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.

---

[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.

---

[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

A Rhetorical Analysis of “Reform Restore, Modernize—An Agenda to Restore the American Dream”

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 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 column in The Week 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.

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.  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.

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 Red State’s 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.

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.

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 awful lot of legwork to maintain the conservative constituency. I want to suggest in this post that at least one section of the document fails to do so.

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.

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.

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.[1] What they held in common were not political ideologies, per se, but instead shared positions of political marginality.

It comes as little surprise, then, that the document then uses a fair amount of combative language to describe the “restoration” of America.  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.

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.”

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.”  There are also four references to either “taxes” or “taxpayers.” And for good measure, there are five instances of reference to “everyone.”  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.

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.

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.

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.  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.

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.  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.

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.  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.

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.  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.

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 present 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.

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 obligation with a legal option the statement makes it seem like Dodd-Frank, which in many senses restricted large banks, actually benefited them.

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 feel instead of generating proposals that aim at resolving the cause of that anxiety and fear.

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." 

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.

Next in the series I will examine the transcript of a Hudson Institute symposium on the prospects of conservative populism, and the contradictions therein.

---

[1] 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.  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'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.

Retroactively Approaching the 2008 Financial Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are some brief thoughts: more refined ones soon.