The Redemption of Walter White

Tonight's finale of Breaking Bad seems to be generally well received in the instant-information world of Twitter and Facebook, although like many of you I eagerly await tomorrow's write-ups at Time, Grantland, and Hitflix.com, among others. In general, I expect the ending to be heavily praised for three reasons. First, unlike the somewhat controversial ending to The Sopranos this ending focused on the resolution of loose ends: there were no Russians left running in the words or Members' Only jacket-related assassination speculation. Secondly, the show left Jesse Pinkman alive and (somewhat, at least) free not only from the Neo-Nazis but also Walter White. Thirdly, the structure of the episode allowed viewers to explicitly disavow themselves of any positive connection with Walter White related to his deluded convictions that he was "helping his family."

It is this third point I want to explore in this blog post. Walter's actions in the episode, while nominally gesturing towards a recognition of his own intense egotism, Lockean fetish for individual ingenuity, and an ultimate acceptance of his fate (and destruction), actually create conditions for the audience to once again root for Walt as  a hero of sorts.

Take, for example, Walt's encounter with Elliott and Gretchen at the home of his old Gray Matter partners' home. When they discover Walt, Elliott holds a small kitchen knife at him, flinchingly. Walt looks down condescendingly at the knife and says "If we're going to go that way, you're going to need a bigger knife." Not only does this serve as an excellent Crocodile Dundee throwback, it also gives Walt a moment to act as a Heisenberg-esque action star, one who acts calmly and cooly in the face of violence. And one would be remiss to not note the phallic relevance of suggesting that the man who took his one-time girlfriend from him needed to get a "bigger knife."And of course Walt comes out of this showdown having "persuaded" his old business partners to start a nine million dollar trust for Walt Jr. with his meth money.

And what about Walt's almost superhuman ability to dodge the police? They miss him in the snowy car at the New Hampshire bar. They hear rumors of him all over town, so much so that even Marie knows, but he nevertheless manages to sneak into Skyler's house. And while the show has certainly established Walt's criminal capacity, just how easily can a cancer ridden man dodge massive police surveillance?  (I understand the false flags Marie refers to in the phone call but, still, Skyler's house?).

The scene with Walt and Skyler is the most pivotal of the episode. As Walt finally begins to make his peace with her she says she's tired of hearing about how he does it all for his family. In this moment she is a cipher for many in the audience who have grown weary of Walt's hoary self-serving moralizing that  has served to displace his own culpability under a regime of attachment to the idea of the nuclear family. But in a turn, Walt admits that he was doing it for himself all along. His selfishness admitted, Walt gets one final chance to connect with his daughter (THAT HE ABDUCTED!) by coming clean about his real motives all alone.

From this point on the episode becomes a series of moves by Walt to atone for the crimes of his selfishness. Enraged that Jesse is cooking again, Walt plots to kill him and the gang of Neo-Nazis, not knowing that Jesse is now toiling in the Giorgio Agamben Bare Life Meth Basement (All Rights Reserved). In the show's final bit of grim homage to Mr. Wizard's World, Walt erects a remotely-triggered pivoting machine gun. Confronting Todd's uncle's gang, Walt realizes that Jesse is not willingly serving them but instead their slave.

The set up whereby Walt discovers that Jesse is enslaved rather than a willing partner certainly strains credulity. King Neo-Nazi, after Walt accuses him of partnering with Jesse, claims that Walt has sullied his honor and demands that Jesse be brought in so that Walt may see his broken and finished state. Certainly, this is near Bond-villain territory stuff. In the past Todd's crew has made no show of morality or principle, killing easily for pragmatic or economic reasons rather than on principle. In this case however Jesse's appearance enables one last element of Walt's redemption: seeing Jesse's state, he tackles him before he sets off the remote gun, holding him down while the gun blasts the Neo-Nazis to death, save Todd. Following the shootout, Jesse chokes Todd to death, avenging his meth slavery. This entire scene is certainly gory, but also has more than a hint of action movie flavor in the way it is shot: stylized blasts from a cannon that paint the outer wall of the building red, an unleashed torrent of seemingly infinite bullets that hit the Neo-Nazis who seem to be just so grouped closely enough together.

