The Rhetoric of New Conservative Populism

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University of Iowa Iowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

Fall 2013

Imagining American democracy: the rhetoric of new conservative populism

Paul E. Johnson University of Iowa

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This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4996

Recommended Citation Johnson, Paul E.. "Imagining American democracy: the rhetoric of new conservative populism." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2013. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.h3xcxu5m

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd Part of the Communication Commons IMAGINING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: THE RHETORIC OF NEW CONSERVATIVE POPULISM

Paul E. Johnson

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

December 2013

Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor David B. Hingstman

PAUL E. JOHNSON

2013

II Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

PH.D. THESIS

This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of

Paul E. Johnson has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies at the December 2013 graduation.

Thesis Committee David B. Hingstman, Thesis Supervisor

Isaac West

Jeff Bennett

Mark Andrejevic

David Wittenberg

To Alan Coverstone, who inspires me daily.

The considerations about the possible danger of uncontrolled metaphors…reawakens the hidden uncertainty about the rigor of a distinction that does not hold if the language in which it is stated reintroduces the elements of indetermination it sets out to eliminate.

Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor”

Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.

Mark Lilla, “The Tea Party Jacobins”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a dissertation is hard. Even though one often imagines a pleasing and solitary life of the mind spent at a warm desk while wind howls out of doors, the reality is that the solitude can be its own kind of maddening. I am fortunate to have had a number of communities to give me advice, support, and encouragement during this process.

My first acknowledgments go to the kind graduate students and faculty at the

University of Pittsburgh where I spent my undergraduate time as a debater. Instead of treating me as a young, naïve, stupid, and shallow youth, the graduate students and faculty who worked with the debate team treated me as an equal, even at moments where

I had not earned such equality.

Second, I must thank those I worked with at Wake Forest. To Allan Louden and

Ross K. Smith who worked with the debate team: both of you believed in me in ways that

I have not always lived up to, but I know that for that you do not believe in me any less.

Allan has always been a trusted confidant, advisor, and human being. Ross K. Smith was a pleasure to work with, and for suffering my academic pretentions he was none the worse. For Peter Brunette, may you rest in peace, I have nothing but thanks. You taught me a lesson about professionalism, work ethic, and attitude that has impacted me daily.

Third, my graduate school colleagues at Iowa were not only capable intellectual sparring partners but wonderful friends as well. Atilla, Michael, Mikey, Chad, Alison,

Kyle, Niko, Rebecca, Brooke, Michaela, Moyer, Bookman, Lisa, and Dan: you are all wonderful people I am proud to call friends. A special thanks to Michael Albrecht, who read much of this manuscript. Meryl Irwin provided invaluable friendship and

intelligence. Megan Foley is a brilliant human being and an even better friend. Sarah

Spring’s contributions to my life in graduate school are immeasurably immense.

Fourth, the A. Craig Baird Debate Forum at the university was a second home within the university for me. The debaters I worked with, including Kyle, Corey, Khiran,

Eric, Ryan, and David, all made my work with the debate team less of a job and more of a pleasure. Adam Abelkop was a joy to coach with. And of course in Jason Regnier, I found a best friend who was not only a happy colleague but a worthy intellectual sparring partner.

Fifth, the faculty at Iowa provided me with enormous support and knowledge.

David Depew and Barb Biesecker, especially, shaped my thinking in ways for which I owe an essentially infinite debt of gratitude. David Wittenberg’s sound theoretical insights and questions always make me think. Jeff Bennett has always lent eyes and ears when asked, and Isaac West provided rigor, criticism, professional advice, and listened to my endless questions, rants, and theoretical obfuscations. His advice and support were sorely needed. David Hingstman has been a joy to work with both as a debate coach and as my advisor, always asking the right questions and pushing me in productive ways.

A number of outsiders also contributed to this project, whether scholastically or socially. Ronald Walter Greene provided helpful comments on early drafts of some of the work. Randall Bush, who I now call a dear friend, provided a wealth of useful feedback and helpful thoughts in long conversations over excellent beer. Special thanks to the faculty and graduate students at Northwestern University for tolerating my presence.

My home (again) at the University of Pittsburgh has also been a hospitable site to inhabit as I finish this project. The faculty and graduate students of the communication

studies department have been invaluable intellectual and emotional sources of support.

Thank you, John, John, Shanara, Brent M., Sydney, Amber, Odile, Matt, Taylor, Joe,

Brent S., Ethan Brita, Cherod, Katie, and Martin. Joseph Packer read almost every page of this dissertation, which is insane. Thanks especially to Gordon Mitchell: you have been a really big part of everything. Many people leave for their first job only to find that it is a very lonely place. Mine is not. Mine is a home.

Finally, I would like to thank those very close to me. My family unconditionally supports and loves me. Caitlin Bruce is kind, charitable, and brilliant and I am lucky to have you. You keep me up when I might otherwise fall. Thank you for everything.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ...... 1

A Tea Party for the Winners ...... 1 Tea Party as Astroturf ...... 10 Tea Party as Racial Reaction ...... 13 Tea Party as Threat to Democracy ...... 17 Procession of Chapters ...... 22

CHAPTER II PEOPLE AGAINST GOVERNMENT IN A TIME FOR CHOOSING...29

Introduction ...... 29 Populists and Progressives……………………………………...……………...….33 The Progressive Moment………………………….………………………………39 Chasing “The People” ...... 41 A Time for Choosing ...... 64 Conclusion: Nixon and Reagan’s America ...... 73

CHAPTER III FINANCIAL CATACLYSM AND AN ANXIOUS "PEOPLE .. 83

Introduction ...... 83 Too Big, Too Fast ...... 85 Liberalism’s Promise ...... 90 Elided Non-Moments ...... 94 Bailout Nation’s Start ...... 98 Wall Street/Main Street ...... 100 Bailout II ...... 109 A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class ...... 115 Conclusion ...... 121

CHAPTER IV DEMOCRACY FOUND? CONSTITUTING THE POLITY...123

Introduction ...... 124 Elections Matter ...... 127 Obama at Grant Park ...... 132 Right America, Feeling Wronged: Conservatism on the Run ...... 137 Conclusion ...... 151

CHAPTER V RICK SANTELLI'S "REAL SILENT MAJORITTY………....152

Introduction ...... 153 Auto “Bailouts” and the TARP Hangover ...... 156

vii

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ...... 172 Stimulus in the Body Politic ...... 181 “The Real Silent Majority” ...... 187 Conclusion ...... 202

CHAPTER VI THE TEA PARTY AND THE FORM OF POPULAR FRUSTRATION………………………………………………………………………..208

Introduction ...... 209 Form ...... 212 Social Movement and Form ...... 214 Taxed Enough Already ...... 218 Visuality and the Democratic Paradox ...... 231 Visual Emergence of the Tea Party ...... 234 Populist Claustrophobia ...... 238 Nostalgic Markers………………………………………………………….……..242 Threat of .Socialism/Redistribution……....………………………………………244 Conclusions ...... 250

CHAPTER VII MELANCHOLIC POPULISM IN THE TEA PARTY ...... 255

Introduction ...... 256 Tea Party Rising ...... 259 Defining the System……………..………………………………………………..262 "Give Us Liberty…” ...... 264 “…Or Give Me Death” ...... 265 Ontologizing Synecdoche ...... 270 On Democratic Objects………………...…………………………………………279 Sarah Palin’s Populism ...... 288 Conclusion: Towards the Populist Deductive ...... 294

CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION: ON MELANCHOLIC POPULISM ...... 298

Rising Partisanship ...... 299 Attitudes Toward Democracy ...... 310 Avenues for Future Research ...... 315

NOTES ...... 316

REFERENCES………………… ……………………………………………………...351

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

1. Cleveland Tax Day Tea Party Listens to Speaker…………...…………....……...238

2. Cleveland Tax Day Tea Party Faces Opposite Capitol…………………….…….239

3. Sign Referencing Founders at Chattanooga Tea Party…………………...………243

4. Cleveland Tea Party Finds Republic Under Threat……………….……...………244

5. Uncle Sam at the Des Moines Tea Party…………….…………....……………...246

6. Proud American Capitalist at the Des Moines Tea Party………………………...247

7. Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage………………….…………………………..249

8. No Socialism, Comrade…………………………………...……………………...250

9. Tea Party as “People”………………………………...…………………………..275

ix 1

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A Tea Party for the Winners

On February 19th, Rick Santelli made what was expected to be another banal appearance on a CNBC morning show that nobody watched. Santelli was a minor personality on a news station that was at its high point owing to the financial crisis of

2008. 700 miles away from Chicago, Barack Obama was less than a month into his first term as president. His administration had recently approved a stimulus package that cost more than eight billion dollars, and was well on its way to passing legislation that would help homeowners who were underwater on their mortgage. Neither move came as a surprise: Obama had been pushed into power on a wave of anxiety and fear about the state of the American economy, and had promised that some of his first acts as president would be acts that would fight for the Americans who had been victimized by the general economic catastrophe.

In this context, Santelli gave a speech that should have been shocking for its content, but perhaps not its tone. Dressed in a slick suit and surrounded by well-dressed day traders, he gave a fiery oration against the mortgage plan that doubled as a rumination on American decline. Santelli railed against the bill for its ostensible result of rewarding “losers” who purchased mortgages that they could not afford, worrying that if

America kept going down this path the “winners” would be left carrying all the water while the incompetent got off scot-free.1 Cheered on by the traders at his side, Santelli continued to rage, hitting a crescendo as he announced that he and his compatriots at the exchange represented “a pretty good cross-section of America, the new silent majority”

2 speaking out against government policies which could not capably distinguish between winners and losers.

I remember watching this speech that day, and seeing it become a viral phenomenon. What struck me was how Santelli’s slick appearance, lack of self- reflexivity, and his almost cruel attitude towards the “losers” in his speech was starkly dissonant with what I thought was the mood of the country. Wasn’t America in the midst of a historical economic crisis of such great scale and scope that it was rivaled only by the Great Depression?2 Weren’t those “losers” that Santelli was talking about middle

Americans who had hopes and dreams tethered to a mortgage that they had signed up for in hopes of keeping up with the Joneses? With a little more thought, however, the phrase

“silent majority” drew more of my attention, suggesting the limitations and biases of my thoughts. The silent majority, after all, was not some neutral phrase, but instead the politicized brainchild of Lee Atwater, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and Richard

Nixon. It bore the mark of a racialized past, as the “silent majority” was a discursive prophylaxis that empowered suburban white, male, and sexually normative Americans to conceive of themselves as the most “true” set of American citizens while it simultaneously built a conservative coalition of southern states on racial animus.3

Santelli, who spoke righteously as a wealthy white man among other white men, had struck a chord with many conservatives who felt marginalized in the months after the election of Barack Obama, speaking in a way that a silent majority never could.

Santelli’s speech was a viral sensation, racking up views on Youtube almost immediately and being praised especially by the conservative news world for his willingness to stand up and speak his mind. Even centrist commentators, who were

3 suspicious of Santelli’s apparent position within the hierarchy of financial elites, suggested that his rant had managed to tap into a very real kind of frustration on the part of the American people. Why did Santelli’s performance circulate so rapidly and substantially? After all, the many Americans struggling during the economic crisis probably did not think of themselves as “losers,” and even if they did, they would almost certainly resent being called such. It was especially shocking to see someone who looked like a stock broker elevated to hero status so soon after the 2008 crisis had made a villain out of Wall Street. Had not Barack Obama run on the promise of representing “Main

Street” and had not Americans elected him decisively?

Yet Santelli’s speech resonated perhaps because of how he tapped into a powerful well of American nostalgia. He suggested that frustrated Americans get together and dump derivatives and other junk stocks into Lake Michigan to launch a “Tea Party” that harkened back to America’s founding. This phrase caught on like wildfire. Protests sprung up across the country. Less than a month later there were scattered protests through the nation. Less than two months later “Tax Day Tea Parties” erupted with protestors showing up to oppose Big Government in the name of “the people.”4 The Tea

Party, as it would come to be known, captured America’s imagination, headlining newspapers, and prompting questions from pundits, scholars, and politicians about its scope, authenticity, and meaning. While the debates about the Tea Party raged, they indelibly made their mark on American politics, helping to push the Republican Party to historic gains in the 2010 midterm elections. However, the movement’s appearance and influence leave lingering questions. Namely, why did American conservatism make its

4 first explicitly populist movement at this time? And why did it take hold in the national imagination? Their explicit populism was a defining characteristic.

In this dissertation, I use discourses surrounding the Tea Party to engage the idea of “the people” as a function that summons and cancels collective belonging. This approach runs counter to accounts of “the people” as either a real phenomenon or a discursive place. I suggest that the Tea Party’s version of populism maintains continuity with the tradition of American populism but also distinguishes itself by defining “the people” against a miasma of elites flattened out into the government. The Tea Party claimed that big business, crony capitalists, cynical politicians, and socialist agents were all working together in the seat of power in Washington, D.C. To sustain this claim my study includes a brief genealogy of conservative populism along with a general survey of populism’s larger history. By situating my study both historically alongside other populisms and in the context of rhetorical theory about collective identification, I show that the typical interpretations of the Tea Party’s meaning cannot fully explain either its emergence or significance for both the public at large and rhetorical critics. By engaging the public neither from the perspective of rational-critical deliberation nor from a purely interpellative tradition one can understand the frustration of “the people” to be an intuitive feature conditioning democratic representation. That is, in order for “the people” to remain a meaningful concept that drives political discourse despite an inability for any actor to finalize its meaning, it must possess very unique characteristics that allow it to configure a broad swath of discourses. I contextualize this particular emergence of “the people” both in light of the 2008 financial crisis and also the election in the same year of

Barack Obama as President of the United States. I examine how the circulating media

5 accounts and self-reports produced popular frustration as a stable sentiment that defined the salience of the Tea Party as authentic. By examining the rhetorical processes that produce “the American people” and the Tea Party, I show the public configuration of the movement conflated it with “the people” and in so doing explain not only why the seemingly counter-intuitive rant of Santelli galvanized America, but also how the movement could succeed by flattening out and rendering equivalent seemingly disparate policies like the American Recovery and Investment Act and the Affordable Care Act.

That the public can be at once one and many things suggests its capacity to flatten political phenomena in public argumentation. Both the popular press and some strains of rhetorical theory have conceived of “the people” as ontologically stable categories.

Michael Calvin McGee began the work of destabilizing this category in his 1975 essay

“In Search of ‘The People:’ A Rhetorical Alternative” where he suggested that “the people” mattered not as either a data point in a logical argument or as a fallacy to be ignored.5 Instead, McGee suggested that the general investment in the concept of “the people” indicated that critics charting and interrogating populist myths over time could generate novel insights about the shifting attitudes of society. While McGee’s move configured a number of notable shifts in rhetorical studies, most notably the turn to constitutive and eventually critical rhetoric, “the people” retain a certain ontological appeal that suggests critics have occasionally not taken McGee far enough. This is true not only within some rhetorical theory but also in widely imported and applied political theory sharing affinity with rhetoric like that of Ernesto Laclau.6 Critics should push even further on the lever inserted by McGee, questioning not only where the interpellative power of “the people” comes from but also the magnitude of that power. I hold that there

6 is an ineffable element of victimization and marginalization associated with this democratic appeal, and theories which hold that “the people” draws its appeal solely from a notion of totality threaten to naturalize visions of populism that contribute to increased political partisanship. Rhetorics of populism suggest a whole and unified “people” even as the necessity of their appearance should suggest the very failure of that totality. But their repeated and common circulation in mass mediated accounts of politics suggest the former thread draws more eyes than the latter even as the persistent circulation suggests an absence attendant to the concept that drives its appeal, suggesting “the people” both summons and cancels itself in the same moment. That some are included and others excluded installs ideas of exteriority and victimization at the center rather than the periphery of the democratic imaginary, particularly in political narratives, even though there is a tendency in political observers and critics to understand those conditions as exceptional rather than ordinary.

To guide this move, I adopt two key notions that allow me to question the force of

“the people” in circulating discourses The first insight I draw from the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, who offer reading strategies that do not presuppose totalizing forces of power but instead suggest how power is always in the process of justifying itself and writing over its inabilities to completely or wholly configure an identity.7 Rhetorical scholar Chris Lundberg suggests that one advantage of the psychoanalytic approach is its capacity to understand the constitutive power of what he terms “failed unicity,” that is,

The labor of feigned unicity affords the subject the possibility of contingent, localized unicities, wrought only through the rhetorical labor of form and sustained by the subject’s investment in imagined unicities. From the perspective of unicity then, rhetoric is pharmakon: it is both the poison and the cure. Rhetoric

names the site at which the essential lacks in the subject, sign, and social relation are produced and made manifest and is simultaneously the means through which subjects are produced, signifiers are made to refer to the world, and by which social relations are imagined 8

Reading for failed unicity allows one to both understand the imaginaries gestured at by concepts like “the people” and how subject’s fractured attempts to understand the complexities of the human barnyard often mark it a well-ordered totality rather than a chaotic mess. Locating the intensities of social relationality in lack suggests how totalities maintain their appeal on fraught rather than firm bases, which drives my project’s problematization of certainty associated with the figure of “the people” in both rhetorical theory and public life.

The second key notion in this dissertation relates to Michael Warner’s work on publics, and especially his essay “The Mass Public and Mass Subject,” which suggests that the “mass public” is constituted on the basis of an abiding negativity directed towards those bodies that appear “in” public. In Warner’s formation, the bodies that appear “in” public actually constitute the mass public by signaling in their particularities their incapacity to be assimilated within the disembodied and privileged public that sees and consumes them.9 This principle of negativity suggests that whatever exclusions and discriminations may be wrought by the constitution of the mass public actually rely on a very fragile firmament. Supposedly firm boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are dynamic. As bodies threaten to matriculate from the area of the excluded into the zone of the included, politicians, media members, and citizens act in ways that suggest constant action rather than inertia sustains the apparent coherence of the mass public. Non- appearance not only carries its own fetishes of appearance that may goad members of the mass public into embodying themselves, but it also suggests that the mass public requires

8 the fuel of other particularities’ appearance in order to run, indicating that an absence of particularities might threaten to withdraw the needed representational grist for the mill of the mass public. The migration of traditionally subaltern behaviors like public protests, rhetorics of victimage, and wounded bodies from the political left to right suggests not only the fragility of the public but also that said fragility enables the particularities of some bodies to signify differently than they have before.

To divine the shifting ground of the mass public requires a diverse archive. I read a body of texts that include books on the history of populism, presidential and candidate speeches, mass media reports, political commentary, transcripts of news shows,

Congressional testimony, trade books, online photo galleries, news paper editorials, letters to the editor, and movement literature. I analyze this broad swath of texts to try and generate an account of circulating public discourse before, during, and after the 2008 election, to establish the intense political environment at the time of the Tea Party’s rise. I also rely on analysis from first-person interviews conducted by researchers in other fields, for example the work of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, who conducted intensive interviews with Tea Partiers during the movement’s rise and establishment.10

Working from these texts not only allows me to suggest something of the national mood, but also how the media environment portrayed the attitudes of the American public. For many Americans, their interaction with politics might consist of watching a news show or glancing at a newspaper headline. The scope of my study tries to approximate the sorts of discourse one might encounter on a given day during the financial crisis, during the election, or during the Tea Party’s rise during a casual encounter with the media.

However, there is a necessary slippage, one that mirrors the complex and fragmented

9 dynamics associated with “the people” themselves. It is impossible to capture the essence of “the people,” after all. While my research does not allow me to state conclusively the motivations of actual Tea Party members, I can suggest affinities and relays between the national mood and those participating in the movement while also relying on first hand discourses, like letters to the editor or person on the street interviews.

My study is not an attempt to understand the political economy of the mass media’s interpretation of the Tea Party, nor is it an attempt to articulate some unicausal theory of either the movement’s rise or its meaning. One cannot simply refer to the Tea

Party as an honest expression of libertarian sentiment, for example. Numerous polls, interviews, and conducted surveys suggested that the Tea Party held conflicting views about government spending and government programs, targeting some of latter like welfare more than other programs like Medicare and Social Security. While figures like

Dick Armey suggest that the Tea Party uprising simply reflected the honest emergence of a kind of intrinsically American libertarian sentiment that was suspicious of governmental authority. The Tea Party, after all, served as a repository for many conflicting political views, but it constituted a big enough tent that its might in the 2010 midterms was strong.

Instead, I examine the way the movement was configured in public discourse to suggest how the rhetorical concept of “the people” configured the noun figure of “the public” which often serves as a warrant driving public policy claims. At times I do read primary literature, letters to the editor, and other examples of Tea Party discourse in order to suggest how popular frustration was configured in not only the mass public but also the counterpublic of the Tea Party itself. This does allow me to comment on the

10 dynamics of the movement itself, and account for the issues, arguments, and objects that it gravitated towards as it developed as a movement. Before I proceed, I should also address some of the dominant theories circulating about the meaning of the Tea Party movement, as I suggest that my project may provide a helpful supplement to them.

Tea Party as Astroturf

A number of observers and analysts have dismissed the Tea Party as nothing more than a fundamental expression of the power of economic interests, magnified and reflected in the economy of distribution, promotion, and marketing of their movement.

Anthony DiMaggio’s The Rise of the Tea Party is representative of these efforts, as it attempts to locate the success of the Tea Party as a “propaganda movement,” one that relies on mystification to dupe the public about the “true nature” of the Tea Party.

Relying on the work of Noam Chomsky, DiMaggio defines propaganda as “the promotion of one point of view at the expense of the other” and suggests that it is

“practiced through restricting views to those expressed by political and economic elites.”11 Suggesting that we interpret the Tea Party only as an expression of an ideological push “in favor of market fundamentalism,” DiMaggio separates the realm of presumably acceptable deliberations about the distribution of political goods and the righting of moral and economic wrongs from the realm of misleading “demagoguery” of the sort performed by the Tea Party.12 On this view, the Tea Party’s political are illegitimate because they do not reflect the real (read: reasoned, civil, and progressive) interests of “the people.”

This book and works like it certainly do contribute a number of useful points.

DiMaggio rightly points out that the media contributed to the production of Tea Party

11 legitimacy by uncritically agreeing that it was a populist movement capturing a certain

American zeitgeist in the wake of the bailouts.13 Even progressive media, perhaps eager to warn people to not rest on their laurels following the 2008 election, oversold the

“mass” element of the Tea Party’s claims to act as a “mass movement.”14 DiMaggio establishes clearly that even progressive media talked about the Tea Party as if it were an authentic movement by using words like protest, agitation, and demonstration.

Where DiMaggio errs is in relying too heavily on a standard sociological definition of a social movement to conclude that the Tea Party is not one. Because the

Tea Party’s mantra reflects a limited and central set of tenets, “it is difficult to conclude they are manifestations of a bottom-up, decentralized, and diverse movement.”15 Earlier

DiMaggio is obsessed with proving the Tea Party is small, going through laundry lists of rallies and pointing repeatedly to the small numbers of attendees to demonstrate it is not a real movement. It is clear that DiMaggio is driven to find a real social movement, one that presumably would advance a left-progressive political agenda capable of challenging various modern forms of capitalist rationality and common sense. However, this suggests that the affective wells that the Tea Party drew on were inauthentic effects of economic power rather than legitimate sites of frustration.

This approach is risky because it may minimize, demean, and ultimately dismiss the investments and attitudes among both producers and consumers of media that made the Tea Party into a news phenomenon. Even the strictest economic determinist recognizes that the media’s interest in reporting stories relates to the capacity of a story to generate attention, and ratings. But why did the media and public become so interested in the Tea Party? Certainly the expectation was not done on the basis of partisanship, as

12 other news sources besides Fox News were eager to report on the Tea Party, suggesting broad rather than narrow interest in the story. Perhaps these media outlets reasoned that there remained a great deal of anger and disaffection in the wake of the financial crisis and the TARP giveaways, and that there would be great public interest in the manifestation of such sentiments. The institutional Republicans also promoted stories and narratives about the Tea Party to suggest the authenticity of their political positions. But many other pet GOP causes have quickly faded to black. This suggests that to dismiss the

Tea Party as a social movement demeans the very real sentiments of worry, anxiety, and fear that continued to circulate as America dealt with an ongoing economic recession as just more false consciousness, grist for the capitalistic propaganda mill.

Certainly, the effect of the Tea Party’s public circulation was to reaffirm and strengthen the market fundamentalism that DiMaggio analyzes. But in part this effect was a result of the Tea Party’s ability to act as if it were a social movement appealing to a series of authentic concerns. It does little good, as many did, to simply condemn the Tea

Party as a top down Astroturf organization, because the Tea Party, like most variants of populism, generated a critique of the hierarchies relied on to warrant a claim like the accusation of its emergence from “the top.” What populism does most effectively is to position an aggrieved “people” against powerful interests in the imagination, creating a powerful enthymeme that refutes the charge of “Astroturfism” before it can generate momentum. DiMaggio’s reliance on rigid sociological definitions of social movement drawn from categories of power that reflect a structurally Marxist interpretation of politics as a space that continuously expresses economic power relations assumes that

13 categories of “powerful” and “powerless” are fixed and universal rather than categories that can be mobilized rhetorically in the service of a polyphony of actors.

Tea Party as Racial Reaction

Others were concerned that the Tea Party represented an expression of white supremacy. The reality of a black president and an America rapidly becoming more demographically diverse threatened not only the long-effective “southern states” strategy that had tied together the Republican coalition since 1968, but also the “white” imagined

America that could not countenance color in the legitimate seat of democratic power.

Typically, these claims took four, often interconnecting, forms. One approach was essentially demographic, noting that Tea Partiers tended, on balance, to be “Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.”16 A second version of this argument historicizes the Tea Party phenomenon as a chapter in a long story about American’s conservatism’s relationship to race. As progressive blogger Jamelle Bouie puts it, “Racial resentment was an integral part of the conservative movement from the very beginning; it animated some of its earliest crusaders – William F. Buckley — and provided it with its first firm electoral footing…there’s no denying that racial animus fuels the movement’s momentum.”17 The third approach, represented in a scholarly article by rhetorician Darrel

Wanzer, understands the Tea Party to be about race for its capacity to insist that race is in no way part of the conversation about the movement. That is, it is representative of a racial neoliberalism that “is marked, ﬁrst and foremost, by an active suppression of ‘race’ as a legitimate topic or term of public discourse and public policy” which then underwrites charges of reverse racism leveled against those who would “see” race in a given discussion.18 In a break from media outlets like AlterNet whose racial critiques of

14 the Tea Party typified the progressive response, Wanzer also suggests some of the blame for the racial element of the Tea Party lied at the feet of Barack Obama, who routinely passed up opportunities to “race” discussions conducting more depoliticized policy discussions. A fourth angle in the discussion focused on groups like the “Birthers” who sought to otherize Barack Obama as an illegitimate president, those who took openly racist signs to political rallies (like the rather famous one depicting Obama as a witch doctor), or those circulating racist chain emails.19

The four tiered racialization of the election indicates how the threat of state intervention threatens anti-black political interests by mobilizing race as a political category.The state is racialized in two ways. First, the state threatens with its interventions to upset the apple cart of hierarchies produced by and with civil society.

The threat is not particularly staunch; many have documented the extent to which the state has, over time, aided and abetted and even constituted racism. That is, to the extent that the state recognizes the category of “race” as a warrant for claims to intervention, the state threatens whiteness. The threat, then, is staunchest at the level of the imaginary.20

Second, the state in our particular conjuncture is racialized because its head is a multiracial (though coded as black) man, Barack Obama. Because the presidency has an inordinate role to play in how citizens imagine the polity, a black president cannot be reconciled with whiteness because where a few minorities in the House or Senate might actually fuel ultimately conservative fantasies about multiculturalism, the presidency’s symbolic function is ultimately one of homogenization rather than diversification: “out of many, one” is the master phrase of the presidency.

The twice-racialized character of the state then explains both some elements of the Tea Party’s white demography and also the presence of elements of the movement that challenged Obama’s citizenship and sought, by turns, to otherize him. In a detailed study that interviewed thousands of Tea Partiers, attended numerous rallies, and surveyed their internal literature, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded that:

Racial overtones were unmistakable, for instance, when a Virginia Tea Partier told us that a ‘plantation mentality’ was keeping ‘some people’ on welfare. These kinds of racially insensitive comments made in person were only a very faint echo of the racial slurs that appear rarely but persistently at Tea Party rallies across the country, including in signs with racist epithets and signs equating the presidency of Barack Obama to ‘white slavery.’… Tea Partier’ views of minorities were even more extreme than other avowed conservatives and Republicans…It is important to note that, compared to other Americans, Tea Partiers rate whites relatively poorly on these characteristics, too.21

The tendency of Tea Partiers to not only deny their racism but also to carefully police displays of overt racism at rallies suggests more than a grain of truth in Wanzer’s estimation that, for the Tea Party, race is a central element that must be disavowed.

I say a central element because it is possible for there to be several highly influential strains in the constitution of a polity. Kevin Michael DeLuca observes that critics should act in ways that encourage rather than discourage the formulation of alliances and cooperatives when facing political challenges. While DeLuca’s example is the environmental movement, I think analysis of the polity can also benefit from

“expanding the links between the different struggles against oppression” and disavowing,

“an essentialist identity politics that Balkanizes” that instead connects “the different antagonisms that give rise to “ various struggles which may be understood as having feminist, racist, environmental” and other vectors of importance.22

Racial lenses tell an important part of the story of the Tea Party. Certainly they serve as a helpful reminder of what Thomas Nakayama and Bob Krizek call the

“functional invisibility, yet importance” of whiteness that structures both scholarly work and also American political space.23 Here race meets what Michel Foucault calls in The

Birth of Biopolitics a state-phobia intrinsic to the mode of subjectivity dominant in the narrative of individualism that circulates easily in contemporary America.24 Foucault suggests that this state phobia holds regardless of particular governmental structures, which explains why racism cannot explain the entirety of its function:

Constantly found in these general themes of state phobia is that there is a kinship, a sort of genetic continuity or evolutionary implication between different forms of the state, with the administrative state, the welfare state, the bureaucratic state, the fascist state, and the totalitarian state all being, in no matter which of the various analyses, the successive branches of one and the same great tree of state control in its continuous and unified expansion.25

Recoil from the state is nothing new, and it is especially nothing new in America, where fear of the state (though not solely fear of the state) motivated not only the American founding but strains of Jacksonian populism coherent even without their racial elements.

Foucault is also careful to suggest that much of this state-phobia in the American context was nurtured by its articulation to the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War.

Moreover, the opposition to authority as a notion, detailed not only by Foucault but also by Claude Lefort in The Political Forms of Modern Society, suggests that even in contexts without America’s racial history, the opposition between state and individual carries a kind of formative charge in constituting subjectivity. Racism cannot, for example, completely explain the tendency of all presidents to face short-lived rhetorical honeymoons in public discourse, outside of wartime. Nor can it account for the affective

17 charge associated with the effectiveness of discourses bashing elites who, for so long, have not been people of color and yet, who have consistently, been targets of populist ire.

