Political Theory, Representation, and Economic Crisis

Both political theory and economic theory must account for the question of representation: how to make a government or a market into an effectively functioning quilting point for a political imaginary without becoming so powerful that the emptiness of such institutions of peoples threatens a legitimation crisis. At least one way that Rousseau managed the crisis of representation was, as Honig notes in Democracy and the Foreigner, was through the introduction of a "Foreign Founder" who could sidestep the democratic crisis threatened by having a politics defined purely by a people. If there is is nothing external to the people, then there is no such thing as politics (Schmitt, Arendt, what have you). The figure of the foreign founder created a not-entirely-natural yet not-entirely-mythical figure that could permit decisionism, and in so doing would interrupt what would otherwise be a troubling negative feedback loop of popular sovereignty. The American founders could not resort to myths of foreign founders, since they were in fact foreigners in their own space. Instead, they articulated republican institutions as the mechanism to interrupt this feedback loop: the roots of decisionism came to be known in the split between government and people that inaugurated the people at the same moment that it sabotaged their totality, or full democratic being.

Similarly, Adam Smith-style capitalism was capable of sidestepping crises in representation that might otherwise boggle or make a mockery of market prediction. Because their remained certain services and functions for which the market was thought incapable, the danger that economics might become incapable of recognizing itself was minimal: the state served as a regulatory bulwark capable of repeatedly reminding the market (and marketized subjects) of its limits. The aggressive increase in class consciousness, characteristic of American identity through the founding period and heightened first during the Civil War and then again during the Progressive-era political responses to the heightened perils of the Industrial Revolution, further served to stabilize not only a "political" people (because the state could be captured for use on either side of political struggle for and against various peoples) meant that the market was effectively politicized by calls to government action on social, political, and economic issues.

The sixties signified a very serious sea-change in how American political identity thought about the relationship between government and people: those who boosted and organized for Barry Goldwater beginning at the end of the 1950's operated under the assumption that an ideological war between government and market had been waged and that government had won: the overweening presumption, even for Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, was that as long as the government had the capacity to intervene into a market, that market could not be trusted to provide to maximum efficacy the products and promises it had made. The Goldwater organization, as Rick Perlstein among others have pointed out, lost the battle in the 1964 presidential election but one the war by producing a vision of "the American people" constituted not through internal oppositions between peoples but instead by producing the liberal individual as the natural (one might even say ontological) contrapuntal opposite of the state. The result was that governmental interventions into the market could now be taken in one of two ways: they could either be read as governmental intervention to fix problems where the "market" had failed, or they could be understood as distortions of what would otherwise be a perfectly natural economic outcome. Because "the people" now took on an ontologically oppositional position versus the government, presumption lied on the side of an interpretation which, because discourses repeated reify and reconstitute in familiar rather than challenging ways identities, governmental intervention tended more often than not to be read unnecessary rather than pointing to inefficiencies in the market in which "the people" by virtue of being the market all would share participation in.

We might quibble with critics of neoliberalism, but if we accept as a starting point their thesis that more rather than less of the system and lifeworld is today given over to internal self-regulation by the invisible hand of the market, we can see that what is at stake in times of economic turmoil is a crisis of representation of the sort political theorists like Rousseau most feared: if the market amalgamates more and more political and social life (and indeed, while there remain material zones of un-capture, one need only to closely read the transcript of a single GOP debate to find a near-consensus as to the IDEAL and therefore "real" extent of ideology in this case) then there is no space for a politics (that is, the ability to define a people) because the market is the beginning and the end of politics as such. A "people" defined tautologically by their status as people (that is to say, a collective identity ratified by nothing less and nothing more than its being a people over and against the existence of a government whose existence in an imaginary sense is democratic but in a real sense is ontologically opposed to that very identity it authorizes) do not really exist, except insofar as they are not coterminus with the government. Economic crises threaten a crisis of representation, in which the true culprit for the crisis is unrepresentable (because if the crisis is the market, and the market=the people, the market cannot be taken as the source of its own failure, as it is not judged in neoliberal discourse through its success or failure but instead by its existence as a market) and the inability to produce (we might say embody) the market speaks to what Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics as the kind of shadow chasing game of individualized market economics: a market always chasing its own non-existence, always making, retroactively, a kind of invisible hand that never quite lives up the sum of its judgments. It is in this vein that we should read discourses that respond to the economic crisis: many of them, it seems, want to embody and make real the villains behind the crisis, whether they be Wall Street fat cats, irresponsible homeowners, sinister loan officers, or a government incapable of reining in its own spending. Because the market remains unrepresentable, however, something in these scapegoatings will awesome seem to miss its mark.