Once Jesse kills Todd, Walt and Jesse are left, with Walt holding a gun which he puts down and gives to Jesse, urging Jesse to kill him. For once, Jesse is free of Walter White's power and refuses to do so, instead hopping in the car and taking his leave. Walt, meanwhile, in a scene set to some musical stylings of Badfinger, dies surrounded by the cooking equipment in the Neo Nazi meth lab. Splayed out on the floor of the lab in a Christ-like callback to "Crawl Space," Walt dies, having given himself to rescue Jesse and murder a gang of Neo Nazis, not to mention the morally bankrupt Lydia whose Stevia-laden tea he so carefully poisons with his now highly Chekhovian-ricin. At the end of the show, Walt's ledger is clean: he has provided information to Skyler that will allow her to barter with the police, Walt Jr.'s future is provided for, Jesse is free, and the Neo Nazis are dead, along with Lydia. Despite the fact that over the course of the show Walt is a rapist, a murderer, and a drug maker, the structure of the narrative continues to suggest his heroism in an almost tragic fashion, rather than a polemic condeming Walter White.

In her recent book Washed in Blood Claire Sisco King examines three periods of American masculinity and their relationship to traumatic cinema, looking at Cold War America, the 1990's, and the post 9/11 period to argue that various films index the changing nature of American masculinity, trauma, and national identity. Whether thinking through cinema as a response to military defeat (Vietnam), various and sundry culture wars (the 90s), or a newfound ineradicable vulnerability (September11th), King argues persuasively that cinema tracks these moves by suggesting how the masculine action hero who heroically gives themself transforms what could be understood as a tragic flaw into a heroic or even laudable trait. I think it is impossible to separate the popularity of Breaking Bad from the contemporary political context of American politics, specifically thinking about the show as emerging at the very moment that America's polity faces increasing demographic changes that, from a political standpoint, put the white male, not to mention the nuclear family, very much on the run at both a demographic and symbolic level. After all, America has its first black president. Gay marriage is increasingly visible at the state and federal level. Traditional relationship structures are undermined in public discourse at rapid rates (Think about how many useless "Girls in college are hooking up more!" stories you see in The New York Times, and then think about how Walter White would feel about his daughter, if he had one).

The show, however, is rarely understood in this political context, with critics instead praising the transcendent performances of the actors and actresses, especially Brian Cranston, and many insist that it may be the best show in the history of television. But I think it is fair to ask: what is the source of this praise? One response is to praise the show's formal characteristics: the cinematography is excellent, the direction crackerjack, and the acting superb. This is all true enough, although were are also in the midst of a television renaissance of such heights that one could credibly say that these things are true about any number of television shows.

I want to suggest that the show appeals by turning Walt's pathological egotism into a relatable character trait rather than a tragic flaw. To wit: simply admitting that his ego was the root of it all convinces Skyler to let him see his daughter again. Or another point: up until this week many would be at pains to distinguish Walt from the Neo Nazis, suggesting that the only real difference between the two of them is that Walt's racism is sublimated through his own (unearned) sense of self-worth while the Neo Nazis bear the markers of "conventional" (and thereby less threatening) racism. But the show's finale features Walt slaughtering a bunch of Neo Nazis. And then, most troubling of all, Walt humanity is found in his recognition that the treatment of Jesse at the hands of the Neo Nazis is too much even for the rather evil Walt to tolerate. But consider what Walt has done to Jesse over the course of the show, not only that he is responsible directly for Jesse's enslavement but also an unlistably long set of violences to Jesse, including Jane's death (murder? Probably murder.)

In a nation still in the throes of economic doldrums and a political scene where demographic shifts are rapidly outpacing the capacity of political discourse to manage difference, Walter White offers a fantasy that simultaneously suggests the legitimacy of feeling victimized and aggrieved so long as one simply owns up to the selfishness of such feelings. This is not too far off from the unreflexive celebration of Going Galt and valorization of "job creators" that permeates contemporary conservative discourse: selfishness is a virtue, and pride is a reflection of one's ability to apprehend the market's brilliance (and of course the brilliance of one's own recipe for pure blue crystal meth). Personally, I think a darker ending was necessary to hammer home Walt's evil, to give the viewer absolutely no place to hide. But instead we are left with this redemption of Walter White.

Twenty five years ago, Oliver Stone made Wall Street and was surprised to discover that viewers came out of the film not skeptical of the ills of finance capitalism but instead in love with Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Gekko, the rapacious financier whose charisma and attraction made Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox seem a pale and tiny human in comparison. Oliver Stone is not known for his subtlety and so one might easily believe that he had simply, accidentally, produced the opposite result. On the other hand, interviews with Vince Gilligan suggest that he understands the element of Walt White that might lie within all of us (or, certainly at least, within the public realm where discourses of masculinity and victimhood circulate together to generate praise for Breaking Bad as a show that demonstrates "complexity" rather than the pathological actions of a brilliant but blowhardy chemistry teacher). Much of  the praise heaped upon the show, and the extra acclaim will no doubt be piled on this finale, might derive from a very troubling source: that is, our capacity to identify with the very worst of Walter White but disavow that identification by praising a set of formally impressive but politically problematic narrative structures.

