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.

On the Location of The People

In an address to the Congress on February 24th, 2009, Barack Obama delivered a stemwinding speech that progressives hailed as a phenomenal victory. The New York Times's Frank Rich argued that it was a "riveting" address, but one that also put Obama at a crossroads, confronting the nascent populist rage embodied in Rick Santelli's now famous rant against "bad behavior" on CNBC. Obama's speech was well received by the public; polls after the speech showed a meaningful pro-Obama bounce. Indeed, even conservative David Brooks praised it as "an excellent speech."

What interests me about the speech is just how conservative it is in content while stylistically is more liberal. It discusses the necessity of governmental intervention to the economy as a temporary intervention in an exceptional circumstance, only needed insofar as it brings us back to a condition of such economic stability the free competitionon an equal plane between economic agents can resume. Obama also locates the responsibility for the economic crisis not just on a greedy Wall Street, but also emphasizes that individual Americans have been behaving in economically irresponsible ways.

Obama also flatly defends American exceptionalism. Economic malaise threatens not human life or dignity but rather the danger is that America's status as "the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history" might be threatened. What will overcome this threat is the American spirit; government action is conditioned upon this fact. Government only acts until once again American excellence can again take over. Rather than examining the economic malaise as a symptom of a deeper problem (pursuing a perspective by incongruity or inquiring after the "metaphor of the metaphor"). The problem is not with the idea of America; it lies with how those called Americans have misbehaved within the structure itself. The economic collapse provides us with a "time of reckoning" in Obama's words, one where it is time to own up to our irresponsibility for borrowing irresponsibly, consuming too greedily, and refusing the future for gains in the near-term.

Obama thus particularizes the human behaviors of the last few decades that led to the economic issues as fundamentally resolvable through human choice. Recession could be avoided: if only we were better capitalists. No foreclosures but if banks don't let greed cloud their market judgment. It seems that the real issue is not a systemic one with the economic system, as Obama's opponents would have it, but instead adjustments within the system. The agents within the system must behave according to the rules of the system.

So fine, dear reader, you might flag this as a banal observation: Hey lookee! The president is supporting the vision of America that everyone assumes is predominant. All well and good. But we ought to be attentive to the situation, as well, and ponder: Obama's speech is responding to a tidal wave of anger (and as it would turn out, populist anger). How does Obama's speech figure the people?

The short answer is: he doesn't. Or at least, they are nothing more than an assumed mass, whose existence is already guaranteed. Their individual agency need only be liberated from our temporary morass. While government is figured as something that does work for the people, that work is only temporary, necessitated by extenuating circumstances. This is true with one major exception: for Obama, the people don't really know that they need his help. He positions the judgment that there is a crisis at the level of the popular but the solutions are positioned as emanating from the government. His tone is to say: "Look at all these things we (I) are (am) doing for you! Tax cuts! A recovery plan! Functioning loan markets!" However temporary, government is the condition of the possibility of a now-functioning American polity.

In this way, the often rambunctious and fiery Tea Party arguments, structured around a sort of populism that locates liberation in common sense and oppression in vague managerialism, gain ground. Because the judgment of the crisis is located in both the people and the government but the content of the solutions is decided by the government, any time-delay in the resolution of the crisis can be attributed to a failure in the government's solution-side judgment rather than in a misdiagnosis of the problem (a diagnosis shared by government and people). The supplement of the government can then be more easily discarded rhetorically, in favor of a sure-sighted support of what the people want--presumably, more freedom and individual liberation.

On the Midterm Election and your Facebook Rhetoric

Previously, other commentators and this blogger have noted how the roots of the Tea Party are based in a lineage that comes directly from the 20th century's suspicion of communism: particularly, the suspicion of elite managerialism that accompanied the John Birch movement and the Red Scare. Critiques of various communist nations centered around their committment to large government programs that reduced people to numbers in order so that they could be aggregated and liquidated through collectivization. "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Five Year Plan" or any other such sloganeering today strikes us as ironic and grim, in light of how public political discourse memorializes the violence of the great political turns to communism.

Little surprise, then, that the distrust of big government (which has always been a powerful American meme) blew up starting with the bailouts and health care debate ("too big to fail" and "death panels"). This discourse plays easily in the contemporary American landscape because while temporally we are increasingly distanced from the threat of "actually existing" communism (the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed, Cuba seems a failure, China is Red but also seems to be increasingly liberalized by market forces), spatially we find ourselves still inhabiting a political space defined by its opposition to communism. This history cannot be easily disavowed.

