Candidate Whack-A-Mole

The current crop of GOP candidates is characterized by one constant: it is a two-person race between Mitt Romney and someone else. The parade of figures thought to be capable of challenging Romney's hegemony (shall we say "Romgemony"?) has been a cavalcade of characters: first Michelle Bachmann, whose commitment to the base for a while allowed her to evade showing her warts: then Rick Perry, who took Bachmann's base but whose campaign has been so disastrous that "Hindenburgesque" would be an understatement: then Herman Cain, who ended up on rocky shoals not because of the incoherence of the 9-9-9 (now just 9-9) plan but instead from a combination of foreign policy blunders and accusations ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault: and now we have Newt Gingrich, the zombie politico of the last great anguish of the angry white male, who is in most ways more accomplished as a politician than any of these other potential Romney enemies, but has considerable personal and professional baggage himself, having overseen the government shutdown in the mid-Nineties which was regarded as a catastrophe for the GOP.

To what do we owe this parade of prospects, each one opposing Romney before being hoisted on their own petard? It has to do with the sincerity of the demands for freedom, liberty, and smaller government emanating from the Tea Party, and the relationship that does demands have with the ideology of conservatism. One does not need to venture too far into the world of political and national identity to know one key precept: people define themselves through an imaginary relationship with other people. In the case of American politics, this mechanism for identification cannot shake free of a central recalcitrance: American political culture and discourse so thoroughly value the idea of the free individual that opposition to individualism manifests itself in any number of ways. Chiefly, support of the managerial liberal state (here I refer broadly to statist basics, like social safety nets, which by reductio the Tea Party and conservative base oppose as anathema) is coded as an intrinsic opposition to the power of the liberal individual, because it operates enthymematically by following that assumption that, freed to act, the liberal individual will do good. The other end of this proposition, which is that for some to rise others must fall, tends to be disavowed with the deployment of particulars that undermine the legitimacy of those participants in the system without challenging the aegis of liberal individualism itself: the failure of some is a result of their intentional choices, but the overall primacy of the "idea" of individual choice is not challenged.

We are only slightly more than a year removed from a midterm election cycle at which the belief in the goodness of this sovereign individual was thoroughly supported at the ballot box. Indeed, while progressives were quick to jump on the failures of figures like Sharon Angle in order to chortle that the Tea Party had undermined itself, such rumblings were of little comfort to those who saw the historically unique shift in the 2010 midterm as, if not a paradigm shift, at least a serious retrenchment in American politics.

Recently, New York Magazine had a little bit of Point/Counterpoint fun with two articles, one by Jonathan Chait and another by Bush-era conservative stalwart David Frum. Chait retroactively rereads Obama's election not as some major paradigm shifting signal in American politics, but instead the business as usual result of practicing a palatable-to-the-mainstream liberalism. Frum agrees by way of a critique of the new-radicalism of the conservative base: the remaining strains of Rockefeller republicanism have been evacuated, he argues, in favor of a new conservative strain which virulently argues for small government at all costs, even at the expense of reason itself. Frum of course is no progressive hero: he made his bones as a neocon under George W. Bush, but he is unique amongst conservatives in his stalwart repudiation of the shift in the conservative base following Obama's election. As he points out, Obama passed a health care bill modelled after a conservative proposal from the 90's: and the response is "down with socialism!"

What seems to be at stake for Chait and Frum is the idea of principle: for Chait the Democrats need to get over worrying about having a pure ethics, and for Frum the GOP needs to have some ability to cooperate and moderate because politics is the art of the possible. What does this have to do with Mitt Romney and "Conservative Candidate X?" Chiefly, Romney appears to be a conservative palatable to folks like Frum: a conservative whose own record (reasonable defenses of gay rights, a statewide health care bill) belies his red campaign rhetoric. This is in contradistinction to say, Bachmann, whose rhetoric and legislative record both play very well to the conservative base. I've long suspected that one of the great achievements of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was the way in which his candidacy moved simultaneously in ways that allowed it to appear both centrist and leftist: centrist to the great moveable "swing voters" while leftist enough to both appeal to the Move.on crowd and goad conservatives into time honored tactics like Communist scaremongering and feting the wealthy.