ObamaCharisma

The recent debate over Syria has highlighted a clear political dynamic of the Barack Obama administration: the tendency of the opposition Republicans to oppose almost any policy simply because it is associated with Obama. This is certainly not unique, at least in simple terms to the Obama administration. A multitude of American progressives remember the Bush administration more for its foreign policy boondoggles that they stridently opposed than the social policies (like Medicare Part D) that ran counter to a number of conservative political positions. Going back further, one might remember the attacks on Reaganomics, a name similar to Obamacare in terms of its ability to reduce the understanding of a set of policies into a metonymic expression of a president’s worldview rather than a more rote unpacking of the content of said policies.

When critics, politicos, and citizens conflate policies with presidential personas we are in the messy realm where politics and charisma intermix. Max Weber offers a popular and influential understanding of charismatic authority as “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by them ." Weber’s definition acknowledges a difficult problem for those interested in the study of political authority: a leader may not be selfsame with “the people” lest the distance that sustains their authority be abolished.” At the same time, there must be relays of identification between a leader and “the people,” lest the gap between them spawn a legitimacy crisis that weakens or even deposes the leader. Charisma is the bulwark of ether that suggests an unpopular decision by a leader should be read by the populace as evidence of the leader’s character rather than an indict of the leader’s judgment. Alternately (or perhaps simultaneously), a charismatic leader elevates themselves above the people, as a hero of sort, claiming exceptional status as earned.

Naturally, many thinkers are suspicious of charisma. Some, like Kenneth Burke, find in the charisma of a figure like Adolph Hitler the poisonous medicine of tragic unity, where the leader’s charisma blended with their naturalized affinity with their population in a way that created a nationalist feedback loop. Going back further, Plato worried that too much charisma might ruin the Republic, with the charisma-laden rhetor lying not far away from the demagogic despots who might lead “the people” astray.

The most interesting question about charisma, however, lies not with the rather futile debate about whether or not to ban it from the Republic. As numerous scholars of emotion and affect remind us, “feelings” are intrinsic to our democracy and we cannot banish them from the world of politics without constructing a somewhat tragic relationship to an ideal and emotionally purified politics that never has and never will exist. Instead, as Joshua Gunn suggests in his excellent piece in the Western Journal of Communication on Huey Long, we can understand a leader’s charisma as having at least two possible structures. In one, the leader maintains a kind of distance from the audience, routinely offering them most of what they want while denying at least one important emotion and/or policy item, producing a desire for the leadership of the rhetor even as the relation between speaker and audience remains split. On the other hand, Gunn’s reading of Huey Long implies there may a second rhetorical kind of demagoguery, more prone to rhetorical burnout, where the leader and vox populi merge into one avatar, a fiery figure of populist bluster that offers the intense satisfaction of popular sovereignty but is also left without any rhetorical firehouse to put out the intense burning passion ignited for a pure populism.

In the case of the Obama presidency we see a similar but somewhat opposite dynamic: the flight away from any policy associated with the president regardless of its content, or even its legitimate connection to President Obama. Take, for example, the “Obamaphone” a racist meme circulating extensively in the conservative blogosphere, Based on a short video clip of a black woman flashing a new cell phone and saying “I got an Obamaphone!” the meme circulated to suggest that Obama had created a program for anyone to get a free phone, working in tandem with the argument that Obama secured his electoral majority by promising (in 2008) and delivering (in 2012) “free stuff” to his constituents. The video suggests a racial animus underlying these claims, not unlike the (mostly white) figures who do not benefit from welfare in a 2012 campaign ad put together by Mitt Romney’s campaign team.

A second, more obvious example that came to mind when having a chat with a colleague the other day, is Obamacare. Rather than referring to the bill by either its official name (The Affordable Care Act) or even the shorter acronym (ACA) there is by now a more or less bipartisan consensus that the bill is to be called Obamacare. Despite the fact that hundreds of legislators (and lobbyists and citizens) contributed to the passage of the ACA, media critics and scholars all seem more or less resigned (or is it excited) to define the bill through the Obama administration and vice versa.

