The Politics of "Breaking Bad", Or, How I Learned to Love Victimized White Masculinity

I've been riveted by the AMC series Breaking Bad since last spring. This post will address plot developments, many from this season, so, if you are still planning on watching the show but haven't yet, stay away for there be spoilers here, ye matey.

We are, it seems, in a television era of the anti-hero. HBO helped start and perfect the trend--Tony Soprano and Jimmy McNulty were two of the most seductive and yet simultaneously troubled leading characters of recent memory. Showtime's Dexter is not centered on what you would call a "good" guy although there is a perverse morality there, an even darker shade of what we see from McNulty in the fifth season of The Wire. Mary Louise Parker's character on Weeds stands out as one of a few female anti-heroes in this mold. AMC boasts two contenders for this anti-hero mantle: the womanizing, dapper, and self-interested Don Draper of Mad Men and Breaking Bad's Walter White. White stands out to me from the other men on this list because, when the series begins, he seems perfectly average--he is a science teacher, rather than a mob boss, an advertising executive, or a cop.

Walter has a pretty and smart wife, Skyler, a good kid struggling with MS, named Walter Jr., and a brother-in-law in the DEA. Oh, and cancer. To make a long story short, Walt's family is struggling to make the payments, so Walt does what any high school chemistry teacher with an exceptional background would do--he starts making meth with one of his old students, Jesse Pinkman. Initially Walt does it to make ends meet, and to provide for his family once he is gone. But a funny thing happens once Walt's body beats the cancer--he doesn't stop making meth. He, in fact, becomes obsessed with how "cooking" is his own art form, a way for him to make his name in the world, to take his exceptional education and mix his labor with goods to really produce something. This decision is contextualized by some backstory we receive in the first two seasons about Walt's involvement with what is now a highly successful company, which he apparently left on bad terms and before it made it big.

Once Walt's wife finds out he's a drug producer, she immediately takes steps to expel him from her and his children's life. Quite legitimately, I might add. He has brought all sorts of potential legal trouble to his home, not to mention the violence and risk associated with the drug trade. Yet persistently, on message boards, Facebook statuses, casual conversations--there is a coterie of the shows fans who continue to identify with Walter White, and cheer his drug dealing alter ego ("Heisenberg", one of the shows funniest gags). Moreover, even if you are not someone who actively roots for Walter, there is certainly an element of identification with Walter White that enables people to continue to enjoy the show even once Walt has really "broken bad".

But really, what is noble and ok about what Walt has done? He has a chance to stop cooking once he is cancer free. It is carefully and clearly revealed that "I'm doing it for my family" is really just another excuse for Walter to continue to adopt his Heisenberg persona, and stroke his own ego in the process. Walt is repeatedly confronted with the collateral damage of his decision (the threats to his marriage, the preposterous plane crash to end season 2, Combo's death, Jesse's traumas) yet continues to cook.

I contend that we should be completely revolted by Walter White's actions. Yet our ability to consume the show and enjoy it testifies to something like Walter in many of us. Let me give an example--you would probably not be that interested in watching a movie about a serial killer told from the serial killer's point of view. Something like the story of John Wayne Gacy told from his perspective presumably would offer little to us for two reasons: 1) the "simple" pathologies of serial killers are the sorts of things we prefer to experience externally, and probably can only understand externally because we ourselves are not serial killers and moreover, defines ourselves positively over and against "that sort" of being--we're very serious about the importance of categories like killer and criminal have in defining our own normalcy or something like it (though the upcoming film version of The Killer Inside Me has some potential to operate inside and outside these categories), and 2. a serial killer's world would be extremely boring, all pathology and no grey area or nuance--at best anyone who enjoyed consuming it would be a fan or Hostel or some such torture-porn drivel.

Back to our friend Walter White. He has blood on his hands. He has violated his family's trust. He is wanted by the Mexican cartel. He is continuously complicit in enabling Jesse's abusive behavior. His actions indrectly lead to Hank's paralysis in season three. "Mr. White", as Jesse calls him, is a bad dude. Sure, he drives a nifty Pontiac SUV, has a neat house, cute baby, had to beat cancer, all that stuff. But at the end of the day, his actions are indefensible to even a light, relative morality. Killing criminals is one thing, but not his only crime.