I do take for granted Michael Warner’s suggestion that for a long time the “mass public” has been constituted as white, unmarked, privileged, and normative because the texts analyzed here suggest that race remains a driver of anxieties in the post-2008

American political environment.26 I also believe that this dynamic of disincorporation has much to do not only with the epiphenomenal expressions of hierarchy (reproduction of privilege) as it does the fundamental hydraulics of the process of subjectivity, which demands the rejection of but also a disavowed connection to, an Other that exists as the condition of possibility of subjectivity. On this account, the inversion of the logic of the mass public, understood as an effect of a body of color ascending to the most kingly seat of power in a democracy, expresses itself not only in racialized dynamics but also ones that raise questions about the place of power and the role of “the people” in the democratic imaginary.

Tea Party as Threat to Democracy

Another line of thought in the public record worries that the Tea Party poses a threat to the civil order of democracy. New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman, for example, worried during the hot summer of health care town halls that the acrimony and vitriol was unprecedented:

There’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.27

As Kate Zernike notes in her book about the Tea Party, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party

America, the movement also adopted signifiers of more radical change, whether found in

18 calls to “Take America Back” or the distribution of “cardboard pitchforks and torches.”

As Tea Party activist Nancy Davey said “’You can’t bring real pitchforks, so these just make a statement,’ not that she wouldn’t like the real kind. ‘We’ve been a little bit too nice’ her friend says.”28

These concerns are also reflected in scholarly approaches to the Tea Party.

George Lundskow, in an insightful essay in Critical Sociology, suggests the Tea Party’s ultimate telos is a destructive and authoritarian negativity. Locating (partly right, in my view) the Tea Party’s motivation to be “personal and emotional” he suggests that “Tea

Partiers are not murderers, they attack programs and policies that offer life to others— civil rights, affirmative action, access to education, and pluralistic diversity. Typically joyless, the destructive person attacks happiness in any form.”29 The intensification of demands for radical change, whether found in summoning revolutionary markers like pitchforks or a fierce and abiding negativity, leads one to surmise that there is an antagonistic relationship between the Tea Party’s small government ethos and the moderate-by-any-historical-standard liberalism of the Obama administration. That this abiding frustration is directed at interventionist social programs suggests an envious desire to deny others enjoyment.

What links the anxieties in all three of these sources is the contrast drawn between the Tea Party and an ideal vision of democratic practice in which interlocutors come together in some kind of shared space. Whether found in the uncivil shouts of town hall participants, the waving of emblems that signify the need to resort to violence rather than civil discourse, or a kind of personal habit of negativity towards shared space itself, something about the Tea Party’s discontent suggests an inability to engage in what

Chantal Mouffe calls in The Democratic Paradox agonistic rather than antagonistic politics. Critiquing traditional advocates of various forms of deliberative democracy, from the earlier work of Jürgen Habermas to the political liberalism of figures like John

Rawls and Richard Rorty, Mouffe suggests that where democracy is understood as a pitched battle between two strains of thought, collectivism and individualism, the pendulum has fallen too far on the side of the individual.30 To correct it, arguers and critics must strive to elevate agonism over antagonism: that is, to construct divisions between opponents to but to do so within a shared space circumscribed by some sort of shared concern.31 Mouffe suggests that only a move to agonism can preserve the capacity for actors to engage in democratic practices.

Mouffe’s definition of “democratic practices,” however, remains evasive. She is careful to distinguish herself from Habermas and other deliberative proceduralists, suggesting that the fetishization of proceduralism blinds participants to the violence associated with normativities used to construct the content of procedures. Indeed, she takes aim at the depoliticization of proceduralism by drawing on Carl Schmitt to suggest the inevitability and necessity of decisionism in the constitution of the political. What then does Mouffe mean by democratic practices that constructed “shared space?” Does she mean shared space is constituted through empty signifiers, those of nation or notions like freedom and liberty? This seems unlikely, for the former are associated with some of history’s worst forms of depoliticizing violence and the latter have proven themselves intensely vulnerable to cooptation by the very forces of individualism Mouffe rails against. Perhaps she is referring to policy aims, i.e. the elimination of nuclear proliferation, reductions in environmental damage, or the extension of public goods? But

20 these policy aims are themselves matters that become prioritized, raised and lowered in the public imagination on the basis of their circulation.

Both the popular press’s concerns about the decline of civility and public reason and Mouffe’s own more critical concern about public deliberation circle around the same anxiety: namely, democracy’s inability to stipulate in advance the issues and content under its purview. This realm is the purview of rhetoric, which has long concerned itself as a field with the liminal spaces between imaginary promises and actually existing exclusions. Jean Jacques Rousseau knew this problem well, which was why in The Social

Contract he sought to distinguish “the people” from the sovereign and establish the former as an impossible horizon rather than a delimited goal.32 To the extent that one remains fixated on the preservation of civility or the defense of “shared space” for contestation, there remains an undecidable element in how one defines the conditions of civil exchange and also the spaces in which such exchanges occur. The idea of agonism and shared space for contestation is not an intrinsically bad thing, and provides many civil and legal benefits for individuals with little in the way of redress for injustice except through the avenue of the law. Our conclusion should not be to toss the idea of shared space out onto some democratic trash heap, but instead to understand that the work of constructing shared space is often done as much if not more through rhetorics of openness and non-determinism rather than through traditional calls for consubstantiality.

Bob Ivie suggests that to “achieve what might be called a fluid condition of consubstantial rivalry” would productively highlight partiality and contingency to better temper democratic politics.33 The fluidity here might be in showing how public discourses deconstruct and render partial “the people” even as it attempts to constitute

21 them. It is the difference between Rick Santelli’s demand that America see his pain and

Bill Clinton’s offer to listen to the pain of others: the former eradicates any space for interpretation.

The Tea Party poses a challenge to this partial consubstantiality by generating a populist discourse with no discernable outside, marked by the articulation of the Tea

Party’s “people” to a large number of political positions, mostly negative. What this also indicates is that the Tea Party was more than just another expression of conservative retrenchment, but at least partly rooted in the technologies of democratic representation themselves. If one follows even the tradition of critics of traditional democracy like

Ernesto Laclau, Sheldon Wolin, Jacques Ranciere, Shane Phelan, and Wendy Brown, one finds that what may redeem democracy is the fact of its undecidability. As Ranciere suggests in Democracy in What State, the power of democracy is ultimately its inability to signify and its capacity to jam up the existing order, to remind us that what exists not as the expression of some eternal order’s vision of hierarchy but instead a product and process of some set of actions, however accumulated, of humans.34 Threats to civility, deliberation, and order can be understood as reactions to the idea of certainty emergent in the Tea Party’s aggressive interpretation of the character, attitude, and meaning of the

American “people,” and especially the implications that this headstrong attitude had for the public good, here understood as the capacity for democracy to be performed in a given circumstance. If democracy requires shared space but populism covertly performs antagonistic politics, recovering the elements of non-finality and seeds of agonism in the

Tea Party’s performance might suggest that the Tea Party reflected not a consolidation of conservative strength but instead an expression of, not only of its weakness, but of the

22 instability that attends to any movement relying on a heavily populist rhetorical style.

This dissertation attempts to unpack the conservative “people” both over time and in the contemporary moment to read the Tea Party for its insistence on its coincidence with “the people,” and the fragility of this appeal.

Procession of Chapters

Chapter 1 attempts to add historical context to the politicization of “the people” throughout American history. Although a full study of the history of this term is beyond this (and perhaps any) project, I seek to analyze the moment where conservative capture of “the people” first became a serious rhetorical strategy. Examining the emergence of the New Right in the late 1950’s, I suggest that conservatives began to define “the people” against rather than with the government. By conflating fears of instability and violence in both economic and military senses, “the people” ceased being defined against self-interested and profit-motivated corporate heads and began to be understood as a virtuous whole that had to assert themselves over and above the government.

Conservatives could then utilize this definition of “the people” to lay siege to New Deal and Great Society programs. Taking issue with the dominant interpretation of a conservative keystone, Ronald Reagan’s famous speech “A Time for Choosing,” delivered at the end of the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater that would sow the seeds for the racialized and divisive “silent majority” of Richard Nixon, I argue that the new conservative “people” were coopted by a Reagan performance that was considerably more radical than conventional rhetorical accounts assert. This definition of “people” against the government would be intensified and refined over the years by conservative rhetors, and eventually mainstreamed by centrist Democrats.

Chapter 2 jumps ahead to the Tea Party’s self-proclaimed starting point, the 2008 financial crisis and the government’s decision to release funds from the Troubled Asset

Relief Program to nationalize private “toxic assets.” This chapter surveys major media and blog coverage of the unfolding catastrophe from late September to early October. I suggest that the public transcript reveals a nation in the throes of a nascent populism but also trying to contain it, by way of an emerging narrative that attempted to scapegoat

“Wall Street” while lionizing the ordinary Americans of “Main Street.” As public discourse revealed one definition of “the people” with a powerful history behind it (the idea of a virtuous “people” abused by powerful financial forces), the emerging narrative both reified and destabilized the narrative of the “American dream” in ways that pointed to a deeper ideological crisis. As Vikki Bell suggests in her reading of Foucault’s work on neoliberalism, the presumption held by public policy advocates that the judgments of the market represent the vox populi creates conditions hospitable to systemic identitarian crises. Once there is nothing outside of market judgment, disfavorable economic circumstances threaten to be understood in public discourse as an indictment of the judgment of “the people.”35 This crisis suggests the inability to reconcile the utopian promise of liberal individualism with actually existing social instability and hierarchy.

Many public intellectuals and media accounts unwittingly sought to rehabilitate this market populism by using scapegoating mechanisms to particularize the crisis. The “Wall

Street vs. Main Street.” theme, one that became central to the ongoing presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain, tried to rehabilitate the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the average American at the same time that it essentially admitted to the limitations and conditions placed upon individual agency in conceiving of the

24 economic as subject to manipulation by an elite few. Barack Obama’s “Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” speech, delivered as anxieties over the economy continued to bubble, exacerbated rather than dissipated the nascent demand for an American “people” by utilizing a language of responsibility that democratized responsibility for the financial crisis rather than scapegoating elites.

Chapter 3 follows on the heels of the economic crisis, examining the moment of

Barack Obama’s election. With the public raging, the elections became a moment to reinvigorate the idea of America. Barack Obama’s electoral victory offered to unite a nation divided by politics and fearing economic destitution. By embodying multiple elements of the American dream (race, class, family, and individualism) Obama’s elections became framed as an eventual moment of national exceptionalism. However,

Obama and the media’s interpretation of the election via what I call “frames of harmony” abolished shared public space that forced conservatism out of the “mass public.” Drawing on psychoanalytic and rhetorical theory, I suggest this case study indicates the necessity of focusing on the other side of nation-making moments, the “cut” that makes the body politics and its relationship to a constitutive rhetoric that we often theorize through an

Althusserian theory of “thick” interpellation. Reading both the election and the conservative reaction to it in Alexandra Pelosi’s Right America, Feeling Wronged, I suggest the constitutive function of “the people” as a paradoxical space that both stabilizes and destabilizes the polity at the same moment.

Chapter 4 explores how this populist opposition concretized in public. I read the testimony in Congress in favor of the December auto bailout to suggest that populist fervor had reached such a high pitch that not even one of America’s most popular

25 institutions, the auto industry, could receive a bailout from a Congress that was still sensitive to public opinion. Continuing anti-bailout sentiment fermented, with conservatives conflating the spending of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act with the spending associated with the TARP program. Anxieties and worries came to a head when the government proposed a plan to help homeowners underwater on their mortgages. This plan prompted CNBC anchor Rick Santelli to unleash a “rant” that quickly went viral, in which he called for the rise of a new “silent majority” that was tired of suffering losses and defeats to political elites. There is a mass consensus that this moment was the key point in the gestation of the Tea Party. I theorize a genre of speech, the “rant,” which displays a gendered tendency to emphasize argumentative spontaneity to justify affective expressions of outrage and anger. I suggest that Santelli’s rant responded to a political crisis in democracy with a masculine suggestion of the capacity to control. The populist energy, which had been, by turns, either exacerbated or not embraced by Barack Obama, settled on Santelli as an avatar precisely because he offered an avenue to condense populist anger lingering about the bailouts. Moreover, his claim to speak America’s “frustration” responded to one of the key dilemmas for any populist movement, namely how to resolve the indeterminacy associated with the interpellative pull of democracy itself, which offers power to “the people” but with no clear outside.

“The people” functions rhetorically as if it were outside of the political field but represents a site where identity is made by rhetors. “The people” offer rhetors the capacity to deny the presumption that interlocutors share space but to naturalize that division through recourse to a populism particularized in a given body. Santelli’s

26 performance magnified rather than minimized the position of conservatism as a populist outsider.

Santelli’s rant ignited a populist fuse that connected conservative disempowerment to simmering resentment over the bailout and the general economic woes of the nation. Chapter 5 analyzes the early emergence of the Tea Party in public discourse and their own visual archive, suggesting their form as one of agitation and protest. Drawing from mostly dormant views of social movement studies in rhetorical scholarship, I suggest that the public interpretation of the Tea Party was guided by an understanding of social movement that conflated phenomenon and meaning in exactly the way Michael Calvin McGee critiqued the field for doing in 1983. I suggest there is a certain fetish for the form of social protest that configures the public. This fetish, combined with the Tea Party’s capacity to harness history and memory, granted the movement legitimacy through its appearance and circulation. In this way the problematic conflation of two forms of elitism, economic and governmental, was elided through the movement’s structured populist appeal.

Chapter 6, the final content chapter of my manuscript, examines how the Tea

Party calcified in the public imagination following its increasing legitimacy. By the summer of 2009, the Tea Party was flourishing. Generating a “people” united in their anger through particular vectors of bailouts, health care reform, government spending, threats of socialism, and high taxes, among others, the Tea Party was riding high on the basis of three key moves. First, the Tea Party argued that institutional rationalities could not match the market acumen of the individual. Second, the movement appeared to be

“leaderless,” generating legitimacy from its position as “the people” rather than their

27 representative. Third, the movement appears to have effectively defined “the system” at the center of American politics as “the people” rather than the government. Examining editorials, internal Tea Party literature, and Sarah Palin’s Tea Party keynote address, I suggest that the argumentative form of the movement is the “populist deductive,” which poses a threat not only to rhetorical and deliberative theory but also indexes a kind of negative feedback loop that evades the systemic American protections against the tyranny of the majority. In substituting “people” for government, the Tea Party not only walled itself off from argumentative dialectics with its interlocutors but also mistook “the people” for a real thing rather than a horizon. The result was a melancholic feedback loop of populism that contributed to the Tea Party’s relatively immobile policy positions.

This dissertation argues that new conservative populism’s mode and method of arguing shaped our contemporary political moment. First, I suggest that increasing incidences of polarization and partisanship in American public life are an effect of the melancholic relationship to “the people” circulating in public discourse. Second, I suggest that the point of coincidence between this form of populism and modern state- phobic pose a threat to political argument and public policy. Finally, I outline a working theory for rhetorical critics called “attitudes towards democracy.” Following Kenneth

Burke’s schema for literary genres, I suggest that the tragic and comic schemas map onto the two theories of populism presented in the dissertation, melancholic and mournful populism. The former understands “the people” as always failing to live up to their democratic promise, while the latter understands “the people” as a category with utility inasmuch as it points out the partiality and incompleteness of democratic practices. What this suggests is that in part the emergence of the Tea Party symptomatized how the

28 investment of pundits, observers, and politicos into notions of unity and harmony configures the rhetorical field of the possible.

These investments set the stage for permanent battles between claimants articulating themselves on the basis of accounts of victimage that mistake the imperfectability of the political as a bug rather than a feature. Melancholic populist rhetoric understands these imperfections as failures. Because politics is marked by imperfectability, this posture broadly antagonizes politics by suggesting the possible abolition of these aggregated particularities were “the people” found by a truly representative political movement. That Tea Partiers tended to be white, upper-to-middle class, and masculine reveals that the attachment to a certain set of particularities sapped the dynamic potential out of “the people.” Such a dynamic would also explain why the static particularity of the Tea Party’s “people” is mirrored in the policy positions of the

GOP. For example, the 2012 GOP platform contained over 50 references to the figure of

“the people” or “the American people” while that Democratic platform contained only six. The GOP platform also focused significantly less on its own affirmative plans of action, suggesting instead a series of negations of major Obama administration initiatives.

Melancholic populism suggests a politics that tends to preserve identitarian inertia rather than to highlight the flexibility and mobility possible under democratic conditions.

Reducing the weight and influence of the concept of “the people,” perhaps by working inductively from the panoply of individuals rather than deductively from a “first instance” claim about “the people” as a totality, might offer some hope of reducing polarization.

CHAPTER 2 PEOPLE AGAINST GOVERNMENT IN A TIME FOR

CHOOSING

Introduction

One cannot perform a contemporary history of the rhetorical figure of the

American “people” without performing a genealogy of how that figure has functioned over time. The American “people” have not always had the heft in public discourse that they wield today: prior to the Andrew Jackson’s summoning of an American “people” to oppose the vicious injustice of a “Monster Bank,” a demophobic suspicion regarding the popular will, one nourished by the American Founders, circulated proudly in American public discourse. There are also no institutional guarantees as to the efficacy and strength of this rhetorical figure, as the republican character of the American government was designed, in various and sundry ways, to snuff this figure’s full efficacy out.

And yet to hear a politician today give a speech which indicts or criticizes “the

American people” explicitly would be quite a shock. There are certainly more than traces of the demophobia of old circulating: the barely disguised hatred of a “people” located in talk about the “real math” related to the necessity of entitlement cuts, speech about the

“necessities” of restricting civil liberties in a permanent wartime footing, or the almost complete absence of the poor from the mass public of American political discourse testify that the relationship between “the people” and the polity is a rather off-again/on-again fetish. But the untrustworthiness and unreliability of “the people” is the “that which shall not be named” of contemporary American politics. Even populisms themselves are demophobic in the sense that they fear competing populisms.1 This is true not only with respect to the threat or fear that a mob might, if given power, overtake and ruin

30 democracy with its passions. It is also true with respect to the unreliability of the rhetorical figure itself, which can be captured, repurposed, and articulated at many moments and in many different ways.

This chapter maps how conservatism adopted “the people” as an argumentative warrant, noting especially how the elements of republican uplift in late 19th century

American populism made it easier for public discourse to define “the people” as an aggregate of individuals rather than a pure collective. This development made it possible that “the people” would become a force that would cease to uniformly authorize governmental intervention into the economy and instead become a figure menaced by a

Big Government that threatened to stomp them out. I start by examining the argumentative character of American populism, noting that the argumentative maneuvers of late 19th century populism found fertile ground in the positioning of a “people” trampled upon by a combination of businesses and government/party cronyism, but were ultimately defeated by institutional and structural forces beyond their power. Next I briefly take up the Progressives, following Sheldon Stromquist who argues that the massive gains of the early part of the twentieth century followed from Progressivism’s decision to produce an American future of harmonious abundance rather than striated conflict. This set the stage for “the people” to appear as a harmonious totality defined not only by their negation of elitism but also their shared positive characteristics as hardworking, ingenious, and naturally talented persons. I then turn to the statist consensus of the New Deal and post-war era, noting that the overwhelming successes of the centrist coalition created a crisis for conservatism: without any space in the “mass public” for the expression of a conservative world view, there was nothing left for the

Right to conserve. Facing a crisis ironically indicated by their nom de guerre, and lacking any shared space in which to launch political contestations of the dominant political ideology, conservatism adopted a method of antagonistic argumentation that cloaked its powerful disagreements in populist rhetoric. Sewn together in the early years by what

David Campbell calls “discourses of danger” articulated to the threat of communism, various and sundry rightist elements were stitched together temporarily even as ideological infrastructural work was underway in communities, school boards, pamphlet printing houses, and outsider elements looking to change the Republican party. In combining economic anxieties with concerns about the lack of a conservative place at the table in the political imaginary, along with concerns Big Government as both a threat to individual liberty and individual virtue, activists wrote a new template for political conservatism. By the time Ronald Reagan delivered his famous speech “A Time for

Choosing” near the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, the stage had been set for a new kind of popular imaginary. Reagan’s speech successfully engaged in what I call

“affective threat conflation,” the blurring of boundaries between inputs and affects, resulting in a productive conflation between the threat of totalitarianism and the threat posed domestically by Big Government. A rhetorical technique which blurs dangers to the individual by preying on the existential needs of subjects, this threat conflation works by preying on the tendency of sensory inputs to group social and political phenomena according to the similarity of their affective resonance rather than distinguishing them on the basis of their content. Reagan’s move prefigures the later capacity of post-Obama conservative populism to flatten out political phenomena through a conceptual linkage to the idea of “Big Government.”

This “people,” primed by Reagan and a host of new conservative activists, though temporarily deflated by the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, eventually found their apotheosis in Nixon’s addresses to the “Silent Majority” and the “forgotten

American”. By making the invisibility of these Americans into the prime evidence of their existence, Nixon’s strategy took advantage of the rancorous and bodily agitation of the political in the latter part of the 1960s, producing a conservative American “people” whose chief virtue came from the very fact of their invisibility. This vision resolved a key quandary that had been facing conservatism since the New Deal era, the dialectic between embodiment and negativity. To constitute a public requires that public be contrasted with those bodies that are not members of what Michael Warner calls the mass public. The failure of the mass public to achieve the universality promised in its appeal to constitute a limitless community threatens the legitimacy of the mass public, exposing the limitations to the inclusive capacity of “actually existing” politics.2 In the late 1950s, the failure of inclusion generated anxiety for political conservatism, which found itself without public purchase in a world where there was a strong pro-state consensus. Because conservatism had long defended entrenched interests and hierarchies, many Republicans could not reconcile the anxieties of their outsider status with their commitment to traditional hierarchies of power. 3 Being a “forgotten American” offered a special kind of utopianized abstraction: the privilege of being a member of the mass public without being threatened by the fact of particularization. In this way “not appearing” could come to mean not the eradication of one’s input into the public but instead became evidence of the truth of conservatism’s hegemonic position in the political imaginary. Conservatism could wield power without the threat of exposure. Such a new arrangement of political

33 power did not prove that conservatism was the real public, of course, only that technologies of disembodiment could effectively conceal the non-universality of the silent majority by finding in its absence the proof of its own existence. This new “Silent

Majority” then could be sustained by tautologous performatives that insisted on the invisibility of this new majority. Eventually the tension between the entailments of the

“invisibility” of the new majority and the actually existing fact of conservative political representation would create a crisis, but not before conservatism had rewritten “the people” through a patriotism that, in the words of Lauren Berlant, denied “practical political powerlessness” by investing in a utopian idea of a harmonious nation and a cultural rather than national definition of nation.4 The chapter concludes by noting how the end of the Cold War made the work of this tautologous political production rather more difficult, and argues that without the intervention of September 11th the “affective conflation” that helped build the conservative political coalition would have collapsed much earlier.

Populists and Progressives

It is easier to define populism as a political style than a political ideology.

Michael Kazin’s somewhat definitive work on the question in the American context, The

Populist Persuasion, finds a working definition of populism as a rhetorical style, one characterized by using tropes, patterns, and language whose animating background feature was a faith the reason and judgment of “the people.”5 Kazin’s study does not dwell too long on the Jacksonian tradition, chiefly because “historians have demolished the notion that, by any hardheaded social and economic definition, anything like

‘Jacksonian democracy” ever existed.”6 According to Kazin, Jackson’s move to populist

34 rhetoric was chiefly opportunistic in how it played with equality in both economic and political senses. The Jacksonian campaign against the “Monster Bank” was part of a move against the financial industry in general, marking a turn in American politics to utilizing populism as part of a campaign against the power elite. As Jennifer Mercieca has observed, the Jacksonian moments marked where the barely disguised demophobia of the Founders was displaced from the court of public opinion, replaced by a fetishization of “the people” highly influential on American politics.7 After the civil war, “the people” quickly came to mean something in contrast to the robber barons and corrupt politicians of the Gilded Age. Populists expressed themselves as an agrarian movement. Some, like

Richard Hofstadter, were inclined to interpret the rise of populism in economic terms, driven by frustration with scandals like Teapot Dome that led Populists to understand “all

American history since the Civil War…as a sustained conspiracy of the international money power” with the associated xenophobic associations.8 Other critics like

Christopher Lasch located in postwar populism a kind of reaction against modernity, a retrenchment of agrarian and conservative interests in the face of a rapidly changing world.9

It is more accurate to interpret populism as a more complicated expression of political sentiments. Charles Postel forcefully disagrees with economically determined interpretation of affairs, arguing instead that it was a combination of difficult economic times but also a faith in the idea of progress (embodied by science and technology).

Postel forcefully argues that the Populists were reformists not revolutionaries, driven by their “belief in science in technology” as forces for improvement that had to be utilized appropriately to more equally distribute the benefits rapidly accruing by modernization.10

Take the railroad, which had initially symbolized the wealth and progress afforded through technological advantage. Because of monopolistic acts by rail owners, the railroad itself became a symbol of greed and mismanagement, but the idea of progress

(and the humans who could wield that progress and contribute to it) sustained.11

Hofstader’s thesis went too far, betting too much on Populism functioning as a revisionist conservatism, when in fact the progressive kernels of pro-development ideology held among populists would establish the style’s floor (strong popular support) and its ceiling

(the tight linkage between faith in progress and faith in economic development).

Populism had issues with the excesses of capitalism but it would be a step too far to say, as Hofstader does, that populism was so resentful of class elites as to be a nakedly anti-capitalist enterprise. This was chiefly because the corporate elite of the Gilded Age offered a vision of capitalism that was not a happy marriage of collective and private interest, but instead something altogether starker:

The capitalist elite pursued a corporate power that left little room for the organized power of the men and women of the fields, mines, or factories. Their corporate vision clashed with the Populist vision of an alternative capitalism in which private enterprise coalesced with both cooperative and state-based economies. At stake was who should be included and who should wield what shares of power—a conflict that all concerned understood as vital to the future of a modern America.12

Corporate overreach helps explain why the Populists were one of the few truly apolitical movements in American history: populist membership does not easily sort according to party lines. While William Jennings Bryan, perhaps the most prominent populist, did run as the Democratic candidate in the 1890s, his failure demonstrates the truth of the non- partisan thesis rather than deny it: bipartisan support for reforms to weaken monetary

36 influence and political corruption remained robust even as these forces acted to limit the gains made by populism generally and the People’s Party more specifically.13

Indeed, the People’s Party’s appeal and its institutional expressions of sentiment were broad. Michael Kazin notes that it effectively melded classical liberalism with a

Republican ideal of virtue. By combining civic notions of moral uplift and right living with a critique of the excesses of industrialism the Populists crafted a wide message with broad appeal that enabled two powerful constituencies, agricultural interests and women, to sign on. For farmers, the decline of agriculture was a symptom of excesses of capitalism and corruption, which monopolized resources and technology that would otherwise propel farm workers to greater liberation from their work.14 Belief in technology and progress among farmers is substantiated by the educational work of the

Populists, who sought to create many forums and venues that could tell farmers about their important economic role.15 Women were also attracted to the party not only because farmers were thought to have a more egalitarian approach to gender (work on the farm was not gender segregated on the basis of a public/private split as much as work in the urban world was) but also because of the message of social uplift articulated within the movement.16

Two further characteristics effectively define populism and explain the appeal of late 19th century populism: an ethos celebrating the ideal of individual independence along with a cooperative and collectivist spirits, and an ambivalence about argument resolved by conflating “the people” with an ideal imagination of future centralized governance. The generation of vertical lines of alliance between “those who had little to empathize and with those who had less” was “an egalitarian attempt, a beginning” to

37 generate shared political positions between people on the basis of their individual characteristics.17 Second, the populists were confronted with the messy problem of the state: because it was linked to the political party system it was an obstacle for change, but at the same time the state stood as an object that could be captured and then used in the struggle for resources to place checks on corporate and aggregated interests. Kazin notes that the suspicions attached to Populist demands for say, nationalizalization of industries, were resolved by generating a critique of the specific content of the system itself.

“Government power itself was not the problem. Everything depended on what kind of men with what ideas and ethics sat in” the government.18

While not the authoritative document on the ideology of Populism, the “Omaha

Document,” which launched the People’s Party, serves as a useful ideological window into the contradictions of late 19th century American populism. The preamble of the document presents a public ruined by corruption and self-interest, and a population weakened by economic asymmetry:

The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists.19

The charged language about capitalism does not reflect the mindset of many populists, particularly “the Southern Populists” who “stopped short of an attack on the market system” but instead had an “objection to the movement away from the homogeneous, harmonious Jeffersonian ideal entailed in the growth of rigid class lines and an end to economic and social mobility.”20

The content of platform demands stop short of a systemic critique of the system of capitalism, instead tacitly endorsing a somewhat libertarian vision in the second main point of the platform, where it says that “Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery.”21 Almost immediately after this however, the platform demands the nationalization of the railroads and a graduated income tax, along with the public ownership of other instruments of transportation and communication. The content of the Jacksonian sentiment (anger and frustration against those in power) is more important than the ideological or philosophical coherence of the platform itself, as acolytes of either modern Libertarianism or variations of Marxism would have their own pointed (and accurate) critiques of the logic in the platform of the

Omaha document.

Ultimately, institutional power and monetary influence put out the Populist fire of the late 19th century. “Populist electoral setbacks said little about the historic necessity, much less instability, of gold or silver, greenbacks or subtreasury loans.”22The economic elements of Populism ultimately ensured that its opponents would be those who could bring the most economic resources to bear in opposing and crushing the movement.

Combined with the arrayed corporate and other political interests submarined its potential, the institutionalization of populism only further weakened its power.23 But the embers of this movement continued to generate heat, as the sentiments about economic justice and state intervention were carried through in legislation passed in the Progressive

Era which “expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats

39 and Republicans. By a turn of fate, Populism was far more successful dead than alive.”24

The platform animated and influenced politics even as its initial structure was destroyed by corporate power and its ideas became occasionally empty platitudes waved around by the two major political parties. Certainly the Populists abiding faith in the hard working and virtuous American individual continued to echo in policy decisions and politics both in the near and long term.

The Progressive Moment

The Progressive movement that eventually realized many of the aims of the populists operated by constituting a collectivity out of “the people” that worked through appeals based on harmony rather than division, even if the need and necessity for the movement was derived from existing political and economic inequality. Shelton

Stromquist suggests that the movement from Populism to Progressivism is in no small part the story of how investments in a common future of economic equality served to both mainstream and neuter the more class-conscious discourses that emerged out of an

America angry about the inequalities of the gilded age. A language of reform opposed to corruption in either the Republican or Democratic Party “developed a powerful appeal that cut across seemingly diverse and contentious interests.”25 The broad coalition enabled by the populist rhetoric of the Progressives also came with a downside: in order to build a broader audience, generic politics structured around appeals to “the people” hollowed out and emptied class-generated terms that had previously been useful for political organizing. The producer’s movement of the past was left behind as “that language of reform differentiated Progressives’ vision from the class perspective of the producers’ movement and left a deep imprint on their social imagination and the

40 boundaries of the movement they sought to organize.”26 A generic “people” united against “elites” or “special interests” ended becoming the key in Progressive vocabulary, even as class-conscious elements of the Progressives remained a crucial driver of the political power of the movement through the late 19th and early twentieth century.