A third instance I will not dwell on long, but it is the continued assertion of Obama as central to the political imaginary. Whether found in the hilarious references to Obama in Louis CK’s television show whenever something goes wrong (“Fuckin’ Obama.”), the various anti-Obama iconography popularized by Tea Partiers, or the circulation of racist Obama images in various conservative counterpublics (the “witch doctor” image, for example), the ubiquity of Obama is at once a reflection of American political culture’s fetish for the presidential but the racial element also exceeds that element. (This may be true of most difference that threatens the normatively white and masculine office of the presidency: anyone remember Hilarycare?)

The recent Syria debate suggests again a move by conservatives on the basis of opposition to the president’s authority in and of itself, that is, his charisma. The particularly opportunistic nature of Republican oppositions suggests this. While some, like Rand Paul, may have familial and historical backgrounds that suggest their decisions are more principled and less opportunistic, for a number of rank and file Republicans who supported previous military interventions, its difficult to read this move as anything less to another knee jerk reaction to deny Obama something just because he wants it rather than on serious policy grounds. (Note: I don’t want to be construed as saying the Obama administration is on the side of principle here. It is a depressing fact that foreign policy, much more than domestic policy, tends to reveal similarities rather than differences in the parties. This is in part why the second Iraq war is such an outlier: it was a real moment where party affiliation really mattered on foreign policy, though many Democrats were complicit in authorizing the war).

These opportunistic moves are very short sighted, however. Which of these arguments about the “cult of Obama” will carry over when the Republicans have to campaign against presumptive 2016 nominee Hilary Clinton? Being against Obama on principle is not only nihilistic, it will be counter-productive for the GOP in terms of generating a party identity that can argue its policy differences with the dominant party. The tendency to reduce all Democratic actions into reflections of Obama may hoist the conservatives on their own petard, as they scramble for a set of Hilary-specific charisma attacks rather than carving out meaningful policy differences.

So You're Still Rooting for Walter White...

And so, apparently, is Skyler. I've already gone through why Walter White is a wholly objectionable figure elsewhere. But I wanted to talk a little bit about why viewers and critics remained attached to the show, finding it continually praiseworthy. I don't exempt my own judgments from the dynamic I am attempting to analyze: I remain invested in the show as well, and think so far this seasons two episodes have been excellent. But there are at least two strains of fandom that I want to talk about. First, those who are invested in Walt as the Heisenberg "badass" and view Skyler as some kind of killjoy, and second, the more sophisticated arguments about how Skyler is the moral center of the show, serving as a sort of cipher for the audience to participate in the narrative without being corrupted by Walt.

Representatives of the first view have become scarcer as Walt's naked ego-driven ambitions have become clearer, rendering less and less credible his claims that he "Just wants to provide for his family." Comments like those of popular twitter character (and AV Club commenter) @ZodiacMotherfucker (who is known for his all-caps tweets) suggest a masculine identification with Walt, as in this example:

BREAKING BAD: WALT NEEDS TO DROP HIS DRIPPY WIFE AND CLIMB ALL OVER THAT LYDIA CHICK
— ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER (@ZODIAC_MF) September 6, 2012

While one might roll their eyes at this (its a comical account, clearly) the comments sections at any number of websites that do recaps of Breaking Bad like Hitflix or the AV Club have sections of fans who do root for Walt a somewhat surprising amount. For example commenter "HISLOCAL" on Hitflix says that "I'm getting a little tired of Jesse moping around, for the same reason I got tired of Skyler's attitude towards Walt. I understand that any of us would, in reality, act like Jesse or Skyler, but it's just kind of a buzzkill to watch on TV." The commenter understands the relation between the fantasy of television, but nevertheless admits that the charge of the show is the connection to Walt and his survival/success.

Similarly the most popular scene from the first episode of this season was the showdown in the garage between Hank and Walt. Even though Hank has the physical upper hand on Walt when he punches him, Walt maintains a mental edge with his gruff "Tread lightly" comment that finishes off his soliloquy about his own power and capacity for dread. This phrase was all over twitter following the episode, and even showed up on fan paraphenelia and imagery, permeating Gchat statuses and social media discussions of the show. They belie a certain kind of admiration for the badass side of Walt's "Heisenberg" persona.

Even articles that take a distanced and critical view of Walt depoliticize the grid of identification that sustains the relationship between the viewer and show. For example this Slate piece argues that Skyler is the best character on the show because "she’s the one who reminds us that it’s necessary to loathe Walt. She is our moral grounding." All well and good, but the last stanza of the article claims that it is easy to get sucked into identifying with Walt because of "the show’s narrative logic—Walt must overcome obstacle A to achieve goal B—to the point of blinding oneself to the evil of the particulars and their endpoint. We root for Walt because we want the show to continue." I disagree with that assessment because the formal characteristics of a show do not necessarily guarantee our investment. No matter how many Dick Wolf procedurals are put it, the level of intensity between the viewer and say, Jerry Orbach's Lenny Brisco is often less intense than that between them and Bryan Cranston's Walter White.

