a sense that the base will love it (and I admit, this is often for reasons that cannot be reduced to race, but often the racial element in this cannot be ignored). Indeed, Scott Brown recently reconjured the "welfare queen" recently, and its difficult to dissociate such images from their implicated racial/political histories. It's no accident here that the "makers" are two "responsible and serious" white guys while the irrational and irresponsible "Barry" is the one incapable of balancing the budget, and I'd expect hay to be made out of that in the general by some rather noxious political elements. It will of course be coded and hidden but, its a sadly operational stereotype.

Affective Transference and Confusion. Or, Questioning "Julia"

Peter Kirsanow, a talented contributor to the well regarded conservative magazine National Review has a regular feature on their weblog The Corner called "Today's Questions for the President." Today's question is regarding the new federal advertising campaign featuring the fictional character "Julia," whose life story is told in concert with detailing and itemizing the benefits this fictional character derives in her life from government programs (You can watch an MSNBC segment on Morning Joe thats highly critical of the advertisement as well here). In a number of ways the campaign fails progressives in a way sure to generate distrust (Julia is white, wants children) out of its attempts to triangulate to a broader audience.

Kirsanow summarizes the enormous mounting weight of the federal debt, then asks, essentially, two questions: 1) how do you expect us to pay for this, and 2) what have you done to make sure there aren't more Julias who "need" federal assistance? (Just for fun, on the first case Kirsanow tosses in the typical reference to how much of Julia's benefits China will need to fund.)

We can set aside the larger debate about how deep the revenue crisis is (short answer on my perspective is: a more robust economy fixes that vast majority of all existing spending problems with the exception of Medicare, and yes, we have to be prepared to preserve Medicare with higher taxes on both the wealthy and the middle class. As far as more support for programs recently axed and reformed, in terms of cost those pale in comparison to the Medicare issue but are also resolvable with a better/broadly stronger economy. (So yes, if you have an axe to grind with people who think our taxes should be higher, you should grind it here.) What really interests me about the first claim is how it plays upon a certain kind of emotional confusion and transference that utilizes existing economic anxieties and makes the budgetary constraints faced by the government into an analogical phenomenon.

At least three major arguments are working in the background of Kirsanow's question. The first is the current anxiety over the European debt crisis, and Greece specifically. Check out for example this chart from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) linked by The Weekly Standard that depicts how much debt America has on a per capita basis, and how our crisis is even worse than Greece's on a per capita basis (one issue I have with the graph is that is measures debt on a per capita basis but does not also account for the enormous potential overall wealth in the tax base nor differences in say, natural resources). If you want more anecdotal evidence, fire up twitter and search "Greece" "debt" and "Obama" and you'll find a multitude of posts (hashtagged "tcot" for "top conservatives on twitter") linking Obama to a future where the U.S. faces mass austerity riots just like the Greek government.

A second background operation being performed here is the insistence on debt as a supreme danger to the polity. This is often accomplished by recourse to analogies which position government spending and household spending as equivalences, in order to make the threat of debt existential. For just one example, look at the clever slide employed by Sarah Palin in her keynote address to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville Tennessee in 2010: governments she says, like households, are sunk if they can't balance their budgets. Such logic elides the fact that credit is not a necessary evil but is instead the lifeblood of any effectively functioning economy: sample any doomsday article from the 2008 financial crisis and you'll find out very quickly that the threat of mass credit paralysis loomed larger than any other problem as a central issue flowing from the banking and investment crisis. Another issue with the analogy is that households don't have tax bases while governments do: unless you like in a polity like California where there are constitutional restrictions on raising taxes, the truth is that the government is more capable of producing income on demand through the exercise of political will than a household is able to "will itself" to more income.

The third argument present is an implicit one as well, one that preys on the dimunization/reduction in overall agency in order to encourage an active identification with the government. A recent piece in Theory & Event did a nice job of identifying how the reduction in individual agency (economically, we might think about this as the reduction in real wages relative to inflation for the lower and middle class starting in the eighties) enabled easier identification with state power in the wake of September 11th. Massive expansions of government power were legitimized and indeed, identified with, by the citizenry because they were one way for citizens rendered inert and powerless to imagine themselves as capable of exercising some sort of agency. The piece, by Elisabeth Anker and called "Heroic Identifications: Or, You Can Love Me Too--I Am So Like the State" is wonderful because it outlines how people might come to think of themselves as aligned with the state, even though the structure of American political government is built to institute a difference between "the people" and the state for their own protection (cf. On Revolution by Hannah Arendt.) We might envision something like an obverse side of this agency argument occurring in this moment, where people, incapable of actually making ends meet on their own owing to increasing costs and stagnating wages (or perhaps to mortgages they couldn't really afford) experience the economic agony of the state (and the threat of bankruptcy). This allows them to experience the threat of economic destitution but through an externalization of the question of responsibility and action (understanding one's own role in ending up in a state of economic hardship is very difficult within the terms of liberal individualism that operate on the American discursive landscape; in part this accounts for the success of government-suspicious discourses like those of the Tea Party or previously the Birchers).