Discourses suspicious of managerialism, then, are more than mere rhetorics; they are constitutive of American political space in the sense that that always conjure an authentic people who knows better than the government by virtue of not being the government. Hence the circulation of the images and stories of the Founders; they are the ultimate embodiment of a people who never trusted that the government "knew best".

For whatever reason (despite a long history of our government doings lots of good things for people) the presumption politically seems to be against governmental action. This presumption seems to operate ideologically as opposed to contingently; the people are greater than the government is a widely accepted American enthymeme (our status as a democratic republic notwithstanding).

So on the day after a midterm election that has shattered Democratic dreams and elected a host of new Republicans office, a healthy reminder: the more your opinions and Facebook posts and complaints assert in advance that people could not possibly support the Tea Party, or about how Barack Obama is so obviously a great president, the more you contribute to the production of the distance between your own political (probably Democratic) position and that of the Republicans, because you're assuming in advance that you're right rather than figuring out the perhaps even honest or sincere political opinions of others. Don't allow your belief in the superiority of your own political opinions to substitute for making a rigorous judgment about political arguments. Because that substitution that comes off as somehow elite or superior; the result is that it activates that very same sort of "elite/people" divide that drove divisions during the Cold War. So just be careful, is all I'm saying.

Joe the Plumber and the Politics of Referents

Our graduate seminar had a lengthy discussion about agency, and the possibility of taking action in a world where agency is found in chains of iterations rather than human actors.

To wit: the critique of the Butlerian/deconstructive positions holds something like--your view of subjectivity denies the possibility of interventions into the world because while on one hand it eviscerates reference (this evidences all kinds of practical problems) it also elevates these references (names) into a higher order of existence (this would be the nominalist position, that things are their names) by establishing that their naming functions as a kind of overdetermination. Presumably the result would be debilitating for scholars interested in fighting violence and oppression because without being able to refer to categories around which meaningful resistances might be articulated (race, class, gender, national origin, etc.) critical rhetoricians would be locked into pursuing something like a politics of unintelligibility. Or, if recourse to such categories is allowable, it would only be by means of contradiction (i.e. the invocation of these categories is not neutral, they are historically developed, and so how can we ensure that our use is not just another pernicious effect of a chain of iterations?)

A response, following what is here (allowing some Butler and Foucault as well) might hold something like: the recuperative argument is undone by installing initially and taking for granted the demand that words mean something more than "just their name". That is, to yearn for a concept or set of notions under which one might organize some kind of resistance (to say nothing of the rather large debate about whether agency is about making change, and what counts as change in a world where subjects are constantly being remade rather than shuffled around on a chess board) presumes in advance that said concept is meaningful/necessary to produce change. Of course, it is the desire to have some kind of stable footing in a dynamic world that operates as the cause (and I don't mean cause in a strict case/effect model, I mean something more like De Man argues here when he notes that what distinguishes the cause and effect is nothing more than the naturalization of metaphor, a naturalization whose repetition consistently a certain kind of ordering whose rightness can be verified by no external authority) of that very anxiety in the first place--what is displaced is that understanding that the anxiety stems from the absence of a founding point for the reading. Instead, this anxiety of no origins is replaced with an anxiety that stems from the moves away from metaphorized/naturalized understandings whose extensive repetitions secure (to use a bit of debate jargon) the status quo.

If this seems theoretically dense and annoying (guess who's been studying for comps!), an example: if we say that agency is in a chain of iterations, rather than in people, a good democrat might complain that this forecloses the ability of humans to attempt to mobilize causes for justice around the image of "the people", because that understanding will always be purely discursive rather than grounded in some actually existing democratic coalition. My counter would be: the understanding that agency stems from chains of iterations rather than agents themselves is the key condition for mobilizing something like "the people" in a way that is not historically determined. After all, it is the materially grounded understanding of "the people" (the loss of which is anxiety generating for those interested in recuperating a doer behind the deed) that seduces us with its claim to intelligibility, but it is the claim to intelligibility that tautologically prohibits us from questioning necessity of the term itself (because its relevance is naturalized rather than being subjected to critique). For example, the failure of "Joe the Plumber" as a conservative enthymeme in the 2008 campaign was a result of the fact that his deployment assumed a logic of external reference. The McCain campaign assumed that a certain kind of Americanness was available through JTP, and didn't hestitate to push him for a couple weeks. The problem was that the selection of JTP as a campaign avatar was guided by the belief he could function as a synecdoche, but instead he had a life of his own, becoming a kind of allegory for Americanness. He had back taxes, no plumbing license, and whenever he talked his political opinions never seemed quite up to snuff. Confronted with the possibility that JTP showed a kind of absence at the heart of politics, subjects simply began to identify against him--rather that confronting the split between "the people" and politics, he simply represented neither category properly. If politics worked with referents, as my fellow compatriots hold, JTP's failure would have sparked some sort of rethinking. Instead, he was always "in and for himself".