In her recent book Washed in Blood Claire Sisco King examines three periods of American cinema wherein shows featuring sacrificial male leads have helped America to "work through" difficult national traumas in a manner that reified and stabilized rather than undermined the hegemony of white masculinity. King examines cinema from the period of Vietnam, the nineties, and post 9/11 America to make her claim. The critical supplication permanently attendant to the drama of Walter White suggests his suitability as an avatar for another American trauma: the first period of the nation that sees a black man in the White House. Breaking Bad saw its critical star really take off during its second season in 2009, where the adrenaline pumping tales of a science teacher who "finds himself" when he is confronted with the threat of cancer. This despite the fact that very early on in the show many of Walt's "struggles" are coded as such only by a misogynistic masculinity: we have no context to determine whether Walt's feelings of restriction within his marriage are legitimate gripes or results of his own small minded selfishness, as later seasons might suggest. What Walt is "finally awake" to is not his objective status as a victim but instead the legitimate possibility that his situation might be able to count as a situation of victimage in need of redress.

In this way Walt's "break bad" authorizes itself to take a position typically denied in the "mass public" according to Michael Warner: Walt may operate simultaneously as both the righteous agent of his own professional/marital vengeance and also take a position that satisfies the need to matter (be seen) attendant to a public where the cost of white male privilege is also the denial of the subtle pleasures involved in relaxing and "being seen" rather than constantly gazing. One describes these as subtle pleasures only on account of Walt's whiteness and maleness: that it takes the trauma of cancer to push him into the exercise of his agency suggests in part the sinister capacity of the subject to interpret trauma not as a sign of something gone wrong but instead evidence of the correctness of what has been, driving them, in melancholic righteousness, towards the pursuit of control and mastery that has only appeared as a horizon rather than a reality. That it took many viewers many seasons to realize Walt's horrible and empty center suggests this reading has more than a little merit.

1965: Reagan's Increasingly Mainstream Moves

Scholars like Kurt Ritter suggest that Ronald Reagan had to moderate his strident anti-Communism as he attempted to mainstream himself for political purposes.  The necessity of this move became apparent to Reagan after his bosses at GE, for whom he was hired to do a long-running series of corporate talks, fired him because he had moved too far too the right.[1] Moreover, if Reagan was going to appeal to a broader electoral center, he needed to move away from meaty redbaiting and enthusiastically appeal to a broader segment of society.

            Following his very well received delivery of “A Time for Choosing” in support of Barry Goldwater late in 1964, Reagan began to campaign and speak even more in earnest, branching out from his old GE circles and speaking more in support of other candidates around the country. In Granville, Ohio on June 8 1965 Reagan came out to speak for Rep. John M. Ashbrook at a dinner gathering. Examining the text of this speech suggests how Reagan’s moves following his 1964 speech maintain many similar and somewhat radical themes in his speaking, although the move away from an explicit reliance on an existential rhetoric of annihilation is striking.

            Reagan opens with a typical series of pleasantries and references to Ashbrook before he transitions into his speech, which was entitled, “A Moment of Truth: Our Rendezvous with Destiny.” Reagan’s first reference to any sort of policy matter comes in the second paragraph, noting sarcastically of the Voting Rights Act, “I think it’s wonderful that they’re going to have a voting bill. If tombstones and empty warehouses, why not people?” This reference, almost certainly referring to the suggestions that John F. Kennedy among others had repeatedly benefited from election fraud, does double duty for Reagan: not only does it position Democrats cannily on the side of undermining democracy, but it also diminishes the ongoing debate over the VRA (which sought to expand the electoral franchise in practice for blacks) by suggesting with its sarcastic tone that voting itself was a relatively empty practice given that corruption had soiled it. Moreover the structure of the joke relies on an equivalence between the explicitly described “tombstones and empty warehouses” which are inanimate objects signifying death and decay and the implicitly black bodies that are to inhabit a parallel place in the structure of the humor.