Checking out the MSNBC roundtable on the Julia ad supports this point: even the most "liberal" member of the roundtable doesn't think the video is helpful because, as avowed Marxist Mika Brezinski notes "I don't think it helps....we are at a state, time in this country where people feel there is no hope" and they don't wanted to be reminded that one of the only sources of hope is the government. Donnie Deutsch further underscores this point, reminding us that "Our character is John Wayne, rugged individualism...Yes the government is there, but we feel weak in that...nobody, not even a progressive guy like myself, wants to see America portrayed that way." Individualism offers the promise of success as a result of the competent exercise of individual agencies and faculties. When things are going bad, its a might bit more difficult to encourage broader introspection about the failure of individuals to contribute to a world that might have been otherwise (to do so might point inductively to a problem with liberal individualism on the whole). To the extent that discourses can focus on how bad a job the government has done, this might enable a disavowal of our individual roles in financial calamities (and I want to be clear: this can extend to ideological complicity with the status quo as much as it might be a decision to say, buy a flatscreen tv on layaway or take a large mortgage).

The difficult is that the government does do lots of things for lots of people all of the time. We drive on roadways produced by a federal government. We don't end up in the poorhouse because we're paying for an elderly relative's medical care (or at least, because of Medicare a lot fewer of us do). Local and state programs benefit us continuously  (and I would contend we may process federal and state policies in the imaginary quite differently, but that this separation might not survive much scrutiny). Many of us patronize organizations that benefit from federal tax exempt status. Those of us who don't make much money benefit from the EITC. And so on and so forth. One reason why this "Julia" video might have generated such scorn is precisely the reason identified by Brezinski and Deutsch: it hits too close to home. Our agency is routinely minimized and circumscribed, in sharp contrast with the "work hard, chicken in every pot, Chevy in the garage" narrative that we have been fed (and feed, when we buy into it and coproduce a reality that lines up with such thoughts).

We wallow in government debt because it does two things simultaneously: it affirms to us that we are like the government (struggling financially) while also reaffirming a traditional narrative sympathetic to the individual (the government is too incompetent to take care of itself.) Anxiety about the economic survival of a household is projected as a general condition of the government itself (even if this is not exactly true, as far as thing go: the government basically has a Visa card with a credit limit the size of the U.S. tax base). If the government and "the people" are both stuck in a financial crisis, then this gives cause to support the more radical sentiment (if not actual policy recommendations) that now matriculates from the small-government GOP base: rhetorics about taking our country back, calls that Obama is a socialist, etc. are all more intelligible if the fundamentals of the country are at stake as opposed to facing a temporary bump in the road.

Thus Kirsanow's second question (What have you done to ensure there are fewer Julias?") comes from an intelligible ideological position: it begins from the premise that strengthening the broader economy is more important than producing federal support programs. This is probably a belief that few in the Obama administration would disagree with, they would simply disagree with the causes of the economic collapse (market failures compared to say, heavy regulations/taxation). Starkly, the quesiton begins from the premise that individuals are entirely separate and distinct from the government as a natural order of things: the government might, through intervention, unmake and distort individuals, and only its exit from the market can restore a certain kind of order.

American exceptionalism has a long tradition. Some of it is about proving that we are definitely better than other countries (Manifest Destiny and whatnot) while other elements are actually about demonstrating our exceptional victimage (9/11 as a sign of our divine ability to suffer, struggle, and rebuild). Sometimes, these goals intersect, as in this case, where the real credit crisis in another country is taken to be an index of the future that America might face, one that can only be overcome by a kind of divine double down on the will, strength, and redoubtable power of the individual. This move  is secured by the production of a government that is exceptionally poor at managing its budget by pointing to its enormous debt load. The result of this is to analogize the government to households, which elides/obscures the fact that plenty of well functioning households do, to some extent, carry debt and oftentimes are incapable of paying all their bills on a month to month basis. Rather than encounter this second fact as an opportunity for ironic introspection about how exactly lives are lived, we turn to the repetition of anti-government jeremiads which, by condemning the government for its inefficiency and incompetence, serve to repeat and reify our clever and centralized trust in our selves against the external Other of the government.