Slightly Tempering a Love for Hannah

There is an Arendtian moment of sorts a-flutter. Hannah Arendt's work is extremely popular in political science, political theory, and rhetoric, to name just a few disciplines. The appeal of Arendt's work is obvious: she produces, as Bonnie Honig has noted, a theory of the political that claims to be able to produce a kind of political space that is made without the failures and violences that have attached to previously constructed political space (the concept of natality). This, combined with what some have called her notion of the "portable polis," the idea that people through acting and speaking together can constitute the political, have made her work, especially the The Human Condition, particularly salient. Her essay on "statelessness" in The Origins of Totalitarianism provides an insightful and key summary of the problem of compatibility between liberal regimes of rights and the nation state, work incredibly important for the work of thinkers like Giorgio Agamben. And On Revolution remains a key text for political thinkers interested in translation and comparative work between American and European politics.

So this blog post will signal something of a break, both with these wider trends, and with my own internal love for Arendt's work. I want to make one brief argument, utilizing mostly The Human Condition and On Revolution. My thesis is that Hannah Arendt at times cedes the space of the political to the market, and her work, while a stunning and soaring rebuke to the state-sanctioned totalitarianism of the 20th century, nevertheless should be approached with some caution as the locus of the kinds of power that generates violence today may be located more and more outside the strictly understood boundaries of sovereign state power.

I will make two warrants to sustain the claim. The first is taken from The Human Condition, where Arendt avers that politics occurs whenever speaking beings share space. The production of the political testifies to difference, and difference itself is the irrevocable mark of the fact of humanity's political existence, that there is something more, beyond the oikos of the Greeks. Arendt breaks from the darker side of the Frankfurt school (a H/T to Joan Faber McAlister on this point) by turning to her idea of natality as the key concept for how politics builds in the possibility of hope: what comes of politics is never reducible to the politics that has come before, so long as differentiated humans participate in the construction of the shared space. However, the driving force behind this is the desire for immortality, a hope that the works that one does might not be lost to history. There is then, somewhere, a tempered appreciation for the good of competition that lurks in Arend't work. This in and of itself does not invalidate her approach; one my invalidate capitalist arrangements and still believe that competition is good. But such a claim would require that competition results in the production of a better shared space, not one that is less diverse.

Second warrant: Arendt's account of the history of democracy, "the people," and republicanism in On Revolution (brilliant explicated by Andreas Kalyvas in a book called Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary that I greatly recommend) is a stunning account of how the system of American government produces the tools for citizens to understand themselves ironically with respect to the formulation of collective identity. Such humility would seem an utter necessity in the light of the state sponsored fascism of Nazi's, Stalinist's and others (Arendt herself a Jewish German). So Arend't love letter to the American founders comes as no surprise: the American system of government breaks up "the people," eradicating their momentum to become calcified in unreflexive cycles of self-congratulation that turn national identity from a contingent functionary into an essential or natural piece of identity that can then authorize violence. Such a function, however, strikes me as potentially problematic if we find ourselves contesting neoliberalism, which I understand to be a variant of capitalism wherein functions of the state once thought to be essential to its calling are now outsourced to private enterprise, and the space of politics (and the construction of a commons, in terms of humanity, the environment, etc.) is restricted more and more to politics in the sense of a negative liberty, one that authorizes the free exercise of reason by Lockean subjects and little else.

In this case, the tendency of government (and of republican institutions) to break up "the people" is more troubling: the typical response to neoliberal discourses and procedures is to erect a commons that testifies to the necessity of government intervention, and helps to make the case that some goods cannot be trusted to the private. However, in the Arendtian model, there are not only incentives to challenge the construction of a commons ("politics is everywhere"), but also few if any "common goods" can long be sustained as publicly held because the political context of America breaks up people's own relationships to collective identity. The welfare state, it seems, might founder on the inability for the articulation of a shared sustainable future.

A few possible rebuttals: one might note, with queer theorist Lee Edelman, that a common future is regularly constructed, and it just happens to be done more effectively by a right-situated set of political actors. One might easily rebut that the success of such discourses is found in part in their ability to segregate and disavow the republican tradition in America: by insisting repeatedly on the "wholeness" and "futurity" of the American family, space for an ironic or tempered relationship to the fantasies they advance is eradicated.

One might also object that Arendt herself in the mid-century declared that the great "Spirit of Revolution" that the Founders possessed had been lost, and that The Human Condition's final great missives against the mass society of consumerism and so forth indicate that Arendt herself was well aware that the problem of mass society was rooted in the production of utilitarian ends/means mechanisms of thought intimately familiar to capitalist logics. As far as it goes I think this is correct. But this does not respond to the charge: if The Human Condition understands utility calculations the proceed unthought as a problem, this only demonstrates that the potential for a reflexivity about what "needs" are under late capitalism is more urgent, and that the need for a shared commons is greater than ever.