            Reagan, having rendered suspect the most visible of democracy’s traditions, elections, then turns to the general notion of democracy itself, suggesting that the real threats to democracy come not from without but from within, suggesting that, “while Rome’s barbarians came from without—your barbarians will be engendered by your own democratic institutions.” Reagan’s warrant is the work of Alexander Tyler, which suggests that democracy “can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” These comments set up Reagan’s later pivot to discuss the dangers of the Great Society, and its placement just a few stanzas after the denigration of the VRA suggests that the ultimate ruin of democracy comes when everyone can vote, with the implicit charge that giving blacks the right to vote will ruin democracy. The very next paragraph substantiates these threats by providing data, in the form of rising national debt, a diminished gold supply, and a rising crime rate, suggested relays or relationships between these phenomena and democracy’s decline.

            Reagan then suggests a rhetorical inversion in the two parties’ relationship to the idea of the “status quo” which he says is “Latin for the ‘mess we’re in.’” The last Democratic campaigners had portrayed conservatives as “radicals who’d bring about some drastic upheaval” where “here we had a peaceful and prosperous America.” Reagan continues a maneuver suggested in his earlier “A Time for Choosing,” where he had argued that “the people” would be corrupted not because of their intrinsic failures but instead by the power of Big Government to ruin their good civic sense. The status quo, characterized by government expansion that threatens to corrupt even the most well intentioned citizens, becomes the warrant for a new conservatism. Reagan implicates this struggle by suggesting that “Freedom is very fragile; it has flowered only a few moments in all of…history and most of these moments have been ours.” Reagan not only taps into a well of American exceptionalism, he positions this freedom as perilous and permanently threatened. While sounding fewer explicitly militaristic notes as in “A Time for Choosing” and his earlier more radical speeches for GE, the general threat to freedom could speak to a large audience of people, especially whites, concerned about what socio-political gains of people of color could mean for them.[2]

            Reagan then pivots to discuss the perils of inefficiency and bloated bureaucracy, pointing out the difficulties the federal government has in competing with the private sector in terms of services provided for cost. This threat is coupled with claims that “the ultimate goal” of federal employment is meant to make it so that “there will no longer be a need for private government agencies.” This point combines with a series of data points about the government gathering more information about citizens. While Reagan does not explicitly at any point suggest what the government will do with data, this allows listeners to infer something sinister: he is, presumably, not worried that the boxes of data will end up somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant. And with the specter of Big Government run rampant not only in Reagan’s speech but also in the latent content suspicious of totalitarianism’s European form, these claims do not need much to do their work on the audience.

            Importantly, however, Reagan makes a good show of agreeing with the intentions of his opponents if not their results. Good intentions should not be conflated with good outcomes, which Reagan hammers home when he tells the story of a motorcyclist who, wearing his jacket backwards, is “rescued” from a crash by an emergency response team that turns his head to the front of the jacket. Reagan repeats this refrain as he acknowledges that problems with education, housing, and other issues are salient, but emphasizes his disagreement with government-based solution to these problems.

Government control of education, for example, risks making education political, and “What if one day, that pressure is of a political nature not to our liking. Education is the bulwark of freedom. If you remove it far from the community…it becomes the tool of tyranny.” These claims set up his historical arguments about the nature of freedom, which he suggests, “comes but once in the history of nation” and at this crucial moment where “we face a world that’s half slave and half free.” The result is a world that raises the question of “whether mankind itself can survive.”  The speech finishes with many apocalyptic tones. Reagan speaks of a “pathway of history” that is “littered with the bones of dead empires…Every time, history tell us, that a cultured, advanced society has met the less cultured, the barbarians triumph.” Reagan then summons a future where “our failures will be recorded in a book yet to be written called the Rise and Fall of the United States of America.” Reagan’s Manichean themes of Good and Evil, which were more explicit in the original “Time for Choosing” speech, reappear here, though they crescendo near the end rather than being peppered throughout. The structure of the speech mirrors the sense that one would have of perceiving the real threat to America as an internal rather than external one: creeping realization as opposed to constant terror.

In an earlier post I suggested that “A Time for Choosing” exemplified Reagan’s ability to engage in affective conflation, wherein the bodies attention to threats becomes a manner for flattening out dangerous phenomena and articulating them to the same set of existential anxieties. Here one can see evidence of a more sophisticated use of this strategy, one that stakes out its distance from the bombastic rhetoric of Goldwater but maintains a similar set of sentiments suggesting that Americans still have to worry about existential threats to the polity.  In a very telling passage near the end Reagan speaks of

Truly forgotten Americans—unsung heroes who get up in the morning and send their kids to school and pay their bills; contribute to their church and their charity and their community. They believe in God as the Creator of all our rights and freedoms and they’re disturbed because their children can’t ask His blessing on a lunch in the school cafeteria.