Such a suspicion maintained hegemony in the minds of many, especially labor leader Samuel Gompers. Gompers, who ran American Federation of Labor, had adopted the Progressive focus on a classless rhetoric, abandoning classed tropes in favor of glorifying “American ideals that all citizens held in common.”27 However Gompers was also very suspicious of a strong state, believing that the radical autonomy of a working people would prove more consistently useful than making a movement reliant on the state.28 Organized labor, despite its reluctant relationship to the state, was a powerful force in organizing opposition to economic elites. A class element was staunch in the

Progressive movement, even if at times it was approached by some members of the coalition through understandings gleaned from theories of republican uplift and religious sentiment rather than strict class solidarity. In this way the interests of morally stout middle Americans and industrial labor could find an at least temporary modus vivendi.

While it is commonly thought that the First World War derailed Progressivism, it was more likely that a series of internal divisions (based not only on economic markers but also racial and gender stratifications) took down the Progressives around the time of the Great War.29 It took the Great Depression and the New Deal to solidify and render more or less presumptive much of the Progressive agenda. Stromquist notes that

While rejecting the class perspective associated with nineteenth-century producerism and the class agenda of radical industrial democrats, New Deal liberals and their Great Society heirs adopted the Progressives’ core values and their project of using the state, albeit in more expansive ways, to engineer a

society inclusive of the people and less vulnerable to the social upheavals the dispossessed might provoke. To the extent that they succeeded, liberal reformers persuaded Americans that, despite persistent evidence of class divisions, the unfinished project of reinvigorating the people, enlarging the domain of opportunity, and fostering social harmony might still keep at bay the ravages of class war.30

The Great Depression solidified the alliance of interest between government and

“people” that had been articulated by the late 19th century Populists. The Populists sought to circumnavigate the tensions between their critique of elitism and the necessity of governmental intervention into the economy by simply projecting forward an imagination wherein the government was an organ of the pure popular will rather than a contingent institution whose rationality was subject to bureaucratic and institutional barriers. The hegemony of this rhetorical strategy on the part of the Progressives and the exigency of the Great Depression produced consensus about the limitations of economics to provide for the public good, and consequently the necessity of governmental intervention in order to accomplish aims for “the people” that the market would fail to attain.

Chasing “The People”

Before the late 1950’s “the people” were monopolized by the Democratic Party of the United States. This was true at both institutional and rhetorical levels. Institutionally, the New Deal coalition assembled during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was established in a political moment where the relationship between “the people” and industry was a driving political antagonism: the state itself served as an object for capture in the battle of resource distribution, as a strongly class-conscious America saw fit to organize politically at the macro level to obtain new rights in privileges while defending those that had been won by progressive interests and the labor movement. After the cataclysmic Great Depression this debate over the strong state had been resolved firmly

42 in favor of the popular capture of the state and the restriction of business interests.

Rhetorically, “the people” had been articulated to strands of progressivism friendly to the

Democratic rather than the Republican Party. “The people,” thought of as a combination of hard working blue collar laborers and people from good hearty agrarian Southern and

Midwestern stock, were organized on the basis of their shared position of relative disempowerment which counseled against the elite interests of Big Business. Franklin

Delano Roosevelt could speak polemically in his first inaugural of “money changers in the temple of our civilization” and receive broad approval.31

There were ethical and moral downsides in this vision of progressivism, of course.

The beliefs in uplift, tithing, and charity that drove a progressive political vision of income redistribution also brought with them claims about the legitimacy of government regulation of moral and personal issues that stood outside of economics. The same rationales that justified extensive government intervention into the economy could also be used to justify governmental regulation of morality. Similarly, the progressive belief in the utilization of a state apparatus for the modernization and betterment of society carried seeds of violence and bigotry. Because what counted as “modern” or “better” was often conflated with what was familiar, the rationalized instrumental logics of social uplift found their darker tones exposed in rationales like the Supreme Court’s decision in Buck v. Bell which reasoned in favor of policies of forced sterilization because “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”32

Yet this coalition was built despite tensions between discourses of moral uplift and a robust faith in the liberated individual. The coalition was so strong it exiled various forms of conservatism from public discourse. From October 1929 until November 1968

43 the only people capable of winning the presidency of the United States were either

Democrats or Republicans who acted, voted, and talked like Democrats. The alliance of labor, women, a growing middle class, and persistent coattails of a large scale economic recovery meant that making headway was difficult for political conservatives. Indeed, to our modern definition of conservatism as an ideology committed to small governments and personal responsibility, the massive centralized spending and infrastructure investment of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower would be anathema. But to an older definition of conservatism, one based broadly on the notion of conservation, that is, the preservation of that which exists on the basis of an intrinsic faith in its staying power as an indication of desirability, Eisenhower’s decisions made sense as an investment in the idea of America. This idea of conservatism, historically most closely identified with the Irishman Edmund Burke, drew its persuasive power from his defense of stability and tradition as sources of authority. The breakdown of order presented intrinsic problems for

Burke, whose famous Reflections on the Revolution in France cautioned against moves away from the “firm but cautious and deliberate spirit” which produced orders that have come to predominate.33 Burke believed that institutions that had predominated over time were owed respect owing to the force of presumption and the passage of time.

Richard Weaver, an influential conservative and rhetorician who wrote during this time of conservative crisis, did much with the ideas of Edmund Burke, and was especially fond of locating in Burke a certain liberal streak associated with his fondness for the

“argument from circumstance,” which according to Weaver was the least conservative of arguments because it proceeded not from an ideal world of principle but instead inductively from the situations and circumstances in which individuals found themselves.

The problem with the argument from circumstance was that it was the “nearest of all arguments to purest expediency” and invests in a given situation instead of in principles.34 Weaver’s treatise, Ideas Have Consequences embraced this idea of the important of principle, pairing it with faith in the rational faculties of humans to make meaningful changes in their world. With the rise of a progressive political hegemony speaking of conservatism in the sense of “conservation” faced a challenge: either redefine what was being “conserved” or define conservatism on some basis etymologically distant from the roots of the term itself. Weaver, along with William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and other important conservative thinkers, sought essentially to do both in one turn, pitching their lots in with the idea of rational and liberated human subject who needed to be “conserved” from the external forces of political and societal decay. At the same time, because the individual’s capacity for action and judgment came from their own perspective on a given situation (and their capacity to exercise individual choice) conservatism had to cease to be, at least practically if not in imagination, an ideology about the conservation of a series of other forces, notably institutions and ideologies, those things that (at least a version of Edmund Burke, the one opposed to the French

Revolution) would have defended dearly.

This turn was a response to a crisis of public acknowledgment by conservatives.

The permanent state of semi-war with the Soviet Union, following on the heels of the

Second World War, created a political crisis of indistinction, one that offered certain incumbency benefits. As Daniel Bell argued with respect to the semi-permanence of governmental control of the economy at the end of the 1950’s in The End of Ideology:

In the long run the problems of the distribution of burdens and the nature of controls cannot be deflected. The “statist” needs of a semi-war economy with its

technical imperatives must clash with the restless anti-statist attitudes of the corporate managers. The first republican administration in twenty years, even though it represents these anti-statist corporate managers, is not able to change drastically the course of government spending. The international situation imposes the same imperatives on republicans as on Democrats, and the semi-war that is made necessary by it inevitably casts government in the role of controller and dominator of the economy. The real political question in domestic affairs will then become which of the groups will bear the costs of added burdens.35

According to Bell, the bipartisan consensus on security affairs guaranteed extensive governmental intervention into the economy. As a permanent rather than temporary feature of American political culture, this state of affairs transformed the old understanding of the relationship between state, corporation, and “people” from one where the state could be seen as an apparatus for capture from either side into a situation wherein the state’s capture was presumed. While Bell and Hofstader were both prone to overstating the hegemony of a certain kind of ideology of liberal progress, Bell accurately identified the existing political presumption and its contours, he only mis-assessed its permanence, divining in the centrism of Eisenhower evidence of a fixed rather than contingent consensus in political environment.

The result of this shift in presumption was to unsettle and undermine the assumption that there was political space in the polity for the identities of conservative interlocutors. A move that took place but was heavily contested during the New Deal became calcified in the post-war consensus. Douglas Ehninger observes that “argument is a person risking enterprise” wherein disputes over political issues are not just disputations over an issue but also symbolic plebiscites about the identities of those in the process of contesting.36 At stake in the ability to articulate a political argument then is not only winning or losing that local argument, but also referendums on the fitness of interlocutors to be members of an argumentative community. Because national identities are made in

46 discourse rather than anchored in objective judgments about geography and factual history, failure to obtain space and recognition in an imagined national polity is not merely an identitarian speed bump: the threat of symbolic exile activates nodes of anxiety and existential worry about one’s relationship to the polity because there is nothing beyond discourse to certify this participation and belonging. Where the presumption now lay against certain conservative arguments against a limited state and a moderated capitalism, the case against “big government” progressivism failed to hit home consistently as a felicitous performative that could suggest a disjuncture between the interests of government and “the people.”

The lack of shared space for political argument between conservatives and liberals created a political dilemma for conservatives. Chantal Mouffe distinguishes between two forms of political contestation: agonism and antagonism. Under conditions of agonism, political agents argue with the basis of some kind of shared space. That is, they may fundamentally disagree about the path and process, but they might agree about goals. Under antagonism, opponents become enemies, arguing with one another without the safety net of “shared space”.37 Many conservatives found themselves in an antagonistic moment where their views on the size of government were antagonistic rather than agonistic. By breaking with the shared American premise that the intrinsic role of the government was a strong command and control relationship to the economy, they were faced with the argumentative equivalent of a coercive threat of exile: renounce your proto-libertarian position or have no role in the public space of America.

Conservatives had at least two options. They could engage in the frame of what Kenneth

Burke calls a “perspective by incongruity” wherein the political circumstances of the

47 moment inductively challenged the conservative worldview (This is essentially what the

Democratic Party did in response to the Reagan revolution, triangulating around neoliberal points of consensus like free trade).38 Or, conservatives could suggest that the rising consensus about government intervention went against an intrinsic American spirit.

Ultimately, conservatives reorganized politically on the basis of ideological assessments that maintained a certain affinity with the some of the core beliefs of previous populism that birthed the post-New Deal consensus. In this way one of the implicit warrants driving reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras, that policies were authorized by the spirit and needs of “the people” could be coopted and deployed by conservatives.

Adapting a populist idiom also helped conservatives navigate competing ideological tensions that emerged within conservatism even as an ideological realignment took hold.

Discontent with the American consensus popped up following three different ideological alignments, each of which attempted to articulate linkages rather than differences between “America” and a conservative position. Jonathan Schoenwald breaks these groups into “Traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists. Traditionalism and libertarianism focused on preventing the state from meddling in an individual’s affairs, while simultaneously they promoted a belief system that adhered to a universal moral code. “ Straightforwardly anti-communism was a fervent opposition to collectivist and communistic thought in all walks of life.39 Each belief system circulated around ideographs, phrases whose meaning is contested but whose relevance is not, articulated to beliefs and attitudes associated with limited government and certain versions of individual choice: individualism, free enterprise, and liberty.40 Schoenwald’s typology is helpful inasmuch as it traces three different modes of reasoning with respective to the

“conservatism in transition” of the late fifties and early sixties. “Traditionalists” saw

America as in the middle of a rapid set of changes, driven by a combination of rapid technological development, unprecedented economic growth, and social upheaval that highlighted the fragile bedrock of social and economic status. This mode of thinking shared the most with the Burkean tradition in terms of its reasoning, arguing that the stability of a supposed status quo was worth defending because of its persistence over time. The libertarian tradition was focused on individual freedoms, finding many of its core beliefs expressed in the Barry Goldwater and Brent Bozell authored The Conscience of a Conservative. By positioning a virtuous, hard working, and enterprising individual against “collectivist” tendencies located in both cultural discourses of progressivism and advocacies for governmental intervention into the realm of the social the libertarian perspective crafted a persuasive vision of an omnicompetent individual being victimized by an overreaching spirit of beneficence. Rather that investing either in a positive vision of an American tradition or a heroic individual under attack by collective forces, the third thread of anticommunism was structured in opposition to an explicit threat of both geopolitical and cultural pollution emanating from the movement of global communism.

The anti-Communist thread can be demonstrated to be a more or less stand-alone perspective that also served as the ideological glue to tie together traditionalism and libertarianism by resolving the contradictory discourses in each tradition. Barry

Goldwater (whose strident anti-communism left him vulnerable to charges of unreliability as in the famous “Daisy” advertisement which suggested he would have a quick trigger finger on the nuclear football) made evident the ceiling of this approach but opposition to communism still helped glue together a new conservatism. Traditionalism

49 and libertarianism were faced with a contradictory core. Traditionalists valued a cluster of beliefs: a heteronormative family structure, religion (probably Protestant), attachment to nation, and the familiar. Libertarians emphasized the primacy of individual choice in political philosophy, locating in the tenets of belief in a “freedom from” governmental coercion the seeds of political autonomy. There was a very serious tension located in these two traditions: traditionalism as a philosophy cuts against libertarianism because the autonomy of free choice raises the possibility of a society that privileges individualist freedom in which individuals exercise this capacity for free choice in ways that undermine the authority of traditional institutions and mores. Similarly traditionalism imposes a restriction upon the ideology of individualism: what has come before ought to be respected, and free choice should be constrained by the acts of those who have built our polities and communities. One reads the legacy of this tension into the contemporary distinction between social and economic conservatives. Logical contradictions rarely impose substantial impediments to ideology. These contradictions can be negotiated through the canny use of rhetorical techniques that enable the disavowal of tensions. Bob

Ivie argues that foreign policy disputes help to do the ugly work of constituting a demos by producing a dangerous and savage external world against which a virtuous “people” can be constructed.41 Rather than denying the existence of tensions, the importance of those identitarian inputs is subordinated in the face of an external and existential threat.

Representative discourses of the “new conservatism” employed discourses of danger that massaged away these rhetorical tendencies. They enabled the disavowal of a series of contradictory tendencies in discourses by tapping into an affective economy riven with anxiety and fear. International relations scholar David Campbell identifies

“discourses of danger” as political grammars that describe the world in Hobbesian terms of competition and conflict. These discourses respond to the paradigmatic problem of identity in a world where identities float rather freely in comparison to a world where strongly centralized political and religious sovereignty anchor identity. In a world where these institutions are in decline the threat that modernity’s promise of “external guarantees” will be lost as the decline of institutions means that the “ontological preconditions” for these external guarantees have been erased by the distribution of authority out of these centralized institutions.42 Rather than encouraging a confrontation with the awkward impossibility and uncertainty of a nation having one true national identity, these discourse outsource concerns and anxieties about the declining authority of centralized forces, displacing the fear of collapse and instability intimate and intrinsic to democracy into alien and foreign figures that become the sources for these threats. That said, security discourses do effectively bury that the fact that interlocutors are violating the democratic covenant to argue as agonists rather than antagonists: the democratic veneer is sustained by transforming those against the nation’s “security” into outsiders who do not exist in or respect the symbolic space of the polity.

These discourses are especially effective, even necessary, in the United States of

America, because unlike its European counterparts, America is defined “more by absence than presence” making it “particularly dependent on representational practices for its being.”43 America’s heterogeneity makes defining it rhetorically difficult, and many aspects that are quintessentially American (for example, the shared history of chattel slavery) are infelicitous points around which to generate narratives of national unity and identity. “American” is not an ethnicity, making claims to define American identity

51 particularly susceptible to charges of arbitrariness. However, there is a historical spirit that makes American populism bind “even as it divides” according to Kazin. So long as

“political actors were fighting over a shared set of ideals” Americans could “avoid the terrors to body and mind that have characterized the hegemony of revolutionary ideologies in other nations.”44 Doing so by externalizing these terrors was one part of the discursive work that made the New Right a force in the early sixties.

The security arguments worked especially well for a key demographic in the late fifties: Southern California was the site of some of the biggest defense manufacturers, which meant that Cold War anxiety and fear was linked not only rhetorically but also materially to the economic fates of the community. 45 The result was that “This virulent anticommunism, combined with a call for American military might, found an audience among conservative Southern Californians despite their hostility towards federal power in other areas…antistatism stopped at the door of a strong defense, and they willingly looked to the postwar Leviathan to protect American against ‘subversion.’”46 Activists in the suburbs of Los Angeles would be instrumental in building the spine of new conservatism, and their tireless effort into organizing and convincing was ultimately crucial to making the new constituency of conservative Americans.

But anti-communism alone was not enough to sustain a political movement, and as at least one rhetorician has observed the mainstreaming of the new conservative message required moving the anti-Communist message to the background.47 The threat of

Goldwater as a nuclear cowboy combined with the residue of McCarthyism to limit anti- communism’s explicit rhetorical power. Anti-communism could drive emotions but by itself could not ultimately constitute a broad enough conservative constituency, in part

52 because opposition to communism was fairly bipartisan during this period.48 Somehow fear and anxiety had to be politicized. Four animating reasons and rhetorics emerged in order to substantively produce the New Right that would be translated by Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan into first the “Forgotten Americans” and then the “Silent Majority” until they could finally sleep peacefully during the Morning in America. These elements were economic anxiety, symbolic anxiety about a lack of representation in mainstream political discourses, fears about threats to liberty and freedom, and a belief that morals and virtues were being threatened by the increasing primacy of the state in public life.

First, there were emergent racial/economic anxieties tied to the robust vision of rugged individualism and progress. At first this seems counter-intuitive: post-war

America was in the midst of one of the greatest economic booms any nation has ever experienced, and not every constituency was threatened economically by cuts in defense spending like the Southern California heart of the New Right. But at the same time that increased affluence resulted in increased focus on pleasure, consumption, and recreation, secular and religious sources of morality and authority were waning in influence.49 As consumerism broke down the traditional tethers that bound individuals to institutions, individualism strained to provide the collective belonging that had been previously offered. The strains of rugged individualism and individual liberty that would be so important to the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater were aspirational rather than static discursive frames: individuals liberated would not merely tread water, in the ideal, but instead achieve wealth and success on a great scale. As politics began to more explicitly deal with questions of heterogeneity and pluralism with explicitly difference conscious lenses (John Kennedy’s rhetoric on civil rights just one of the clearest

53 examples), Robert Mason argues that social reality was still perceived on a race conscious sliding scale where rising “economic unease was not absolute but relative, generated by the sense that African Americans were advancing faster than whites were.”50 Economic location was only one part of how Americans imagined themselves, with racial elements also playing a powerful role in crafting access to public resources as a zero-sum game involving competing and raced individuals. So while individuals may have found themselves better off economically, anxiety still attached to the social dislocation threatened by the rapid growth of secular attitudes and also of opportunities for blacks.

These concerns about individual achievement were not neutral, and it is difficult to disentangle the imagination of the successful persona of the “average American” in this period without account for the racial element. Race theorists suggest that the coherence of “white” identity, however fictive, is purchased over and against

“blackness,” an element of identity that is impossible to incorporate and integrate into the space of American civil society.51 Many whites, who in no small measure owe their position of social power to the subordination of racial others, presumed that social and material advancement were zero-sum games, namely that in the political imaginary they are, as identities are secured through negative references to those who are not part of the mass public. To understand the perception of advancement and progress requires thinking about the difference between the ideas of jealousy and envy. Psychoanalytic theorist Joan

Copjec distinguishes between them on the basis of possession and denial: either the possession of enjoyment, or the denial of another’s enjoyment. According to Copjec, the jealous are concerned about losing what they already have, while the envious are thrown

54 into pain by perceiving the enjoyment realized by another subject and object.52 Envy is regarded in her view as the most pernicious and perhaps anti-political of emotions because its narcissistic viewpoint denies legitimate space to the other: envy seeks to spoil one’s (indeed, an other’s) capacity for enjoyment rather than to contribute productively to the world.53 Because the structure of the American Dream fantasy is progressive and aspirational, there is a strong chance that for many the gap between what is achieved and what is imagined becomes not something appreciated for its intrinsic good, but instead understood resentfully as evidence of failure of total success. Affluent white America of the 50s and 60s used this envious frame as a means of interpreting the threats and causes of social change Consumerism became a key means of practicing citizenship (and thus displaying civic virtue while also individualizing it). Envy, thought of as a move which attempts to deny another their enjoyment (not their object) functions as a compensatory maneuver that addresses the gap between the pleasure offered by the fulfillment of a narrative of individual accomplishment and the actually existing political reality of contingency and wealth. After all, the quintessential American success stories are narrated as “rags to riches” rather than “rags to modest domestic equilibrium.” Emerging support for concepts like “individual liberty” should be understood for how they enabled a politics of envy, translating support for policies shrinking government programs into a more digestible idiom that denied the enjoyment from others through a positive vision of unleashing freedom. In this way the race conscious projects of civil rights and the various social causes of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson can be understood as the giving of enjoyment to some, which implies, of course, a lack of enjoyment and privilege to others.

Ultimately, the republican realignment of the 1960s occurred on large scale racial bases:

Barry Goldwater’s only real victory was to puncture the previously “solid South” of the

Democratic Party, and in the coming years Southern whites came to vote for Republicans in very high numbers, in no small measure as a result of a politics of racial animus.54

Second, conservatives had no place at the table in public discourse, rendered anxious by a lack of their own public appearance. Boxed in by a liberal consensus regarding the necessity of state intervention and uplift, it was unclear what exactly conservatism could stand for. The new conservative agitation “was a result not of strength but of a lack of political power and influence within national politics” as the most conservative elements of the party were sidelined when supposedly conservative

Earl Warren’s liberal court decisions proved even mainline conservatives had acceded to the “moderates’ triumph within the Republican Party.”55 For those who did not identify as liberals, or did not agree with the new statist consensus, their political position in this space was unclear. But because democracy’s fantasy is constituted through an ethos of inclusiveness and an imagination of invitation, the promise of inclusion could be read for its failure to provide space for the hard right. While I further pursue this theme in Chapter

4, it is important to note that the historical understanding of democracy as constituted through exclusions is a history that was lost in popular discourse after the Jacksonian turn to populism: the public imagination turned often on articulations of a “people” who functioned as the emphasized center of politics, but did so only at the expense of covering over the facticity of democracy’s exclusions. As McGirr notes, the response by conservatives following their marginalization in the political discourse of the day was not an ironic introspection about the gap between their political beliefs and those of the supposed mainstream: instead there was a new focus on organizing, on taking control of

56 the apparatuses of local education, and of building community infrastructure to support the ideology of what would come to be called the New Right.56

The inherent fragility of the political transforms the threat of exclusion from the polity into an existential rather than moderate risk in the perceptual space of the subject.

In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt argues that the discontinuities between political space from one moment to another is a feature, not a bug of collective life: the unsettled nature of the political, that shared space created when humans gather together on the basis of some shared interests and characteristics, is apossibility marshaled so that politics might not be some permanent and unerring darkness of similitude but instead a complex and vibrant permanent space of agonism.57 So for Arendt the fragility of politics is part of its beauty and potential: the dynamic state of politics, and its constitution by differentiated actors are seen as the best possible response to one of humanity’s darkest political moments: the aftermath of the totalitarian horrors of the Second World War.

However, the carefully calibrated balance of the portable polis brings with it instability along with its hope for change: sustained only by human action, its exclusions and inclusions are also only decided by the finicky wills of human action. Evidence that one does not belong to the polity (for example, the failure of one’s arguments to circulate to a broad audience and allow for the establishment of a conservative identity through a series of “knowing glances” enacted in newspapers, news broadcasts, and community gatherings) activates anxieties precisely because Arendt’s insight about the political’s fragility.

The Jacksonian takeover of the American political imaginary in the name of “the people,” furthered by the first the Populists and then later the Progressives helped to

57 create the conditions whereby political failures could come to be taken as signs of the failed universalization of a political will rather than a sign of the limitations inherent to the practice of democratic politics. The Populists adopted European and somewhat

Marxist notions of collectivity into useful American idioms that were based around both revering and protecting the individual worker, but did so on the basis of their status as individuals and workers rather than on the sole basis of their status as workers. In this way those who called the People’s Party “socialists” in the 1890’s badly missed the mark: the scientific faith in progress and individual virtue would contrast explicitly with a more pessimistic scientific “faith” possessed by Marxism in the collapse of the system as such.

For Marx there would be virtue and dignity for the worker, but for the Populists this evidence was found in the individual, in their status as atomized figures that made up a mosaic of America. Evidence for this is found in the way that it was not the contradictions of the populist movement that doomed them (respect for individual property and views of governmental coercion as a wrong were accepted in lockstep with calls to nationalize industry and raise taxes) but instead the institutional forces arranged against their petitions. The Progressives encountered similar contradictory problems, but the manner of their resolution further supports the thesis that these resolutions tended in the direction of a democratic and popular ethos of harmony: Progressivism created a future horizon of belonging through the abolition of class in the futures imagined by its rhetoric. A somewhat different kind of contradiction was created and resolved through the particularization of the futures: a future would be made up of individuals no longer distinguished on the basis of class or social position, but instead united by the technological advances of industrialism and right living. Because the vision of politics as

58 a zero-sum game between the virtuous “people” and greedy industrialists adapted by

Populists was adopted by the Progressives, much of the blame for a negative political circumstance lied with the wrong exercise of political will on the part of the haves rather than with a more systemic critique of the American system of labor and politics. The central notion in this case was that if individuals simply adopted different attitudes and behaviors, imbalances that were non-systemic in America would be corrected.

Conservatives adopted this forward-thinking democratic vision to produce the conditions that would facilitate the rise of the New Right. The progressive and labor decision in the early part of the twentieth century to secure a modus vivendi with the state aligned with individual autonomy and ingenuity in concert with a favorable attitude towards government regulation made even more thinkable discourses that placed a high value on individualism alone. At the heart of calls for state intervention was not a set of demands for the permanent intervention of the state into a terminally unfair situation, but instead the elements of republican virtue and uplift that had animated agitationist thinking

(giving American gifts like Prohibition along with women the right to vote) to imagine the state as a necessary figure to remedy what would otherwise be a series of circumstances that might push down otherwise hard working and virtuous Americans.

The state’s relation to the labor was symbolically fungible rather than fixed.

America was only a decade and a half removed from an active military struggle against the forces of totalitarianism, not to mention the ongoing struggle against Big Government totalitarianism in the geopolitical persona of the Soviet Union. In 1956 both Russia and the Western world began to become more familiar with the character of totalitarian horror under the Stalinist regime, creating a linkage in public imagination between the brutality

59 of the Second World War and the struggle that America was now involved in globally.58

The inability to segregate the threat of totalitarianism threatened by Hitler and the one threatened by the Soviet Union was undoubtedly aided and abetted by the general anxieties of a Cold War where the threat of nuclear annihilation looked large in everyday life, underscored by incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Citizens struggled to integrate these apocalyptic threats into their quotidian routines.59

While Americans remained fearful of a statist Communist menace, conservatives were concerned with another statist danger: the near-consensus about the role of the state in post-WW2 America. The public sphere offered little safe harbor to conservatives suspicious of state intervention. For those suspicious of the state, the political was constituted around (but also in ignorance) of this question. In a certain sense it was not exactly “political” following Arendt.60 After all, as Arendt notes, the political should be thought of as a shared “space of appearance” where the participants of a polity gather together for exchange about views and interests.61 But what does it mean for politics when one set of interests cannot gather in this space? What happens when they are denied a place in the “space of appearance?” Arendt suggests that an inability to appear in the space of appearance threatens the sense of “immortality” attached to public life: the notion that what is built in public is the set of things that might outlive the mortal life of those participating.62 Moreover, the other available space of belonging, the spaces of privacy and work, could not appropriately substitute for the public “sense” one gets from participating in the space of appearance. Private property and wealth themselves are part of a process of accumulation while the manufacture of political institutions is a form of structural accumulation. A person is simply different in public, and the absence of this

60 difference means that no matter how successful one is in the realm of the private that one’s private existence will only be an amplification of one’s existing perspectives and attitudes rather than a difference in kind of the sort attached to the production of public space.

It is in this context that the third point, about threats to individual liberty and freedom makes a great deal of sense as an explanation for how new conservatism was thinking of itself. By conflating the “Big Government” that had become presumptive rather than exceptional in the wake of the New Deal with the threat of government-driven totalitarianism and liberty reduction that drew on familiar tropes of a statist menace, the

New Right repurposed individual liberty in the service of an anti-statist vision. Prior to the Second World War, the idea of a totalitarian government posing a meaningful threat to the liberty of the American people was essentially unthinkable. Even the totalitarian marks on America’s past like the Alien and Sedition Acts, the suspension of habeas corpus, and Japanese internment were all exceptional actions taken on a wartime (or near wartime) footing that targeted individuals who were suspected of being “less than”

American owing to ethnic and racial heritages. The New Right perversely democratized this imagination of state authority: now “real Americans” could be threatened.

The rhetoric in defense of freedom and individual liberty tapped into a powerful historical vein to manufacture this new vision. As watchwords, defenses of individual liberty in the populist tradition drew from visions of an elite who used their disproportionate power to keep good hardworking Americans down. Because of the rampant corruption of the late 19th century, anger towards “elites” was anger directed as a mixture of corrupt government and business interests whose anti-democratic control of

61 the political party system disenfranchised “ordinary” Americans from having their say in the political world. McGirr’s interviews with some of the women at the heart of the nascent New Right in the late fifties indicated that “In unpacking the meaning of anticommunism, it becomes clear that it subsumed a host of concerns—concerns about the state’s regulation of the economy and national life, changing cultural mores, and racial egalitarianism.”63 The threat of a disempowered liberal individual crushed and trampled by an unresponsive state apparatus was key as a conservative “wariness toward the ever-increasing power of the state helped begin the process of integrating traditionalism and libertarianism in which the individual remained the most important commodity.”64 The animating idea of individual freedom was not abandoned by the New

Right but repurposed as the old idea of individual freedom (which had near universal assent) but with a different threat rendered more plausible by recent experience with violence derived from Big Government: the state.

The public presumption in favor of governmental intervention into the economy presented the New Right with a tricky rhetorical situation. If they opposed interventionism on principle they would find their claims interrupted by the enthymematic primacy of the interventionist warrant. Without any tools for effective agonistic argument waged within the shared space of the agreed upon structuring “facts” of the polity, elements of conservatism that felt disenfranchised by the existing political consensus had to turn to antagonistic arguments in order to make their case. This of course presented a problem: straightforwardly calling one’s opponent an enemy or “un-

American” was a difficult proposition, made more so by the public backlash against the

62 explicitly antagonistic tactics of Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist crusaders of the early fifties.