There are a number of problems with engaging in rank populism: xenophobia, declines in the quality of social service, and other attendant dangers present themselves. Nevertheless, a common language of needs is a necessary language in a world where neoliberalism is on the march. And Arendt's brilliant success in providing normative support for projects that fragment and break up "the people," preventing their aggregation, are something of an obstacle. So take note, scholars: Arendt's responses to the problems of state-based violence may suffer a bit in translation where the market is an increasingly important source of violence today.

Why Can't the People Be Wrong? Or, On Popular Egotism

Since Plato, the prospect of popular rule summons up a terrifying demophobia. Whether understood as a distrust of the masses as a kind of idiotic hoi polloi, concerns for how a majoritarian tyranny might take advantage of the minority, or the Arendtian worry that mass society with no check brings the risk of fascism, these claims consistently attend critiques of democratic rule.

Contrast the suspicion of the people with the also-constant suspicion of elites that in part explains democracy's appeal. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely!" shout maxims. "Let them eat cake!" signifies the inability of the ruling class to ever connect with the concerns of people. One reason the printing press really mattered was because it offered up the possibility of a popularized, rather than centrally controlled, understanding of religion and God. This historical keystones find substantial sympathy within the academy: Theodor Adorno's radical distrust of expertism, Michel Foucault's critical investigation of expert mantles as discursive assemblages rather than as absolute pieces of armor, and however many Marxist demands against those in power illustrate that a lack of faith in the empowered is common enough.

Contemporarily, however, only one of these discourses circulates popularly enough that we might think of it as hegemonic, or at least strongly influential. That is, I think, the suspicion of elites. Lets attempt an analogy: Clintonian "Third Way" politics have taken their share of criticism because of the compromises made with neoliberalism in the name of political necessity. Welfare reform and free trade, it was said, were the cost of business, of pushing other policies friendly to progressive politics. Surely Clinton-era successes like the Patient's Bill of Rights, increased taxes on fossil fuel companies, and tax cuts for the poor and tax hikes on the rich are understood as political victories from a progressive standpoint. Many have claimed that the rhetorical concessions made to neoliberalism (economic growth as a premiere policy goal, neutral assumptions about opportunity and effort at the individual level, and support for free trade as a lever of change) undermined the important old progressive political coalition, eradicating the rhetorical resources (notions of class, race, gender etc.) necessary for constituting a political coalition capable of decisively influencing public policy.

We might benefit from asking: was there ever a similar phase in American politics where the resources necessary for making the demophobic critique of "the people" were lost, concessions made for some other instrumental political good? Its certainly easy to pinpoint at least one golden age for government management, stretching from the administration of FDR (emboldened by the Great Depression) into the Great Society era of Lyndon Baines Johnson. During this time government did many things for many people: social security, welfare, civil rights, and countless and innumerable expansions of governmental policy. While the exigence of the depression might have authorized a good deal of FDR's policies, the discourses outlived him in presidents who created national highway systems, raised the minimum wage and strengthened social security, and went on the fight the war on poverty in the name of a Great Society.

Like any political movements, these policies made sense within their particular times. FDR's great policies were considered necessary given the extreme threats of economic collapse. Truman and Eisenhower presided over post-war booms but the specter of the depression continued to stalk the American landscape. And JFK and LBJ had nations on fire, with evental political epidemics of discrimination and crime that necessitated large visible social policy.

By the time of the Reagan Revolution, however, social policy was on the defense. The economy was devastated in the late 70's by a combination of foreign oil crunch and the notorious "stagflation" of American currency. Reagan's administration, while it did not succeed in radically shirnking the size of the federal government (it continued to grow at a solid rate) did commit rhetorically to hollowing out the government's committment to social policy and functionally doing so by making massive tax cuts. All this during "Morning in America", a time of new beginnings for an old and hallowed place full of bright and motivated individuals simply yearning to break free and make a new life for themselves.

What could explain this shift? This is a blog post, not a history book, but the other day over a drink my friend Patrick brought up a good point: that during the 50's and 60's, there was a political consensus against communism and its embodiment in the Soviet Union. Certainly this consensus mostly emerged in the shadow of the threat of thermonuclear extermination, but it could directly articulate itself as such (perhaps the psychoanalytic trauma of the horror was too great, necessitating a displacement, but it is also likely that the threat of big government control threatened by Stalin's purges and the related horrors of WW2 legitimized this anxiety, which still needed to find its basis in democratic and relatively genocide-free America in what new social policies COULD prefigure). So whatever domestic policies could be associated with the kind of big government social managerialism characteristic of both America AND the Soviet Union could then be linked, however complexly, to these existential anxieties about the threat to America posed from abroad.

