James O'Keefe and the Gendered Politics of Radical Publicity

He's like Saul Alinsky's worse nightmare in argyle. His ubiquitous presence offers that what counts as a "radical" politics might not always be associated with radical methodologies for social protest. His own form of conservatively bent but guerilla inspired political intervention certainly operates in with a pitch perfect ear for our current media environs, even if his escapades occasionally end up trading in subtle sexism if not outright misogynistic. If the fevered images of a frat boy gone political went mainstream, they would certainly bear a slinking resemblance to O'Keefe.

Two things interest me about this: 1) the link between O'Keefe's status as a young male and the recent dust-ups with respect to the sexist characteristics of fraternity hazing at Yale, and 2) O'Keefe's embrace of what Saul Alinsky calls the "Rules for Radicals," a play book of none other than the famed Chicago political scene thought to have birthed Bill Ayers, Barack Obama, and any number of other activist stalking horses for the political right. These two points are connected.

First, the gender issue. O'Keefe is a young, good looking man. He looks like your neighbor's kid, who probably weeded your garden for about 10 bucks a weekend until he got old enough to steal away in a moderate suburban sedan to try and sell his plans for world domination to his peers. He is straightforward about the nature of his political pranks. He espouses a philosophy that makes it clear that he believes liberal hegemony of the social is a fact. Keefe is marked as straight (at least, straight to the extent that he wants to protect the nuclear family from ACORN and he wants to seduce CNN reporters aboard the U.S.S. dildo), and I imagine the only thing that distinguishes him in the minds of many liberals from an investment banker are his level of notoriety and pay.

O'Keefe's "sex boat" scheme was deplorable and highly objectionable to say the least. Yet his other successful pranks continue to receive coverage, with nary a mention of how his pranky past is clouded by as much bad judgment as good. I think what we see here, as in the case of knee jerk reactions against feminist interventions against misogynistic chants by frat boys at Yale, is a clear case of how young masculinity receives certain freedoms and permits to "play", a kind of freedom that is not guaranteed for any number of other subject positions. If you "don't get" that O'Keefe's moves were pranks, you "just don't know how to have fun," and take everything too seriously. This language articulates very neatly to the standard set of conservative arguments against political correctness, which claim that the PC movement drains any fun out of social spaces, removing the charge and risk that comes with humor and sex in public and professional spaces.

I see O'Keefe, and I mostly am depressed that liberals keep falling for the hoaxes. But my depression runs deeper. Because I remember how many young men like O'Keefe loved movies like Fight Club, especially because those movies gave young white men a sense of being victimized (in the film by corporate capitalism, but in experience, it seems, that sense of anger and displacement may be easily transfered to other causes). I remember, how as a kid in college and a young masters student, how I sometimes chuckled at the various tales of internet celebrity Tucker Max, who was outright celebrated as a hero of sorts by a certain, mostly male, subset of the university population, for his "winning" stories of casually misogynistic behavior. And indeed, I shudder at the strange embrace of Charlie Sheen, a clear perpetuator of domestic violence and probably sex slavery, for having the "courage" to produce a public persona that says NO to discourses of therapy. And lest you believe that I mistake the popularity of his insanity for actual support it is worth mentioning in our digital environs that in this economy of celebrity circulation, a retweet is akin to giving the figure a certain kind of currency.

Second point: O'Keefe embraces a radical leftist/guerilla sensibility when it comes to his pranks. He and his film crew insinuate themselves as real people, seeking support from ACORN or Planned Parenthood, in order to eviscerate these organizations of their credibility. His mechanisms play upon the social trust that these organizations have to give to those who come to them, the trust of sincerity. But I confess: when each prank is revealed, my blame and concern is not generally for O'Keefe, it is rather directed at those who fall for the tricks of the camera crews. Because what O'Keefe's performances reveal, clearly, is that nobody is perfect. For every ten legitimate pap smears or dozen pieces of sound advice given to a confused young sexually active woman, there are undoubtedly instances in which the actors located within Planned Parenthood fail to act responsibly and in civically defensible ways. Of course this goes both ways: not every troop in Iraq went "Abu Ghraib" on interned Arabs. The point is that it takes a long time to build up social capital and trust, but it takes very little to erode these, whether this is trust for public, semi-public, or private institutions. Just as community organizers who were inspired by Alinsky's tactics would sneak rotting fish into safety deposit boxes at the end of the close of the business day to protest bank takeovers, so to do O'Keefe's take advantage of the open ethos of organizations that provide a public service.