The constant dance with the "not-Romney" figures in the race to me indexes a certain kind of crisis within conservatism: a legitimation crisis based on attempting to reconcile the intense pseudo-libertarian demands for limited government with the absolute desire to see Barack Obama (and make no mistake: while Harry Reid and more so Nancy Pelosi find themselves as targets of conservative ire, Obama seems to uniquely ignite this fire). I really doubt that the conservative base will throw electability concerns to the wind, (but I don't own a Magic 8 Ball, and posts like this may betray me) because the negative characteristics of identification I referenced earlier are chiefly important in the construction of political identity. To the extent that Obama successfully stands in for "Big Government" its much less about the particular policies he supports (Healthcare, for example, which tends to poll quite well in pieces is one good example. Another is how polls consistently show the public associates TARP with Obama although it was passed by Bush) and much more about how these particular policies serve as condensation points for opposition to Obama. Romney has his warts, but especially given the economy's continued fragility, conservatives will probably remain focused on the "bad" of Obama rather than inconsistencies in their own political advocacy. There is little real drama in the battle between Romney and the "no-chancers:" we seem to have much more an electoral Kabuki theater of sorts than a meaningful primary. But I do think fundamentally that eventual settling upon Romney indicates conservatives will argue by way of the situation rather than by way of principle: they'll attempt to weigh down Obama with his four years rather than producing a charismatic and complex plan of action for the next four years.

Form vs. Content: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

Its fashionable (and interesting) to compare the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. One need not wander too far afield to figure out why: both of them are taking the form (or in the case of the Tea Party when still nascent, took the form) of a sixties style social protest. This form of comparison can, of course, be misleading: as David Zarefsky pointed out in the early 80's in an essay on rhetorical studies's penchant for studying social protest, simply aping the formal characteristics of a social movement (appearing in public, lobbing demands at the state) does not immediately qualify a human gathering as an actual, anti-institutional social movement. However, this point, confined as it was to an article almost 30 years old, seems in some ways to have been lost (if it was ever found) by those comparing the Tea Party and OWS. I too, may prove guilty of this sin. However, I merely plan on assessing how the Tea Party's relevance changes the ways in which OWS can be read by the mainstream media.

To do so requires a reminder about what was truly incredible about the Tea Party: it was a conservative political organization willing to appear in public as an "outsider" organization, that is, as a group claiming to be structurally disempowered politically, and using that status to authorize it demands against the government. Typically, publics theory (especially those who follow closely Michael Warner) understand a key element in discussing political space the identification of those bodies that are marked and visible. Those marked and visible persons, because of their material existence "in" space provide the symbolic resources to construct an unmarked, invisible "mass public" not coterminous with the "marked" public but nevertheless related to them by virtue of the difference they share. But the fact that the Tea Party generated coverage, and was discussed (even in the vein of "are they legitimate?) was key because it established, at a deeper (one might say ontological) level the "truth" of the Tea Party as a protest movement: by virtue of its identification as "not" the public, its existence was certified.

Of course, the underside of this was the Tea Party, by appearing in public, risked marginalizing itself as (to use in an actually relevant way for once) "always already" not the public: by trudging out the white, mostly male, middle aged bodies of the Tea Partiers, they established that they did not belong to the mass public they identified: the progressive, neo-socialist political movement led by Barack Obama. Nevertheless, whatever work the Tea Party did to unhinge a certain version of conservatism from its disembodied position as the structuring possibility of American politics, the Tea Party itself, by measures of either symbolic circulation or policy/electoral success, established itself as a relevant force in American politics.

It was something about the form of the Tea Party that attracted media attention. After all, American for Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich: all of them were demanding lower taxes, smaller government. And its not as if these calls hadn't succeeded: between Clinton-era welfare reform and the Bush tax cuts, such policy positions were riding high. But the combination of electoral victory for Barack Obama and the ardent, energized, and angry Tea Party proved an alluring media target: how was conservatism configuring itself in the wake of the electoral chaos of 2008's repudiation of conservatism? Its actual appearance, that it appeared at all, was a really big deal, because it signaled a kind of refiguring of American political space.