However, populist idioms offer an attractive method of delivering antagonistic arguments that shield themselves from criticism about their status as such. Appeals to

“the people” are capable of sanitizing the exclusions attached to the production of

“actually existing” democratic life. The fantasy of “the people” offers an appealing picture of harmonious and fully inclusive political life, beckoning all to participate in name but at the same time continuing a democratic tradition of exclusion. Jeremy Engels names this phenomena demophilia, explaining:

Demophilia creates space for the people to enter into public conversation, but it does this through constitutive exclusions built into the logic of the democratic grammar itself. We should be clear, here, that demophilia does not come from the people but speaks in the name of the people. Like demophobia, demophilia is ultimately a discourse that can be used to tame democracy—for it shapes how democracy is lived, altering what is sayable and thinkable, who can speak and in what ways. We should be on guard when political elites speak lovingly of the masses in the language of demophilia, with its emphasis on consensus, its praise of proper discourse, its insistence that wealth is sacred, and its denial of structural barriers to equality, because it is precisely in such moments that more radical democratic possibilities might be foreclosed.65

Turning to a demophilic vocabulary of “the people” enables an argumentative sleight of hand, wherein the antagonistic character of charges that opponents do not share the same argumentative/symbolic space as the interlocutors are hidden by recourse to an argumentative practice cloaked in the populist ethos of inclusion and incorporation. Such maneuvers also have stabilizing effects on the subjectivities of those enunciating the positions, neutralizing the more noxious aspects of explicitly jingoistic ideology. The move to a populist vernacular, articulating the New Right’s political beliefs to a “people” defined by their capacity for individual achievement and a fervent defense of individual

63 liberty, produced a more subtle political grammar than that employed by forerunners of the New Right like Jack Welch of the John Birch Society, whose claim that Dwight

Eisenhower was a Communist agent temporarily ruined the credibility of new conservative elements in society.66 Similarly, it was only later conservative who could modify and “avoid Goldwater’s excess that had alienated the broad middle of the electorate” that conservatism could return to the driver’s seat of political discourse.67 By stating a positive case about who “the people” of America were, the antagonistic constitutive exclusions of the New Right could be buried.

The fourth major theme of the New Right was a series of arguments that positioned the excesses of state regulations as threatening to trade off with the development of individual moral virtue. The idea of a strong state breeding dependency was an old one, in fact, one that even made an appearance in the 1935 State of the Union by the champion of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who argued “that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictate of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.”68 The arguments of the late fifties now spoke of moral decay and lost virtue. Such appeals generated the possibility of a broader coalition: for those in the audience for whom the conflation of “Big Government” with European- style totalitarianism represented a stretch. The degradation of internal morals (not coincidentally the increase in economic opportunity and affluence was increasing consumptive and pleasure driven activity that did trade off not only with a classic sense of republican morality but also traditional moral institutions like the Church) could be

64 understood as an effect of state action trading off with individual cultivation of moral/ethical attitudes.

The production of these new themes came from a number of different sources: hardcore Goldwater supporters disappointed but not deterred by his 1964 defeat, acolytes of the John Birch society who feared the permanent Communist menace, organizations like the Young Americans for Freedom who hung their hats at the newly minted National

Review, middle-class (or soon to be middle class) and suburban families (or soon to be suburban families) concerns about the future life available for their children, and cynical politicians like Richard Nixon who were calculating how to best nurture and take advantage of the ideological seeds planted by the failed Goldwater campaign. In order to demonstrate how these four themes would come to be weaved together, I examine the last gasp of the Goldwater candidacy but the first emergence of a considerably more robust and successful politics: Ronald Reagan’s famous “A Time for Choosing” speech.

Delivered on the eve of the 1964 election in support of Goldwater this speech would immediately form the “spine” of Reagan’s appeals to the mainline conservatives and centrist Democrats throughout the rest of the 1960’s.

A Time for Choosing

“A Time for Choosing” was Ronald Reagan’s first foray into the national stage as a conservative politician. Dreamed up as a last minute move to give a boost to Barry

Goldwater, the speech actually upstaged the Senator from Arizona, introducing the nation to the political potential of Reagan.69 This speech was Reagan’s stock campaign speech, and he had given it before and would deliver it many times later as he became the face of new conservatism. Reagan faced a difficult task. While Goldwater’s ideological leanings

65 would eventually turn out to have primed the pump for a conservative renaissance,

Goldwater himself had campaigned ineffectively, delivering the speeches ill-suited to his particular audiences. As Hammerback notes, “The Arizona conservative had consistently violated perhaps the most fundamental axiom of campaigning, by ignoring—or even arguing against—the obvious needs of many audiences he addressed.”70 Even the most successful elements of the Goldwater campaign, including his capacity for identifying with audience’s love of individual freedom, were long term rather than immediate effects, seeds planted that would later be culled by Richard Nixon and then Reagan himself.

“A Time for Choosing” is notable for analysis not only because it represented a first national rhetorical foray by a figure who would later become president, but also for the synechdochal status of its name and giver. Reagan himself had for a long time been a

Democrat, switching parties only when he became overwhelmingly concerned about the creeping menace of communism and the vulnerability of the Democratic party to said menace. Because a major task for the post-1964 Republican Party was to facilitate a major political realignment around the collapse of the classic Democratic coalition, there is a sympathetic relay between the account of history and the topic of Reagan’s speech.

Scholars have tended to come to a consensus that “A Time for Choosing” represented a turning point in the rhetorical style of Reagan, as he moved from away from a hardline anti-Communist stance to a more moderate position. Kurt Ritter, for example, argues in two articles that Reagan exchanged his hardcore conspiracy theorizing about communism for a foregrounded narrative about the plight of individuals who were rendered powerless and victimized by a bloated and inefficient government.71 The public relations firm contracted by Reagan encouraged him to adopt commonplace and everyday

66 styles, like using notecards for a homely speech feel, that would broaden his appear to the

“common” audience.72 Amis Kiewe and Davis Houck address “A Time for Choosing” in their large work on Reagan, agreeing that the speech was a key part of Reagan’s moderating move to the mainstream and that his most important accomplishment was translating the old internal scourge of communism from an internal plot into an external one.73 Mark P. Moore situates Reagan as expanding upon mythic themes of rugged individualism deployed by Goldwater, articulating them to myths of the nation’s founding, but is more interested in Eighties Reagan than his sixties shift.74 Finally, G.

Thomas Goodnight argues that understanding this speech can only be done through an analysis of the theme of individualism and the “American Dream,” which encouraged the resolution of “actually existing” anxieties in subjectivity related to economic factors by particularizing “economic displacements” and “change” as historical accidents rather than proper representatives of the American experience. 75

In general I agree with these critical assessments: “A Time for Choosing” reads not like the fevered imagination of a John Bircher but instead more like a measured (if homespun, or perhaps hokey) adventure into the rhetorical wilderness of the mass public.

This thesis certainly follows if one pursued a traditionally logical map of Reagan’s performance. However, all identification is not only identification with, but also identification against. As Kenneth Burke notes, all selections of reality are also deflections.76 For theorists of democracy, these “deflections” are the constitutive exclusions that make democracy (and populist rhetoric) work by constructing an outside, a political outside against which the mass “people” can be defined. A close reading of “A

Time for Choosing” shows that the animating threat to America remains Big Government

67 opposed to freedom and liberty. Reagan’s recalibrated style not only allows his proponents to disavow the claim that Reagan was a neo-Bircher, but also his speech enables him to make an appeal on the basis of a constructed totalitarian threat to the

American way of life.

Reagan opens by addressing one of the key challenges of his rhetorical situation: the apparent and overwhelming sense of optimism and happiness about the state of the

American economy in 1964. Reagan addresses this fact head on:

One side in this campaign has been telling that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, ‘We’ve never had it so good.’ But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in….now our national debt is one and a half time bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world.77

After addressing the prosperity side of the equation Reagan takes on the claims about peace, pointing to the many Americans dying daily in Vietnam. Mentioning these dying

Americans, Reagan then pivots to a broader theme about the Cold War, noting “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom or ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”78 Reagan conflates death and life by envisioning a working polity ruined by the failure of its citizens to act. Reagan addresses the existing feelings of optimism while also reminding his audience that the future might strongly disagree with their assessment of the present: like the heat being slowly turned up on a frog in a frying pan, the struggle of war against the enemies of

68 freedom is ongoing, if difficult to perceive. Reagan further exceptionalizes not only the conflict but also the stakes, delivering an anecdote about a Cuban émigré who reminds an

American of the special relationship American possesses to the world, with its status as a beacon of freedom. 79

After this anecdote, Reagan then turns to the meat of his appeal, generating a relationship with the audience on the basis of discussing government and “the people”, contrasting the common Americans from “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” that haughtily believes itself a superior manager of people’s lives. Reagan is careful not to construct the American “people” as a mass, which would threaten to activate enthymemes associated with America’s own vibrant demophobic tradition. Instead, it is the government that theorizes the “people” as an unthinking mass. “I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as ‘the masses.’ This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America.”

Reagan’s speech cannily distinguishes between a impoverished European peasantry and the vibrant American “people” defined by virtue of their commonly held individuality: a being together by virtue of singularity. Here Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” is understood as a specific appeal made at “vote-harvesting” time, a reference whose agricultural imprimatur is not lost on an audience whom the Cold War has made familiar with the dangers of collective agriculture. Historically, too, one can see the agrarian spirit of the proud Populists at work as well in Reagan’s words.

Reagan then moves to themes of Big Government, describing bureaucratic bloat, inefficiency, and permanence. “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth…proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations

69 have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant?” In only a couple paragraphs time, Reagan is connecting these violation of liberty with the greater international struggle against communism, arguing that, “We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “give up your dreams of freedom, because to save our own skins, we’re wiling to make a deal with your slave masters.” The “soup kitchen of the welfare state” is transmogrified into grim and dark bread lines, no doubt summoning not only of projections of life in the Soviet Union but also memories of domestic rationing during the Second World War. The analogy to slavery also does opposition work to emphasize the progress made by America in comparison to the Soviets. This metonymic move allows Reagan to close with a call that

“We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”80

Reagan’s speech was moderated from his ordinary stump speech to conservatives, but his speech’s capacity to generate support still derives from tapping into a discursive economy loaded with energy and anxiety. Martin Medhurst observes that a similar pattern can be detected in Eisenhower’s push for the Atoms for Peace program, which contained two levels, an explicit and an implicit argument. The explicit arguments were dispassionate reports about the power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but the implicit arguments were threats directed at the Soviet Union whose nuclear programming had them nipping at the heels of the U.S.81 Reagan’s speech operates similarly, with a set of explicitly segregated topoi (foreign policy, over-regulation, high taxes, agricultural creep)

70 connected a second level with the noisy conflation of the causes and impacts of each. The continuing atmosphere of risk in the Cold War, not to mention that rapid changes

America had undergone since the Second World War, made citizens sympathetic to arguments that linked the increasingly difficult to understand world littered with threats.

In this sense, “A Time for Choosing” moved away from apocalypticism to the jeremiad in a formal sense, because it privileged a message of American uplift over a traumatic story of apocalypse. America was no longer inevitably threatened but instead possessed the tools (namely, respect for individual freedom) necessary to overcome the menace.

However, the continued presence of a set of threats articulated to Big Government, the victory of communism, and a “thousand years of darkness” give this critic reason to qualify his statements about this move to jeremiad.

A look at later Reagan speeches shows this conflationary maneuver was par for the course. I name it “threat conflation” (to distinguish it from “threat inflation” in international relations), which is a rhetorical operation mixing claims, warrants, and data in such a way to prey upon the confused attitudes and affects of a public conditioned by sensitivity to conflict, warfare, and anxiety. When confronting the new threat of international terrorism in the mid eighties, Reagan faced a unique rhetorical situation, wherein the U.S. faced threats both from terrorists who operated independent of the nation state system and also traditional geopolitical threats. Jackson observes that Reagan successfully abolished this confusion by engaging in a strategy of rhetorical conflation, by interspersing and using almost interchangeably rhetoric of “’international terrorism’ and ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ constructs” that “both amplified the danger” and

“conflated terrorists and enemy states. Conflating terrorism with certain states allows a

‘war’ on terrorism to be re-targeted at countries which are the focus of American interests.”82

Something similar is at work in this version of “A Time for Choosing.” In a

United States that found itself increasingly beset by instability, confusion, and violence, the conflation of inputs and outputs of fear and anxiety was certainly possible. While audiences may not have explicitly generated whole chains of argument linking increased government regulation to a totalitarian horror, Reagan’s shifting in between stories of the horrors of communism and Big Government overreaches produced an environment where the enthymematic insertions of an audience could have generated sympathetic relays between accounts of the dangers of Big Government and the present and past totalitarian horrors against which an exceptional America had been defined.

These moves succeeded where pure red-baiting had failed because Reagan drew from ground fertilized by earlier traditions of American populism and progressivism.

Reagan emphasized the vision of a hard working and virtuous American individual, but refigured this individual not as the subject of elite market forces (or a government tied to economic interests through the practice of crony capitalism) but iinstead as a victim of a state hell-bent on destroying liberty and freedom. His recapitulation of the stakes of the

American Dream through the lens of state-powered totalitarianism created a mechanism to ally the various forces constituted by the New Right’s cadre of suburban activists and tireless workers. The New Deal consensus, perceived as the exigency driving calls for a new conservatism, ironically threatened rhetorically the very opportunities it nominally sought to defend by investing in the rhetorical power of the government to move and change the world. Because the spirit of American individualism is driven by the fantastic

72 elevation of the individual’s capacity for achievement as a universal rather than a particular one, state intervention came to be understood as a prima facie “no confidence” vote in the American “people” according to the discourses of the right. Fears and anxieties linked both to the existential dangers of the Cold War but also the more quotidian uncertainties regarding moral and virtuous life were externalized upon a rapidly growing state bureaucracy that threatened to “manage” individuality and spontaneity of human life out of existence. Conceptualizing “freedom from” government intervention as a key trope encourages the investment in individual singularity as the raison d’etre of politics. Arendt makes a relevant point about the relationship between immortality and public space. The specter of government encroachment threatens to turn “the people” into an unthinking herd by replacing civic virtue with empty state morality. Reagan’s rhetoric explains how the New Right simultaneously claimed the mantle of “the people” while avoiding elements in the American republican tradition that were suspicious of “the people.” Reagan successful resuscitates the old demophobic anxieties about the “people” but positions them as a consequence of Big Government gone off the rails, articulating the only possibly dangerous version of the “American people” as a consequent of the adoption of policies that translate them into a herd or mass similar to the droning and alienated populations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The only “people” capable of constituting a public that might outlive their conditions is a “people” freed of the domineering force of government. In this way Reagan constructs a populism simultaneously suspicious of the implicit “people” authorizing centrist policies in

America while at the same time clearing space for a conservative “people” defined

73 deductively from their status as free individuals rather than derived inductively from their social standing and actual position relative to opportunity.

The relative character of economic anxiety was also important. To the extent that

Reagan’s speech and the broader constellation of “New Conservatism” generated skepticism about Big Government, these arguments were premised on a principle of belief in the inefficiency and imprudent judgment of the government. These discourses participated in the construction of a regime of scarcity which held that the inverse relationship between an “equality of opportunity” and government intervention reigned.

So long as gains were conceived of as zero-sum (and talk of inefficiency smuggles in an economic of scarcity rather than abundance) the logic of envy rather than jealousy may predominate: the reality of the scarcity of opportunity can be confused with reference to government. Thus the denial of another’s enjoyment could be rationalized as a necessity rather than an overreaching.

Conclusion: Nixon and Reagan’s America

The rhetorical transformation of the “American people” from a figure whose composite individual parts were threatened by a combination of corporate and elite interests to a figure threatened by the specter of Big Government’s simultaneous power and inefficiency was key in explaining how a new conservatism was birthed out of the tepid centrism of the Eisenhower era and the cacophonous electoral defeat of Barry

Goldwater. Because the “American people” was an ideal it could not be encountered in

“actually existing” political discourse but its absence could be explained by the presence of Big Government, which functioned presumptively to crowd out “the people” from the space of appearance. While this is true of all discourses of mass publicity, not all of them

74 configure “the people’s” absence as proof of their suitability for public life. Crucial to this understanding is Michael Warner’s work in identifying how public space comes to be defined not by what appears in public but instead is made over and against those bodies that appear as marked and agitationist in public discourse. Warner apprehends that something like the “authentic public” never really exists but instead is a concept that tautologically animates its own capacity to frame understandings of “public space” by negatively defining the “mass public” against that which is capable of appearing in public. For Warner, the mass public is not encountered as positivity, alive with demands and identities, but instead functions as an instrument to encourage metonymic ventriloquisms of what “the public” thinks.

Such ventriloquism is not the intrinsic enemy of democracy but a necessary compensatory mechanism that adjusts for the impossibility of “the people” themselves: where a collective insistence of existence is found in polling data, news reports, founding documents (“We the People”), and political discourses, “the people” must exist, even as a force of negativity derived tautologically from their own absence in political discourse.

However, Warner also identifies a not-so-salutary effect of this public-making function of discourse: the tendency for the mass public to be defined against bodies that are easily marked, bodies that are queer, disabled, gendered, and/or raced.83 Moreover this work happens not after a public is constituted but instead is the mechanism through which the mass public is made, suggesting a fast, almost instant action at an affective level that produces the mass public not as a consequence of a certain rhetoric but instead as a sensible and firm structure for the disembodied to inhabit. Reagan’s use of affective conflation previews the success

This tautological tendency was on full display in the America that followed

Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” and Goldwater’s electoral defeat. Rick Perlstein documents how a rising tide of discontentment and instability accompanied the progressive political gains of the Johnson era of the “Fair Deal.” Between race riots, discontent over the Vietnam War, emerging feminisms that emphasized cultural rather than institutional definitions of citizenship, a civil rights movement represented not only by the (mediated) “moderation” of Martin Luther King Jr. and the more visibly polemical grammars of Black Power movements, the public profile of America circulating in newspapers and in news media was loud, messy, and anxious.84 The result is anxiety for those not represented in public discourse: on the one hand, appearance gives the tools against which one’s own existence can be defined while at the same time creating a certain kind of envy or fetish for that which appears: the Arendtian desire for immortality, the need to be in the “space of appearance.”85 The need to have some sort of existence but also to avoid appearing (which would entail the renunciation of disembodied privilege, the affective charge that comes from supposed membership in the

“universal” of the mass pubic) creates a rhetorical situation wherein the burden on

Warner’s principle of tautological negativity is high. The very fragility of the public sustains its tautological existence.

Richard Nixon and his staff proved up to the task of managing this negativity and energy. Following his victory in 1968, as much an index of Democratic chaos following

Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the election as a validation of Nixon’s politics, Nixon and his political apparatus faced a challenge: how to sustain, indeed build upon, the nascent electoral coalition signaled by his victory in the 1968 elections. There were

76 several major coalitions for whom Nixon had to craft an appealing message. First, the base of conservatives whose activism had gotten Goldwater nominated had to be convinced that Nixon was a true believer rather than an opportunistic politico. Second, the South was in play for conservatives owing to racial dynamics. Finally, middle class whites were an important voting constituency as well, one whose often working-class roots led them to lean Democratic.

According to Jeremy Engels, the success of Nixon’s political strategy can in part be understood through his move to rhetoric of the “Silent Majority” which generated fear about the “tyranny of the minority” and positioned these anxieties as emotions of resentment against those whose “acting out” threatened the stability and safety of

American democracy.86 Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, turned first to the language of the “Forgotten American” and then to that of the “Silent Majority” to create an appeal suitable for those who did not appear in the American “space of appearance.”

As Engels analyzes:

By talking in terms of silence and shouting, Nixon constituted his audience—the silent majority—as victims. The problem with democratic culture, the president proclaimed, was not war, racism, economic injustice, or other forms of objective violence. The problem was that minorities had disregarded the democratic process and had begun yelling at the (silent) majority. The rhetorical violence of (loud) minorities was thus a marker of democratic violence, for these minorities had broken the rules by refusing to defer to the majority’s will.87

In this way the forgottenness or the silence of the “real Americans” could be their defining characteristic that simultaneously crafted them as a member of the mass public defined by their absent speech but that filled in this “absence” as a profound kind of speaking as the authentic of real mass public of America. The constitutive absence of the voices of the Silent Majority thus made them into the authentic sample of Americans.

What distinguished Nixon’s move from earlier political plays on pain and victimage was his move to use a victimage ritual as “an opportunity for leaders to perpetuate pain and thereby extend their rule.”88 Here the pain is that pain of not appearing in public, the pain of being denied circulation and membership in the image of the political that circulates. While earlier moves to political victimage by American opinion leaders, like Father Coughlin, burnt out, Nixon’s cultivation of the pain of exclusion had serious staying power because it defined victimage not in term of some content related to a political situation delimited in time and space (loss of jobs, passage of legislation) but instead utilized a more or less universal grammar that defined victimhood by one’s membership in a discursive fiction whose existence could neither positively be proven nor disproven. Engels is absolutely right to use victimage as the explanatory mechanism for Nixon’s success, but I want to add a supplement to Engels’ observation, drawing on a vocabulary borrowed from Warner and other theorists of public space and negativity: the tautologous characteristics of public formation helped to lock in this rhetorical feedback loop, one that would drive not only Nixon but also the future America of Reagan. In politics, one tends to assume that if something does not appear, it does not exist. Witness the contemporary correlation in dominant public discourse between the absence in rhetoric of the interests of the poor and the corresponding difficulty in generating a policy consensus regarding measures to help them. Contrast this with the utter ubiquity of the rhetorical the “middle class” and the high visibility of efforts in their name: payroll tax breaks, student loan relief, and other measures. The cleverest trick of the move to the silent majority was that it transformed the disappearance of conservatism from a piece of data that could be read to suggest their marginalization and irrelevance of

78 politics to instead suggest their centrality in the political process. Their silence was evidence not only of their majoritarian status but also their suitability for participation in democracy, as a non-agitationist collective that would trigger not demophobic anxieties but instead slightly righteous head-nods from a population concerned that their nation was outpacing their own view of reality.

The relay of sympathy between the themes of the New Right (especially those developed in Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing”) and the Nixonian move to rhetoric of the silent majority is not minor or accidental, The field of rhetorical studies has already dwelled productively on this speech. Such rhetoric allowed including not only those just

Americans anxious about foreign policy into Nixon’s audience, but also crafted a means of understanding for those who had been forgotten in circulating news accounts: those who were not represented, those literally forgotten in public discourse, those who were not agitating or protesting. What was forgotten was of course not only the present but also the future: following Arendtian lines, the ability to appear in public is tied to the human desire for immortality. Because New Conservatism was already founded on the appropriation of a certain kind of individualized collectivism (the American “people” remain individuated historically, functioning as a sort of atomized articulation rather than a collectivity where the “collective” element blurs out the individual) the forgottenness may well have testified to the existential state of the American psyche: those who could not appear and who also thus felt that their immortality was threatened.

Such a reading also explains why even as the explicitly anti-Communist rhetoric fell out of favor the use of appeals to fear and anxiety continued to work effectively.

Discourses of danger are typically studied as figures used to explain international

79 relations and international situations, but the human affective apparatus is poorly positioned to distinguish between the various and sundry “vectors” of affective anxieties and worries. With a set of subjects already positioned by Reagan as anxious about the effects of Big Government and the still-present specter of anti-communism, a rhetoric of the “Silent Majority” playing on the inability of the American “people” to appear was reinforced by the general sense of disappearance aesthetically invoked by such rhetoric: whether “the people” were made invisible by the government or by a riotous and ungrateful minority protesting.

These anxieties are not apprehended straightforwardly. Brian Massumi indicates that the apprehension of fears does not occur through a straightforward process of cause and effect reasoning but is instead troubled by an “indistinction issue” with regards to threats and fears:

Threat is the cause of fear in the sense that it triggers and conditions fear’s occurrence, but without the fear it effects the threat that would have no handle on actual existence, remaining purely virtual. The causality is bidirectional, operating immediately on both poles, in a kind of time-slip through which a futurity is made direct present in an effective expression that brings it into the present without it ceasing to be a futurity…fear strikes the body and compels it to action before it registers consciously. When it registers, it is as a realization growing from the bodily action already under war.89

Massumi is writing in the context of the Bush-era war on terror, but his observations seem generalizable to the condition of fear apprehension: human subjects are poorly situated to determine the various causes of anxieties and fears because of the conflationary tendencies of causes and effects to trouble not only the chain of reasoning from one to another but in fact to untether the claims about whether one or either even really exist. The result is that the perception of environments is a business of guesswork.

“Indicators do not have truth-value, or even knowledge-value per se. What they have

80 ultimately is affectively inflected uncertainty-value.”90 Indicators, then, like a lack of appearance or circulation, while they could be taken to index many different things, might be repeatedly and more likely taken up as threats to the non-existence of a “Silent

Majority” whose breathing and thinking existence testified against their lack of representation in “public.”

Here the constitutive exclusions of the New Deal consensus pair with the detritus of anti-communism and a general populist sympathy with “Americans” pitted against forces of elitism no longer classed but instead defined generally as the metonymized

“elitism” of government action and regulation: “silence” becomes an index of a constitutive exclusion perpetrated in American political discourse by a set of forces whose defining characteristic is the non-recognition of the “forgotten American”. Here is where the tautologous function of Warner’s “mass public” becomes most clear. Warner’s theory of publicness is highly discursive: he relies on discursive circulation as the driver of publics in his theory.91 This reliance on discourse defines the mass public as intrinsically fragile, as what is made through discourse can also be remade through a different set of performative reiterations. This fragility is a counterintuitive strength, as the tautological character of a public renders it rather difficult to disprove. The anxieties of the “Silent Majority” are existential anxieties regarding the capacity to “appear” and constitute the American mass public: the dematerialization of “the people” here functions to make that mass public work. Every “knowing glance” towards public discourse further certifies the existence of the Silent Majority by providing a set of rancorous and marked reminders that the “not appearing” is what makes the Silent Majority appear. It is not just cultivating resentment that Nixon did so well, but it was cultivating an existential

81 resentment about actual political existence. In this way the subjectivity of the Silent

Majority was built not only its resentful status, but also its vulnerable status: the risk that a tautologically produced public might whisk it away became the animating anxiety that encouraged its ready and ever-broader circulation amongst targeted conservative demographics, and indeed, so-called “Reagan Democrats.”92 These tactics produced and cultivated subjects primed to receive differences as threats activating a messy bundle of domestic and foreign policy concerns, concerns aggravated and rendered existential by the inability of individual consumptive practices to generate collective belonging in the way that political institutions could. These tactics built a powerful longstanding coalition, one that could read “Morning in America” as textual evidence of the success of their permanently alerted affective states.

Nixon’s coalition was rather powerful, and it is unclear that without the Watergate scandal that Jimmy Carter would have been elected. Indeed, by the time America arrives in 1980, we again see the correlation of a Democratic incumbency with an anxious domestic America. The Iranian hostage crisis, high gas prices, and Reagan’s flourishing question “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” was seen as a high point, with Reagan’s “you” calling out again to that mass of Americans whose economic situations at the moment indexed, in Reagan’s discourse, a position not being acknowledged or addressed by politics as such. By 1984, it was time for an iconic

“Morning in America”, with the famously bucolic images of “ordinary life” happening in

America’s quiet and productive world: a flag being raised over a schoolhouse, tractors tending to the earth, people walking to work, and a marriage bringing joy to an old grandmother. The figures are almost entirely white. And crucially, Reagan himself never

82 appears, only introduced once at the very end of the advertisement which features his face on a campaign button. The mass public of Reagan’s America was patriotic, quiet, businesslike, and persistently productive (whether in terms of family or labor). With the advantage of incumbency Reagan’s campaign could afford to gesture in the direction of a quiet and peaceful story about the status quo, because of the resonance between the symbolic incumbency of Reagan-led America as the mass public. The quiet of Reagan’s

America could provide confirmation that the tempestuous kettle of “uncivil” America had been left behind.

And so it more or less remained. With the end of the Cold War, the elements of conservatism that had been sustained by anti-communism were still sizeable enough that the lack of a Red Menace so drained the symbolic coffers of conservatism that a newly adjusting Democratic Party in 1992 could take the presidency away from a president who had only one year prior led the most successful war in the history of the United States of

America. And the rising tide of political indistinction was so powerful that in 1996 Ross

Perot split the vote and in 2000 voters complained loudly that the choice between George

W. Bush and Al Gore was almost nothing: so much so that Ralph Nader had a highly successful campaign as a third party candidate. Indeed, without the intervention of the events of September 11th, the political fortunes of America might have been radically different: six months into his term, Bush was a historically unpopular president. But with

9/11 came all the activated nodes of security, anxiety and fear, and it would take a domestic rather than foreign crisis, not to mention a terrorism-induced case of security fatigue, to again shift the tectonic plates of American politics.

CHAPTER 3 FINANCIAL CATACLYSM AND AN ANXIOUS

PEOPLE

Introduction

The collapse of venerable Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers ignited a political crisis in September 2008. The crisis not only powerfully influenced the 2008 presidential election but also configured the American political environment for years to come, sensitizing the populace to the concerns about the disproportionate power of finance capitalism in the economic environment. While the public record is ripe with details about the nature of the crisis, as in Michael Lewis’ well regarded book The Big Short or the popular Matt Damon-narrated documentary Inside Job, the long term implications for the crisis on the American political environment, and especially on how it configures the dynamics of political argumentation, remain to be outlined.

Rhetorical takes on this crisis tend to focus on either the micro or macro level of the housing bubble, as in work by Megan Foley and Joshua Hanan.1 Foley focuses on the idea of citizenship contained in the debates about federally backed mortgage giants

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while Hanan suggests that discourses of home ownership displace an ideological crisis that threatens to expose neoliberalism’s incapacity to write over the gap between its representational performance and material conditions. The understandings of the crisis in the “mass public” of widely circulating discourse still require investigation.

Taking a different tactic, this essay will suggest how the mass-circulated account of the financial crisis at the time enacted a certain version of the American “people,” one confronted with the limitations of America’s promise in the circumscription of individual

84 agency at both micro and macro levels of analysis in the political and media discourses. I survey public news reports, Congressional testimony, “person on the street” style news articles, and Barack Obama’s campaign speech “A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class,” from the period of September 13th, 2008 until October 13th, 2008, the date of Obama’s speech. I suggest that the speed and magnitude of the economic crisis outstripped the capacity of technologies of liberalism to render coincident both the narrative of individually produced prosperity and exercises of individual choice. The result was a catastrophic encounter with the limits of the fantasy of liberal choice, exposing critical moments of elision that reify the idea of “choice” in the American political imaginary. To suture this moment, Americans, politicians, and commentators tries two tactics. The first relied on traditional mechanisms of scapegoating, dipping into the populist wellspring pitting a virtuous Main Street against the vicious greed of Wall Street elites. The second, enacted by Obama, was a mortifying return to American values, where Obama placed the blame for the disaster on Wall Street and an American “people” who had lost their way.

Because the first attempt actually suggested limits to the agency of individual choice while the latter actually implied “Main Street” bore responsibility for the crisis, the populist sentiment was not dissipated but instead exacerbated in public discourse.

I proceed in four steps. First, I show how the speed and magnitude of the financial crisis outstripped the capacities of traditional narratives of individualism and self-reliance to contain fear and anxiety. Second, I examine the role of liberal individualism in constructing an account of American identity, suggesting that a substantial economic crisis such as this one exposes the impossible reconciliation between individual choice and guaranteed future prosperity. I then turn to two public attempts to mollify the

85 circulating fear and anxiety, first the development of the Main Street/Wall Street binary, and then Obama’s attempts at mortification. Because the Wall Street/Main Street binary only works by implying a deficit in “Main Street’s” economic agency and because

Obama ceded too much ground in his speeches, I suggest there was a popular energy that remained up for capture that would later express itself in the surge of the Tea Party. That is, with their interests struggling to appear in public, “the people” would resurface.