I contend that Walt as a character is only intelligible to the viewer within the frame of the American Dream. There have been some interesting studies done on the opinions that people have about tax policy. One reason why tax increases on the upper class remain somewhat unpopular is because a lot of people imagine that even if they are not currently well off, they will be one day, and they don't want the government taking their wealth. Moreover, American culture is very, very bad at teaching people to be happy with what they have. And hey, thats's capitalism--one needs to not be satisfied with one's position because that lack of satisfaction is what produces the drive to innovation and ingenuity that ultimately underwrites advances in technology and civilization. We need to be dissatisfied because that dissatisfaction produces the motivation for more labor to occur. I'm not saying its bad or good--just trying to map that model for a minute, to show how Walt's actions might only make sense to us through that frame.

Walter White is not wealthy, but once he beats the cancer he should be able to go back to work and the family could make it. His continual insistence that Skyler not be the family breadwinner reeks of a kind of lingering idea of a masculine hero capable of providing for his family (notwithstanding Skyler's affair with her boss, the status of which in the anterior is unclear). Walt's son, Walt Jr., has his name but not his working legs. One of the most depressing moments in the show is when Walt is trying to show his son how to drive with only one foot, even though the MS makes it very difficult to do--Walt is insisting that his son be "normal" even in the face of that impossibility. Walt's condescending rants to his high school students, about how he was a world class scientist, indicate a dangerous narcissism. His refusal in season one to take his former partner Elliott's money reflects a debilitating heap of pride and indignance. Walter had an exit strategy that did not involve making meth and he kept doing it.

Walt is not a serial killer but when presented in these terms he is a figure from whom we should seemingly want a lot of distance. To the extent that we identify with Walt we suffer from this "disease of more". To the extent that we revel and cheer his badass actions as the dapper and capped "Heisenberg" we are celebrating his temporary escape from the toil and drudgery of responsibility and normalcy. When we are astonished at the potency and purity of his meth we are not "buying the magic of science" but instead are authorizing his astonishingly puerile ego trips. How far away from the "angry white male" of 1994 are we? Walter lives well above a subsistence level--by all appearances, it is a fine middle class existence, one of privilege relative to the lives of many others in the country. He is getting to live a life that many would envy. Yet Walt is dissatsified. Walt is furious that he is normal. Furious that he is unmarked, his genius unacknowledged, that his personal struggles are not the stuff of legend.

Walt would fit in very nicely at a Tea Party rally.

"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.

Political Incoherence

Been doing some remarkable reading--I strongly advise you check out Mark Lilla's recent New Yorker piece on the Tea Party movement. He has an amazing eye and ear for history, and the way in which he contextualizes the Tea Party movement as an extension of his 1998 article "A Tale of Two Reactions" is fascinating. Essentially, the argument is that the New Left of the 1960's shares with the Reagan democrats (and now, the confounding subjects of the Tea Party who want to defend their individual selves from governmental tyranny) a strong belief in the power of individuality to echo and exercise force for good.

Why this argument seems so precisely correct to me is that it explains how something like the Tea Party is capable not just of appearing in public but also maintaining its own internal coherence in the face of a rather sizeable amount of American history that contravenes a lot of the reductios circulated by the Tea Party in the name of limited government. I'm thinking particularly of the small rightist cottage industry set up around writing books about why the New Deal was bad, or the way a creeping form of originalism is beginning to do more than just legal work, rewriting the national imaginary in a way to prohibit anything like governmental involvement in social issues (ignoring momentarily the ways in which this government is supposed to intervene temporarily to return the country to how it was, in a form of regulation and intervention whose temporary acceptability is indexed by reaching into our past for a fictive shared fantasy of purity and natural greatness).

FDR was one of our greatest presidents. Nixon coopted George Wallace's voters and then enacted what amounted to progressive, liberal policy initiatives at the federal level. Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "military industrial complex". It's not all peachy keen for liberals--we're saddled with Woodrow Wilson, JFK (it seems like he was really bad, if attractive), and Clinton dispirited the former elements of the New Left as much as he pleased centrists. But as Frederic Jameson said, "history is what hurts". History, especially, must hurt the Tea Partiers, tethered as they are too a historical signifier of America's refusal to bow to something like "authority"--nevermind that what defines that authority, and one what terms, is ineffably contestable in a way that can point to the incoherence of the Tea Party's politics. Since they are for less government, and so much less of it that it would render an awful lot of our already existing political establishments, we need to account for how those arguments can appear. That, for now, can wait. But Lilla is right to point to something like a clash fostered by the contradictions of liberalism. More later.

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.