The key in this case, however, links my first and second points. O'Keefe has not only appropriated radical methods and put them into action, but he has done them in a social and political climate where the straight white male is thinkable as a victimized subject (the recent controversy at the University of Iowa over Conservative Coming Out Day is just another example). Ultimately, the more questionable tactics that O'Keefe takes can be excused, because critics "take all the fun out of everything." The political successes he scores, however, count as palpable hits because they reveal the possibilities of institutional failure that underwrite criticisms of big government. They are visible. A video of a woman receiving a pap smear would not be newsworthy, nor is it even possible to succintly put together into a 10 second video clip a sound bite that explains how because Suzie wore a condom, she got her BA in four years. But these stories are the other side of O'Keefe's interventions. In this case, however, the clean cut, educated, straight white male has again ventured over to the "dark side" to reveal that the dark underbelly of liberalism is, to take another pundit's words, "what we thought it was." His full on embrace of radical and misleading political methods (somewhat creepy and carrying odd violent implications in the case of the "bondage dungeon" stunts) reads as so much white noise to the conservative base because the hypocrisy that he reveals hits home. O'Keefe is a crusader for a victimized American-ness, and his embrace of radical political tactics well suited for the 60's only hammer home that indeed, the American tradition is one in crisis, one that calls for a temporary suspension of the conservative criticism of "radical" methods in order to expose the real truths of the political left.

All this being said: Planned Parenthood needs to report sex slavery. That is true. It is also true that what O'Keefe does reproduces a certain set of normative beliefs about America that contribute to a potentially problematic political environment, by eliminating through quickly promulgated video-ready enthymeme much good work done by institutions for people in need.

Death Drive of the Republic

In the imaginary, democracy poses the possibility of a return to the original (apolitical) condition of human existence: a world without signification, a world without politics, a world where the natural unity of the people guarantees political harmony. For example, people do not identify with democracy out of some hope that it will temper or humble their own identity/perspective: the allure of the democratic is that it offers the possibility of the projection of the self into a kind of universal, the ultimate form of self-affirmation. This is what explains the allure of democracy rhetorically, at least for both E. Burke and Arendt in On Revolution.

The messy world of the symbolic, the compromise formation that testifies to the utopic position of the imaginary, emerges as the other side of the logic of self-projection that drives the rhetorical appeal of democracy: the pluralistic and difference riven conception of "the people" that functions as a universal to gain adherence also stands in for "persons". Nothing new here: this is a fancy way of describing the Platonic charge of demophobia, although we might say in addition to the Platonic worry that "the people" might run roughshod over truth, there is an additional issue built in at the simplest level of identification: the existence of the other "selves" which goad one initially to attempt to project the self as a universal that founds the political, not only frustrates that full realization of identity is simultaneously threatens the self with the secret truth that the self is never so whole as it seems (again, basic Lacan).

Now so long as what frustrates the full achievement of a pure people as sovereign is a split within "the people", you get your purges and your scapegoating and your democratic what-have-you, following Arendt, K. Burke, Stavrakakis, etc. Each attempt, once more, to purify the people struggles to identify the conditions of its own failure in anything other than a kind of bizarre inductive: we elevated "the people" to the position of power, problems persist, we must have picked the wrong "people". In this case it seems clear that we can dredge up the old familiar Copjec discussion: "the people" are being taken in for their failure to live up to their ideal image.

Alternately, we'd like it if "the people" could be appreciated as they are, what they are, in and of themselves. So it becomes a question of how we produce a kind of political "sense" or "atmosphere" or "mood" or "affect" that positions democratic subjects with a kind of skepticism not towards "actually existing" democracy but instead to its authorizing imaginary force. This is extremely difficult: as said earlier, few if any modes of identification operate by behaving skeptically and cynically towards the self, authorized as they are typically by a differential equation premised on exceptionalism.