So while a liberal, managerial politics is consistent both with the fact of America (so many policies embody this ideology) and its history (we did, after all, ditch the Articles of Confederation for a reason) it is highly likely that the appeal of such policies diminished as the Cold War began to increasingly overdetermine the idea of what "America" went during a period that saw numerous proxy conflicts and an imaginary colonized by the threat of nuclear extermination. In order to differentiate American from the Soviet menace, its ideological discursive committments (equality, planned economics, state intervention, socialist policy) had to be taken as absolute terrors, co-equal with the threat of Soviet dominance (always articulated as an ideological/absolute clash).

So one thing we might glean from this admittedly brief and too broad reading is at least one insight: the horrors of big government have far more punch and verve than the benefits big government supplies. The discursive economy privileges threats of evental genocide, nuclear annhiliation, and economic collapse much higher than the values provided to individual's everyday lives by a powerful and vibrant welfare state. Not to sound like broken record of some terrible K debate or anything, but we seem to lack a language to describe why exactly goods like equality or health care ought to matter as much as others. The necessary supplement to this reading is to figure out how "the American people" came to always be on the one side rather than the other, which I shall pursue in my next post.

"Gather Your Armies"

I'm inspired to post today after seeing this campaign advertisement, for Rick Barber, a conservative candidate in the GOP runoff in an Alabama district. Obviously, its all kinds of awesome, and this is in a midterm year that has already seen the rise of Demon Sheep and the unbelievably hilarious ad in the New Orleans coroner campaign, two all time greats.

Barber's ad is noteworthy, I think, for how it represents a figure really buying into everything that the Tea Party movement stands for--limited government, limited taxation, and something of a libertarian ethos. The ad mostly rails against the Internal Revenue Service, although it drops in some health care reform hating as well. Primarily, the ad is noteworthy for two reasons--in the ad, Barber is having a discussion with some of the Founding Fathers (they appears to be Sam Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin), and the ad ends with one of the figures supporting Barber's rant against the government by pledging his loyalty to Barber's cause with the cry "Gather. Your. Armies."

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo and his people did some good work on this ad, and they tracked down Barber who denies that the advertisement is a call to arms--it could just be "misinterpreted" that way. I'm inclined to say that Barber is not really "lying" per se--he and his campaign staff probably don't think the ad will lead to any real violence, and instead its another attempt to capitalize politically on the happy combination of the myth of the American founding and the voting block of individuals who feel symbolically disenfranchised by the Obama administration's somewhat progressive policy agenda. In general, the unsubtle violence threatened by the ad is closer to the rattle of a spray paint can than a full force political gale. By this I mean--anti-government yahoos and Michigan militia types are probably going to continue to meet, buy assault rifles, and get steamed while watching Glenn Beck whether or not this ad exists. One caveat to this claim is that an anti-government extremist did crash a plane into the IRS building in Austin--its pretty bold of Barber to put out this ad in light of that.

What's interesting about the ad is the striking originalism (in a hyrbid historical/legal sense) that permeates the performance. We've seen explicit echoes of this throughout the right. For example, the idea of constitutional challenges to the health care bill, the persistent attempts of a few people at The Corner to claim that New Deal was both unsuccessful and unconstitutional, and the general argument that a "big government" goes against what the Founders wanted. I am not here to debate what the Founders did or did not want--that work is the job of historians, and frankly, is uninteresting for people interested in how effectively the supposed myths are mobilized within a general public.

No, what's fascinating is the implicit vision of what the Founders stood for that Barber's ad assumes to be the case. Addressing Washington et. al. about the reach and power of the IRS, and to speak to them specifically as small business owners is a rather hilarious conceit. Not to mention the details of what the IRS does that are so objectionable--you need to have records of who is hired, fired, and how much they are paid? Heavens to Betsy (Ross, in this case I'd wager)! Political ads by their very nature trade in reductio and polemic, so I don't want to single out this ad just for being those things (although it certainly is). But what strikes me about the ad, and the candidate's performance, is just how goddam sincere he is. The fact that this ad was made means some people in a campaign think it really will resonate with some people.

To review briefly, we might ask conservative rapper Polatik what the major characteristics of a Tea Party are. To quote his song "That's a Tea Party", they are fiscally responsible, stand for limited government, are "not a race thing", and echo back into the past to summon the spirit of the American founding. I jest, but essentially, what we really know the Tea Party stands for is less government and less government spending, both of which are consistent with a lower overall tax rate. These statements are too general to form much of a positive political platform--and indeed, the Tea Party is mostly into negation, writ large, as seen in the way they flooded the town halls to show their opposition to health care (and yes, I know many of them were civil--negation can be and often is civil).