Josh Gunn (whose blog should be mandatory reading) points out in a recent TP/OWS comparison post that there was a pretty substantial "lag time" in the way the media responded to OWS, owing to the difference in the movements form. Josh argues that the Tea Party was a mostly virtual movement, while OWS was fairly "spatial" in that the actual Occupancy of a physical space near a site of injustice matters. I don't disagree but I want to add a supplement: I also think that the history of social protest in America (Full disclosure: I recently read Nixonland and can't get away from it), especially the dominant narrative of the sixties as a battle between authority and hippies/protestors, helped to overdetermine how the form of social protest was itself a kind of content: one that harkened back to the old battles between cops and Yippies, trials of the Chicago 7, civil rights marches in the South, and so on. The Tea Party, however, as a conservative insurrection, produced the possibility that social protest could not be coded immediately as "liberal" on the basis of form alone. So while the right continues to circulate the old "bunch of smelly hippies" arguments, they are finding a lot less circulation in mainstream political discourse than did say, the WTO protests (also, to the Occupiers credit, violence from movement members has been very, very low). Occupy Wall Street may well persist because objections to the movement on a purely formal basis may be difficult to sustain. Instead, content based arguments about the movements demands (or lack thereof, to read the papers of the day) signify that the form of the protest might matter a lot less for deliberation purposes, and that space for meaningful disputes on the basis of policies is posible (though perhaps not likely.)

In sum: the gambit of the Tea Party was that they could appear as outsiders, aping the protest strategies of progressivism to capitalize on the way the symbolic environment on American seemed to be marginalizing them after the 2008 election. However, by legitimizing "appearance in public" as a protest strategy in form alone, one of the most effective conservative arrows used to delegitimize liberal protest politics (the linking of social protest as a "form" to a history of the "loud minority" cataclysms of the 60's) was taken out of the argumentative quiver. To the extent that OWS makes successes in the future, it owes these in part to a conservative belief that social protest could be coopted in the name of conservatism.

More Thoughts on the "Mere Attention" Thesis

As is the custom, I read a great deal of conservative media coverage. This is in no small part because I agree with a lot the sentiments in this piece today by The Nation's Eric Alterman. I am discovering that reading the conservative coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement shines some lights on one of the driving theses in contemporary political study: namely, Michael Warner's observation in Publics and Counterpublics that "A public is constituted by mere attention...The cognitive quality of that attention is less important than the mere fact of active uptake" (p. 87). I follow this, and perhaps tend to agree more often than not. After all, existence is kind of a big deal in a world where political discourses opt to deny the existence of a political "Other" with demands. Take, for example, the constant play of patriotism (this is a tactic of Right and Left, although the Right is better at it) introduced by arguments about the "Americanness" of a particular candidate, party, or political demand. Such arguments circumscribe opposition in such a way that the argument/opponent is thought not to even exist by being outside the space of "America." However, even these arguments are forced to grapple with the possible legitimacy of such claims: in and of itself a minor victory. Conservative strategies of "colorblindness" work by even denying the existence of a "marked" racial subject: their effectiveness is in their actual denial of the possibility of "attention" given to the relevant marks, by denying the existence of a racialized public sphere in the first place.

Its with this in mind that I survey three conservative responses to the OWS movement: Mark Steyn's "American Autum" at NRO, Robert McCain's "DIE YOU COWARDLY COMMIE SCUM!" on his blog and Matt Labash's eyewitness take at The Weekly Standard.

One common thought to all three columnists is a focus on the cleanliness of the protestors. McCain calls them "unwashed," while Labash calls it a "hygenic disaster area," even as Stein implies that the protestors do not know how to bathe. Now I'm not a rally planner or a master of logistics, but if your plan is to occupy a large swath of territory for a long time with a critical mass of people, many of whom are not from the area, it is unclear what options for washing exist: moreover, as these folks are in many cases people who find themselves on the wrong end of the current economic bargain, they probably could not afford hotel rooms. If we are to take these complaints at their face value, we have a standard for social protest: no social protest without regular showers! Of course it seems more likely that this argument circulates because it serves to generate a connection between the image of the unwashed longhairs of the 60's with the contemporary protests: and as those protests also rose up in the face of a Silent Majority, so to do these protestors so revel in their opposition to the establishment that they care not at all about hygiene. Or perhaps: the propriety of public space dictates no unwashed masses protesting! Please, only locally found protestors capable of showering every evening!