Too Big, Too Fast

While the economy had been struggling in fits and starts since late 2007, it was not until the public threat of a collapse at the venerable Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers emerged in September that general panic became palpable. Despite calls to bail them out, the federal government refused to bailout Lehman, as the New York Daily News’ Peter

Siris said, because “it had to draw the line somewhere, and other financial institutions could not get comfortable with Lehman’s assets in an instant.”2 The practical element of that rationale foreshadowed something that would become clearer as the financial crisis intensified: the financial sector had become so opaque and maze-like that it threatened to overrun the capacities of experts and laypeople, not to mention the government, to predict, control, and regulate it. A survey of public discourses on the second day of the crisis, September 15th, reveals both confusion about the scope of the crisis but concern about its magnitude. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman put it, even

Alan Greenspan “sound downright grim” in noting that “this is in the process of outstripping anything I’ve seen, and it still is not resolved and it still has a way to go.”3 Neither the cable news service of record, CNN, nor The New York Times provided reassurance: a CNNMoney article pessimistically titled “Wall Street on Red

Alert” apocalyptically quoted a Lehman executive saying “’This looks like the end,’” while “the Treasury Department was adamantly against using any government money to help finance a takeover” even as the Times reported on an “epidemic…an epidemic of capital destruction” that threatened the financial solvency of not only Wall Street but the broader economy.4 The majority of the discourse on the collapse suggested confusion.

Greenspan’s comments particularly resonated amongst the moneyed and pundit classes: as the architect of, more or less, twenty years of economic prosperity in America,

Greenspan’s negativity was not a voice in the wilderness. The Wall Street Journal reported on the crisis as an “epidemic” that proved to be easily spread: descriptions of economic contagion emphasized the general threat to the entire economy. By September

18th the U.S. economy was “a patient in intensive care. The body is trying to fight off a disease that is spreading, and as it does so, the body convulses, settles for a time and then convulses again. The illness seems to be overwhelming the self-healing tendencies of markets.” NYU economist Mark Gertler indicated even the treasury secretary, Ben

Bernanke, was overwhelmed, “Mr. Bernanke is taking out his playbook…and rewriting it as we go.”5 This disease not only existentially threatened the American economy, but also the ideological coherence of the economic system; Time columnist Justin Fox suggested that the nation was in the midst of a “financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order.”6 These systemic worries would become less common in public discourse as the crisis deepened, particularly as corporations, the government, and even ordinary Americans started to shoulder the blame for the collapse.

In the early days of the crisis, however, uncertainty became the rule rather than the exception. Sam Stovall, chief financial analyst at Standard and Poor’s, suggested,

“markets…are gyrating ever more wildly…’Investors are like hyperactive first graders playing musical chairs…There are a lot of investors that don’t want to miss the absolute bottom.’”7 Stovall’s language not only renders members of the financial community into children, but the word “gyrate” suggests chaotic, uncoordinated movement, the opposite of the “creative destruction” so valued in the account of capitalism given by Frederick

Hayek and other economists. But even the “bottom” (itself a euphemism for untold millions in “lost value”) was revealed to be a mental construct rather than a meaningful entity: Alex Berkenson of the New York Times noted that “A lot of smart people have tried to call the bottom on Wall Street this year. So far, they have all been wrong. Now even Wall Street’s professional optimists have given up predicting exactly when their industry might stabilize. One senior executive…speaking anonymously so he could speak freely, recently observed that the crisis was entering its ‘19th inning’ with no ending in sight.”8 The supposed infallible capacity of the market to find true values was being questioned in public by experts and commentators alike who expressed concern that the self-correcting mechanism of choice was not functioning to effectively stop the collapse.

This situation reflected the scope of the crisis. Because of a weakening of restrictions on asset exchanges and other measures that watered down the regulation of big banks and the financial sectors, the Lehman collapse signaled a broader cataclysm resulting from investment banks hedging their bets by essentially laying wagers on failures. With an excess number of subprime mortgages in the economy (so called because the value on the homes to which these mortgages were tethered had dropped so precipitously that there was little chance the loans could be repaid) firms like Lehman engaged in what were called “credit default swaps,” that is, agreements between financial

88 institutions to pay others for assets in the case that they were defaulted upon. The result was a careful equilibrium where any element of uncertainty would constitute a major rather than minor threat to the financial markets because it pointed to the self-referential character of the investment bubble. The inability to find the “bottom” of the market suggested a problem with the market itself in which projections of economists and investors had themselves produced both the value (but also the risk) associated with these assets that could come to be known as toxic. Much of this story became apparent only later. At the time, the pace, magnitude, and scope of the crisis was reflected in public discourse as increasingly apocalyptic, while economic wizards like Alan Greenspan were rendered helpless, to say nothing of people who lived lives even less connected to the inside baseball of the finance industry.

Meanwhile those that did make sense of the financial crisis did so in terms insensitive at best and cruel at worst for those facing financial anxieties. California economist Sung Won Sohn, described the collapse as a natural adjustment, a punishment because “We went overboard” in terms of spending and borrowing. “As a result, the financial market is imposing some discipline on our behavior, and it’s painful. But that’s how the system works.”9 Sohn’s arguments advance an equilibrium based theory broadly endorsed by economists, who hold that markets themselves eventually correct for overshoots in speculation, and the “creative destruction” of value at these moments is actually a sign of a working market rather than a broken one. Sohn’s discourse sanitizes a major loss of wealth as a natural function of a systemic logic rather than as a catastrophic problem for the real people/real wealth signaled by the market’s existence.

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, had another naturalistic take on

89 the crisis, describing it as “not uncharacteristic of financial markets, moving from exuberance to fear, from greed to fear.”10 Thus Volcker, while critical of the crisis and understanding of the necessity of governmental intervention, provides discursive grist for the mill suggesting crises are merely part of the ordinary economic matter of affairs rather than something quite extraordinary. A financial adviser quoted in the same story as

Volcker has rather harsher words to describe the natural boom/bust cycles of economies: he notes that “’not bailing out Lehman is a good thing—we need to flush the garbage out of the economy.’”11 “Painful discipline,” “restoring equilibrium,” and “flushing out the garbage:” each of these phrasings impose a kind of natural certainty to the economic crisis: it can be read as a natural and proper correction, where the value of certain products (and, it should be noted, the value of the individual judgments) is judged and found wanting by the invisible hand of the market, that is, by an aggregation of individual preferences represented in the desirability of a product. If this kind of catastrophe is a “natural” function of our economic system, one might begin to doubt its desirability.

Contrasting these euphemisms with the growing public mood of worry and anxiety as the crisis develops suggests that any beauty to this particular act of “creative destruction” was in the eye of a very few beholders. After all, while the crisis seemed to be emerging on Wall Street, economic interdependence meant even those who eschewed the poker room of global finance were at risk. The Chicago Tribune reported that those banking with local institutions that owned none of Lehman’s debt might still “do business with other banks taking a hit from the bankruptcy…everything’s connected to everything else…It’s a real witch’s brew.”12 Other articles asked the question “What does the Wall

Street crisis mean TO YOU?” answering with a breathy reference to a coming credit crunch: the less financial liquidity in the system, the harder pressed institutions would be to lend money to “average” Americans, as Kevin Hall of the McClatchy notes that

“Problems in the banking sector spill into the broader economy…That means banks are playing defense. If you want a business loan, a car loan, a home loan, a student loan or virtually any other kind of loan, they’re hesitant to lend…The economy is slowing as credit is squeezed.”13 Even though many Americans had not made the decisions that caused the circumstance, economic interdependence meant that the mistakes of others would be visited on the collective whole. A person on the street feature in the Tribune hammered the point home, quoting registered nurse Sheri Marshall whose unease reflects not only her lack of expertise but general worry that ’I know my personal finances haven’t been great this year. So, when the big investors are having problems, and they’re the ones with the knowledge, it’s really scary.’”14 The crisis was outstripping the public discursive means to manage it. It was too fast, too complex, too big, and too serious even for those with a special knowledge of the market to interpret. Rendered as an exceptional event, this crisis threatened the liberal tenets of the American Dream because it implied that the judgment of America had resulted in this outcome.

Liberalism’s Promise

A broad scale economic cataclysm lay outside the memory of most of the

Americans alive in 2008. While the Great Depression remains in history books and circulated in fevered debates about the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America had not faced this kind of economic crisis in the mind of the mass public since the 1930s.

This is not to deny that millions of Americans face economic disasters everyday as a

91 result of the general tendency of wealth to be distributed upward under the waning of the state and rise of corporate power detailed by David Harvey, among others.15 But as far as full blown publically enacted economic dramas, even Enron and the 1980’s-era S&L scandals stopped short of 2008.

I cannot outline a monolithic understanding of how all people thought about the financial crisis. But I can suggest the mood signaled by public discourse during the time of the financial crisis, with some implications for how that narrative resonated with

Americans who were experiencing it as they scanned newspapers headlines or fired up their web browser.

Since the mid-eighties, upward mobility in America has stagnated. In late 2008 the Wall Street Journal reported that even though the economy had mostly been on the upswing for the 24-year period from 1884 to 2008, “of those in the lowest bracket, half were still likely to be there 10 years later. It’s a trend that held true for a group studied from 1984 to 1994 and reiterated itself in a group studied from 1994 to 2004.”16

Meanwhile even as upward mobility has stagnated, general wealth inequality has skyrocketed, with resources become more concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. A

Reuters’ series on income inequality suggested that the upward flows of wealth have radically intensified since the mid-eighties.17 Realizing the American Dream has become more difficult.

This data contrasts with data obtained in interviews by sociologists and psychologists about the American system. Robert Bellah, in the landmark study Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, found that while individualism was the “first language in which Americans tend to value their lives” this

92 language is constantly battling with “other more generous moral understandings” of human life, particularly Christian religious thought and civic republicanism which contribute the collectivist elements necessary to round out a world that individualism cannot fully understand.18 Bellah and his team of researchers, who first released the book in 1985, came back to the book with fresh eyes in 2008, and suggested that they had overestimated the positive force of these two collectivisms, concluding that their moral force might not, on balance, be enough to outweigh the radical individualism they find in transcripts of American life. In fact, some strains of Protestantism exacerbate rather than ameliorate these trends towards individualism: “One influential strand of biblical religion in America encourages secession from civic life rather than civic engagement, and is even tempted to condemn the most vulnerable as morally unworthy.”19 Individualism threatens to cover over the republican strains of thought in American life by directing our focus to the individual at the expense of the collective.

This is certainly not always the case: there are many moments in American history where the individual took a backseat to the collective. But as Bellah points out, during times of economic prosperity “Americans have imagined individualism as a self- sufficient moral and political guide” while “in times of adversity, such as the present, they are tempted to say that it is up to individuals to look after their own interests.”20

Individualism suggests that virtue is found in the virtuosic performance of individual talents rather than through exercises of collective will.21 James Arnt Aune noted more than twenty years ago, “Americans typically use a ‘first language’…of individualism” tied to three key precepts: a divinely anointed self, a highly expressive and poetic self, and an self structured around the acquisition of objects.22 Evidence of this is found in the

93 way the nation responded to lower scale economic crisis, such as the collapse in technological stocks in the late nineties and early aughts. Thomas Frank, in his essay

“The God That Sucked,” notes that when it comes to economic crises, often presumption is given to explanations that are routed through the prism of individual choice, declaring the exercise of individual choice to be sovereign and infallible, “The explanation for this supposed impotence is, strangely, a moral one—choice. Since those lovable little guys acted of their own free will when they invested in Lucent, PMC-Sierra, and Cisco, today there is no claim they can make that deserves a hearing. What has happened is their fault and theirs alone.”23 Because individuals are presumed to be intrinsically miraculous, powerful, and omnicompetent, public discourse often uses a language of “responsibility” when talking about difficult situations. This tendency is bipartisan. For example, Bill

Clinton worked with Republicans in Congress to author welfare reform in the mid nineties on the basis of a belief in the moral value and power of the idea of responsibility.

More contemporarily, conservative discourses critiquing state social services using the rhetoric of “the dignity of work” coincide with progressive politicians who have moved the goalpost from equality of circumstance to equality of opportunity in discussing public policy matters. As just one example, 2012 candidate for Congress Tammy Duckworth spoke of preserving social safety nets “to give everyone a chance” (emphasis mine) at the

American Dream.24 There are many examples of politicians, pundits, and literature enacting a separation between opportunity and outcome only to suggest they meet at the same coincident point.

Indeed these concessions to individualism shift the public’s soft presumption to interpet one’s social location or position to act as an index for their worth as an individual

94 rather than as an expression of some sort of broader systemic or cultural logic. The idea of future achievement, then, gives citizens a chance to belong for what they might do in the future even if, at the moment, they have not yet achieved greatness. Bruce Robbins, in his literary study of upward mobility in contemporary and classical literature, argues that the desire for upward mobility represents a kind of way for subjects to conceive of themselves as aiming for a belonging to an institution even when the stable and historically-important institutions (i.e. the Church, family) have come under further and further fragmentation and collapse as the proliferation of difference in representation and demography suggests the limitations to traditional modern narratives about the precise makeup of the world. These concerns are highlighted in the highly and increasingly heterogeneous America. Thus economic belonging substitutes for these kinds of collective identification that have been made harder by the weakening of societal institutions.25 From Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick to Will Smith’s The Pursuit of

Happyness the cultural perseverance of these ideas indexes their relevance. The need to imagine a prosperous future constitutes a mechanism to sustain the existing conventional wisdom about the relationship between individuals and the economic system. Sustaining this relationship, however, requires an account that can navigate around the rather consistent gap between what is promised and what is provided.

Elided Non-Moments

The promises of individual contained in mass culture and in political discourse lay in tension with the differences and inequalities suffusing political and socio-economic structures. Why does the public discourse stop short of jumpstarting a mass legitimation crisis for capitalism? After all, the 2008 crisis caused critics to worry about the future of

95 capitalism as an institution. However, to assume that this understanding would ascend requires one to believe that individuals can be separated and segregated from the economic system for the purposes of imagining their attitudes. Vikki Bell outlines the manner in which the intersection of market and person is rendered coincident through discourse in her essay “The Promise of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom” by relying on the work of Michel Foucault. She starts by suggesting “liberal democracy advocates a world in which social order rests crucially upon the citizenry’s faith in the good consciences of those who govern. That liberalism rests upon this capacity to promise…is the locus between liberalism’s present and its future—its vision—creating a sense of causality and temporality.”26 Governing, of course, means more than just the actions of those who lay within a particular bureaucratic apparatus, but also the

“governance” of those who, in other ways, contribute to the public good. The regime of liberalism does not only demand good governance from those in institutions but also good governance performed by citizens who rule and rule in turn others through their participation in the collective good of the economy. For example, George W. Bush’s now notorious proclamation that following 9/11 Americans had a patriotic duty to go shopping locates the stability of the polity in the exercise of a civic choice circumscribed by the economic: the exercise of economic choice will stabilize the nation. Many of course rolled their eyes at this proclamation

However, liberalism’s promise rests in the giving of free choice to an almost countless number of subjects. That is, the often unexplored other side of Bush’s statement is the implication that if everyone exercised their choice in the direction of not purchasing liberalism would fail to provide what is has promised. How can the democratization of

96 choice be rendered coincident with an assured outcome of prosperity when the very idea of choice carries with it the sneaking threat of unknowability, the possibility that the exercise of choice might create something altogether distinct from what was promised?

Put differently, there is a tension between the promise of freedom and its practice. As

Bell puts it, “Any moment of disbelief, any lack of faith in another’s promise, is a moment that liberalism can contain…but it is also the more fearful moment for the liberal machinery…liberalism contains a necessary but potentially destabilizing point at which the ability to make promises joins the ability to hesitate and…to imagine the future differently.”27 Choice must be limited in its universalization because truly universal exercise of the faculty of choice might produce chaos. It is for this reason that the function of “choice” must be abstracted into a factor that is an unqualified good: the capacity of choice serves as something like an Archimedean point in accounts of neoliberalism, there can be no choice about choice.

Bell’s analysis implies that scholars of rhetoric and controversy should be mindful of moments in public discourse that have to particularize and sanction choices in a way that undermines the universal claims that drive claims about how the invisible hand might fix any and all problems. These “glimmers of hope that open up as one moves amongst and between the techniques by which power relations attempt but never truly succeed in

‘holding’ their pattern” operate in the space between the promise and practice of liberalism.28 De-linking choice from its guarantees suggests that need to interpret these moments not as moments where individuals have inappropriately chosen but instead moments where choice does not offer the right answer to the problem being posed.

Before these moments are closed off by rhetorical mechanisms of disavowal or

97 distraction used by those who parrot conventional wisdom, scholars can point to them as moments that warrant interpretations that go beyond the presumptive force of market logics. These moments are fleeting, however, because the representation of the market’s promise and its actual practice are blended by the performative characteristics of the

“market” itself which emerges to that is seems to be an effect of the interaction of forces of choice rather than the cause of their coherence.

The logic of performativity rather than representation explains how liberalism sustains itself. Representational operates within the coordinates of space and time as imagined in the fantasy of liberalism, with stark divisions between where we are and where liberalism will get us. This account assumes the relationship between choice and reality as causal. As Bell says, “Temporally speaking, the representation of a practice cannot be carried over in the way opinion can; it needs the space of time.”29 Choice must have some sort of content to matter, the idea of choice alone means nothing without other choices to compare it against. Preserving the stability of a binary of good and bad choices allows one to reason from socio-economic location to the character and quality of one’s judgment. However, where economic catastrophe is shared, and indeed, where it may even fail to punish those thought to be responsible for a problem, the meaning of choice is disentangled from its performative function. As the debate over the bailout developed, those who argued for the bailout relied on arguments which implied that those who made good individual choices would not be appropriately rewarded. At the same time the speed of the collapse and the government response was so fast that only the government, not the individual, could provide stability. This suggests why the economic crisis was a crisis

98 with a powerful force over subjectivities. It spoke directly to the incapacity of individual choice.

Bailout Nation’s Start

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke started to put together a plan for the government (and hence the taxpayers) to take on the toxic assets threatening to bottom out the American economy. The plan drew fire; with the government purchasing these toxic assets it would reward the very Wall Street risk takers who had created the catastrophe in the first place, and render public the private risks taken by these bankers. A widely distributed McClatchy piece quoted Bill Gross, the

CIO of Pacific Investment, who defended a bailout on the grounds that it was needed to save ordinary Americans at the mercy of forces beyond their control: "Write some checks, bail 'em out, prevent a destructive housing deflation," he wrote in words that proved prophetic. "This rescue, which admittedly might bail out speculators who deserve much worse, would support millions of hard-working Americans whose recent hours have become ones of frantic desperation."30 Indeed, the generally slow pace of American government meant that the anti-democratic content of the so-called bailout was highlighted by the closed doors anti-democratic negotiations in Congress. The editorial suggests that “hard-working Americans’” choices were all for naught; they are caught up in economic tides that are beyond their power.

Meanwhile, Paulson and Bernanke worked with captains of industry while most of the representatives in Congress were left in the dark about the fine print, including conditions, of the bailout. The Washington Post emphasized the sense of urgency that

99 was driven by the fact that only a tiny sector of the nation could possibly affect the economy now:

The frenetic pace of the financial crisis has forced the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to make rapid-fire decisions in recent days, leaving Capitol Hill lawmakers effectively impotent -- and frustrated. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed concern yesterday that they have had no control over when and how federal money has been used to curb the panic on Wall Street. While many have been convinced that the moves so far have been necessary to prevent a wider financial meltdown, they said they felt confined to the sidelines, as power to make momentous decisions has been concentrated in very few hands.31

The concentration of decisions about who would receive what and under what conditions implied that the democratization of choice was itself a somewhat hollow or empty endeavor. That is, on both ends of the liberal promise, to free individual choice and provide prosperity, there was now doubt about whether either side of the equation could explain the circumstances. Even the public’s representative, Congress, was kept in the dark. Public polling, while an imperfect measure, confirms the general air of unease: an

Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted reported that “an overwhelming majority thinks the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers and the sudden sale of brokerage firm

Merrill Lynch will have a negative effect on jobs and the economy.”32 Because this effect was segregated from the choices of the “people” it suggested a gap between the promise of liberal economic theory and the capacity of practices to contribute to it. In a field where “your choice matters” is considered a simple fact and people are constantly bombarded with advertising and narratives that celebrate the sovereignty of individual choice, the circumstances threatened to eviscerate the meaning of that capacity to choose.

Politicians, observers, and citizens relied on a rhetoric of “Wall Street vs. Main Street” to make sense of the crisis, hoping that invoking a simple binary between the corrupted

American economy and a more authentic homespun could make sense of matters.

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Wall Street/Main Street

As the crisis outstripped the capacities of figures to manage it, the media began to call for the skins of those responsible. There was talk of criminalizing bad trading and a return to legislation like the regulations in the Glass-Steagall act that had regulated big banks. These discourses suggested a moment that would shrink the promise and practice of liberalism into a coincident point where imagining state intervention into the market would be possible. These moments are similar to what Kenneth Burke calls “perspective by incongruity.” For Burke, the world is structured by a set of commonly-agreed-to social motives, what he often calls pieties or proprieties. These principles do not stay true over time, but instead seem to maintain their permanence because humans rely on “certain blunt schemes of generalization, conceptualization, or verbalization” that create the impression of continuity out of the chaos of human existence.33 “Perspective by incongruity” refers to a moment where pieties change on account of the unsettling and maneuvering of hierarchies that have framed human conduct. For example the

Progressive-era fight for labor rights required that the view of workers as simple mechanical parts of a business be wrenched free with the suggestion that the workers were, first and foremost, human beings. For Burke, then, the question in a given controversy is not one of preserving either a right or wrong view of humanity, but instead of showing how we remain tethered to familiar understandings that preserve the illusion of consistency in an ultimately heterogeneous world. Much as the perhaps apocryphal worry of Stuart Hall that signifiers do not often float far suggests a kind of intrinsic conservatism in social reality, Burke believes that humans remain tethered to pieties even when events powerfully challenge their coherence. Humans reason from the certainty of

101 the piety to social data rather than in reverse, valuing the safety of familiarity in narrative over the inchoate hidden disadvantages related to change.34

Scapegoating rituals sustain pieties by externalizing the sources of crisis, in a community through rhetoric that places the blame on peripheral elements of the social imaginary. Many crises emerge as a result of collective investments in certain notions, and they often symbolize the incapacity of those notions to effectively write over the messes of the “human barnyard” which is why Burke suggests that the “‘scapegoat cannot be ‘curative’ except insofar as it represents the iniquities of those who would be cured by attacking it. In representing their inequities, it performs the role of vicarious atonement.’35 In order to atone for the sins of a community, the scapegoat has to toe a curious line, being enough of a community so that its actions can be reasonably have thought to have ruined the community but, on the other hand, it must remain external enough to function like an alien enemy, one whose expulsion will confirm the virtue of the existing community.

In the case of the financial crisis, there was a ready scapegoat at hand: Wall

Street, that bastion of financial achievement but also a vile pit of greed and avarice.

America’s relationship to Wall Street has always been one of measured complexity, given the capacity of Wall Street to appropriately condense the appeal and excess of the

American Dream. As Steve Fraser notes in his book Wall Street: America’s Dream

Palace, Wall Street is marked by a dual status as both a place of hardened rationality but also extreme risk:

Inside its monumental piles of granite, steel, and glass, the equations of economic fitness are calculated with mathematical rigor. Like its very name—the street of streets—it exudes a certain quintessential purity...Yet Wall Street also evokes a radically different set of symbolic associations as the center of mad ambition.

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Fevers, manias, and frenzies race up and down its pavement like hysterics in a lunatic asylum. Life on the Street cycles between irrational ecstasies amid depressive panics. This is the land of financial “wilding.” Here one indulges all dreams. Here one gambles recklessly on the future. No one is denied entrance to this democracy of the greedy.36

A repository for the dirty laundry of American capitalism but also a site of dreaming,

Wall Street does not operate in the straightforward manner of a conventional “devil term.” For as much as Wall Street is tracked in the popular imagination by events like

Black Monday, the S&L scandals of the 1980s, or Gordon Gekko, it remains seductive for both producers of cultural texts and news industries whose only task is to track what people on “The Street” are thinking, both as persons and as reflected in their judgments of stocks. A 1987 review of the Oliver Stone film Wall Street in The New York Times suggests as much, arguing Stone’s attempt to stage a morality play about America’s ethically questionable financial center backfires because the slick and charming Gekko’s

“wickedness” ends up being “a lot more attractive that perfunctory moralizing.”37

Public discourse surrounding the financial crisis blamed Wall Street. Reports suggest a Wall Street rendered powerless to understand what was really happening, with the European Report identifying a “rare degree of uncertainty” in the international economic scene while the St. Petersburg Times noted that “the picture remains unsettled, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in exposure assumed by taxpayers is alarming to

Americans” as the barrier between Wall Street and Main Street seemed more permeable if in outcome and not deed.38 The Voice of America News noted there was a crisis of confidence and “cause for concern” as the inability of Wall Street to read the market

“will filter its way down to the lending markets for consumer(s).”39 The vulnerability of interdependence is on display throughout these commentaries.

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As the threats signaled by interdependence circulated, other public accounts summoned an “ordinary” America, understood through the metonymic phrase “Main

Street.” Signaling a pristine town center, perhaps in the 1950s, the phrase conjures a simpler and less complicated world where virtues and dreams have not yet been trampled by a messy encounter with the fallen morality of the big city. Discourse emphasized not only that Main Street was threatened but also that it played no part in the rising action. In the early days of the crisis papers of record were openly wondering about what the collapse meant for the “real Americans” on Main Street. Greg Burns of the Chicago

Tribune, in his article “Meltdown will continue to reverberate” opens with a graph contrasting how “Wall Street’s meltdown sent the stock market reeling” which “left Main

Street with one sobering throughout: It isn’t over yet.” Burn’s commentary closes by emphasizing the clear lack of agency most have: “Few Americans have a direct connection to the events unfolding on Wall Street, but practically everyone has a stake in the game…everything’s connected to everything else.” 40 Mike Allen of Politico reported not only could “America’s banking instability…upend the final 50 days of the presidential campaign” but also “The crisis, which once seemed like a confusing Wall

Street story, has reached a tipping point where Wall Street will visibly affect Main

Street.”41 Other news reports depicted Main Street as the innocent and isolated realm of sanity. The Dallas Morning News quoted economist Mike Davis in noting that the

“ hasn’t shaken Main Street nearly as much as Wall Street…but unless the financial markets and the housing markets stabilize, that’s got to be reverberated back to the other aspects of life in the economy…the worst-case scenario is that this is a black hole…that’s the analogy: that these dominos, this house of cards, begins to fall apart.”42

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In the early stages of the crisis, the dice are quite clearly loaded against “Wall

Street,” which is positioned as the opposite of regular or ordinary American, a wholesome and virtuous “Main Street” minding its own business. By and large “Main

Street” and “ordinary people” are contrasted with the mavens of Wall Street who have failed to accurately read and predict the markets. By September 18th fault lines calcified further. The St. Petersburg Times remained committed to laying the blame at the feet of

Wall Street., but acknowledged, “The crisis on Wall Street is a crisis on Main Street.”43

Clinton-era Labor secretary Robert Reich said, “There is cause for concern. The worry is that the credit markets become so tight as a result of all this, that lending all but stops…Small businesses cannot get the loans they need…Individuals can’t get the loans they need…and the economy basically goes into a very deep recession.”44 Moreover, even as economic malaise creeps, it also becomes apparent in public discourse that whatever trust Wall Street has earned has been frittered away. An account in the Arizona

Republic entitled “The Wall Street Mess” noted that “The tumult in the financial markets has entered such confused, uncharted territory that even the most dependable analysts of events are begging for time to sort it all out…Wall Street is an enterprise that either expands or contracts, not on the evidence of the economy as it stands but on expectations of where it will be in the future. And currently, it is clear that the masters of finance have no clue.”45 The promise of economic affluence is contrasted with an uncertain and risky present.

Meanwhile Congress continued to debate about bailing out Wall Street. The Wall

Street/Main Street divide had infected this discourse, as Market Watch reported on

September 25th:

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Wall Street is about to get its bailout from Main Street, but what do we get in return? Everyone from your house to the White House now agrees that swift action is needed to keep our head-case economy from a rendezvous with a worst- case financial tsunami. Does Washington have the solution? That's the $700 billion question. The patient is coming off life-support, but is still very weak. Housing prices are sliding, consumers are strapped, lenders are paralyzed, and corporations are reluctant to part with cash. It's hardly the time to own speculative financial assets, but we have no choice. And if we're lucky, most of these troubled securities actually may fetch higher prices than we paid for them. But at the moment, that's a big "if." 46

This article highlights again the language of economic disease, and also brings up a

“tsunami” suggesting a natural disaster occurring outside the scope of human agency to control. No one wants to spend, lend, or invest, and the result is that the utopia of choice has been hemmed in by its own failures. A St. Paul Pioneer Press article ran some worst case scenarios with its readers in its article “How the credit crisis could squeeze Main

Street” opening the article with these stanzas: “Without a government rescue of U.S. financial markets, experts say some worst-case scenarios could ensue: Your employer won't be able to make payroll because the company's bank account has been frozen in a bank failure. Your credit card will be rejected when you try to pay for groceries or fill your gas tank. Your bank may close.” The article lays all the blame at the foot of institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns rather than a generalized set of individual behaviors.47 Meanwhile the Boulder, Colorado based Daily Camera, published a fairly sarcastic editorial letter to Wall Street, which opened with by claiming that “Main

Street” can feel Wall Street’s pain, but if Wall Street is going to balk at having strings attached to the bailout bill (checks on executive compensation, oversight) then they can pretty much be left to fail.48

It was in this context that Congress rejected the initial bailout bill. CNN frames the failure of the bailout in partisan terms, with the GOP positioning themselves as

106 favoring the bailout until, in the words of then-minority leader John Boehner (R-OH),

“passage would have been possible if it had not been for a speech delivered by Nancy

Pelosi” that insisted on the absolute undeniable necessity of the bill. Pelosi’s ‘partisan speech” had poisoned the well on Boehner’s view, politicizing an issue that should remain above the fray. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) refused to buy into the Republican narrative and in response to the bill’s failure argued “Because somebody hurt their feelings, they decided to hurt the country…That’s not plausible.”49 Several other objections to the bill were also voiced: some noted that the plan threatened economic freedom by intervening into the market, others thought the bill a relatively hasty and poorly thought through response to a crisis (Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett analogized to the Patriot Act), and other worried that the bill included too few measures for the recuperation of money if businesses succeeded as a result of the bill.50. Meanwhile the battle for distributing responsibility for the crisis between Wall Street and Main Street continued: a length U.S. News and World Report piece insisted on a top down reading of the continuation of the crisis, calling Wall Street’s “Great Unwind” the result of

“investors and speculators, including scores of American financial institutions…tak(ing)

unprecedented risks(s) ” and making “bets made on a now collapsed foundation of greed and overly optimistic economic assumptions.”51 Note how the language is of risk, bets, and greed: the excessive and dangerous side of capitalism was harnessed to bad ends by greedy investors who had their own self-interested rather than the collective good in mind. Certainly this suggests a violation of Bell’s description of liberalism as an “economic compact” where choice rules and is ruled in turn.

