The Proliferation of Emptiness: Indexing Politics in Party Platforms

This blog post is third in a series of posts focusing on looking at conservative messaging and ideological documents from 2009-present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 2012 Republican platform has four striking characteristics indicating its roots in oppositional negativity. First, the document contains more than sixty 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.[i]

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.

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 not. 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.

Many have commented on recent reports like those of the Pew Foundation 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.[ii] 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 not 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.

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.

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[i] 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.

[ii] 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.

A Return to the Hudson Institute Symposium on the Prospects for Conservative Populism

This is part 2 in an ongoing series of blog posts analyzing key ideological and messaging documents in American conservatism from 2009-present.

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.

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?

I have already examined some of this dialogue on the blog 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 Weekly Standard 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:

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.

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 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).

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.

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.  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.

As I and others have argued, 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.[i] 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.

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.[ii] 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.

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.

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.

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[i] For more see Michael Warner’s “The Mass Public and Mass Subject” and Lauren Berlant’s wonderful book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City

[ii] Michael Kazin The Popular Persuasion and Michael Lee “The Populist Chameleon” in Quarterly Journal of Speech

Haunted By Hobbes and Reckoning with Rome

Reading Hannah Arendt's On Revolution today, I was struck by her insight. I'd been turned on to the book by David Depew and a simple phenomenal chapter written by Andreas Kalyvas in his incredible book Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. Arendt's book valorizes the revolutionary Americans while condemning Robespierre and his French ilk. Kalyvas follows this argument down the line to forward the notion that revolutions which maintain some sort of continuity with the existing system are less likely to end in a violent Jacobin terror.

What interests me is something Kalyvas addresses somewhat, and the rhetorical tradition as a whole seems very well suited to examining. Arendt argues that Rousseau's failing (and that of the French revolutionaries) was to decide that the major guiding principle of the revolution should be the general will: the "best interest" of "the people" (or le peuple, for those scoring at home with their constitutive rhetoric texts). Because there was no means for this idea of "the people" to be broken up, fractured, and fragmented within the French context, breaks between what "the people" wanted and what the government actually did could not be found--instead you had only a perpetual Terror, performed in the name of the people.

Here in America we have a republican tradition. That is to say, the government is understood to be elected by the people but not to always act in manners and means coterminus with "the people". I know this is a gross, gross oversimplification. Yet, I venture to make the claim that the contemporary emergence of the New Right (in the form of the Tea Partiers) is at least in part the result of a conflict between what is entailed by the discursive committment to democracy as an ideal (focusing on the "by the people" part of our hallowed refrain, and within a milieu saturated by what remains a fundamentally Hobbesian understanding of the necessity of sovereignty) and the abiding notion of Republicanism that informs the structure and institutions of this country. I'll attempt to explain and unpack this.


For Arendt, a major difference between the French tradition and the American one lies in the American committment to a notion of separation of powers.* That is to say, in the American tradition brakes on the power of the general will are built forcefully into the system. This is to be contrasted with the French notion of freedom, which Arendt finds anchored in something like a pseudo-pure Rousseauian idea of the "general will". The problem in the latter situation is well framed by this Arendtian quote: "Power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute". The problem, as you can probably see, is that humans tend to want to understand things in terms of absolutes. Ulrich Beck (and countless theorists of argumentation) have eloquently made this point elsewhere in arguments about risk assessment--humans want to deal in absolutes and certains, even when uncertainty is the name of the game.

A layered or textured understanding of democracy does not tend to resonate in the imaginary. Such matters much be simplified to make the enormous mass of a nation state reduceable/representable (think Burke here). For example, we imagine national borders in strict inside/outside logics (little room for flexible borders in the demos--just ask Arizona, and any number of democrats that successfully campaign on outsourcing). Similarly, we tend to conceive of any loss of democratic power as total and incredible, rather than temporary and partial. This is, I think, especially true when it comes to the Presidency, which seems to exercise a disproportionately powerful hold on the public imagination. We imagine the President as the center of the government, even though in many ways the Congress and Supreme Courts are just as, if not more, powerful. Chalk it up to the human need to simplify--singular human embodiment of the state is a neat and nifty tradition. Also divine right still haunts us--signifiers of authority ain't that far adrift.

In general, we need to deny that our system is Republican for another reason--one needs a Republican system because "the people" are untrustworthy. Otherwise we'd just let the general will run free, like some sort of junkyard dog of democracy. Essentially, the Constitution talks down to the American people. "We think you're pretty awesome...except when you're not." There are LOTS of mechanisms in place to make sure that the government does not equal the people--the Supreme Court, the electoral college, the non-proportional representation provided by the Senate--yet when we SAY we are a democracy, we think more of the Greeks than the Roman.

But never far from our thoughts is the lurking Hobbesian narrative about the state of nature. With total risk nearby, we need a total sovereign to secure ourselves from a life that would otherwise be "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." In the face of such danger, suspicions of republicanism are understandable, because republicanism mediates rather than constitutes the will of the people, especially if this will be for a strong sort of decisionism.

The Tea Party wants to "take the government back." The problem, of course, is that they want "the people" in charge, in a place that will forever be occupied by republican representatives of the people. The pure general will will not occupy the seat of power. But Arendt is right--the Tea Party does not seek a true revolution in her sense, just different representation. The virtue of a republican system is that it allows any faults in the government to be identified with the representatives, rather than finding members of the polis lacking in their committment to the general will, which necessitates purges. I suppose I'm rather more sanguine about what the Tea Party aims at after writing this post.

*Which, if violated, would leave us very much as we would be in the case of the use of nuclear weapons, in a situation where we wouldn't want to say "I told you so".