These “forgotten Americans” preview Richard Nixon’s silent majority, not only suggesting how their disappearance (and silence) indexes their marginal position relative to the status quo that Reagan spends a great deal of time indicting, but also preying on their anxious worries about their own relevance in a moment where institutions of privilege (the Church, a white ballot box, economic self-sufficiency, and a relatively stable domestic circumstance) were threatened by the “barbaric” forces outlined by Reagan. The American government has created these barbaric forces by inserting itself into matters best left to the social rather than political spheres.  Reagan’s implied solution is a shrunken government, one that poses less of a threat to the virtues of America’s citizens. Without a smaller government, only the “barbarians” will be remembered as those whom clamor loudest receive the most notice and acclaim. In the context of “Great Society” programs that were premised on singling out for improvement sectors of society, Reagan’s call about the “forgotten Americans” transformed these Great Society programs from benign initiatives into actions that signaled who did (and did not) matter in the eyes of the government. The “extermination of mankind” references by Reagan creates a kind of sympathetic relay with the disappearance from society of these “forgotten Americans” and their replacement by poor and racially-marked barbarians who lacked the civic sense to see that good intentions and right actions did not always meet at a coincident point.

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[1] Ritter, “Reagan in the South.” This happened in 1962, although Reagan continued to give versions of “The Speech” like “A Time for Choosing” and the speech under examination here for some time.  Another crucial matter was that Reagan threatened not only ideological embarrassment for GE, but also financial: he spoke out against programs like the TVA which benefited GE immensely.

[2] As explained in an earlier post, despite the rapid gains in the standard of living and the white middle class through the fifties and early sixties, gains and losses tended to be experienced relatively rather than absolutely through competitive rather than cooperative logics. This suggests a pernicious element of individualism that even robust rhetorics and logics of republicanism struggle to snuff out.

A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class

The 2008 financial crisis shook America’s attitude and generated widespread anxiety. When Obama took the podium on October 13th, 2008, he was already in a favorable position in the presidential race. Capitalizing on the financial chaos resulting from the failure of the venerable Lehman Bros financial firm, Obama had built a healthy lead in the polls over John McCain on the basis of two factors: a calming political demeanor cautioning resolve and deliberation in the face of economic disaster, and a persistent recourse to effective scapegoating through by juxtaposing the American “people” (represented through the figure of Main Street) against irresponsible and selfish capitalists (figured metonymically as Wall Street). Speaking in Toledo, Ohio, Obama delivered an address entitled “A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class”.  My contention today is that this speech embraced a hybrid populism which came close to encouraging meaningful collective responsibility for the September financial crisis, but ultimately created an opening for the conservative economic populism that emerged in early 2009 by advocating for a democratic fantasy capable of remedying economic strain.

Obama opens the speech with a flurry of collective pronouns that alternate between establishing his consubstantiality with the audience but also the occasional reminder that the demands and insecurities present are those of the “people” not of the government. “We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic crisis we face is the worst since the Great Depression.”  Obama then moves to the second person. “You’ve got auto plants here in Ohio…closing their doors…You’ve lost one of every four manufacturing jobs…the question isn’t just ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’, it’s ‘are you better off than you were four weeks ago?’” referencing the famous Ronald Reagan slogan even as he made clear the issues Americans were facing. Immediately after setting the table for disaster, Obama presents the election as part of a moment for a transformation in American politics. “We still have the most talented, most productive workers of any country on earth…It won’t be easy, but there’s no reason we can’t make this century another American century.” These workers and their existential economic concerns are then juxtaposed with the comments of a McCain campaign staffer who had been quoted as saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” “Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but I’m worried about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings…they can’t afford four more years of the economic theory that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.” By tapping into the still-circulating “Wall St./Main St.” trope, Obama establishes a unity between governmental elitism and private sector elitism.