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Some, especially economists, disagreed with the assessment that the economic crisis represented a failure of the market system. For example, at a public panel on the financial crisis, finance professor Ron Melicher, admitted that the bailout package was a necessity, but simultaneously argued that everyone was to blame for the bailout: “people, financial institutions, and regulators at all levels share the blame…they all thought someone else would solve the problem.”52 Melicher was only one of several participants at a forum, and the only one to really democratize blame for the crisis. This type of view did occasionally appear in the news media, but was generally outweighed in public discourse by the “Wall Street fault” view at a powerful ratio.

Letters to the editor also reveal a pained public ultimately distributing blame upwards. In the “Letters to Editor” section of the Los Angeles Times on October 1st, directly after the bailout failure, the first letter is from Oren M. Spiegler of Upper St.

Clair who frames the bill’s failure as a necessary mechanism to promote “personal responsibility and free enterprise…we Americans are likely to find that we have been living too high on the hog. We demand constant upgrades to our standards of living, and we acquire most of what we want on credit…the purported need to continued to feed the credit monster is the hue and cry of those who demanded passage of this massive, socialistic bill.” John Owen of Los Angeles focused on the ills of the bailout itself, calling out the Newspeak found in changing the name of the bailout to the “’economic recovery plan.’ Talk about lipstick on a pick…for a Wall Street giveaway.” Moderate

Democrat Howard Gittleson shares Boehner’s critique of Pelosi, asking that she put country about party instead of “putting partisan politics above the nation’s needs.”

Shirley Conley of Gardena said “Congress took a three-page bailout proposal and turned

108 it into a 110-page one. Methinks we need fewer attorneys and more accountants in

Congress.” Charmingly, Lyle D. Mutz simply wishes everyone in America be encouraged to “watch the classic Capra movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” (Nostalgic idealism enthusiasts may be forgiven in their anger that, in light of the legislative gridlock, he did not suggest another Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)53 Here the ratio is 1:4 of letters distributing blame throughout the polity, suggesting a sympathetic relay between how citizens were thinking and also how the news was framing the matter.

A piece in the Herald-Times of Bloomington, Indiana sheds further light on the subject, presenting an uncompromising summary of the “average American’s” thoughts on the matter by following U.S. Rep. Baron Hill as he walks through his community surveying the members on the financial crisis and bailout bill. The story reports on three citizens views, each of whom both wants to punish the people responsible for the crisis

(and accordingly, not reward them with a bailout package) and also lays the blame at the feet of Wall Street.54 A third lengthy piece in the Richmond (Indiana) Palladium-Item illustrates the difficult paradox at work in public discourse of the bailouts and the relationship between Wall Street and Main Street:

Emotions ranged from shock to satisfaction…as the dust settled Tuesday on the U.S. House of Representatives' rejection of a $700 billion financial bailout package. Many were pleased with the vote, saying that common sense ruled the day. Others were left with little confidence in the U.S. economy while wondering what's next...‘I'm in favor of the bailout. ‘This is not a time for partisan politics," he said. "It's time for someone to step up and do the right thing, to do what's best for our economy and do what's best for our country.’ Others said the bailout was a knee-jerk reaction that would not help.…there is also real anger in the community at what some believe is the arrogance and greed on Wall Street that created the economic mess. ‘I'm totally against the bailout...’In my opinion the executives who oversaw the companies who gave out all these loans should be held responsible. Instead, they get a golden parachute. It's just not right.’55

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This article summarizes and condenses three common claims during the financial crisis and over the course of the bailout debate. 1) People with power did wrong and deserve punishment. 2) The American people feel wounded and mistreated, and desire accounting and justice for their wrong. 3) ANYONE should be able to see this, as found in the regular invocation of tropes like common sense. That this cluster of sentiments is centrally and repeatedly found in the discourse is interesting given that one major talking point against the bailout early on (and more substantially post facto) was that the bailouts constituted a kind of socialism that intervened into the markets. Of course, any call for collective political action to intervene into the market crisis is an endorsement of a certain kind of socialism: the activation of a collective apparatus of political representation to intervene and distort the market out of necessity. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to find public discourse critical of the idea of the market itself: the white- collar crimes of Wall Street are exceptions to economic logics rather than exemplars.

There is a definite sentiment in favor of government intervention, but perhaps it is unclear exactly what sort of intervention (short of stringing up Wall Street fat cats) has any real broad support.

Bailout II

Two final themes calcified in the discourse while a second bailout bill was written and presented to the House. The first theme is that the bailout is a necessary evil. Anxiety soared to higher even levels, with billionaire Warren Buffett describing the crisis as “an economic Pearl Harbor…it really is one.”56 Meanwhile the Chicago Tribune amongst other news sources reported that the initial failure of the bailout has now made the approval of the renovated bailout package on a second vote into a fait accompli as

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“Congressional leaders and the White House insist the imperative need to take action has been strengthened by a roller-coaster ride on the stock market, which followed the

House's rejection of a bailout on Monday with its biggest single-day point-plunge ever.”57

Both senators from Indiana, Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh, defended their vote for the bailout on the grounds that it was noxious but necessary, and that the broader economy would suffer without their vote.58

The second theme suggested the bailout helps out those who did the worst while not helping out ordinary Americans. A widely circulated Associated Press report emphasized the second, starting with a representative anecdote:

The harsh reality for Murielle Montes and hundreds of thousands of homeowners who are behind on their mortgages is this: A $700 billion bailout of the financial industry will probably do little to help them avoid foreclosure…House lawmakers are scheduled to vote on the package, amid intense lobbying from President Bush and industry groups who say the measure is crucial for stabilizing the staggering U.S. economy. But when it comes to foreclosures, the Treasury Department is only directed to ‘maximize assistance for homeowners’ and write up monthly progress reports. That's not enough to help Montes.”59

Meanwhile the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, reported that average Americans were suspicious of the new bailout package. Iris Brown was “one taxpayer” that “thinks the government action came too late. ‘Where was the crisis when it was the working people losing their homes at an alarming rate?’…Now all of a sudden it’s the rich people and those friends in high places. Now it’s a crisis I think that’s really sad…Somebody needs to go to jail.’”60 Populist rabble-rouser Glenn Beck said on his CNN show that the reconfigured bailout package was not a bailout for Wall Street: instead “it’s not for Main

Street either. It’s for K Street. It’s for the lobbyists and the special interests and everybody else who thinks they can finally” fit their hands in a cookie jar of government pork.61 What tethers all three of these accounts is their absolute denial of the

111 interdependence that allows the economy to function: anything that is not money or other relief given to suffering individuals outside of Wall Street does not count as economic support. Brown’s discourse reveals a perception of preferential treatment: only once the most powerful are threatened economically do politicians intervene; the previously struggling economy did not matter until it was bad enough to affect even those at the very top.

The more or less bipartisan scapegoating blames both the government for its disconnect from “the people” while locating much of the fault for the financial crisis in the halls of Wall Street, a bastion of greed and avarice. That the bailout is a necessary evil is evidence of how much ill these figures have wrought, forcing the public to take on private risk. Liberalism’s promise, found in the ongoing economic and political catastrophe, is reconciled with its practice through an exercise that suggests it was not the improper exercise of individual choices of the “ordinary” economic sectors that erred but instead a few choices that were magnified in their effect such that they crowded out and silenced the signals of ”normal” actors. Throughout, commentators and individuals go to great lengths to suggest we are witnessing a problem derived from the excesses of the economic system rather than an expression of its true nature. Calls for the prosecution of white collar criminals and antipathy towards the bailout derived from the belief that it rewards those who caused the crisis suggest something similar. Those who made bad choices would ultimately be rewarded, and specifically through the perversion and pollution of the market by the government. Indeed, that some cheer the failure of the original bailout bill, one that would protect the general economy from a greater catastrophe, suggests that the identitarian component to locating blame for the crisis

112 strongly reconfigured the public set of attitudes towards the crisis in general. The defense and protection of an existing set of pieties now took precedence over the pragmatic considerations associated with buying off a broader economic cataclysm.

Eventually of course, a bailout passage to purchase the toxic assets passed, and though it included more conditions and limitations than the early versions of the bill, the

“TARP” provisions as they came to be known remained a powerful lightning rod for political opposition. Public understandings of the bill continued to conceive of it as a giveaway for those who had ruined the economy in the first place, as the later debate over executive compensation would show. Why did the public remain staunchly opposed to a bill that most economists concluded would actually save the economy from destruction?

Part of the answer has to do with a hiccup in the scapegoating mechanism.

Typically, scapegoating procedures play on traditions and stereotypes that can confirm a dominant piety while at the same time explaining why it is threatened in a particular moment. During the early period of the financial crisis, even conservative thinkers like

Irwin Stelzer of The Weekly Standard mused that America was on the precipice of a radical change

Market capitalism as practiced in the United States will never be the same…We are witnessing a radical modification of capitalism. Some of this is obvious. We know that the old view that some banks are too big to fail has been augmented by the view that some financial institutions are too interconnected to fail. So Freddie Mac,Fannie Mae, AIG and others are bailed out by one device or other, even though no depositors were directly threatened by the demise of these institutions.62

Here interdependence, rather than being the rising tide that helps all ships is instead an anchor that drags down every boat. These understandings ultimately faded out of the public discussion, replaced with the Wall Street/Main Street dualism. Such a dualism

113 drew on the cultural ambiguity towards Wall Street but could not shake the latent attachment to its promise, the achievement of material success. Moreover, the public transcript emphasizes the substantial amount of agency exercised by those on Wall Street who traded with the nation’s future, and at times the bailout opposition also magnified the agency of the government in egging on and even encouraging these financial rogues.

The fact that bailout anger lived on long after October, and as we will see, configured a great deal of America’s political fortunes for the next few years, owes something to the idea that the promise and practice of liberalism were not effectively sutured into a supposedly coincident moment. The move to scapegoat Wall Street carried the implication that Main Street’s own economic agency was in fact circumscribed by higher powers. Because public opinions and discourses tended not to scapegoat capitalism itself, there were few rhetorical resources available that were capable reconciling the fantasy of individual choice’s relevance to the economic crisis. Therefore in the logic of the Wall Street/Main Street divide, the disproportionate power of the latter over the economic fortunes of the former was enthymematically granted by the public controversy over the crisis and bailout. The discourses which defended the bailout as a necessary evil suggest limits to choice. These linkages between the kind of prosperity imagined in the prospects of liberalism’s universalization and the other convoluted side of the role of Wall Street in our imagination (consider the subtle and permanent appeal of figures like Gordon Gekko, who may strike us as oily but whose easy access to private jets indicate there are rewards for emulating his behavior) imply that scapegoating Wall

Street cannot shake much of the latent appeal of discourse of prosperity and, thus, liberalism’s promise. The resulting attempt by public actors to suggest a bailout as a

114 necessary evil but without offering a major attitudinal and ideological course correction threatens liberalism’s guarantee to link its promise and practice, because the individual practice of choice on economic levels below the hallowed halls of finance is rendered inconsequential, or at least mostly irrelevant to the conduct of the economy at large.

Discourses about economic interdependence and the manner in which the economic crisis would travel down to create a credit crisis for ordinary Americans suggests that no matter how responsibly they had lived their lives and managed their finances, the enormity of the catastrophe threatened to suck then in, retroactively implying a kind of insignificance of their own economic choices. The lingering anger over the bailouts as months went on suggests that there was not a complete restoration of capitalist equilibrium

By the time the bailout bill had passed, the American “people” were frustrated and angry. Populist opposition to the bailout served enabled politicians and the public to kill two birds with one stone: principled opposition to corporate cronyism could offer a plausible explanation for how a massive financial crisis was in the offing, while simultaneously rendering the circumstances that contributed to the coming economic cataclysm exceptional events rather than part of the normal conduct of economic affairs.

The nullification and eradication of agency threatened by the initial crisis (and exacerbated by the move to a Wall Street/Main Street scapegoating frame) was explained by the unfair linkage between Wall Street and their supporters in the government. The mutual distance between “the people” and both Wall Street and the federal government combined to make constituting an American people relatively easy. With the passage of the bailout, there was no stopper to bottle up the populist anger emerging: only a further

115 exacerbation of the anxiety. An article in the October 5th Albuquerque Journal even explicitly referenced the 1976 film Network:

The 'mad as hell' attitude is far more pervasive. People are mad about the

economy and the bailout and don't know quite what they can do about it. They -

and we - are mad about the poor management at these gigantic companies,

especially the fortunes made by the executives. We're mad about the regulations

Congress implemented, which directly impacted the situation negatively. But

we're really mad that the taxpayers are going to be stuck paying the bill. We're

even more angry with Congress - for a whole bunch of things. They've passed a

bailout bill that we're not even sure anyone read in its entirety. It didn't seem like

they even considered alternatives that might have ended up with the same result

without just giving handouts.63

Public discourse continues to reflect these anxieties about the state of the economy, and crucially, about the displacement of ordinary Americans from any position related to decision-making, whether over the microeconomic level or the level of legislative action.

It was shortly after this that presidential candidate Barack Obama took his shot at harnessing American economic anxieties for his presidential run, and showed that while he was keenly tuned in to America’s historical understanding of itself, he was slightly tone deaf on the exceptional circumstances the nation faced.

A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class

When Obama took the podium on October 13th, 2008, in Toledo he was already in a favorable position in the presidential race. Capitalizing on the financial chaos resulting from the failure of the venerable Lehman Brothers financial firm, Obama had built a

116 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). Obama had also benefited from a number of McCain campaign gaffes, including his statement on the same day of the

Lehman collapse that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” and his gambit to

“suspend his campaign” to dodge a debate during the bailout controversy. Obama already had a wide lead on McCain, and had a lot of latitude in terms of the kind of speech he could give.

Obama delivered an address entitled “A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class”. This speech embraced a hybrid populism that came close to encouraging meaningful collective responsibility for the September financial crisis, but ultimately set the stage for later conservative populism because it refused to either purely demonize Wall Street or offer an unqualified opportunity for mortification. Obama reduced his own capacity to serve as a demagogic lightning rod, perhaps in part because of how race constrains the appearance of the “angry black man” in public.

Obama opens the speech with a flurry of collective pronouns that alternate between establishing his consubstantiality with the audience but also occasionally reminding them 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.”64 Obama then moves to the second person. “You’ve got auto plants here in Ohio…closing their doors…You’ve lost

117 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 Street/Main Street” 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.”65

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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.”66 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 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.”67 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

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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 suggests 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.68

Obama also gestures towards the possibility of what Kenneth Burke calls mortification, the possibility that people might suffer for their sins.69 However, instead of cultivating such a sense 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 call for mortification, is that while there is still a crime or an exigency (financial disaster) responsibility for this disaster cannot be properly allocated. It may lie with average

Americans themselves, suggesting a further reason for later populist furor against Obama: subjects make use of many techniques like disavowal and scapegoating to evade their complicit in catastrophes. 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

120 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

121 post-2008 political conservatism. What this chapter has suggested is that the populist themes nurtured in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. 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”, Obama establishes a relationship to “the people” in the context of the financial catastrophe that positions him poorly to act as the righteous avatar fighting against greed and injustice.

Conclusion

The financial crisis in September 2008 hit America with speed and mass uncertainty. With the mavens on Wall Street unable to process of manage the crisis, an anxious American public turned to the federal government to provide a response.

However, the government initially proved feckless and toothless, able only to listen to information delivered on a need-to-know basis by Benjamin Bernanke and a few select others. As the representative apparatus of the American people proved unable to deal with the anxiety, public discourse catalyzed around a classic scapegoat: the elitist “suits” and gamblers on Wall Street, who took the lion’s share of the blame. Typically, discourses summoning “the people” position them as virtuous and omnicompetent.

Attempts in public discourse to make a virtuous public out of Wall Street’s toxic shock, however, ran into an unforeseen barrier. Wall Street’s symbolic position in the American imaginary is partly negative and partly positive, owing to the future-oriented identifications with the successful Wall Street gambler as much as the negative attitudes towards the robber barons of the past and the Gordon Gekkos of today. The result is that

122 any attempt to scapegoat Wall Street runs into an unthought-of barrier: Wall Street owes as much to America as America owes to Wall Street. And the more Americans blame

Wall Street for the crisis, the more it suggests that Wall Street, not ordinary Americans, contribute to the strength or weakness of the American economy. The resulting rage and anxiety spilling out in interviews, editorials, letters to the editor, and news commentary did not reflect some passing phase but instead represented a moment of crisis for liberalism, one that was exacerbated rather than extinguished by the reminders that

“choice” that had any kind of meaning was possessed by “the people.”

The government’s move to bailout the businesses on Wall Street that had purchased toxic assets only further underscored the disconnect between “the people” and their representatives: instead of pushing a rescue for Main Street, it was more rewards for the Wall Street icons who had through poor decision-making threatened America’s future. For an American “people” already worried that they could not contribute to the polity with their economic choices anymore, the lack of formal representation suggested a doubly eviscerated public agency, one that would try to make up its absence with a rancorous populism in the coming months. The debate over the TARP bill remained a festering wound because by the time the bailout bill had finally passed (on a second try through the House of Representatives) it was still fundamentally understood as a giveaway. As public sentiment festered, Barack Obama delivered his speech “A Rescue

Plan for the Middle Class” overall emphasized that the government could not be the real source of a permanent solution to the problem, while also emphasizing themes of collective responsibility of polemicizing against greed located in the higher echelon of the American economy. The result was that while Obama’s speech offered an opportunity

123 for America to take responsibility for their actions, he did too much to emphasize the failings of the government and its central role in countering the collapse to create rhetorical space for a real cultural change. Such a framing suggest in part why the field for economic populism remained fertile even after the 2008 election.

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CHAPTER IV DEMOCRACY FOUND? CONSTITUTING THE

POLITY

Introduction

Following intense public anger and frustration after the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting federal bailouts, there was a real hope that Barack Obama’s election would fix what ailed American politics. In the months that followed, this hope would be contrasted with cynicism in widely circulating media accounts of the political scene.

Scholars in rhetoric have long focused on moments of collectivity, like elections, as key points where national identities are built, torn down, and/or rearticulated. When “the people” emerge it may disclose crucial data about tightly held national fantasies and how populations think about themselves and others. However, as a vector of analysis, “the people” are also shadowed by the “un-people,” those who are excluded or positioned outside those concepts of the vox populi; their exclusion makes intelligible the symbolic geography of the polity. Rhetoricians often focus on how a “people” is made but scholars like Raka Shome remind that the discipline should be mindful of exclusions because rhetorics of national unity tend to carry in their abstract promises of togetherness material tendencies towards the exclusion of those explicitly or implicitly devalued in whatever notion of “the people” functions hegemonically.1 Shome’s injunction to align against

“unidirectional” forms of rhetorical criticism gestures in the direction of a critical practice that should displace rather than secure elements of rhetorics canon that commit exclusionary violence.2

Because Shome’s topic is the relation of rhetoric to imperialism, it may seem an odd piece to cite. What does a critique of neocolonialism have to do with an essay that

125 propounds to examine how public discourse configured the moment and aftermath of

Barack Obama’s election? Is there not a risk that by focusing on the discourses of the

“mass public” that I am contributing to the re-production of “the people” that scholars like Shome and others following the path of “vernacular criticism” have repudiated?

Exclusion, however, has many modes and meanings. Exclusion, in of and by itself, is not always a sign of the legitimacy of a subject’s political grievance, although in democracy claims of exclusion are often treated as presumptively true even while the unequal distribution of responsibility for said exclusion reflects power and privilege. For example, politicians often suggest that the poor lack agency not because of structural or systemic factors but because they have not properly exercised their faculties. At the same time the

“middle class” is often positioned as intrinsically virtuous and lacking in representation as a result of systemic political failures to divine how to achieve their best interests.

Following the 2008 election, however, many of those who behaved as if they had been most grievously excluded from the “mass public” were not the people of color or diasporized bodies centered in Shome’s work. Rather, they were embodiments of a certain kind of normatively idealized “American” subject: white, often male, and economically secure. Shome’s suggestion that we ought to be mindful of who is excluded reminds also that the metrics for exclusion used also matter and that the capacity to appear in public is itself not neutral but also politicized. The claim of exclusion is judged in public discourse not by some neutral panel of justices who apportion the space of appearance but instead by the technologies of disembodiment and disincorporation that themselves make it possible to speak of the mass public.

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This chapter reads three texts related to the 2008 election: Barack Obama’s victory speech, newspaper coverage the day after, and Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary

Right America, Feeling Wronged. I suggest that rhetorical scholars should conceive of

“the people” as a doxastic function that writes the apparent coherence of the inside and outside of an imagined community. Instead of thinking about “the people” as an achievable horizon in the manner of some threads of constitutive rhetoric or liberalism, I suggest theorizing “the people” as a function explains the intensity of the public reaction to the electoral victory of Barack Obama. “The people’s” functional role as a point enabling the imagination of a coherent inside and outside suggests that the public discourse, which painted the election result as a disproportionate Democratic victory, eradicated shared symbolic space by generating a narrative of liberal landslide and conservative retreat. I argue that we should apprise key moment for writing national identity with an eye towards how misunderstanding “the people” as an object rather than a function risks understanding democracy as a wounded entity rather than a terminally imperfect process.

This chapter proceeds in five steps. First, I examine how the media framed the

2008 election as a transcendent moment through the simultaneous elevation and neutralization of Obama’s race. Second I look at Obama’s victory speech at Grant Park election night to argue that he further attempted to dissolve partisan divides by suggesting a stark coincidence between the realization of democracy and the electoral results. The third section examines both narratives of conservative decline and the Pelosi documentary to suggest a disconnect between the political narratives about the election’s result and the role of conservatism in American political life, explaining that the public

127 conflation of “the people’s” functional role with the idea of “the people” as a place cultivated democracy as a wounded site of melancholy rather than one suitable for agonism.

Elections Matter

American news media declared Barack Obama’s electoral victory a realization of the American Dream. The perfect circumstances of Obama’s rise to prominence, including his complex racial makeup, and his talent for charismatic speechmaking, were a perfect tonic for an anxious America. The Wall Street Journal’s headline screamed

“OBAMA SWEEPS TO HISTORIC VICTORY: NATION ELECTS ITS FIRST

AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRESIDENT AMID RECORD TURNOUT; TURMOIL IN

ECONOMY DOMINATES VOTERS’ CONCERNS.”3 The clear linkage between

Obama’s own personal characteristics and his appropriateness for the moment was echoed by Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post who reported that Obama succeeded by embracing “the legendary Clinton message, ‘it's the economy, stupid…’” while also seamlessly “weaving it into a narrative all his own, making the economy the cornerstone of his argument that the country was on the wrong track and desperately needed change.”4 These responses typified media interpretations of his victory.

Bold post-electoral prounouncements are not unique. Presidential elections tend to topically monopolize public conversations, Part of this dynamic reflects the capacity of the presidential elections to serve as moments that renew the national covenant, moments that encourage and remind nations that they are bound together even though it often seems they are separated. Even as the form of the electoral contest and its circulation may bind the polity, they also offer to remake, and perhaps complicate, the national picture.

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As Mary Stuckey observes, presidential elections are person risking enterprises because

“presidents have a disproportionate voice in the articulation of our national identity, we place a great deal of that identity on the line during every election.”5 Presidential choices also involve “choosing what sort of people Americans want to be.”6 Stuckey’s remarks, while in the context of party’s nominating conventions, are even more applicable to the general election: if the conventions are aspirational exercises about who we could be, then the electoral aftermath is about triangulating the results to a national sense of “the people.”

What makes presidential elections appealing for producing news narratives is their capacity to write over, or perhaps disavow, the messy questions associated with the permanent and often foolish search in public discourse for the “right” identity of

America. Because presidents rule “over a radically heterogeneous demos” in Vanessa

Beasley’s estimation their singular role as chief executive makes them somewhat more elegant avatars for the demos than a rancorous and difference-riven Congress.7 Yet

Americans are beset daily, by heterogeneous incursions and encounters with difference that threaten to remind them that difference and not unity are the rules of the day. Beasley suggests that “it may be that there still exists a rhetoric of shared beliefs that can help the

American people feel united even when their daily experiences tell them that they are not.”8 Beasley’s insights about presidential rhetoric also hold true for thinking about the role of the presidency in the nation at large: whether or not you voted for or support a winning candidate, they are still your president.

And in this case, that president was also everyone’s first black president. Media narratives deployed a frame that placed race at the center of a story about American

129 redemption. An evolving racial consciousness is placed parallel with Obama’s successes in articulating and identifying empathetically with the worried “representative”

Americans of the middle class. The Washington Post found the race angle crucial in describing Obama’s capacity to meld “the pride and aspirations of African Americans with a coalition of younger and disaffected voters drawn to his rhetorical style and a unified base of Democrats worried about the economy.”9 The Wall Street Journal followed a similar angle, featuring in its monster election coverage a section interviewing

African-Americans who were “celebrating how far a black man had come.” Willie

Smiley, a Detroit resident is quoted as saying “’It’s a feeling we feel all the way inside—

Lord, we’re finally overcoming.’” One New York Times article is perhaps a bit too on the nose, suggesting the election as a kind of cathartic release point that could not only let out pent up frustrations about 8 years of Republican rule but also just “happens” to signal a positive evolution of America:

Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history.10 (emphasis mine)

The condensations of what Obama’s victory “means” in these discourses suggest presidential elections bear an intense burden in writing national narratives. Like a single flying buttress asked to prop up an entire national cathedral, the presidency is a load- bearing symbolic institution.

The news narrative ultimately neutralized race as it discussed Obama, foregrounding his ability to speak and act for the middle class as the real electoral key.

Much public discourse defines his blackness as incidental to his capacity to “really”

130 represent American. For example a Philadelphia Inquirer piece that leads with Obama’s race but also notes how he “relentlessly pushed a message of change, paying special attention to the needs of the middle class, an approach that matched up well with the concerns of a restive electorate.”11 This Inquirer approach is representative: many articles on the day after the election slip in and out of praising the importance of Obama’s racial difference, but also emphasize how properly Obama identified and reassured the electorate during a trying economic time. While his differences were particular and real, they remained less important than the general result of the election. As the Chicago

Tribune’s Mike Dorning and Jim Tankersley reported, the Obama campaign took place on ethereal terrain, where:

He waged his groundbreaking campaign in transcendent terms, on themes of hope, change and common purpose, calling on the nation to rise above racial and partisan divisions. He styled his bid as a popular movement, tapping the nascent power of the Internet to mobilize voters on an unprecedented scale and raise more money than any candidate in American history.12

Obama’s election helped not only to rehabilitate America’s relationship to race (or at least better legitimate it in the eyes of some) but also worked to reassure voters during a difficult economic time. Few, if any, of the news reports comment upon only the mixed race heritage of Obama. Indeed, the coverage mirrors Obama’s speech in that his racial heritage, while important, is often subordinate to his abilities to connect with an uneasy middle class struggling through difficult economic times. Nominally, Obama’s race was central to the story of his election. But in the media coverage, the warrant for this claim of racial advance was Obama’s success at triangulating and connecting with the middle class. Obama’s race itself was not the substantive part of the story, but instead a happy component of a campaign that spoke properly to the American “people.” The transcript

131 suggests that Obama’s multi-racial background was ultimately only important as a more or less empty component of his biography because it could help to redeem the bigger figure of America in the national imaginary: once incorporated, and only after he agreed that the interests of the “middle class” were central, could Obama pass into the presidential threshold.

That Obama’s racial background bore little clear relationship to the economy in chaos did not seem to trouble the narrative. In part the need to affirm Obama’s transcendence in difficult times is tied to what Dana Nelson suggests in Bad for

Democracy is a general attachment to the myth of leadership in the context of the presidency. For Nelson, “The myth of leadership becomes more pronounced in times of social or political uncertainty. In societies that consider hierarchies necessary, people turn to leaders when they full out of control, looking to put things in order. Leadership, then, has both factual and symbolic dimensions, which are often wildly misaligned.”13 The public investment in the presidency is at odds with the heterogeneity of both American history and its members. The presidency’s offer to overcome this heterogeneity is part of its appeal but also undermines its representational efficacy as it both attempts to write over difference while pointing out the persistence of these fissures. Obama’s charisma and speechmaking talents, combined perhaps with a begrudging latent respect for the difficulties of being black in America helped to make Obama the right figure for the moment. Of course, Obama’s race often only mattered to the extent that it could validate

America’s greatness rather than functioning as a signifier to trouble rather than stabilize

American identity. The American public’s normative attachment to a certain white vision of politics had not lapsed but Obama was a capable leader despite his racial background

132 rather than because of it. Obama’s victory speech on election night furthers suggests how

Obama himself subordinated his race to the moment.

Obama at Grant Park

Obama opens by locating the health and vitality of American democracy by opposing it to a skeptic who worries that America might not be “a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy” to suggest the election as an answer to such skepticism. For Obama, the literal bodies composing a version of the body politic provide

“the answer. It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that time must be different.”14 Here the act of voting renews democracy, and Obama’s words work by implying a relay of resonance between those who lined up to vote and the huge throng taking part in the Grant Park festivities. Interestingly, Obama suggests that it is the hope in democracy, its promise to improve, that remains a key point. Obama links this argument to the heterogeneity of those who vote, suggesting that “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white Latino, Asian,

Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled” who together “sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.”15 Obama subordinates particularities not only of raced, classed, gendered, and variously abled Americans but his own particularities as well, placing them below “the people” just as other particulars are incorporated into the “United States of America.”

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Near the end of the speech Obama draws again on a language of transcendence, suggesting “Our union can be perfected” moments before he addresses himself to “those

Americans whose support I have yet to earn” whom he knows are listening. To them he says “I will be your president too” indicating that there remains some shared relationship between Obama and what political scientists call a “loyal opposition,” those who disagree with the particulars of a given political circumstance.16 Obama’s speech gestures in the direction of a democratic understanding exemplified in the writings of Jean Jacques-

Rousseau, who suggested that democracy should be understood as a tempered negotiation between the abstracted idea of the general will and the actually existing governmental authority called the sovereign. “Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will.”17 Obama’s speech contravenes one of Rousseau’s key insights, namely by advancing the idea that the union can be perfected, Obama suggests a point of coincidence between the general will and the sovereign, a point that is a horizon rather than a realizable place.

Rousseau, writing during the Enlightenment and in the context of the legitimation crisis of European political orders, feared that the capacity to mistake a particular will for the general will marked a moment where the political would be made hospitable to despotism. That is, should a critic or observer mistake the agenda of the sovereign as coterminous with the actual character of the general will, one is denied the capacity to critique the actions of the sovereign on the basis of their merits and instead judges sovereign action by measuring it against an imagined baseline of the will of “the people.”

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Underwriting this position is an economy that treats the vox populi as sacrosanct and understands the actually existing democracy of the sovereign as tragically alienated from the popular will. The appeal in Obama’s speech derives in no small measure from his capacity to point to the physically assembled throng and a set of subjectively marked particularities and assert not only some measure of their togetherness at that particular moment but also their teleological relationship a moment where “Our union can be perfected.” His language, and the moment, write over the indeterminate space between democracy’s promise and its practice.