Not to beat a dead horse (elephant) but the ol' Boston Tea Party and general crankiness of revolutionary America related in part to the "without representation" part of the old "no taxation" complaint. And I guess part of what frustrates/amuses me the most about this ad is that is makes an explicit call for a revolutionary solution to a problem that already has a political avenue for expression--elections allow for "the people" to change their leadership. It really assumes that the audience has little to understanding of any nuance that came out of the revolution. But even the most sanguine and cynical observer would have to admit--most history classes taught it as "no taxation without representation", rather than "only enough taxation to allow for the fulfillment of Nozick's limited state".

Typically, people revolt and protest when their demands and claims are not being satisfied by the dominant political elite. In this sense, the emergence of the Tea Party is perfectly logical and legitimate--the government is dominated by individuals who do think that the government should do things, lots of them, and the Tea Party points to how their is precious little wiggle room for the pragmatists who speak dogmatically to soothe their base (I'm looking at you, Lamar Alexander).

There is no great theoretical point to this post. But I want to make the case that right now, the conservative movement in America is, in terms of argumentative quality, at an absolute nadir not seen since Alf Landon was getting his ass kicked by FDR. We have an oil rig exploded in the Gulf. A massive economic collapse that we are not even two years removed from. Enormous natural disasters in Louisiana and Nashville. A giant volcano that basically shut down all air travel to and from Europe for a while. A housing crisis that is impacting to a great extent the country's population (not including that it also casts doubt on the ability of both the celebrated liberal individual and the bank to judge what is and is not a good investment, a pretty key bit for the whole capitalism operation). And the Tea Party has one overwhelming argument--less government. But its not the government that people fear will make their lives worse--its the prospect that shrimp might cost twice as much, the possibility that some distantly held dividends will collapse, that your 401K becomes a 200.5, in my father's formulation. We are not at the End Times, but these are certainly not the beginnings either. Perhaps not the best time to rail against the government, when plenty of bad news comes from outside the government's purview.

Barber's ad, and the Tea Party proper, is following a well worn conservative tradition--just as Nixon was able to effectively tap into the anger of Southern voters even though his politics were left of George Wallace's, these politicians are using communicative strategies to try and harness some of the anger and popular sentiment to boost their campaigns. Fair enough--its politics, after all. But to think the angry folks now number as Wallace's constituency did in the sixties seems a risky gambit. And frankly, in 1968 "I protect states rights" was a better argument than "the IRS is fascist" is in 2010, if only because racism taps into something deeper and more irrational than various libertarian strains of thought. Yet today a real revolution is truly unthinkable. People may brandish guns at health care summits, and we might yet see another Oklahoma City bombing--but the structural issues that proceeded the secession of the South in the 19th century and the American revolution of the 18th century are nowhere to be found. We instead have a political party grasping for its identity, trying to be something more than a kind of principled resentment. It had a very nice 40 year run or so, this principled resentment.

Nothing throws this into starker relief that the firestorm stoked by Rand Paul's initial claim that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he was then forced to painstakingly walk back after it became clear that opposing such legislation was essentially to deny the importance of a serious lesson of equality embedded in American history. It was a mistake, surely, but as a colleague noted to me, for Paul and his staff only a PR mistake, not a principled one. Indeed, if you but into the very general tenets of the Tea Party movement you end up with something that looks a lot like a version of libertarianism than santizes social violence and endorses abstract equality at every step, and especially in the face of actually existing material inequality. No one is against "freedom" or "liberty" until the definitions of those goods come into conflict with an individual's already existing understanding of their content--thats one nice lesson McGee gave us with the ideograph. The Tea Party is relying upon a certain notion of what it means to be an American, one it believes is unproblematically articulated all the way back to what the Founders did. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the way in which they summon American history is a way that almost any seventh grader knows to be factually inaccurate. At some point, the Tea Party will either have to rewrite American history to present something that produces the actions of the Obama administration as something illegitimate, or it will cease to succeed in writing itself a history, and conservatism will hazard down a different path.

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".

Tea Party as Symptom

Basic, boring Foucault: language is necessary to express points of view, and indeed, its something like the condition of the possibility of points of view existing. Within our political milieu, there are certain discourses that are accessible to us and others that are not. Somewhat tautologically, those that have force or effect are those which are capable of operating differentially within what Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge a "discursive formation"--a cluster or cloud of notions, discourses, rhetorics, all of which only meaning in relation to the other. The upshot is: for a discourse to be intelligible it has to "make sense" in a particular discursive formation.