So it seems like the genius of republican representation (and the further checks and balances in the American system of separation of powers) is that it provides a possible mechanism to produce skepticism towards any set of government actions as not being properly representative of the people: this makes a good deal of sense if your concern is with too much government power (like a bunch of Lockeans skeptical of the Hobbesian Leviathan sick of paying taxes to the King, or if you're a Jew who just escaped the state-run genocide of your people in Europe, like Hannah Arendt).

However, under the conditions of late capitalism, this virtue becomes a vice. To the extent that a pervasive skepticism of the people is built in to the structural political system, it reduces our capacity to understand popular demands as strongly authorized, demanding instead a kind of suspicion to these claims. So to the extent that the symbolic space of America is less and less tolerant of the welfare state, this reflects not only the neoliberal belief that governmental functions should be outsourced to private agents, but also the general fear that the government's actions are not what the people want. The republican theories behind American political institutionalism are built for an era where state power is the ultimate threat, and does not envision a world where the asymetrical aggregation of private property threatens the well being of the population.

So to the extent that democratic theory envisages a return to the original conditions of existence, those that are pre-political or pre-social, how does it compulsively repeat attempts to return to these origins? It seems like in a weird way the prepolitical character of democracy's offer of a pure people parallels capitalism's offer of a level playing field: both offer the annihilation of difference if you will only take one deshistoricizing pill. If the move towards a full "people" is desire, and if the drives are what break up that move (in this case republican institutions), then constitutive rhetorics demonstrate a kind of repetition compulsion in gesturing to a total and complete people that can never be completed. But instead of allowing us to locate this difference within the people deductively (compare this to the inductively violent result of the French Revolution), republican institutions locate this split not within the people but in the act of translating the popular will into political institutions themselves. Now so long as you have what Arendt calls the "revolutionary spirit", that is, a radical committment to the idea that every beginning can be a completely new beginning, this is perhaps not such a problem: institutions can be made again, and made in ways that their lack of selfsameness with previously existing institutions does not doom them to a failure by comparison. But when the totality of "the people" is regularly interrupted by institutions (and indeed, "the people" are constituted against the government in the style of contemporary conservative suspicion of governmental action), it seems that the repetition compulsion to summon "the people", if it is indeed an urge to return "to an earlier state of things", is nothing more than a reminder that the people are not the government.

Fetishizing Radical Democracy

We are, it seems, very into radical democracy. Positing that the field of the political is nothing more (and nothing less) than the competitive play of discourse permits scholars to advance compelling and appealing arguments such as the one developed in 1985's seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that the most important political task is to remember that there is nothing outside the political (or the discursive) and so new hegemonic articulations (important shifts on the rhetorical landscape in which certain signifiers occupy new positions that correspond to new political opportunities) are possible no matter how the dark the times may appear for progressive politics.

In theory, of course, this articulated political is to radical critique what the printing press was to the word of God: a force to democratize the understanding of the social radically, turning the power of liberalism into a kind of bulwark against a pre-determined political by insisting that the political as it is constructed now could always be otherwise. And as Laclau explains more acutely in On Populist Reason, the vehicle capable of articulating new politicals is that of "the people", the ultimate democratic category, one who force of interpellation is powerful.

But what if there is a kind of hostility built in between the democratic ideal and the progressive social welfare state continuously supported by Laclau, Mouffe, and the like? After all, populism works on an imaginary terrain through the assertion that the people know best: that they know their interests, that their judgment is sound, and that internally these facts will be tautologically reaffirmed by the normative goodness of the will of the people.

All well and good. These very smart people are aware of the potential pitfalls: Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox is built around the persistent clash between liberalism and democracy. Liberalism, with its focus on the individual, is at a kind of structural loggerheads with the democratic ideal, whose committment to equality threatens to cancel the liberal committment to freedom. Still, however, both notions valorize the people: liberalism trusts the individual judgment and valuation of various markets, while the democratic ethos insists that an aggregation of the popular voice produces something marching in the direction of "the good life."

Neither account offers much bulwark against the threat that kept the Founders up at night: the tyranny of the majority. Moreover, republican political institutions exist in a way to counter both democracy and liberalism: their very existence signals a distrust of the individual's judgment or the voice of the people. Yet few theorists speak of advancing a "radical republicanism": it is assumed in advance that the interests of the people articulate to normative goods. If progressive political articulations are consistently structured around finding the voice of the people then there is a kind of subtle fetishism produced: we again attempt to find the people's "true interests", or to refigure/rearticulate them through discourse.