The indeterminacy of “the people” has long been a feature drawing attention in rhetorical studies. In his 1975 essay “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical

Alternative,” Michael Calvin McGee suggested that the unfinalizable character of “the people” in popular discourse evaded the grasp of two different kinds of critics. The first set were rhetorical technicians who reduced popular appeals to mathematizable effects of causation. In suggesting a hydraulic relationship between collective rhetoric of “the people” and epiphenomenal subjectivities, these critics could not deal with the ethical character of these populist appeals. A second set of critics thought that by simply seeing through the fallacious thinking involved in all rhetorics of “the people” (argument ad populam) one might expose the vacuous popular appeal, creating conditions for more effective political deliberation, echoing the old Platonic fear that the demos would ruin the order of the Republic.18

Elections play a key role in constituting national identities, and especially, play a rhetorical role in constructing ideas of the nation at given moments. Moments where elections build nations participate in deeply held democratic myths about national

135 renewal. As McGee says, “One begins with the understanding that political myths are purely rhetorical phenomena; ontological appeals constructed from artistic proofs and intended to redefine an uncomfortable and oppressive reality.”19 In the case of democracy at least one “uncomfortable and oppressive reality” is democracy’s own limit, that is, the impossibility of it including every particularity, underscored even in a “decisive” election by the fact that almost 47% of those who voted did not vote for the winning candidate.

Obama’s suggestion that the union is perfectible writes over the mythical function of “the people” by encouraging the imagination of a moment where political arithmetic had settled upon something like Walt Whitman’s “divine average.”20

But as McGee suggests, understanding the mythical function of “the people” cleared way for rhetorical critics to generate insights inaccessible to their empirical counterpoints because rhetoricians were freed to focus on context and experience rather than the formal or logical characteristics of the figure of “the people.” Once critics theorized “the people” as neither a pre-existing/extra-rhetorical audience to which a speaker appealed nor just another fallacy, their role as a key function rather than thing was underscored. John Muckelbauer obliquely makes a similar point his his discussion of the relationship between doxa, which is traditionally understood as a common sense, and episteme, which scholars tend to understand as pure knowledge. Muckelbauer argues that to understand doxa only as common sense would limit rhetoricians to conducting something like ineffectual discursive opinion polling. Instead of simply relying on the distinction between fallible common sense and something’s true nature (episteme)

Muckelbauer argues doxa is not a noun but instead a process, referring to “the singular rhythm that structures the insistent (and quite real) distinction between the appearance

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(my emphasis) of doxa and the reality of episteme.”21 The continued belief in an opposition between something like real essences and popular perceptions is sustained by the work of doxa, figured here quite differently from the notion of common sense.

Obama’s speech relies on the distinction between appearance and reality in order to abolish it. He suggests democracy is renewed by “the people” who voted on the basis of hope that things might be otherwise. This state of things being otherwise is tied directly to his claim that the union is indeed perfectible. His speech is laden with flourishes indicating an opposition between the cynical appearance of politics before the election and the election itself as a key moment, as when he notes that:

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.22

The existing cynicism was false, based on confusing the appearance of the polity as a failing and divided place with the reality testified to by the election, that is, the promise of America encoded not only in Obama’s own diverse background but also “the people” who saw fit to elect him. This data suggests Muckelbauer’s theorization of doxa as a function rather than a noun explains the role “the people” play in the democratic imaginary: as a mechanism to travel between the flawed “reality” to which the democratic fantasy rarely lives up and an ideal point of consubstantiality that drives the appeal of democracy itself. “The people” served a doxastic function to move the audience from a cynical America divided by Red and Blue states to the electoral moment of democratic sublimity. The real essence of the American “people,” that is, a moment of unity, is found at the same moment that the cynical America fades to black.

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Obama’s speech and the media coverage on the day after his election constituted a mutually reinforcing relay emphasizing the election as a moment of found unity. The easy circulation of this narrative suggests the rhetorical resonance of the narrative of a nation renewing itself in an election to find its true representative. What made the narrative appealing to politicos, the media, and some citizens was the insistence on understanding “the people” as a noun rather than a doxastic verb. By suggesting “the people” had been found, media accounts configured the public discourse so that there was little legitimate space for “loyal opposition” to Obama. Certainly, the election came following six months of rancor, discord, ugly campaigning, and uglier discourse. While the end to such a period can be cause for great relief, that relief also comes with the expectation of a politics marked by more unity and, hence, more aligned with a unified idea of “the people.” But as “the people” are a verb rather than a noun, public discourses capacity to alight upon the deep meaning of the election also created expectations that

“the people” might be located in politics. As I suggest following my examination in the next section of conservative reactions to the election, however, the frames of harmony employed both by the media, Obama, and conservatives themselves suggested that the doxastic role of “the people” contributed to the formation of a melancholic relationship to

“the people” which poses a threat to politics. Understanding “the people” as a thing rather than an act explains the later configuration of conservatism according to a language of victimization later in Obama’s term.

Right America, Feeling Wronged: Conservatism on the Run

Throughout the later parts of the 2008 campaign, the John McCain campaign and its surrogates struggled to articulate why their campaign properly represented the spirit

138 and interests of America. For example, on a campaign stop in North Carolina, Sarah Palin said that “small towns were the ‘real America’ and also were the ‘pro-America areas of this great nation.”23 After an outbreak of criticism in the media and from her opponents,

Palin “apologized” but not for the content, instead saying only “’If that’s the way I came across, I apologize.’”24 Rather than admitting to have made the claim that one could divine out who fell into the categories of “real” and “fake” Americans, Palin was suggesting that she had been misinterpreted despite her clear statement.

Another famous instances referred to the case of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, also known as “Joe the Plumber” in the political narratives. Wurzelbacher, an Ohio contractor who aspired to build a small business, had an exchange on the campaign trial with Barack Obama, accusing Obama’s pro-government policies of taxation with causing undue burdens on small business aspirants like himself. When Obama suggested he only wanted to “spread the wealth around,” the quote had the feel of something that could make movement in the race for the McCain campaign, and Joe was mentioned often in the second presidential debate as a kind of synecdoche for those Americans whose

Obama’s policy would restrict.25 While he failed to strongly galvanize support, Joe the

Plumber lived on after the election as a somewhat prominent figure in conservative circles, even running for Congress in Ohio.26

Both these examples draw explicitly and implicitly on the idea of a firm notion of who an “American” is, rather theorized explicitly in the case of Palin as a geographic matter or the implicit Cold War throwbacks from Joe the Plumber. There is a politics to both choices: North Carolina is a Southern and somewhat rural state, the exact kind of conservative stronghold imagined in the fevered dreams of Lee Atwater. Not only was

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Wurzelbacher from Ohio, a battleground state, he also represented the fluid (but not too fluid) subject centered in much of the American imaginary: a white, middle-class but upwardly aspirational blue collar worker. Both Palin’s arguments and the circulation of

Wurzelbacher’s encounter with the president index not only the priorities of conservative political strategists but also the conditions for the intelligible circulation of these arguments in the media, suggesting tacit agreement on the part of the political media establishment about the merit of at least debating these through these lenses. In short, these tactics suggest conservative politicos believed in part that their ideal voter base was those individuals who best fit the identity categories of a white, economically well-off, and civil public. A political film about the 2008 campaign supports this assertion.

Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Right America, Feeling Wronged, which traced the 2008 presidential campaign in conservative circles was meant to take a sample of political life from conservative America during the 2008 presidential campaign. As a documentary, it offers a look at conservatives during the campaign and its immediate aftermath, and of course is not only edited by Pelosi but also perhaps serves a slightly different public function than news reports, the latter of which often have to triangulate more to the broader narrative demands of an audience. In an interview with The New

York Times, Pelosi emphasized that she “felt like it was my duty to give these people a voice…we’re not trying to spoof them; we’re trying to show their side”.27 Despite

Pelosi’s claims, some outlets panned the documentary for its seeming partisanship, with

The Washington Post finding the documentary to be unfair, singling out strains of conservative extremism.28 Read retrospectively, however, the documentary seems prescient, seizing on nascent themes and arguments that would come to define

140 mainstream conservatism following the electoral victory of Barack Obama. The documentary revealstwo lines of argument/attitude that would become increasingly important rather than just “fringe” elements in how conservatism articulated the electoral victory of Barack Obama. 1) Barack Obama does not understand “real America.” 2) A thoroughgoing suspicion of charisma, and, appropriately, democracy.

Self-definitions in the documentary begin by opposing Barack Obama to “real

America.” One subject aggressively defines the American people as those who have nothing in common with Obama: “Real Americans are here. Americans who love this country.” An older man notes “Obama doesn’t know real America. He’s never lived in a real America” which is defined in opposition to city living. When pressed to define a real

American, he invokes the thought processes of “the common man.” Moreover, the documentary discloses a tendency also reflected in popular press coverage of the election: rhetorical support for John McCain was considerably more rare than rhetorical criticism of Barack Obama. “Real America” at best stands for various ideographs like freedom and liberty, articulated in opposition to Obama. Faith in “real America” compensates for the negativity intrinsic to identification against. This echoes Palin’s misstep, but also suggests its role as a conservative dogma.

The second major theme emergent in the documentary was a suspicion of charisma. For example, subjects seize upon McCain’s campaign theme “Country First” who contrasts McCain, who subordinated his well being to nation during his time in a

Vietnamese prison camp, with Obama, the individualistic celebrity. A woman also happily offers that there is nothing “wrong with being one of the folks,” articulating a defense of ordinariness associated with “real America.” The film shows several populist

141 moments for McCain/Palin on the campaign trial, where an angry agree at a rally yells that “It’s time you two are representing us” leveling the candidates down to the level of

“the people.” Another clip shows a frustrated voter stating “John McCain…he’s the right man for this country…but people can’t see it” locating McCain’s struggles in the poor judgment of the demos. Here we see a rearticulation of a classically demophobic trope: the fear that a talented rhetor might somehow trick or persuade an audience out of their own interests or away from the Form of rationality proper. This them then aids and abets the earlier rhetorical sequestration of Barack Obama from “ordinary America” where his political and rhetorical aptitude are marks of his capacity to undermine or detract from the divine America out there. This theme was also expanded following the election, as complaints about “Obamabots” among other monikers were given to those who supposedly “unthinkingly” voted for Obama.29 These discourses extend a demophobic fear of “the people” while doubling down on the investment in the democratic fantasy of unity, projecting the redefinition of “the people” in such a way to bring politics in line with its more harmonious birthing place. These sentiments were also reflected in post- electoral discourse. For example, one telling quote from a representative of the American citizenry who chalks up Obama’s victory to an irrational youthful charisma: “’It’s like you are going up against the most popular kid in school,’ Geno Coefaro, 22, of Boca

Raton, said of Obama. He voted for McCain but would have preferred a more conservative candidate.”30 These anxieties remain tinged with a racial element as well, as in this quote from Ron Tanner quoted in The Tulsa World, “More than 63 million voters had the wool pulled over their eyes. The Brooklyn Bridge has finally sold…our enemies are dancing in the streets. At least we here in Oklahoma know a snake oil salesman when

142 we see one…I thought Joe the Plumber would make a difference. It turned out that the election was swayed by Joe the Gullible.”31 “Real America” remains undisturbed if

Obama’s victory is a result of charming snake oil salesmanship rather than his ability to legitimately gather political support.

When Obama’s victory became more or less clear in the days before the election, these themes of charismatic charm tinged with a racial element circulated widle.y For example, Accuracy in the Media’s Roger Aronoff suggested Obama’s victory was a result of the mainstream media being “overwhelmingly in the tank for Barack Obama… Day.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger calls Obama a “con-man” who intends on buying the election with untraceable and possibly illegal contributions or stealing it through the efforts of ACORN if necessary…The evidence…continues to pour in.”32

Eagleburger’s suggestion that Obama is a criminal has more than shades of what Cindy

Patton says is a “racist stereotype of the black con man” that conservative forces have previously used to render illegitimate the civil rights movement.33 Only by subverting democracy with shadowy money trails (like that of community organizing group

ACORN, who mostly operates in urban terrain) could Obama be elected president.

Aronoff goes on to complain about media bias, suggesting that neutral media watchdog groups “found that, based on coverage from 48 news outlets between the end of the two party’s conventions and the end of the debates, 57% of the stories on McCain were negative, while only 14% were considered positive, while for Obama, those figures were

29% negative and 36% positive.34

Another avenue that the Obama candidacy threatened democracy was through the boogey-phrase “political correctness.” Doug Mackinnon, former campaign director for

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Bob Dole, linked rising demographic challenges to “perverse” market incentives for diversity in the newsroom: “Regarding the Obama phenomenon and the media fascination with him…the pressure within the news business to diversify and be politically correct means more minorities, women, and young people are being hired… go easier on candidates who look more like them, are closer to their age, or represent their ideal of a presidential candidate.”35 This concern is actually inseparable from the existential angst associated with the defense of “real America” against the

Obama incursion: whether distorted by Obama’s charisma or perverse market incentives in the newsroom, the coherence the narrow version of conservative identity is sustained rather than negated by Obama’s polling strength.

Post-election discourses also suggested that the demographic crisis was not a matter of political correctness but instead a matter of actual demographics. As put by

William Gibson of the Sun-Sentinel the election was driven by a “burst of participation by young and black voters” which “eclipsed the remnants of the conservative movement that helped elect George W. Bush and other Republicans since the early 1980s.”36

Meanwhile The Baltimore Sun insisted that attempts to understand Obama’s victory as an exception rather than a rule ignored that “Demographic trends in states long dominated by the GOP promise more serious trouble ahead if the party doesn’t find ways to broaden its appeal to moderates, the young and minorities.”37 Here the media frame positions the election as a snapshot of an electorate to come, one that will become increasingly less sympathetic to Republican political positions over time without substantial shifts in policy. Here a Democratic future is posited as the telos of American politics, with the idea of a Democratic hegemony/harmony as America’s political future. The election not

144 only discloses data about America’s present but also its future, as the here and now and the world to come is made to reflect the moment of now. These reactions also reflect how while in one sense Obama’s racial makeup confirmed the American Dream, it also triggered anxieties and worries that disclosed how various strains of American political identity remain indebted to othering and marginalizing black identity.

At several levels, conservative identity is threatened. The election threatens the symbolic centrality of conservatism by ushering in a liberal-progressive president whose own identity characteristics run against the demographic grain of conservatism.

Moreover, the tendency to identify “the people’ as a place or thing rather than a function not only in Obama’s own discourse but also the media reports that hyped his victory as a key moment for American democracy suggest that those on the other side of the election were not part of a historical moment for the American polity. And the demographics driving Obama’s election suggest a fading and winnowing of traditional conservatives’ ability to influence, not to mention a long-term threat to the southern states strategy discussed in Chapter 1.

Some conservatives did respond charitably in the style of loyal opposition following Obama’s victory. Prominent conservative blogger Patterico deployed a frame of understanding that distinguished between demonization and disagreement, arguing that

Obama was not a bad person, but instead misguided. “But I’m not going to write Obama off as a Bad Man because of his beliefs, contrary to the wishes of my former commenter.

And I’m not going to write him off as a Bad Man — or the majority of his supporters as bad People — based on what I’ve seen to date. So far, as I’ve said, I see him as a basically good and decent man who, like many politicians, has engaged in some highly

145 questionable behavior in the pursuit of power.”38 Another influential blogger, Allahpundit from Hot Air too a similar tack, arguing that the shared space of the nation deserved respect in light of the election. “So in that spirit, congratulations to Barry O on a race superbly run and to our country for not having let the wrong reasons deter it from making the wrong choice. I’ll never be a fan, but I swear I’ll never take a nutroots posture either in relishing his failures because it helps my party. Like it or not, he’s my president. As a great man once said, country first.”39 These accounts suggest that the shared space of the nation may offer inventional resources for negotiating the inevitable conflicts, and losses, accompanying politics.

But this response did not predominate. While the longer range political trends following the 2008 were in the direction of polarization, paying attention to the immediate electoral aftermath as portrayed in Right America, Feeling Wronged points towards the roots of the post-2008 political landscape. The documentary shows anguished conservatives reacting to Obama’s victory. In clips that frame the beginning and end of the documentary, the trauma of an electoral loss chiasmatically shapes the understanding of the election. At the beginning, an affluent looking white woman wipes tears from her eyes as McCain delivers his concession speech. When McCain says he had the pleasure of calling Barack Obama to concede, boos emanate from the meeting hall. As the documentary ends, it shows Republicans at McCain headquarters reacting to Obama’s victory speech. They approach the speech with a wary affect, again wiping tears, holding their children closely. They are not a racially diverse group. One woman does say

“democracy is about living with our choices” and that she will live with Barack Obama, though she says it tearfully.

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Democracy names a process-based relationship to the body politic rather than the body politic itself. This is why I earlier noted that for Rousseau democracy has always already failed if we conceive of its goal as uniting the general will in a coincident moment with the actions of the sovereign. Instead, critics should conceive of democracy as descriptive of a certain part-whole relationship between subjects and myths, albeit one which constantly generates (legitimate) suspicions about the capacity of the myth to suture the set of subjects in a given position for a lengthy duration. The obverse side of this element of non-determination associated with “the people,” however, is that the gap between the idea of the general will and its actualization is a permanent feature of the political terrain.

The gap between the two may be a good, insofar as it provides a bulwark against the despotism of a popular tyranny unable to recognize its own injustice in the view of

Rousseau, and in that of later theorists like Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. But that gap may also function as a traumatic source of anxiety and fear. That is to say, rhetoric may direct and configure attitudes towards this constitutive gap. The public worries in the record of the day about looming demographic trends for Republicans

(whether demographic or imagined) and the wounded affects on display in Pelosi’s documentary. Also concerns in very conservative publications like The Hattiesburg

American are exemplary: days after they election they published a piece from USA Today saying that “The Republican Party is essentially in tatters, and not that long after George

W. Bush's 2000 election spurred talk of enduring GOP dominance…the Republican Party is going to through a Dr. Phil, self-analysis moment.”40 In one sense, of course, this moment could have provided an opportunity for American conservatism to go through

147 what Kenneth Burke calls a “perspective by incongruity” in which easy associations between concepts that hold together pieties are subjected to a “cracking process” that exposes orders or pieties as self-interested systems of order rather than eternal “rationally established justifications.”41 In such a process shifting terms expose the arbitrariness of naturalized attachments to certain concepts.

However, the publicly circulating concept of democracy as a thing rather than a verb sets the stage for democratic indeterminacy to function not as a liberating fact generating these perspectives by incongruity. Between media declarations about the historic nature of the victory that were careful to note Obama’s race but not establish it as the central force in his victory and worries aloud in papers of the day about the magnitude of the (still 53%-47%) electoral victory, democracy’s appeal to offer a moment of perfectibility generates both investments on the basis of its offer of inclusion, but also threatens to marginalize, if not annihilate, the identities of those who do not see themselves as part of the mass being led on that road to perfectiblity.42 The result is to constrain the perceptions of available discursive space by underscoring how the ideal of perfectible democracy carries with it the risk of exclusion. In this case, the strong investment in elections as key polity making moments simply suggests that the democratic promise of inclusion’s appeal is simultaneously highlighted in intensity even as the heterogeneity that makes up the polity is underscored not only by the divisions that are not banished by the election but also exacerbated by speeches and media reports on the result.

The subject’s affectation in Pelosi’s documentary suggest an orientation towards the democratic gap as a trauma. While this may initially seem an odd move, consider our

148 tendency to refer to the organized political authority of representation as the body politic.

It is divided in the history of political theory according to those who are and are not members of the body politic. The language of the body, Elizabeth Grosz suggests, is not accidental but suggests a relay of intelligibility between our idea of a whole body and the clean notions of a neatly delimited political field.43 The coherence of the body does not preexist language, however, or, in the case of politics, presupposing the coherence of the body politic does not come before the work of democracy itself. Instead, the body politic is retroactively constituted through language as the contours of the body politics are shaped by various articulations. These articulations necessarily include and exclude.

For those whose perspectives are marginalized or otherwise decried in the papers of the day, the relationship to the body politics is more fraught: after all, while they may remain tethered to the idea of the nation state there is a tendency to emphasize (not to mention overstate and exaggerate) how elections not only repudiate their views but also put them under question. The ties remain, but the public questions them. The piety of the nation state maintains its coherence in part because of the nature of the attachment to the body politic, derived from how the body remains incomplete. It is this incompleteness that makes it both a potentially hospitable place for subjects but also one that may repudiate them. In The Ego and the Id Sigmund Freud suggests that human’s come to know the contours of their own bodies in such a way that “Pain…seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of the organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our own body.”44 Pain is understood as a negative experience, but it is also the condition for knowing not pain, that is to say the “regular” or the “normal.”

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Following the election the predominance of the reactions foregrounded by Pelosi over the measured responses of Patterico and Allahpundit suggests that attachment to nation was suggested through a mode of melancholic rather than mournful attachment.

Because there is no true originary place from which subjects emerge, and because this case is underscored in the context of an America whose claim to nationhood is more troubled by narratives of heterogeneity than many of its European counterparts, national belonging is more explicitly mediated by objects that serve as sites for citizens to gather in order to maintain their national attachment. Freud understood there to be two possible orientations towards these objects. The ego may become enriched and strong, enslaving the world to its own perceptions, incorporating the loss and subordinating it to its will.

Freud calls this condition mourning. The other orientation, melancholia, attaches when the ego remains trapped in a slavishly dialectical relationship to the loss that renders the loss itself imperceptible and unacknowledged. In his words it is “an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.”45 The distinction between the two lies in the capacity of the subject to apprehend the loss itself. Mournful subjects withdraw from the world and suffer precisely because they know that they are wracked by loss. On the other hand, melancholics grieve for a loss that they do not know has occurred. When the bond between subject and object is jarred, the mournful subject takes another object, incorporating it, building a new world. Contrasting with this approach, the melancholic subject’s energies do not become invested in an external object, but instead are

“withdrawn into the ego.”46 In either case the object’s function remains the same:

“loving it affords a corporeal experience of the self,” indicating that the investment in the

150 object is not (as is often misunderstood) about what the object does or does not do, but is instead about the preservation of the subject itself.47 The expressivity of the rhetors speaking in news accounts, documentaries, and interviews is conditioned by a relationship the nation that proceeds from an unquestioning relation of deduction from one’s fixed membership in a certain idea of the nation to a rationalized attitude towards

“actually existing” democracy.

Stories about Obama’s electoral “mandate” flooded out following his election, with more than 204 found on Lexis-Nexis in just the five days following his election.48 At the same time, a considerably portion of the nation and electorate had not given their support to Obama. Yet the media environment suggested disjunct between the representational capacity of the election itself and the ideally perfectable democracy towards which the election gestured. Psychoanalysis suggests why the post-election tendency was not a move towards perspective by incgonruity but instead recalcitrance: the lack of representation of conservatism as relevant in the immediate aftermath of the election suggested its absence and the media narratives focusing on the importance of the election implied there was a legitimacy to said absence. However, exclusions from the polity could not be disentangled from a rising consciousness about demographic challenges facing the Republican party. Talk of Obama as a “con man” (which prefigured later claims in 2012 about the need to “unskew polls”) suggests at least one circulating perspective that could not come to terms with the legitimate fact of the Obama presidency. That is, instead of admitting to the loss of the object “democracy” a deductive definition of democracy judged the actually existing polity to be impoverished owing to its disjunction from an ideal conservative polity. Hence the melancholic bereavement

151 over democracy’s absence metonymized through a democratic election that could not be understood as such. But, as Pelosi’s documentary suggests, the mood reflected not a grievance over democracy’s loss but instead suggested a misunderstanding of democracy as a thing that could be lost rather than a function escaping the capacity for representation within democracy. The misapprehension of the noun “the people” for its role as a means for reconciling democratic promise with actually existing democracy suggests the difficulty of democratic mourning in wake of an election configured monolithically in discourse: democracy offers to integrate all differences but moments of electoral decision suggest the limitations of such an offer.

Conclusion

The insistence that Obama’s election was historic not only pushed conservatism out of habitable shared political space, but also underscored how popularly held assumptions about democracy as an achievable goal rather than a process ultimately subvert a community’s ability to achieve democratic goals, if those goals are defined as the practice of unsettling that which becomes calcified and heartened within national identity. It also marked the democratic wound, the site of pain, as a site capable of being sutured and fixed through the practice of politics rather than an ineradicable site of political praxis and fluid identification.

In the coming months the widely held fetish for populism would further configure the conservative resistance that emerged against Barack Obama. I want to suggest that this resistance did not, despite what many indicate, suggest only a hard and revanchist return of the worst elements of the political right, elements soaked in nativism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and violence. Such elements would have a part to play

152 but cannot be understood apart from two contextual factors at work following the 2008 election. 1) There was still an enormous groundswell of anxiety, energy, and frustration related to the popular anger over the TARP bailouts issued in September by the Bush administration. This anger in part resulted in a debilitating loss for the GOP, regarded as the “in-party” during the time of the collapse, but this anger was also not dissipated or evaporated by the rhetoric or policy decisions in both Obama’s campaign season and his presidential transition. The potential of this energy can be witnessed in the December

2008 debate over the auto bailout. This energy remained a volatile and powerful source of political power. 2) The frame of harmony and its attendant assumptions about the legitimacy of “populism” as a political lens, no doubt ascendant because of the populist character of opposition to TARP and the crucial role of elections in promoting fantasies of democratic harmony, served to code political disagreement as absolute rather than contingent by activating a vocabulary of populism which used as its argumentative assessment rubric the will of “the people,” itself the subject of debate. By annexing the republican capacity for judgment outside a populist frame, policy disputation became more about whether or not support for a particular policy served to ratify and reify existing imaginary conceptions of the popular will rather than the warrants and backing in their favor. In this way a certain kind of tyranny of the argument ad populam became inculcated as a rule of thumb for media coverage, as the unfinalizability of “the people” was not an ally of progressive politics but instead a mechanism to facilitate the disruption of policy deliberation. Melancholic populism, populism obsessed with finding and restoring “the people” to power, came to rule the day instead of a more mournful populism that could figure “the people” as a function rather than an object.

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CHAPTER V RICK SANTELLI'S "REAL SILENT MAJORITY"

Introduction

By the time Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, his administration had to deal with a public still simmering with resentment and anger about the 2008 financial disaster. By refusing to play the role of class warrior, Obama projected a calm and steady demeanor that reassured voters he was no hotheaded ideologue.

However, his choice positioned him as an ambiguous figure for a nation angry and scared about the economy. Self-identified conservatives remained especially wary of Obama.

Whether suspicious of his comments about how rural Americans “cling to their guns and religion,” suspicious of his faith in state regulation (aka “Big Government”), or compensating for their very public repudiation at the polls in November, many conservatives approached the Obama era at arms length.

As I have argued, partisan wariness over Obama reflected a systemic identity crisis that dogs the liberal democratic imaginary. Pundits, politicians, and news reports positioned Obama as a unique figure of unity and American achievement. In the immediate aftermath of the election Obama and his staff emphasized these frames of harmony in their public discussion of the election result. Instead of imagining politics as a permanent struggle between competing articulations of “the people,” public discourse conjured a political imaginary of Democratic empowerment and Republican emasculation. By implying democratic inclusion was an all or nothing proposition rather than an ongoing process, his rhetoric of harmony fanned the flames of democratic paranoia rather than nullifying fears of political discrimination. Because most actors, including Democrats, Republicans, and political pundits had internalized the democratic

154 legitimacy of Obama’s victory, for those who opposed him the identitarian stakes were existential.

Conservatives had to find a place in public discourse without constituting themselves as actively hostile to the will of the American electorate. Populism remains one viable strategy. Because both left and right variants of populism work by generating discursive articulations to varieties of elitism (with the former articulating elitism in economic terms while the latter does so as a socio-political variant) rhetorical populisms work by relying on the structural distinction in the American political imaginary between the government and “the people.”1 The emergence of “the people” should be understood not only through moments signaling the emergence of the disenfranchised, but also scholars should politicize “the people” by paying attention to the dynamics of masculinity and victimage that structure the mass public.

This chapter examines a period of time stretching from December 2008 to

February 2009 for the ways in which a post-electoral environment riven with economic anxiety deleted materializations of “the people” in public discourse. The emergence of conservative resistance in the form of Rick Santelli in his famed “rant” indexed the new utility of a politics of embodiment for conservatism. The move to embodiment discloses two key insights: first, here is an intrinsic link in democratic politics between conceptions of masculine control and explicit populism and second, political space is constructed dynamically on the basis of circulating discourses, suggesting there is no necessary connection between one’s status as a victim and traditional markers of political subalternity (race, class, gender, ability, etc.) The embodied emergence of a white masculine corporeal essence as the new voice of a paradoxical “Silent Majority”

155 attempted to square an identitarian circle by installing previously privileged bodies in a position of political victimage. In attempting to put democratic heterogeneity and indeterminacy under erasure, Santelli’s performance as the shouting self of a silent majority sought mastery of an ontological dilemma: namely to build the mass public around the very body that was ordinarily abstracted away from public discourse, that of the upper class white male. As a result, public discourse suggests a political environment committing a category error that understood the aggrieved and victimized white male body as an object of politics instead of an expression of the logical function of democratic representation. Rather than directing media and political attention to the possibility that universality of the white male subject was in doubt, Santelli’s rant suggested a kind of vanguard action, fought in discourse, to protect masculine privilege from the ravages of political and economic anxiety. The rant stages the position of fear and anxiety as both constitutive and appropriate longings for a totally closed and safe public sphere, one that the contingency of political space not only threatens but undermines. Santelli’s performance both installs and agitates this need for totality, cultivating it through the attempts to embody the disembodiable.

This chapter proceeds in a few steps. First, I briefly analyze the December 2008 auto bailout testimony to Congress and the Obama administration’s push for a stimulus bill. I use Kenneth Burke’s work on victimage and mortification, showing how the latter should have “rationally” succeeded but instead failed because public discourse was circumscribed by an economic of affective scarcity. Second, I analyze Santelli’s outburst: his claims reveal the non-universality of the previously established mass public. Reading the emergence of the new populist conservatism with the genre of the “rant” allows me to

156 identify how the separation of populist conservatism from the mass public constituted a new breed of conservative protest around what Wendy Brown calls “wounded attachments,” cuts that both constitute but also domesticate victimized subjectivity. While this chapter covers a lot of ground, the Santelli moment was crucial in establishing the ethos of the Tea Party and emerged out of a complicated context.

Auto “Bailouts” and the TARP Hangover

Little more than a week after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, the Senate Banking Committee summoned heads of the struggling American automotive industry to testify in Washington, D.C. Reeling, like much of the country, from the effects of the September financial crisis, domestic automakers (especially Chrysler and

General Motors) faced potentially catastrophic effects of a massive credit crunch. CNN reported a bailout would stave off an immediate loss of 2.5 million jobs. However,

Congressional opposition to bailouts remained staunch, with many lacking sympathy and believing “automakers' problems are their own doing, born of bad business decisions, uncompetitive labor agreements and vehicles that Americans have decided are second- rate.”2 The combination of economic worry and anger created a toxic situation: auto executives came to Congress asking for help and left D.C. with bloody noses. As one news report put it, “The CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler may have told Congress that they will likely go out of business without a bailout yet that has not stopped them from traveling in style, not even First Class is good enough.”3 Public discourse reflected an abiding frustration and anger over executive bonuses administered after the TARP fiasco the previous fall.