One quick historical example-in a powerful essay on the potential of civic resistance, Ken Cmiel points to the way in which members of the civil rights movement in the 1960's swung public sentiment in their direction by behaving in overwhelmingly civilized ways despite the abject violence directed at them by racist authorities and citizens. The result was a humanizing effect that enabled something like identification between the American public and these victims. To borrow from Kenneth Burke: its quite possible that these scenes transformed the African American victims of violence, previously dehumanized through rhetorical and social techniques into something fundamentally "Other", into fellow citizens by something like a "perspective by incongruity" in which the incompatability of competing frames (traditional notions of race vs. traditional civic belonging) is pointed to and eventually one is discarded in favor of the other. We might say that in this moment, African Americans became intelligible as "civic" actors--that is capable, of asserting themselves and behaving as someone who had the full understanding of what it meant to be a member of a polity was. This occurred in contradistinction to acts of violence on the behalf of police and racist authorities, which also simultaneously demonstrated that mere formal characteristics of citizenship (full access, total officialy recognition) were also not necessary OR sufficient conditions for a person being a citizen; after all, their actions had to be read as indexes of personal/individual/geographical biases rather than an entire national malaise for the frame "America" to persist undisrupted.

Why do I bring this up? In the 1960's the civil rights movement utilized the available means of persuasion within a political system to point to the ways that such a system operated with some measure of arbitrariness. Because the exposure of said arbitariness would threaten the coherence of the system as a whole, the system moved to address these concerns. The point is that the existing "discursive formation" provided the tools/mechanisms for this demand to be produced. When we turn to the Tea Party, I think we are seeing a symptom of a peculiar structural particularity: the tools available within our political system today for the Tea Partiers to produce arguments seem much less rich and ample than those provided to the social movements of the 1960's. Take one of the major arguments the Tea Partiers push on a regular basis--that the president and Congress are a bunch of socialists. Jonah Goldberg pushed this argument pretty hard in a recent Commentary piece titled "What Sort of Socialist is Barack Obama?" He and the rest of the righties aren't wrong that the government is displaying socialistic tendencies--but this is only because they broadened the meaning of the word socialism so far that it ceases to possess any meaningful utility for social critics, referring as it does to basically anything that the government might do that gets in the way of anything approaching a free market. However, rejecting something "because the government is doing it" isn't much of an answer to an awful lot of policy proposals. And it's not particularly persuasive either given that history still has a force--no matter how hard Rush Limbaugh tries we can't just forget about FDR and the New Deal.

It seems like the reductio about any governmental action turning into tyranny, fascism, etc. has been too played out. But the argument is hysterically repeated ad nauseam, in the faint hope that it will somehow make more sense. During the Cold War you at least had an existential threat to connect the fear of socialism too--the elements in the government behaving somewhat "socialist" could at least be linked to an alien force locked in cold combat with the United States. Today, however, its difficult to draw a link between Al Qaeda forces and the "socialist" elements of the Obama administration. So instead of being a socialism that successfully threatens the fiber of America (connecting healthcare policy to an enemy is easier, when you, know that enemy still exists and still seems politically viable) it instead seems like a nettlesome poke from some angry children. So I guess today I'm optimistic--it seems like the available resources in our "discursive formation" don't provide the conservatives with very many intelligible/persuasive arguments. There will need to be a shift that acknowledges that the Cold War is over, to allow for arguments to coalesce broader arguments now that the clarion call of "Terror! Freedom! Liberty!" is becoming less effective.

Another Democratic Paradox

Bonnie Honig's recent book Emergency Politics points to a logical problem that has plagued political theorists since Aristotle--if democracies produce good citizens and good citizens are needed to produce democracies, then we face something of a chicken/egg conundrum--which comes first, "the people" or the people? There is an indisputable gap between the "general will" in Rousseau's sense and the elected representatives of said will, not least because if the two were completely coterminus the display of unity would obviate the initial desire to have a split between "the people" and the government because aggregated interest would be a pure and properly total index rather than a partial snapshot of what "the people" want.

One popular move of late in political theory is to grab a Schmittian matrix and decide that some form of decisionism is inevitable, if not desirable, in politics. Following this tactic most visibly in the political tradition is Chantal Mouffe, whose book The Democratic Paradox seeks to resucitate some form of decisionism from postmodern indeterminacy while simutaneously refusing to engage in the sort of fascist violence the philosophy of Carl Schmitt typically produces. The solution is to think in terms of horizons rather then borders, in terms of agonism rather than antagonism, and to produce a shared space where friends and enemies share something like a mutual, begrudging respect the projects itself in some share conditions of intelligibility between arguments.