            By then offering a five point plan for recovery that includes tax relief and mortgage support, the contrast between existing Washington ways and Obama is made clear: his rescue plan for the middle class is a bailout for the “people” not for economic elites benefiting from the cronyism of their partners in Washington. The repeated emphasis on first person language solidifies this effect. “We should also change the unfair bankruptcy laws,” “We just need to act quickly and decisively” “We should also extend and expand unemployment benefits” “We should fast track the loan guarantees.”  Such measures will be paid for by “scouring the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do work more efficiently and cost less.”  The explanation for the how of payment makes easier a transition into the second part of the proposal: a call for Americans to become more financially responsible in their own private lives. “We’ve lived through an era of easy money, in which we were allowed and even encouraged to spend without limits; to borrow instead of save.” “Allowed” and “encouraged” are verb choices which imply that the decision to spend beyond one’s means was not one taken with a full knowledge of the risks involved: such spending is the effect of a previously undetectable cultural malaise. Obama goes further to trade on a rhetoric of individual responsibility while also undermining it, framing more spending as “not a choice but a necessity. People have been forced to turn to credit cards and home equity loans to keep up, just like our government has borrowed for China.” Again Obama strikes with a parallelism between “the people” and the government creating an equivalence that makes it easier to admit to one’s own failings as the enthymeme “if the government can do it, so can I” remains implied. However for both “people” and government, this turn to debt is dangerous, and our reliance on such measures is temporary, for “Once we get past the present emergency…we have to break that cycle of debt. Our long-term future requires that we do what’s necessary to scale down our deficits, grow wages and encourage personal savings again.”  Note again the use of collective pronouns establishing the government and “the people” as one.

            Rather than delivering a fiery class sensitive polemic about the wrong done to America, Obama’s speech indexes a moderate view less beholden to scapegoating urges and more invested in a positive sense of futurity. Obama only mentions restrictions on CEO pay in passing, but generally passes over populist demagoguing in favor of his rescue plan for the middle class. The government can work for the people but not against Wall Street. Michael Lee observes in his study on populist argument four major characteristics of such speeches: construction of a virtuous people, construction of a nefarious enemy, articulation of the enemy to a systemic logic, and the production of an apocalyptic confrontation. By these standards, Obama’s speech is a tepid, perhaps even non-populist speech, which continues to advance the virtues of “the people” and locating the minimization of their agency in culture and circumstances not in a malevolent enemy figure.

            Obama also gestures towards the possibility of what Kenneth Burke calls mortification, the possibility that people might suffer for their sins. However, instead of cultivating such a sense (one which, if directed correctly, might lead to a perspective by incongruity and a course correction in action) Obama locates the main causes of irresponsibility in circumstances and culture. Because subjects are enmeshed in their cultural contexts, scapegoating “culture” can amount to the worst of both worlds by excusing potentially deleterious individual attitudes on the basis of their cultural production (hence depoliticizing them) while providing no discrete vessel to serve as the specific scapegoat capable of discharging the process of victimage. One result, then, of this halfhearted move to mortification, is that while there is still a crime or an exigence (financial disaster) responsibility for this disaster cannot be properly allocated. As Burke and many theorists of identity are fond of noting, identification is not a purely positive process but occurs on the basis of negative differentiation: to square one’s self with an ongoing economic catastrophe requires the dissociation of one from the conditions that contributed to that catastrophe, unless the mortification process is pursued to its fullest extent.

            Obama here explains the economic crisis as an error, something that human agents have caused rather than a systemic expression or symptom of deeper problems in our socio-political milieu. This explanation does not demand an adjustment or reassessment of the relationship between American national identity and prosperity. The American people have lost their way, but they may once again find it. Obama’s speech relies heavily on the figure of the American “people” but neither as a class victimized by elites nor as a criminal class responsible for economic problems: instead, “the people” exist (though they are victims of circumstance), the government is their agent (but not to avenge them, only to defend them), and the current crisis will abate should America return to its intrinsic values.

            As we now know, the crisis did not abate but intensified: while Obama won the election in a sweeping fashion, the economy continued to grind and stutter. And by February 2009, an organized conservative populism presented itself as the answer to an Obama administration that could not stop the bleeding (warranting an observation about the outsized expectations of the presidency, seeing as we were roughly only a month into Obama’s term when a new conservative revolt began). What to make of the rapid emergence of this opposition to Obama? It is tempting to cynically filter some of the explanation through the thesis that politics is warfare, and political opposition benefits not from compromise but opposition. This might be right and might explain part of why Republican intransigence grew so quickly into the Obama administration. But it does not explain the emergence and persistence of populist themes in the emerging mode of new post-Obama political conservatism. What this essay has suggested is that the populist themes nurtured in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the TARP relief package were not brought out and either resolved or distributed by Obama’s rhetoric, but instead only partially acknowledged, leaving a reservoir of anxiety and public discontent as part of a public mood. By committing neither to a populist polemic nor to a fully introspective mortification-driven “perspective by incongruity”, “the people” remain a figure invested in Obama for his steady hand during the early moments of the economic crisis, but also a figure subject to later capture by conservative forces who suggested the president had not fully identified with their anger and anxiety.