Here we see that the problem is not a slide to "pure nominalism"--the function of langauge to cut us off from external reference, and then its ability to seal us from encountering that fact by having already installed itself as a natural rather than a contingent truth ensures that we are already on a nominalist plane whether we like it or not. Trying to rescue some kind of agency from this fact lies in letting it be an assumption that drives our theorizing--and its meaning as an assumption is evacuated if we alter or forswear it by insisting that things are otherwise, as the call to recuperate agency does.

More Tea Party Madness

No stranger to the public eye these days, the Tea Party continues to announce its fresh relevance. The latest incident to underscore the importance of the political movement is the victory of Christine O'Donnell, a family values conservative in Delaware who defeated a more moderate conservative in Mike Castle in a senatorial primary. Several liberal bloggers and commentators celebrated the victory as a case of the Tea Party cutting off its nose to spite its face--Delaware will almost certainly not go red in the midterm election as a result.

David Brooks, however, gets it right in his column today when he argues that in the short run, the Tea Party will still help to deliver a crushing blow to the Dems in the midterm. Long term, he thinks, the fallout from the movement may be bad for conservatives as the Tea Party's radical ideology (just a hop, skip, and a jump away from a form of libertarianism) is subjected to more scrutiny (presuming several external conditions like the economy somewhat reverse themselves).

Some of my own armchair theorizing: I think it bears a historical resemblace to 1994, when the GOP had massive gains and Bill Clinton was really down in the polls. In fact, Newt Gingrich has even talked about how the GOP should consider staging another massive fight over the budget in order to force the rollback or repeal of some parts of Obamacare. 1994, like today, saw an electoral cycle dominated by resentment fuelled political appeals. The GOP arguments were similarly about the problems with who was in charge. One major difference, I think, was that there was a more clearly developed platform in 1994--the Contract with America actually offered up some bipartisan policy measures like term limits, and campaigning on welfare reform (which perversely put a "human face" on a fairly noxious policy) was effective.

Today, however, its unclear what new policies the GOP would enact or try to enact. One of my professors likes to argue: don't worry, they'll have something. Even if I agree with this (I would have a little more faith in that argument if a few conservative politicians would really back Paul Ryan's budget roadmap, for example), I suspect that thinking about the coming political circumstance through a fairly simple lens of guilt and identification might paint a rosier long term picture for the Democrats. Let me explain.


To begin with, I think its a fairly uncontroversial presumption to say that in America the people identify much more with the president than the Congress or Supreme Court. How many historically important senators or house members can the average person list? Not nearly as many as presidents I'd wager. My suspicion is that this is a function of the human necessity to reduce complexity: we participate in producing the government, but we want ourselves wholly to produce it, so the way that the Congress fractures national identity is resistant to our desire to identify self with government. Generally speaking, people say the politician who most inspires them is Ronald Reagan or FDR. Rare is the figure who musters a strong defense of John Calhoun or Tip O'Neill.

Barack Obama was elected, and by a very strong margin. This fact cannot be wished away by conservatives (nor regretful liberals). And because the image of "the people" authorizes his term in the presidency, frames of rejection for his term have to negotiate with the fact that they disagree with the will of the people. In a midterm, of course, what helps facilitate this negotiation is what politicos refer to as the "enthusiasm gap" that almost always accompanies the middle of a president's first term. Right now the symbolic contours of the national political debate are being overdetermined by the poll numbers (leaning very conservative) and the visibility of the Tea Party and other conservative movements.