I routinely find these inside/outside explanations of political identity formation persuasive, not least because they seem to soundly explain certain recurrent political trends. One need look no further than two presidential terms each for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom parlayed rhetorics about existential threats into political power that persisted despite political decisionmaking that was certainly questionable, if not unpopular. Moreover, as Robert Ivie has neatly formulated in his book Democracy and America's War on Terror, these distinctions operate not merely external to the physical borders of a nation but also work in the national imaginary to produce individuals who might be cititzens of the nation from a formal standpoint who nevertheless constitute enemies to "democracy" for their refusal to support the troops, the war, or acts of civic protest.

What interests me is--how is the American population protected from confronting this paradox? I will look at the example the 1960's New Left. I've been reading several pieces on this subject (if you're interested, check out the work of Ken Cmiel, Michael Kazin, Robert Cathcart, and others) and what stands out to me the way in which violence and dissent are mostly framed in political discourse as irrational outbursts of unreason that refuse to submit or kowtow to dominant political and institutional logics. This evidence can be found in our contemporary political discourse--even conservatives wholeheartedly embrace the safe and hopeful rhetorics of MLK, while liberals and conservatives alike rushed to condemn the violence of the Weather Underground as Barack Obama struggled to distance himself from sixties radical Bill Ayres.

This point has been made well by Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples--the way in which violence's appearance in public is figured is an extremely important factor in determining how "public opinion" will come down on the side of a particular movement. After all, kids in school all read MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech while being consciously pushed away from considering say, Stokely Carmichael's speech at Berkeley that attacked the silence of white privilege. Ken Cmiel, in a sharp reading of the sit ins during the civil rights movement of the sixties, points to how the tactic was effective because it performed a form of civility instantly recognizable to a moderate audience, enabling the generation of a bond of sympathy between those protesting and a broader audience--because civility is the norm, they who are the most civil will draw the most love, and sympathy.

Violence can be viewed as legitimate, of course. The vast majority of Americans view the violence used by the American government of the Union in the Civil War as legitimate because it struck out against an illegitimate human monstrosity (slavery). The violence of the Revolutionary War was scene as necessary to counter the tyranny of the British, who sought to rule and control that which they had not properly mixed enough of their labor with. But of course, those acts seem more legitimate in hindsight because they helped to produce the modern polity that we currently reside in--a United States of America produced in opposition to Britain, and rebirthed in the wake of the Civil War, cleansed of the sin of the 3/5 clause.

So long as a vocal minority is seen to be illegitimately using violence or threats thereof, a democratic population is prevented from encountering the fact that what is produced politically reflects themselves. That is, it produces a distance between the population and the unruly "people" in need of democratic regulation. Therefore, those who were part of Richard Nixon's "silent majority" in favor of a continued presence in Vietnam were given a tactic to tell themselves that they were part of a democracy (participating in the civic process of voting, casting judgment upon the violent and unruly war protestors) while also asserting that they were the "right" part of the democratic population--the part that understood what being in a polity meant in terms of personal responsibility and knowing that what it DID NOT mean was the rioting and violence thought to characterize the New Left. So in at least this case, it seems like any encounter with Honig's civic paradox is prevented. Instead of being able to apprehend that they are part of "the people" and thus in need of regulation (justifying the split between the people and the government), "the people" are projected as being the unruly protesting political masses while the "silent majority" are those people who know what it means to be civic, and also do not need to be subject to the actions that the government may take.

On the other hand, if for example you find the activities of the Weather Underground to be legitimate, you are fully embracing the problem posed by Honig's paradox--you are pointing to how "the people" are untrustworthy, and demanding an escape hatch from the circular/tautological ring of people and government who are mutually producing violence and injustice in ways that are invisible to the dyad by virtue of the non-ironic or non-distanced relationship between people and government.

The Tea Party and Violence

In a recent dust-up between David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, the two went the rounds over the true character of the Tea Party movement. Brooks took the position that the movement represented a radical break with the existing system, in much the same way that the student led New Left of the 1960's demanded radical social justice based on the existing system's inequality. Goldberg comes back at Brooks to make the point that what distinguishes the Tea Partiers is that the "New Left had no interest in restoring America's founding vision."