Affects are structures of feelings. These structures of feelings operate, according to some, prior to signification and the function of language. They help to answer the question of desire (or if you prefer in English, the question of how a narrative comes to be or cohere even when there is not necessarily a ready-made reading guide for the consumer). Why the repetition of certain themes, structures, ideas, and modes of thinking? It's owed not to some arbitrary force, but rather to repetitions, and how repetitions are appealing in and of themselves because they are familiar (familiarity does some work to certify something like "truthiness"). We constantly "re-up" the familiar because we are invested  in it (see Lauren Berlant's brilliant essay "Cruel Optimism" for a more extensive treatment of this subject). Wallowing in the fantastic struggles of the government to make ends meet helps produce a continuously familiar world, one where the government's own incompetence covers over something else about broader levels of competence amongst the civic folk. That is to say: what is familiar is our goodness, and what is also familiar is the untrustworthiness of the Other. Private anxieties, privately earned, are transfered to the public as public anxieties, earned "publicly" but by no individual, owned instead by the monolithic "government" who bureaucratic failings provide a ready made explanation for the crisis. In this way personal struggles are externalized, and the just rage of the economically deprived can be understood as a public phenomenon, evading the liberal judgment that would be visited upon those whose economic issues were understood in advance as private.

O'Blogging on St. Patrick's Day: Main St./Wall St.

The emergence of the Wall St./Main St. theme in the 2008 presidential campaign was a crucial narrative moment. While political narratives opposing the "big city" economists to the ordinary economic agents of flyover America are as old as the progressive populism espoused by William Jennings Bryan (if not older), the salience of such themes fades in and out of public circulation on the basis of several contextual factors, including A) the current state of the economy, B) class sensitivity, and C) the visibility of the moneyed and urbane. While previous outbreaks of outrage at white collar workers for financial improprieties had been seen not only during the Great Depression but also during the S&L scandals of the 1980's, the Wall St./Main St. division that erupted in September 2008 was particularly important because it happened at the height of a hard fought presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Almost as soon as the financial woes of Lehman Bros. were made public, a Wall St./Main St. narrative began to emerge in the media. On September 15, the Chicago Tribune reported that "Few Americans have a direct connection to the events unfolding on Wall Street, but practically everyone has a stake in the game." By September 18th it was reported in The Business Times that Wall Street had fundamentally "lost touch" with the economy. The explicit use of language contrasting Wall St. with Main St. increased, and became a staple of presidential campaign rhetoric up until the early November election.

Rhetorical theory teaches us one way to read the emergence of these discourses is that they serve as ways of ordering or making more understandable a world riven with anxiety and indeterminacy. As Kenneth Burke argues, the production of scapegoats is part of a ritual of victimage which serves to consolidate a collective identity in ways that render negative or threatening political circumstances as emerging in opposition to said collective identity. Rhetorical theorists have tended to focus on the political implications resulting from the use of such rhetoric, whether in Burke's incredibly important essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle" or more contemporary efforts like Brian Ott and Eric Aoki's work on Matthew Shepherd, Jeremy Engels work on Nietzchean victimage, and Richard Nixon, or Barry Brummett's work on symbolic form.

Engels' essay is of particular interest to me, as his argument in his Rhetoric Society Quarterly essay "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority" is about how scapegoating as a political ritual perpetuates its subjects' victimized status by allowing them to perpetually wallow and identify with their sense of resentment and anger at the world. Rather than understanding anger and anxiety as temporary conditions, Engels understands that there are rhetorical mechanisms that prolong these rituals of victimization. An angle I want to add is that it seems that there are also ways in which scapegoating discourses may unknowingly or unthinkingly perpetuate the angers and resentments they attempt to foster.