But a big win in the midterm cannot undo the rhetorical work done by Obama's victory in 2008--because at that moment, a lot of Americans put their stamp of approval on his brand. The result will be that a big midterm win can be understood as a conservative victory--but it will also activate implicit political frames that impugn the original judgment of "the people" in 2008. I think the result might be that we'll see something like an inversely proportional relationship-- the more the GOP runs now on "Obama is really screwing up the country" the more they encourage moves that force a decision on the part of the voters in 2012: they could either embrace a kind of Burkean perspective by incongruity and decide they screwed up when they voted for Obama, or they could double down on their support for him. Given the human tendency against humility and towards ego, my suspicion is that 2012 could still be very good for the Democrats. Especially because once the GOP owns at least the House, any continued failures on the part of the Obama administration will be understood as the GOP's fault. Because if the presidency has a disproportionately powerful role in our symbolic economy, anytime they fail to do something the logical reason can't relate to the president's weakness or failing--it will more likely be written up as something external.

The GOP's "America Speaking Out" Program

Something that I've been focusing on a lot (and blogging about some) is the fundamental tension that drives the American political scene, the tension between Republicanism and Democracy that is woven into our own founding myths. Jennifer Mercieca's book Founding Fictions examines some of the ways that the contradictory character of the American political system has been forgotten, as we find ourselves in a political scene that is discussed as a democracy but functions mostly as a Republic.

What makes this tension interesting from a rhetorical standpoint is that the democratic narrative overdetermines much of the popular and media reading of governmental action. There are a lot of potential reasons for this explanation but perhaps the one that makes the most sense to me is this: individuals (particularly individuals sensitized and raised in a liberal culture that promotes individualism as a central value, if not a sinthome that helps a whole social narrative cohere), do not like to be told that they are wrong. Because at any moment as individual imagines their understanding to be one intelligible to a broader audience (this is the act of imagination necessary to formulate something like "the people", unless we are talking about an avowed polemicist) individuals are not encouraged to approach their own viewpoints with humility: instead, they conceive of their own thoughts and opinions as brilliant flowers that deserve to bloom.

Indeed, a democracy that purely celebrates "the people" encourages us to imagine that these opinions can explode in full bloom. We don't, of course, have to go very fall down the ol' linguistic turn to see that there is a problem with this belief: Chantal Mouffe, for example, argues in The Democratic Paradox and elsewhere with Ernesto Laclau that interpreting political discourse as a product of agonistic conflict is preferable to interpreting conflict as a clash between competing truth claims that are resolvable by some objective judgment. This is because there is no external arbitator capable of resolving the competing truth claims--we are, to some extent inhabting a relative space. This is somewhat liberating, however, because the understanding that we occupy a space where "everything is permitted so nothing is permitted" at least frees subjects to make arguments/produce opinions that are not "determined in the last instance" by some calcified or hardened social structure whose force or power masquerades as an essential or guaranteed truth.

To return to Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, it may be that out task in a rhetorical democratic republic is to figure out how citizens might begin to understand themselves as humble combatants rather than figures who posess an absolute truth. One might counter this assertion by pointing to The Human Condition's aggressive defense of agonistic political space to prove that humility is not a desired trait because it might act to discourage individuals from attempting to write their name into history by producing a lasting force. To put it into Mouffian terms we might ask the question: how do we facilitate the transition from antagonism to agonism without abolishing the difference that drives both?

The benefits of highlighting the republican aspects of our government are clear in light of this objection: republican governments affirmatively defend that some kind of line must be drawn between the people and their representatives while democratic modes of thinking defer the willingness to make a judgment, relying instead upon an inchoate/spectral idea (for example, a Rawlsian "public reason") to tie up any loose ends with regards to harmonizing the social. Bringing this back to Arendt's argument in On Revolution (as explicated by Andreas Kalyvas) we see the danger in promulgating something like a theory of public reason: public reason, because it refuses to claim to be made out of a decision and instead to constantly aid and abet public formation, might be the source of just as much violence as forms of acknowledged decisionism, but rather than humbly acknowledging this decisionistic character of thought and action, something like public reasons consistently denies that it is the product of decisionistic thinking because its virtues arise from its ability to exist external from critique/the social--if it were revealed as decisionism, the reasons to prefer it would fade to black.

Recall how the roots of rightist populism are in the mid 20th century anti-Communist movement: McCarthy, the Birchers, the "get out the vote" Goldwater crowd, and the general creeping suspicious of liberal management as an intellectual tactic that relies on a docile and unthinking public--these roots are visible today in something like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for example, which is something of a modern bible for the NRO crowd.