This might also support the "attention" thesis. The media can no longer afford to ignore the protests (unlike say, the Malachi Ritchser self-immolation in 2006) in part because the coverage of the Tea Party produced an expectation that protest action was a legitimate form of political behavior. Because the conservative opposition can no longer say "Don't bother with those clowns!" (far too many, it seems, ARE bothering with those clowns) the next step is a denigration of the actors involved: some protests might be ok, but probably only the ones where people are dressed as Colonials rather than as sixties radicals.

McCain points indirectly to this problem in his own commentary, where he complains that while the media went out of their way to find associations between the most "radical" members of the Tea Party crowd, they are not commenting upon statements of global solidarity from organizations like the Workers World Party. Of course, it took almost two weeks for major media coverage to settle upon occupy Wall Street. Counterpose this with the immediate almost universal recirculation of Rick Santelli's "Rant Heard Round the World" that launched the Tea Party: consciousness of that rant a scant two days after it happened (a rant by one person, who just happened to have an institutional megaphone) as opposed to a fairly well attended protest taking a few weeks to make it into major media narratives.

Labash's piece operates by a logic of reduction, focused on attempting to manufacture representative anecdotes for "proper" workers opposed to the protestors. Labash spends some time interviewing someone named "Spooky," and while Labash concedes that the approach has a real organic root, he finds in Spooky (a fellow who is unemployed and unabashedly trying to milk his time at OWS for food and profit) the zeitgeist of the protest: free riding for profit. Pizzas, blankets, they have it all. Labash's focus on the agency of Spooky (and those he represents) occludes the reader from asking the question about how Spooky got where he is today: why is someone so resourceful unemployed? Maybe, Labash notes, he just isn't interested in working: Spooky is homeless by choice and came from Orlando because they are not generous to panhandlers there. Labash's anecdote about Spooky takes up roughly half of his column. This allows Labash to imply his major premise: those who "choose joblessness" like Spooky so they can "come and go as they please" make up the vanguard of the protests.

Labash contrasts Spooky with a black man named David Harvey, who is well dressed, and working as a flyer distributor, who says that we ought to "Complain all you want--but on your way to work." This again, begs the question: what about those who do not have a job? The implicit rebuttal is, of course, that these people should go get jobs. Whether or not one is employed is resulted to a simple matter of individual choice: choose (wisely) to get a job or choose (irresponsibly) to not work and simply float.

Labash also quotes a magazine poll indicating that 37% of the protestors think capitalism is immoral. I must admit, given the way the conservatives describe these protests, I rather expected that number to come in at roughly double. Only slightly more than a third...meaning, what, the 0ther 63% are good red blooded Americans who also happen to have legitimate gripes?

McCain's tactic is to ask, with an even/or style, are the revolutionaries mainstream/relevant or are they wacky Communist psychopaths? McCain posits this as a forced choice, buying off and eliding another possibility: that the protests might turn out to be both radical AND popular! Such would be radical politics: a meeting between radicality and general publicity that reconfigures the political.

Mark Steyn's column advances one central argument: that the youth of American are lazy, and want to enjoy a Western lifestyle without earning it. They only like an open border policy because it brings in cheap immigrant labor to do the jobs they don't want, and they are apolectic over having massive amounts of student loans and no career prospects. The question begged is: if Americans have a trillion dollars in student loans, how is it that every individual's judgment is so woeful that they all got a student loan? And in fact if it is woeful than what good comes from reducing individual's agency in making choices (they can't be trusted to make educational decisions, obviously)? Once again being bad off is understood as a choice, with luck, misfortune, and the actions of other individuals and institutions eradicated.

All the responses manifest an anxiety about what Occupy Wall Street means. I mean that in the following way: the discursive performance of all three works acts to A) reduce the protestors to exceptional rather than representative actors, B) locate their status as unemployed/economically disadvantaged as a result of "bad judgment" or an inability to make the right choice, and C) to imply that a concern about economic status is revolutionary rather than sincere and legitimate. The "mere attention" received by Occupy Wall Street, combined with the newfound legitimacy of political protest as a form (in the wake of the Tea Party's rise) necessitates these discursive maneuvers, because the sensus communis can not be trusted to ignore the protests so long as they are receiving attention. Part of the anxiety of communication is the anxiety of interpretation and its multiples: this condition is accentuated under the conditions of liberalism, where individual judgment's sovereignty is encoded in a powerful web of social discourses. We might double down on this proposition in a democracy: the terror that a set of individual judgment's might reign sovereign, and thus reconfigure political space itself, is somewhat terrifying indeed.