In the case of the "Wall St./Main St." binary, blaming Wall St. may have the effect of accelerating rather than postponing an existential crisis for the aggrieved subject. As has been written elsewhere and ad nauseam, American politics and society is saturated with a notion that the liberal individual is an absolute sovereign, and the individual choices/decisions carry a certain kind of legitimacy not on the basis of the results they create but instead from their simple, tautological status as individual decisions. Such a fantasy works with efficacy during times of relative economic prosperity because the individual investment into the economy at large is validated with recourse to a simple kind of correspondence: I am both acting and living, and the economy is going along well. We would expect, then, during times of economic destitution and crisis, that the capacity and competency of the self as an individual actor would be threatened, because a flailing economy indexes the flailingness of those subjects operating within it.

Here is where the scapegoating mechanisms of "Wall St./Main St." come in: blaming Wall St. for the large scale 2008 financial crisis resolves the crisis offered by economic disrepair by distributing the responsibility for blame at levels far above that of the average American. Such a maneuver taps into a historically rich tableau of populist narratives which paint good and hardworking "normal" Americans against an opposed and greedy moneyed class. However, what goes overlooked is that this rhetoric may actually serve to exacerbate rather than reduce the anxiety and tension in American subjects. After all, in order to believe the finance derivates, greedy financial managers, and loan-crazy banks were behind the financial crisis, one has to admit to their own lack of agency in the realm of economic affairs. Because most people have moved away from the "storing money under a mattress" financial model, they conceive of themselves as public economic actors. One needs nearly spend time detailing the wealth of financial avenues available to "normal" people, like the website eTrade which promises to elevate everyone's individual economic judgment to the plane of Wall Street and enable them to make their own sound investment decisions. However, in the case of a broad financial collapse, very few people are immune from financial ruin: not only because many people unknowingly or unwittingly invest their money in unstable sectors of the economy, but also because of a general credit crunch that results from a constricted financial environment.

One result of the "Wall St./Main St." demagoguery, then, is that it evacuates the agency of Main Street. Main St. can only be the passive victim of Wall St.'s sinister machinations if it has little to no say in the matter. This might not ordinarily be a problem, except that because of the tightly held fantasy of individual choice, the evacuation of "average America's" agency is not a minor matter but instead an assault upon the constitutive fantasy of individual identity: that the exercise of individual choice, is in and of itself, meaningful and tends towards "the good." Piling onto this is the rather massive "perspective by incongruity" that would be witnessed were Americans to interrogate their own investments and roles in the financial collapse: even if you believe that the 2008 financial crisi was primarily the fault of derivatives traders and an economic system going off the rails, it is undeniable that a collective investment in the idea of individual economic security contributes to Americans rolling the dice on risky financial decisions like "out of their depth" home loans.

Many have wondered why the political era of the Obama presidency has been besotten with extreme political rhetoric. (It is unclear whether this rhetoric is worse than in the past, but its effects on creating an atmosphere of partisanship in the Congress is uniquely terrible). I think one cause of this (aside from the obvious inputs of Obama's race, a collapse of the classic "southern states" strategy started by Richard Nixon, and the slow creep of pseudo-libertarianism into a central position in the GOP architecture) is that the 2008 financial crisis was as symbolically important as it was in real economic terms: the truth of it radically threatened to pull out the rug from the fantasy of liberal individualism held near and dear (and it should be noted, a support of liberal individualism is a fairly bipartisan fantasy). The initial anger over the collapse, which political operatives then doubled down on by facilitating and encouraging the "bailout anger" which eventually condensed around Rick Santelli to produce the Tea Party movement, was an anger that allowed subjects to disavow their own relatively miniscule agency in affairs of the economy, a miniscule amount of agency that would be tough to square with the pervasive fantasy of individual action as highly economically meaningful. The bipartisan character of this sentiment can also be seen in the emergence of the Occupy movement: both parties seem to understand that the economy is "bigger than all of us" but struggle to articulate intelligible demands to remedy the problem of extreme power disparities in our political climate (for the record, I think the incoherence of the Tea Party's political agenda signals that their disavowal is considerably more tragic: Occupy refuses to "double down" on the liberal individual for the most point, and its supposed "unintelligible demands" are a sign of its politicization of the economy rather than a kind of failure of New Social Movement).

We might then think about economic demagoguery as a type of particularly uncontrollable political rhetoric of scapegoating: in order for an audience to acede to its major premise, a major premise of American subjectivity itself is challenged and threatens. Because our identities are structured in the form of a sort of a defensive armor (qua Lacan) we should expect the defensive maneuveres on the part of identity in response to this existential threat to manifest themselves in the active affects and politically contentious discourses and actions of our current milieu.