The GOP's new "America Speaking Out" program operates according to democratic principles but does on a democratic/republican plane of battle. The program, intended according to Senator John Boehner is intended to give the American people "a megaphone" so that their voice can be heard amidst the hustle and bustle of Washington. The website features a fair number of comments (although some quite clearly are not from conservatives, and instead are both sarcastic and genuine liberal suggestions) and the comments touch on traditionally conservative political positions: reducing federal support for abortions, solutions for illegal immigration, cutting taxes, banning the IRS, etc.

The genius of the plan is, of course, that no one likes to be told that they are wrong. And so with a handy vox populi that generally supports conservative positions, we see an organ for the GOP to position its arguments as unassailable: how dare you disagree with the people! Moreover, this program boxes the Left into a difficult argumentative position: if they don't wish to argue with "the people" they must prove that the voices present on the website are NOT the people or attempt a more nuanced argument that takes into account the plurality of voices in a democracy and then claims to properly sort them. The former argument risks tapping into a sort of intellectual elitism that haughtily disregards "average Americans" (a particularly risky situation given how effectively "elite thinking" has been critiqued by American conservatives since people were skeptical about The End of Ideology etc.) while the latter demands a certain complexity that may not function properly in our digital Twitterverse.

You might say that the mad genius of the "America Speaking Out" initiative is that it continues to insist upon the fundamentally democratic character of America while denying its opponents access to the inventional resources available in a republic. Following Mercieca's work in Founding Fictions, we might hazard that the frame taken up by the conservative strategists behind this initiative is a solidly romantic one--one that believes that a committed people can have their will properly represented by the system. This abolishes the possibility of any ironic distance from the system because of how these discourses circulate: it is never "the President judged the will of the people and found them wanting" but instead it is "the people's voice has again been trampled".

The task for progressives, then, is to figure out just how we might encourage a humility rather than an arrogance in our democratic subjects. How might we encourage people to take a comic perspective about everything that is happening in the political world? And for now I say: how might we do the impossible?

The Curious Case of Journolist

If you're not up to date on your scandals and media memes, the recent kerfluffle over Journolist, a message board set up to enable communications between left leaning media types, might have missed you. The list first came into national prominence when Dave Weigel, the man on the beat for the Wapo's coverage of the conservative movement, was outed as having said some relatively liberal things on this list. He shortly resigned from his position at the Washington Post, forced out presumably because of the oft-understood and regularly repeated mantra that we expect those people who produce our news to be objective.

Since Weigel's departure, conservatives have taken to this Journolist controversy more and more, pointing to it as evidence of how the media persists in perpetuating forms of liberal bias. At The Corner for example, Daniel Foster points to some leaks from Journolist taken from November 3rd and 4th, 2008, when Obama won the presidency. You can look at them here. (It should also be noted that Weigel's reporting on the Tea Party movement was top notch stuff).

Foster's comment sounds an interesting echo back to a previous topic taken up on this blog: the dispute over who are the true Jacobins on the contemporary American political scene, the progressive liberals who support Barack Obama or the Tea Partiers who want a limited state and lower taxes. Foster says that the revelations from the Journolist "make him feel sad" for the people, because they naively believe that what is occurring is something truly momentous rather than just another banal changing of the guard.

Of course, Foster's own sense of pity (how charitable of him!) only makes sense to an audience capable of refusing to identify with the comments from Journolist. What strikes me in Foster's comments (and indeed, much of the conservative reaction to the Journolist controversy) is that their sense of what journalists ought to be like approximates something like a demand that people in the media ought to function a robots, with a set of opinions and sense of judgments that are completely separate from whatever own personal viewpoints they have.

Imagine engaging in an imaginative reversal: what would the react have been on the right to a McCain victory? Do we imagine they would have shrugged their shoulders and gone "well, we've got another Republican president, but I am not very excited about the victory because it's just another president". I have a feeling that most would admit to, if not a euphoria, a sense of satisfaction and happiness that individuals whom they genuinely believe would make America worse off did not control the Presidency.