"They Don't Have a Demand"

So I guess there's some obligatory waxing about "Occupy Wall Street" to be done. In general, I'm quite interested in how people attenuate themselves to the movement. There tend to be four or so different responses:

1. "These damn dirty hippies are seditiously ruining our country: just like their forbearers in the Sixties, we should make sure that they know that the vocal and smelly minority won't have a say in politics." This response tends to be conservative. I should also note that to the extent that violence and disobedience are overcoded as the responsibility of the crowd in the cortex of our imaginary, I am sympathetic to quasi-fascist arguments that the protestors should be held to a higher standard of behavior from within, simply to defend their optics. The counter argument, of course, is that even if nothing approaching "inappropriate" behavior is done the media frame will inevitably construct some such action out of misleading bits into a spectacle. Perhaps. This is no reason not to try.

2. "I have sympathies, but what is their PLAN??!" I find this argument the most difficult to stomach, in part because it is the argument where the moderate-pseudo progressive left meets a conservative complaint. Actually, thats the whole reason. Look, in the last 2 years we have seen a resounding wave of conservative populism, a political movement that appears as a function of grassroots beliefs mixed with a healthy does of rhetoric about the "American people" in a way that makes most progressive gaze lustfully at the American flag. Of course, when one pushes hard on the Tea Party for real plans, one comes up against a barrier: those that refuse to defend substantial cuts in Medicare and Social Security, when you get down to policy particulars, do not have a real PLAN to address the liberty-based concerns for which they advocate. This, as Obama has recently been fond of saying albeit a bit less appropriately, is math. However, the reason the Tea Party's arguments have sustained and now embedded themselves as relevant fragments within the deliberative framework of the GOP is because they work within an effective taken for granted frame: that government is bad, and its forces tend towards inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Conversely, the progressive/liberal democratic party has tended to concede space to this argument, generally arguing only for government when its a necessity but generally speaking about the need to free the "American people" to make the country great again. Now there are exceptions: you have your millionaire surtax, your Wall Street/Main Street binary, but the recent decision to NOT push harder EPA regulations underscores the Democratic mainstream's tendency to collapse in the middle MUCH faster than their conservative counterparts. I would like to assert (as many smarter and more eloquent theorists and writers have already) that this is because (until OWS) progressives were conceding the basic thesis of conservative arguments: that government is bad. There are exceptions to this, but it seems like "States of Exception" are more easily generated in the face of an existential threat to all Americans (terrorism, ahem) than in the face of a partial or part-ordered amount of discomfort for many Americans (but crucially, not the universal image of hardworking "Americans" whose suffering must never be read inductively as an indict of America itself.) The reason why "what's the plan" is so frustrating as a response to OWS is that before you have a plan, you have to understand the political terrain. The status quo understanding of the political terrain treats the market and the actors of market capitalism as unvarnished natural goods. OWS is beginning the work of challenging this presumption. So a plan? That might come. For now, you've got to not rewrite common sense, but just make it thinkable that its no longer common sense.

3. "They've been at this a while." They've been there for a few weeks, whereas the unabashed declarations of love from Hayek and Mises are decades old. Lets holster the speed gun, kids.

4. You have cautious support on editorial pages of major daily newspapers. That it is even being covered is a big deal, although I have healthy skepticism's about Michael Warner's "mere attention" thesis: if something receives "mere attention" as an abject/external point to generate another kind of publicity, thats far different from fawning adulation. I do think that this everyday support is a powerful point to argue that the insistence of the crowd that they are just "regular Americans" is a pretty amazing thing. Once the state and not the market became the enemy of the American people, the Clinton-era welfare caves became a fait accompli. If "the people" can become read not as an effect of the government's displacement of their true and thorough virtuosity, but instead as evidence of a linkage between government and popular interest against the market (monsterized in this case at the heart of finance) then that might really do something.

Slightly Tempering a Love for Hannah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.