But the very idea of a people's interest is no political neutral. In fact, support for what individuals want supports individuality itself. This perhaps strikes us as no particularly troubling until we do a quick and brief survey of the kinds of discourses that pop up in say, the recent flare up of Tea Party movement. Here we see a series of discourses that unconditionally exist upon the sovereign individual. Moreover, these discourses are commited to a kind of radical eradication of productive relationships between government and citizen (cf. Sarah Palin's keynote address to the Nashville Tea Party rally).

If one sought to take up arms against the Tea Party discursively, one option advocated by the radical democracy crowd might be to produce a more effective version of the "popular will", one that would counter the radical individuality of the Tea Party with something like a set of popular demands for the expansion of the welfare state. The problem is that, viewed comparatively, the former arguments have a kind of build in leverage point for success by implicitly valorizing the individual. Discourses that bombard the state with paternalistic demands, but do so on individual/liberal terms, risk reproducing the very political terrain so sympathetic to the radical liberal individuality of the Tea Party. This, perhaps, is why a kind of republican vocabulary is necessary: it does not always trust the people, and so is capable of supporting with a kind of intellectual consistency support for the welfare state.

Form, Content, and the Rhetoric of Social Movements

In 1980, David Zarefsky warned that the way that rhetoricians studied social movements took for granted the agitations and discourses of a movement at their word. Namely, he said, what guaranteed that a social movement always existed outside the existing relays of power in a given political space besides its own claims to be a "social movement"? Rhetorical studies, he argued, risked deciding in advance what was and was not a social movement by assigning certain movement-specific content a transhistorical role indetermining the formal characteristics of what counted as a social movement.

Zarefsky's alternative was to always insist on historically situated studies of the rhetoric of particular controversies and demands. Through close historical analysis, one could presumably figure out at a given synchronic moment whether or not one was seeing an oppositional or hegemonic social movement. Zarefsky's form/content argument strikes me as absolutely correct: just saying you're a social movement doesn't make it so, and the left does not hold a monopoly on discourses of social agitation.

One is also tempted to fill out Zarefsky's objection through a recourse to post-structural theories of political space and identity. Namely, what is at stake in even announcing the existence of something like a "social movement" implies the existence of something like a total/fixed/settled field of the political and its constitutive discourses at a given moment. The danger, of course, is analagous to the recurrence of the "determination in the last instance" problem faced by those attempting to make critical gestures at the existence of structures without allowing those structures to pre-exist the political possibilities available to critics. That is, once you've established what a social movement is "against", that which it is "against" is thought to pre-exist the social movement and movements always occur in a kind of dialectical relationship on an existing political plane. The movements, however much they oppose what exists/is hegemonic, nevertheless have some of their radical oppositional potential drained by defining themselves oppositionally rather than producing their own independently intelligible discourse of appeal.

To contextualize through criticism: one might think about how, for example, how ineffective on a large scale pro-socialism discourses in America are today. This is not because there is anything inherently unpersuasive about socialism: indeed, America has a long and glorious history of federally and state enacted "socialist" policies. It is, instead, because the American political imaginary coheres through an understanding of socialism that displaces and marks its discourses as alien to discourses of "Americanness" in the abstract. We can think of this as needing a kind of rhetorical means-testing: until a socialist policy is calcified in the realm of the political the presumption lies against its normative desireability. All of this operates under the presumption that something like "Americanness" exists, that it is known, and that it does a kind of natural/guaranteed work in producing a coherent political space.

Back to Zarefsky: how can we even begin to claim to know the contours of political space before we investigate it? I think that we cannot. All we can do is to inquire (following Foucault) after the conditions of discourse's intelligible enunciation. To do otherwise risks stipulating in advance that a certain something already exists as the antecedent to the discourses that exist, and in so-doing we might naturalize the existences of the very hegemonic discourses to which we are opposed. If we map progressive political content onto the form of social movements generically, we are left always doing criticism that produces social movements as outside an already established system. Once they are outside, there is a kind of historicized presumption against them. McGee was, as always, onto something like this before most with his seminal work on social movements. For now, careful of form and content!

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.