I contend that the most important rhetorical marker of the difference in the Right and Left responses is that the left responses reek of a kind of individualism that conservative responses to victory annhilate by couching the legitimacy of a conservative victory with recourse to the rhetoric of "the people". For example, in a 2004 NRO column Victor Davis Hansn celebrates the victory of George W. Bush because it represents the victory of the will of "real Americans" over a media and academic elite who tried to load the dice in the election. Conservative celebration of the win is allowed but only if it does so by suboordinating the importance of the victory to the role of "the people" in producing it, as in this passage, where he argues:

"The East and West Coasts and the big cities may reflect the sway of the universities, the media, Hollywood, and the arts, but the folks in between somehow ignore what the professors preach to their children, what they read in the major newspapers, and what they are told on TV. The Internet, right-wing radio, and cable news do not so much move Middle America as reflect its preexisting deep skepticism of our aristocracy and its engineered morality imposed from on high."

Hanson's comments track appropriately with the old right wing populist meme that "the people" should be championed because they know better than an elite and technocratic will which emerges from some higher power. This is the theory that drives Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and has animated conservative political activism since Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstader were writing in the 50's. What is curious is that this positions that desire of "the people" to continue as they always have been as the sort of conservative break on the overreaches of progressivism (Goldberg's "Democracy of the Dead", reference in a previous post makes sense here). The central tension that informs the conservative desire to turn the comments found in the leaks from Journolist into comments that come from a liberal media elite rather than a series of thoughts that represent something "American" is that an implicit criteria for what are and are not acceptable political viewpoints must operate. So what really troubles me about Foster's comments are not that he opposes the presidency of Barack Obama (which is fine, democracies are full of disagreement) but the pity that he feels for those who believe in Barack Obama, especially given the content of some of these leaks.

Two examples:

"HENRY FARRELL, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up."

"HAROLD POLLACK, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: I am awed by the responsibility we have taken on. Tomorrow a desperately ill African-American woman will present at my university hospital for care, and she will be turned away. She will expect us to live up to what we feel tonight. So we’ve got a lot to live up to."

What, exactly, is so sad about these comments? One possibility is that they Foster believes they are disingenuous--but of course, if Journolist is full of disingenuous comments then the media is less "left leaning" than most conservatives hold. Another possibility is that Foster finds it sad that people have channeled important civic feelings/sentiments through the figure of Barack Obama, rather than expressing them concretely in some other mechanism. Due respect to Foster, but the president plays a disproportionately important role in America's symbolic economy. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan remain considerably more common targets for left leaning pols than say, the grim spectre of Trent Lott or Tom DeLay. Similarly, most Tea Party rallies focus on the ills of Obama rather than pursuing scathing critiques of Harry Reid or Russ Feingold. To imagine that people should not invest themselves in who the president is demands of citizens a way of thinking about politics that is almost alien, if not entirely foreign.

Additionally, many of the people presented in these dispatches are writers who never claim to be non-partisan. Ezra Klein is a progressive, Alyssa Rosenberg acknowledges that her private sentiments defer from her public performance, and even Spencer Ackerman's "YES WE DID!" presumes that journalists shouldn't be allowed to have a rooting interest in politics.

Essentially, I think Foster wants our journalistic community to be a bunch of robots. This robot media would reflect objectively upon politics, and would never take time to have a separate person that reflected or thought about politics. I understand that there is a separate argument, which is that Journolist was a forum where people intentionally speculated or strategized about how they could bend certain stories to the left. That is its own issue, and deserves a separate post. But you know, it shows a remarkably lack of faith in democracy to operate in an environment where you trust that people with viewpoints are incapable of bracketing those viewpoints when telling stories or presents issues. Democracy is, in fact, founded upon our ability to persuade others of our viewpoints by understanding that there is a difference in perspective that must somehow be bridged through persuasion or argument. Foster assumes that the beliefs of the reporters are a material and ideologically guaranteed barrier to the formulation of anything like a Perelmanian universal audience. Such a belief has the effect of calcifying political difference and making it function like a natural given rather than a constraint that a rhetor is capable of manipulating.

Many sports journalists comment that covering sports makes them incapable of having a rooting interest anymore--that their job and the demand for professionalism ultimately covers over any latent fandom they may be dealing with. In politics, of course, the stakes are not wins and losses but rather lives and security. We are, it seems, in danger of demanding of our reporters that they should do things that they cannot do. Foster is pitying these people for being human, for being invested in something that gives them meaning. That says something curious about the right's monopoly over reason/rationality in public political forums.