The clash, then, is between interpreting the Tea Partier's relationship to American history--Goldberg seems intent on reading for a continuity, seeing the parties emrgencies as a natural reaction to a Leftist political agenda that has taken the country away from its founding principles, while Brooks wants to interpret the group as sharing with the New Left a radical distance from on-going politics. Indeed, I hope I am not stretching to say that Brooks attempts to pull off an argument that would make Foucault proud--he points to the Rousseauian optimism at the heart of both the New Left and the Tea Parties in his view. Of course, this optimism generates different policy suggestions--the New Left wants an increased governmental role in the social so that forms of equality might be produced that let this basic human goodness flourish, while the Tea Party view wants the government out of markets especially, holding that a world unencumbered by heavy governmental regulation will produce the greatest good for the greatest number, owing to the way that market forces testify to man being "born free".

Why does this matter? Well, few political movements (and even fewer successful ones) publicly mark themselves as being against the words and principles upon which their public is founded. Witness, for example, Obama's attempt to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric of "God damn America!" It is bad politics to set yourself up as being against the political structures you inhabit. The Tea Partiers certainly do not do anything like this in their rhetoric, which is peppered with words like freedom, the Constitution, liberty, and of course the signifier "Tea Party" which we tend to imagine is articulated to what America stands for. However, it is a messy business to disentangle this "Tea Party" signifier from its association with revolution and violence. This is why, while I largely think Goldberg's analysis is more persuasive than Brooks's, I find myself recalcitrant in the face of the former's suggestion that the Tea Party movement proposes no break with the American tradition. After all, the Tea Party most commonly might signal for one of two things: the slogan "no taxation without representation", or the beginning of a revolution. Certainly the Tea Partiers consistently claim that they are not represented in Washington but this lack of representation is of a different character than that experienced by the colonists--it is temporary, democratically authorized, and legitimate, even if it is not experienced as such.

It requires some interpretive charity to believe that the "Tea Party" as a signifier floats around with absolutely no affective or signifying force linked to its associations with revolution have an effect on the subjects within the movement. In 1988, Gustainis and Hahns pointed to what they called a "negative reference group" problem, which posed issues for 60's era war protestors. The risk was that the more moderate elements of the group risked being linked in the public imaginary with the worst and more excessive elements of the anti-war movement, delegitimating the entire group effort. The Tea Partiers are conscious of this problem as well--a recent New Yorker article depicts participants at a rally kicking out people for bringing racist signs and being on the lookout for radicals who would promote a negative image. I am quite sincere when I say that a major motive for kicking these people out is also the participants taking offense at offensive messaging--I do believe that the Tea Partiers as a whole are well intentioned individuals (for more on this point see Jonathan Raban's piece in the New York Times Review of Books from a few months back).

Nevertheless, I cannot shake the suspicion that the historical event of the "Boston Tea Party" hints at a threat of violence. After all, we could settle on any number of different signs around which to organize our anger with the government--conservative PAC "Freedom Works" gathers constituents around the less revolutionary and depoliticized "freedom", "Americans for Prosperity" gathers folks around with a message of optimism in the market, and "The Next Right" is another conservative PAC that could produce a new political movement that insists on its continuity with the past. No, there is something in the notion of a Tea Party that makes it a vibrant rhetorical site around which to constitute a movement. It ineffably signifies not only dissatisfaction with a contemporary state of affairs, but also a willingness to promote action to change that state of affairs.

All well and good, you might say, but are not political protests a legitimate way to promote action through legitimate political channels to contest the status quo? Quite right. And we've seen a number of conservative movements that protested publicly over certain issues (abortion and gay right, for example). Those groups often united themselves with a rhetoric of defending "their way of life" or "defending their country and values" against a force externally constituted. And indeed the Tea Partiers continue this tradition, demanding often that they "take their country back." Besides some isolated incidents, however (Eric Rudolph and the Eightmaps controversy over Proposition 8 in California come to mind because of the work of my colleague Sarah Spring) these movements mostly appeared in public as movements defending a certain already American status quo (Lauren Berlant elegantly details this in her collection of essays The Queen of America Goes to Washington City). Because social space was already configured with a presumption or hegemony in favor of the conservative arguments, there was little need to associate the movement with revolutionary imagery (and the privilege of being an unmarked public plays into this as well). So for me, the move to the Tea Party as a signifier of conservative discontent represents not just continuity with America's past, but also a tacit acknowledgment that when things get bad, resistance and recalcitrance are legitimate. Why else move to this imagery that secures the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in a polity that spent much of the 20th century using rhetorical strategies to delegitimze violent resistance and depoliticize political space itself? Words like "freedom" and "liberty" do not quite do enough work right now for conservatives, because while everyone is for them, they are fundamentally hegemonic terms whose possible rearticulation is made concretely threatening to conservative privilege through the electoral victory of Barack Obama. Subjects need a vocabulary to disagree not just with the content of the President's policies but also a means of symbolic compensation to assert that no matter how much the government does not represent their views, they will always have some kind of voice, even if it is a violent one.