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Despite all this, many assumed the auto industry would remain outside the political rancor. Colin Campbell, in a long form article in Maclean’s, outlines the special relationship between cars and American identity. Detroit’s lengthy period of economic success, along with the resonance between the idea of personal automotive transport and the culture of American liberal individualism, cement the role of the auto industry in the

American imagination:

‘The auto industry and the image of the nation were bound together as one,’ says Bruce Pietrykowski, a sociologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. ‘The industry was the major promoter of cultural events, such as symphonic orchestras and popular television shows.’ The city of Detroit was buzzing, as it built not just cars but a new wealthy American middle class. Owning a car became a ‘symbol of upward mobility, financially as well as socially.4

While Campbell is mostly speaking in the past tense, contemporary advertisements like

Chrysler’s “Made in Detroit” campaign featuring Michigan residents like rapper Eminem and Detroit Lion Ndamokuhn Suh capitalize on Detroit and the automotive industry’s special relationship to America.5

Despite all this, the Big Three had quite a challenge before them. USA Today highlighted this concern, listing the black eye of “overpaid executives” as one of several issues that automakers would have to address if they hoped to convince Congress they deserved assistance.6 Media accounts located the automotive industry in parallel with financial and political elites in the American political imaginary instead of understanding them as special and proper representatives of the American dream. Even letters from a highly sympathetic source, the left-leaning Detroit Free Press, are critical of the automakers and Congress. Some, like Rand Moorhead, direct their blame at Congress, arguing, “If our so-called leaders in Washington would have done their jobs, the economy wouldn’t have tanked and the auto industry wouldn’t be in trouble.” Others like

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Mike Harrison of Farmington ask why the American taxpayer should be made to pay, noting, “Why have we not heard of the Big Three approaching Big Oil for financial support? Huge profits in the oil industry…have been amassed, and I am not aware of any real investment on their party to assure the future of the machinery that consumes their product!” Gary Pituch of Florida lodges the common complaint that Detroit’s cars are of a low quality: “How about making some vehicles that make a Consumer Reports ‘Best

Buy’ list? Until you guys and gals do something courageous and innovative, the rest of the country won’t care if the ‘For Sale’ signs go up.”7 All three of these letters do not directly engage the public arguments from consequence about the necessity of the bailout, but instead configure the public debate as a matter of right and wrong instead of a question of utility.

Congress invited the executives back to Washington. The media was still having a field day over the fact that on the last trip executives had taken private jets down to

Washington, so for the second round of hearings executive drove to Washington in domestic automobiles. Advocates chose two new tactics to ask for support. First, they reframed the “bailout” as a loan, a form of temporary assistance that would help the industry survive an economic tidal wave. 8 Second, a series of arguments from consequence were constructed pointing to the potential financial catastrophe that the collapse of the auto industry would cause. The Investor’s Business Daily reported that the economic results of such a cataclysmic outcome would be so great that a loan of some sort was still a fait accompli, with the negotiations in Congress likely to be paint by numbers boilerplate.9

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The result was democratic Kabuki theater: with a result supposedly dictated by economic circumstances, the hearings became spaces for three major movements that married national sentiment with political and economic necessity. First, ongoing economic anxieties continued to surface in the testimony and address of public figures, which externalized financial and economic calamities that continued to face the nation.

Second, the leaders of the automakers could show that they were humbled by their early

November missteps and had taken their chidings from Congress and “American people” to heart. Doing so would establish their business as existing in parallel with “ordinary

Americans.” Third, the public work of distinguishing these auto loans from the radically unpopular TARP program would be navigated.

The cloud of economic malaise and catastrophe hung over the hearings. Senator

Chris Dodd (D-CT) began by emphasizing the persistent economic malaise sourced not only in the September financial crisis but larger vectors: “the clouds on the economic horizon have grown even darker and greater in number. Just this week we learned that many of – what many of us have believed for a long time: Our economy is mired in a deep and sustained recession – a recession that began some 12 months ago.”10 News accounts of the hearing magnified Dodd’s words, underscoring the cataclysmic risk a collapsing auto industry would pose to the U.S. economy.11 Dodd also externalized economic struggles to a banking sector that precipitated “massively irresponsible actions by those in the financial sector, including lenders who are now the recipients of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal taxpayer bailout assistance.”12

This anxiety was then articulated to several different versions of “the people,” as senators summoned up several competing and complementary figures of the populace

160 and their concerns. Senators Bob Shelby (R—AL) and Bob Menendez (D—NJ) advanced two of these visions. Shelby frames the hearings as in the interest “of the American taxpayer…I opposed the creation of the TARP. Applying the same standard, I intend to oppose bailing out the Big Three auto manufacturers…a great deal is at stake in this debate...The strength of the American economic system is that it allows us to take risks, to create, to innovate, to grow, to succeed and, sometimes, to fail.”13 Menendez signals similar themes, repeatedly invoking the specter of an American Main Street “victimized” by the lack of conditionality and accountability in the TARP program.14 Both

Congressmen oppose TARP because of the way it distorts the incentive structure of the

American economy. Importantly, Shelby and Menendez are concerned with victimage with respect to the TARP bill itself in addition to the general economic doldrums.

Shelby’s distinction between “taxpayer interest” and accounting for the inevitability of failure, indeed, failure’s necessity, however, internalizes difference within an ideal

America. The presence of failure, in and of itself, is not a problem, but the method by which success and failure occur is what matters. Some managed, acceptable failure represents a healthy system. Menendez, however obliquely, makes essentially the same argument, thematizing the abolition of responsibility from public life in the wake of

TARP as one of the gravest threats to the American system. Bailouts become opposed in the public imagination to the idea of “the people” here understood as guarantees of opportunity not affluence. Such testimony writes a discourse of scarcity into the agreed- upon content of the public sphere by carrying over an implicit account of economic hierarchy based on right and wrong actions resulting in accurate and representative incentives and punishments.

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Notions of responsibility and right treatment summon an imaginary constituted by an idea of justice that is structured around not the ample distribution of public good but instead the envious denial of an Other’s enjoyment, whatever the cost. Because TARP’s offense is a distortion of the economic incentive structure (for it rewards those who deserve failure), fairness is here constituted as a populist idiom tied not to the efficient distribution of goods but instead tied to the denial of future enjoyment on the basis of inequality. Public discourse produces an impoverished American “people,” one defined by its separation from the inegalitarian system of publicly awarded goods. Both the

TARP bailouts and the proposed auto loan were hailed by experts in public discourse as economic necessities even as they were perceived as rewards for the wicked.15

The contours of the bailout debate suggest competing and vital visions of the nature of American society. Indeed, because it occurs at the vital nexus of the economic, popular and political, I believe these hearings staged a debate between an abstract ideal of justice and the actually existing necessity of political decision-making. The discussion foregrounds a question of basic fairness: should people be rewarded for what they do according to market logics, or do logics of valuation outside that of the market have a role to play in assigning value? With the government involved in this question, broader ideological questions are also asked about the role of the government, and also questions about balancing interests: those of say, the taxpayer in reducing governmental deficit versus the general interest in preventing an economic collapse. The former is animated by a utilitarianism structured by a belief in scarcity in public goods while the latter suggests a utilitarianism animated by a focus on outcome rather than process.

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Psychoanalytic discussions of the clash between idealism and utilitarianism map the contours of this dispute. Lacan’s description of the “utilitarian project as the misguided attempt to cut enough holes in a piece of cloth for a number (the greatest number!) of people to stick their arms and heads through it” indicates that the quest for public good assumes the “good” to be of an infinite and equal nature.16 There is no cloth big enough for all humanity, because the “cloth” through which people might appear is actually constituted by relations between subjects. The veil of ignorance is crafted from the negative material of the difference between subjects, so the idea of stepping behind a veil and abstracting oneself only makes sense if we deny the ontological difference between subjects that is the basis of subjectivity. So while a figure like John Rawls may find that their keenest objections to a Benthamite mathematical proposal for the equitable distribution of goods is the inequality of starting points, that objection holds little water for Copjec. Instead, Copjec suggests questions of desire undermine vocabularies of justice not because liberalism’s fantasy of universal equality fails because of the subject’s self-interest, but because the subject’s suspicion of the Other is integral the narrative of liberalism. Or filtered through the testimonies, we have a clash between the righteous voice of the “people” embodied in Shelby’s concern that “the people” get what’s owed to them (responsible spending) while the automakers get what they have earned (waning market share). Utilitarianism in opportunity here coincides with justice in outcome, but only through the generation of a narrow sense of “public good” that disavows the prospects of a broad economic calamity by coding it abstractly as the routine operation of the market, which aligns neatly with the interests of “the people” narrowly defined as taxpayers. If we understand the “cloth” Lacan references to be not a set of public goods

163 but instead the righteous feeling of envy that configures and points a certain kind of

“people” towards antipathy for the public distribution of goods, we can see that in part what is at stake in this dispute is a defense of the American public as an unimpeachable and responsible entity.

One may be willing “to abstract myself from my pathological self-interests to determine what is fair” as Shelby does, but the problem is that abstraction is not a transaction that is hermetically sealed from the social.17 Michael Warner observes in fact that processes of abstraction that constitute this liberal self are not “merely contingent encumbrances to the public sphere, residual forms of illiberal ‘discrimination’.”18 Instead these processes of abstraction are transactional, played off against a certain set of marked bodies that tend to be anything but “the male, the white, the middle class, the normal.”19

Imperfections in Others certify the perfections in the self. As a result the absence of justice comes to be understood not as a structural condition of democratic life but instead another product of wrong living on the part of the Other, whose mere existence might testify ontologically to the imperfection of the self. But this insight is displaced in the act of abstraction; so that the self’s supposed coherence becomes seemingly more real the more it is contrasted with the Other. In this way the Other indicts the self’s capacity to suture the social.

Copjec suggests that for Freud envy emerges as a call for “a truce in the form of a demand for justice and equality for all. That is, envy defends itself against its own invidiousness by transforming itself into group feeling.”20 Reading this insight with a second proposition, that “envy’s unhappiness is the very stuff from which idealizations are contrived” suggests envy and imperfection operate in a mutually constitutive manner.

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The collective demand for justice contained in arguments against governmental intervention (“Don’t reward the irresponsible!”) operates following the neutral sorting functions of the dyad of responsible and irresponsible. Such arguments assume the theoretical possibility of an appropriate apportionment of goods. Utilitarianism and equality are two sides of the same coin, except the former posits equivalence in outcome with the latter positing it as occurring in the first instance.21

In this case, however, the figures against whom public discourse attempts to conjure itself are privileged, white, and male members of an economic upper class. The historically prevalent discursive public, then, could not be published so straightforwardly.

The publics demand for an end to bailouts is a demand that operates according to a universal logic of justice structured around an idea of equality in principle undone by its own universality. Because the suggestion of totality inherent to universality is a demand sabotaged by the character of actually existing subjectivity the demand for justice constitutes a gesture of control, one seeking to manage the threatening difference that is both the cause of and threat to subjectivity. A universalizing gesture (and the abstraction it imagines) serves as an immortalizing prophylaxis, protecting the subjects from their own finitude. Congressional and popular ire towards the bailouts express an unfinalizable demand for ideal justice in the form of equality of status through not the elimination of forces that produce victimage but instead through an envy-ridden demand for the withholding of enjoyment of Others. The intersection between Congressional and popular demands for the removal of assistance for economic elites conjures an ideal horizon of pure equality defined by the absence of special treatment. This demand is also uttered in conjunction with the pangs of economic anxiety sounded by Dodd at the opening of the

165 hearing. What this suggests is the presence of an idea of a pure “people,” defined by the absence of differences that marks their absolute coincidence, at least in the imaginary, with a reality of prosperity and satisfaction.

Turning to Kenneth Burke also sheds light on how the formal characteristic of the victimage kept the hearings within the realm of victimage, and suggests a tragic element to this “people.” The metonymic alignment of auto companies with other financial and political elites positioned the auto industry as just another representation of what was wrong with America. Executives represented the worst kind of avarice, incompetence, as their mode of conveyance to the initial hearings came to stand in public discourse for the entirety of their contribution to the polity. American public discourse enacted what

Kenneth Burke would call rituals of victimage, the production of community through

“common involvement in a killing.”22 For Burke, the rather public insistence of unity, harmony, and public betterment are accompanied at every step by the creeping indeterminacy intimately associated with democratic life. In a babbling human barnyard, the analysis of human relations and public discourse is not just one way of attempting to survey the political and ideological commitments of a community, but a way of assessing how public life is written by the “Order, the Secret, and the Kill.”23 Order refers to the hierarchies that structure human existence, the Secret to the engine of inscrutability that motivates the dialectical relations within these three terms, and the Kill constitutes things, concepts, and persons outside of the Order according to one account of the Secret rather than another. Whether symbolically killing bankers or auto executives, public discourse reflected an abiding necessity to make community on the basis of its opposition to these other terms. Burke is careful to note that it is not the killing itself that certifies a

166 community, but instead the common participation in the ritual. The outcome is less important than the process just as the form is more important than the content.

Mindful of the public’s attitude, the executives of the major auto companies pursued both consubstantiality and mortification: the ritual submission of the self through humility to judgment and authority. Mortification is a kind of willed suicide, a dying for a particular cause that is an intrinsically religious ritual to the extent that it is a “dying to this or that particular thing.24 In an appendix of Permanence and Change, Burke notes that mortification finds expression in piteous vows of chastity. Self-denial of enjoyment and aggressive actions to insist upon the self’s own role and agency in its own position is key to mortification.25 Like victimage rituals, mortification processes remain rituals of killing, but the killing is directed inward, at the part of the self thought to be responsible for a crime or grim set of circumstances. The performance of the auto executives shows

“selves” that sought alignment with the American “people” even as they admitted to some fault. The result was a frame oddly consonant with Obama’s responsibility-ridden rhetorical approach. The heads argued that their companies, just like the American

“people,” were victims of vast economic circumstances beyond their control, though they were trying their best. GM CEO Gerald Wagoner, Jr. outlined technological, efficiency- related, and sacrificial measures that would help GM become more competitive, emphasizing the development of a more fuel-efficient fleet of automobiles and “sacrifices by all parties involved”, including continued suspension of our common stock dividends, and changes in executive and board compensation.”26 These actions were “tough, but necessary” and additional federal loans would allow the industry to “weather the global financial crisis.” Wagoner closes his opening statement by invoking the nostalgic paeans

167 for a robust auto industry, noting “GM has been an important part of American culture for a hundred years, and most of the time as the world’s leading automaker. We’re here today because we made mistakes, which we’re learning from; because some forces beyond our control have pushed us to the brink…and…because saving…all this company represents, is a job worth doing.” Wagoner implies that the company represents, in all its complexity, the flaws and faults of America itself, both the promise and peril of existing in an economically competitive environment. His comments suggest not only that “the people” are defined not against GM and the other auto companies, but also within the same formation as them. By advancing a more comic understanding of the crisis, one that suggested the limitations and circumscriptions attendant to human agency in a large global economy, Wagoner’s account hints that “the people” might be constituted by focusing not on what the automakers “got” from the government, but instead on how the mutual entanglement of “the people” and the companies in the economy provide opportunities not only for mortification but also for the recognition of mutual interest.

Wagoner’s testimony works in concert with that of the head of the United Auto

Workers, Ron Gettelfinger, who wants a loan with “strict accountability measures” while suggesting that “the current crisis may require workers to make further sacrifices…there may need to be adjustments in other areas.”27 Robert Nardelli, head of Chrysler, goes even further in describing Chrysler as a victim of circumstance rather than a victim of its own poor exercise of agency, painting a picture of a company that through the first half of 2008 had “met or exceeded its operating plan…We’re here because of the financial crisis that started in 2007 and accelerated at the end of the second quarter of 2008.”28 The financial crisis is presented as an externality, with the auto industry outside of the

168 economic apparatus that caused the problem but located “inside” enough to be affected.

Finally, Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi testifies about the importance of the auto industry to the economic writ large as he pointedly observes, “the federal government should provide financial help to the domestic automakers. Without help, the automakers will quickly be in bankruptcy, resulting in liquidations and hundreds of thousands of layoffs at a time when the broader economy is suffering its worst recession since the Great

Depression.”29 In defining auto companies as possessing both responsibility and deserving sympathy, the testimony had to navigate between the public demands for victimage and externalization but also the quintessential morality demanding accountability and, indeed, mortification. By drawing on a complex tableau of populist,

Puritan, and ethical discourses, the auto executives constructed a rich narrative that was mortifying and sympathetic.

Still, public sentiment remained opposed to the loan. The ratio of letters to the editor in for/against in the The New York Times and The Boston Globe was 2:5. Partisan bickering continued to threaten the deal. By December 11th, Senate Republicans were balking at the deal, with Bob Corker (R-TN) reporting that “’there’s less than a handful of votes” on the Republican side.30 Despite the fact that the corporate heads had come to

Congress, humbled themselves, and presented masses of evidence about the impact that an auto industry collapse would have on the general economy, the Senate was still unwilling to act. Such attitudes index the magnitude of the “TARP hangover” affecting the national environment. Eventually, George W. Bush had to step in and authorize money to be taken from that very TARP program to loan to the auto industry. Bush cited the major economic threat that the collapse of the automobile industry would pose. It is

169 not incidental the Bush was a lame-duck president at the moment, empowered to action because he had nothing to lose.

The auto bailout debate reflects the way in which the post-TARP anxieties about economic futures dominated the political landscape. Where were the bailouts for

“ordinary Americans” instead of incompetent elites who had ruined the economy? Even though public discourse was rife with statistics, figures, and narratives illustrating how the collapse of the auto industry would make “ordinary Americans” worse off,

Congressional representatives still called the automakers “irresponsible,” “behind the times,” or “unfit” to receive support. Moreover, the inventional resources of an anti- bailout populism present themselves as a serious reservoir for the exercise of rhetorical agency; “the people” were summoned to oppose government assistance for corporations on the basis of an egalitarian logic that assumed popular agency was equal to (if not greater than) governmental agency. As I outlined in chapter 2, “the people” are constituted in opposition to rather than in alliance with the government following the post-1968 reconfiguration of the American rhetorical environment. This suggests that the consubstantial parallelism attempted in Congressional testimony failed not only because of its content but also because of its locational syntax that assumed “the people” and government could act in the face of a populist fervor that implicitly framed government and people as opposites rather than differential expressions of the “popular” in degree.

That is, the argumentative structure of the argument ad populam draws on popular sentiment to warrant the adoption of its claims. However, because “the people” were constituted against the government (and committed to justice by opposing the

170 government’s insistence on rewarding failure), that the bailout necessitated governmental action threatened to nullify (and hence exacerbate) public anger and agency.

Two factors contributed to the production of this feedback loop between “people” and government. The first was the envious frame of the public discourse configuring the testimony. By focusing on the denial of enjoyment rather than the equal distribution of enjoyment, public discourse gestured in the direction of an ideal horizon where inequality would be eradicated and the right and proper justice of “the people” could take its rightful place as a universal governing decision making. The position of the popular voice as outside of the realm of “bailout society” installs this logic of envy through a tautological move that suggests the cause and effect of the demand for equality is the existence of differential treatment itself. Heightening this effect is that the attempt to generate this abstracted and justice-obsessed public took place against a victimage ritual that attempted to demonize a set of economically successful white men. This suggests that the stakes of the victimage ritual were all or nothing because they functioned as community builders.

Rather than generating one perspective among many, the proceedings function as a victimage ritual where community was found in its absolute commitment to denying enjoyment to an Other.31 The public debate is configured by an economy of scarcity relating to enjoyment, where enjoyment is here understood as receiving attention and support from the governing apparatus.

Second, magnifying the closed nature of this feedback loop is the fact this

“people” had no efficient figurehead to embody their rage. Not only had Obama not yet ascended to the presidency, his discourse was considerably more even-handed and less polemical than that of the public thirsty for economic blood. Congress, too fractured and

171 polysemous, was a poor popular ventriloquist as well. Difference generates actually existing democracy. The question is not whether or not we inhabit a fractured or harmonious polity, but instead whether or not our public discourse consists of attitudes and sentiments capable of making peace with the fact of difference or staging perpetual insurrections against the idea of difference cloaked in assaults in particulars. Power, understood as a different way of naming the fact of difference (and hence inequalities and subordinations) expresses a notion intrinsic to democracy rather than its opposite: the process of taking a uniform imaginary and marking and staining it with difference.

Essentially, actually existing democracy comes to be by ruining the democratic imaginary. In this case the public constituting power of discourse had a hitch in its giddy up: “the people” were made by conflating political representatives and business executives into one out of touch assemblage, the elite. Historically this is nothing special, as Michael Lee suggests populism almost always defines itself against an out of touch ruling elite.32 But in this case the popular energy lacked the ability to either dissipate itself fully either through scapegoating (while Bush discharged the TARP funds for the industry, a lame duck does not make much of a lightning rod) nor through an investment in an avatar of power (Obama was not yet president, and he had seemed opposed to the kind of demagoguery on display during this debate). Not only is this particular figure of “the people” concerned that it might not be receiving enough attention from the political sector, it also represents bottled up economic frustrations in need of an outlet. Perhaps the early moments of Obama’s presidency would provide the necessary cathective thoroughfare. However, because Obama remained committed to a “post-

172 partisan” political frame, his policies were easier to politicize and attack. This left him vulnerable to a conservative counter-insurgency capable of harnessing popular anger.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

When Barack Obama was inaugurated as president in January 2009, the economic crisis was so acute that his presidential transition moved at an unprecedented pace.33 The

Obama team hit the ground running. His first acts as president were a number of executive orders that attempted to achieve progressive policy aims like closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and passing the Lily Ledbetter act which provided equal pay for women. Another major early legislative that caught the public eye was a large spending bill in order to inject a jolt of cash (and confidence) into the still flagging American economy. The bill included money for state governments fighting budgetary constraints, subsidies for clean energy, supports for consumer-friendly automotive trade programs, infrastructure projects, health and poverty assistance, and more.

However, the content of the bill did not exist in a vacuum—the debate over the stimulus bill waded into intense political waters where the aforementioned resentment and fury about economic catastrophe was simmering. Public speculation about the early parts of Obama’s term wondered how he would punish the wicked on Wall Street.

Obama upset the apple cart in a manner predicted by his campaign rhetoric. When addressing the economic challenges facing the nation in his January 20 inaugural, Obama followed the path set out in his October “Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” speech, acknowledging the depths and threats of the economic crisis but distributing blame among regular Americans in addition to Wall Street operators. “Our economy is badly

173 weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered.”34 Obama’s words turned away from the externalization of anger: by locating guilt collectively, ordinary Americans had to consider their role in the economic difficulties the nation was facing.

Further exacerbating Obama’s inability to channel the anger of the American people was his proposed solution to crisis: an antidote of hard work, rededication, and political harmony. He argued that, “the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this

America: They will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” After setting the stage for a prolonged difficulty, Obama then positioned his political opposition as those possessing “petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” He then describes these cocnerns as “childish things,” suggesting an element of puerile immaturity on the part of his opponents that threatens what the adults in Washington have got to do. He opposes that childish position to those who make the decision to “Reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.35” Obama’s speech implicitly repudiated many

American’s anger at corporations and government. His comments about putting an end to

“recriminations and worn-out dogmas” reads in part as a critique of the tired ideas of the

Bush years but also are part of a move to critique ideas of conflict and partisanship

174 themselves by arguing for a deliberative focus on the future rather than a forensic account of economic tragedy.

Media accounts of Obama’s inaugural reinforced the non-polemical and inward- looking character of the speech. David Sanger, writing his account of the speech in The

New York Times, noted Obama’s inward turn and his post-politically pragmatic tenor.

Mr. Obama blamed no one other than the country itself — ‘our collective failure to make hard choices’ and a willingness to suspend national ideals ‘for expedience’s sake.’ Yet every time Mr. Obama urged Americans to ‘choose our better history,’ to make decisions according to science instead of ideology, to reject a ‘false choice’ between safety and American ideals, to recognize that American military power does not ‘entitle us to do as we please,’ he signaled a commitment to pragmatism not just as a governing strategy but as a basic value.

For Obama, everyone owns a share in where the nation is at the moment, for good or ill.

Sanger also notes that Obama’s decision to focus on the moment rather than himself was the logical counterpart for a man whose campaign worked “by denouncing where ideological zeal has taken the nation.”36 Those who found the speech transcendent dwelled on the moment’s considerable uplifting power rather than its political context: conservative columnist Kathleen Parker was awed by the speech’s focus on “what is, in fact, not change, but the natural, if difficult, progression of an ideal that is true and good and transcendent through time. Barack Obama's presidency isn't a change from, but a continuation of, the American experiment toward its hoped-for destination. Mr. Obama hinted at this in his speech by invoking American values of hard work and honesty.”37 As a Los Angeles Times editorial concluded, Obama had reminded America about the importance of an “us” instead of a “them,” and “as we now struggle to forge America's future out of ‘our better history,’ we all share responsibility for the hard work ahead.38

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Obama’s decision to bury “them” in favor of “us” raises a question: how does one manufacture an “us” without a “them”? For if one does not do so, others certainly will.

Conservative media concurred that Obama’s speech lacked polemical or divisive content. Ed Morrissey, a prominent conservative blogger at Hot Air, noted that “Nothing remarkable got said today, or at least nothing we haven’t heard a thousand times already from the campaign trail…It’s a generic speech, lacking in specific vision from Obama.

Of course, that may have been by design. Obama said he wanted to take the divisions out of politics, and one way to do that is to offer speeches with no points for later debate.”39

A right-of-center editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer worried that Obama’s mantra of change might in fact, prove to be wholly empty: “And for all the hoopla and hype, his speech didn't soar. It was so weighted with sandbags of historic self-awareness, it hardly bounced off the ground… ‘The world has changed, and we must change with it,’ he said.

Change how? Remake into what? We look at the economy, our jobs, our 401(k)s, terrorism, breathtaking bailouts, nationalized banks, the decay of our culture or the blob- like spread of socialism and think: Yes, the world has changed, but not for the better.”40

The somber state of Obama’s inward looking prose also struck a chord with conservative columnist Michael Barone, who though Obama’s tone “was far more somber than the mood of the crowd of 2 million on the Mall.”41 Obama’s speech either soared or sunk but either way it had little content.

Obama’s solemn prose exacerbated anxieties but did not tap into the growing well of populist discontent. If the auto bailout demonstrated that an American “public” and their Congressional avatars were still out for blood in the wake of the financial crisis, then Obama’s political performance unwisely doubled down on an American political

176 imaginary of indistinction rather than painting a canvas where enemies and saints were painted in bold colors. These rhetorical choices constrained the terms of the public debate over the stimulus. Opponents sought to politicize it and indeed succeeded because the mere fact of its politicization would suggest Obama’s failure to achieve the goal of harmony he set out in his campaign and his early term. In a major speech pushing the stimulus bill, Obama produced an American “people” opposed to the old “era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.” Like many observers, Obama agrees that the depth of our economic crisis is substantial, but it is nothing that America cannot overcome:

We can rebuild that lost trust and confidence. We can restore opportunity and prosperity. We should never forget that our workers are still more productive than any on Earth. Our universities are still the envy of the world. We are still home to the most brilliant minds, the most creative entrepreneurs, and the most advanced technology and innovation that history has ever known. And we are still the nation that has overcome great fears and improbable odds. If we act with the urgency and seriousness that this moment requires, I know that we can do it again.42

The words Obama chooses reflect a persistent opposition to polemicization: by calling the economic crisis a result of “irresponsibility” rather than villainy or greed, it is framed as a mistake rather than a crime. Here are hints of a how a comic frame might be applied to the financial circumstance, understanding its causes as beyond the control or capacity of any one authority or institution to manage.

But such opportunities quickly fell to the side. Opponents quickly worked language about bipartisanship and politicization into the stimulus debate. Despite the fact that the bill included a number of conservative political proposals including tax cuts, the stimulus bill as it came to be called became the immediate subject of a partisan firestorm.

By January 25th, the debate was in full public swing. For example, a memorandum

177 circulated by House Republican Mark Kirk (R-IL) complained that the bill was inefficient (creating a new job would cost $412,162 via federal spending, versus $50,283 from the private sector), that some items were unrelated to economic stimulus, that an insufficient number of non-partisan economists supported its high cost, and also that the bill had no bipartisan oversight.43 The editor at conservative newsmagazine National

Review also came out firing with both barrels, attacking the stimulus on the basis of its partisanship:

We now have a much better idea of what President Obama and the Democrats

mean by "stimulus." They do not mean those policies that will provide the

greatest boost to economic activity. They mean those policies that will stimulate

the economy within the narrow bounds of what partisanship and ideology will

allow, plus some policies that are wholly unrelated to economic stimulus.44

Items cited include Medicaid funding, transportation infrastructure spending, and seed money for “green energy.” According to these conservative commentators, Barack

Obama was not living up to his promise as the figure to “transcend” the ordinary boundaries of partisan politics, but instead was just part of a politics as usual, which hijacks the political process in the name of “the people” only to reproduce the same set of tired policy options. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg noted in the Los Angeles

Times that the real action regarding the stimulus bill was not about whether or not it would pass, as the Democrats had won and had decided to govern. Instead, the real action was in the framing of the bill, as evidenced by “centrists” like Arlen Specter jockeying to be a part of the bill in the name of responsibility.45

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The politicization of the bill becomes a way not only to hoist Barack Obama on his own petard, but also a means for rendering bland rather than exceptional the aftermath of the election. Rather than fulfilling the promises that Obama would transcend the typical bureaucratic drudgeries and political divisions, creating something truly unique, a bill that could be legitimately described as a “bailout plan for the American people” came instead to be understood as just another political salvo in an ongoing political war. The election had only delivered more of the same.

The administration’s push continued to focus on responsibility. Economic adviser

Larry Summers spoke on Meet the Press about Obama’s challenges framing them as historical and exceptional:

He has inherited an extraordinarily difficult situation, the worst economy since the

Second World War; a financial system that's got very serious problems…The kind

of situation that requires the types of decisive action he's been working with

Congress to produce.46

The solution, Summers says, is “decisive action” of the precise sort that political opposition threatens to grind to a halt. Obama’s earlier notes about the irresponsibility of opposition work with Summers’ comments to emphasize that opposing Obama is tantamount to threatening the nation’s well-being. After emphasizing the grim situation,

Summers also ordinary citizens should respond to these anxious times. Summers hit the highest notes when discussing the classic American value of responsibility. “This is…why President Obama was elected, and this is why his call for an age of responsibility in what government does for all of us as we manage our own finances, as we do on our own, is so very important. People need to work hard, they need to play by

179 the rules, and those of us with responsibility for economic polity need to do everything we can to make this economy work.”47 The administration framed the problem as an absence of responsibility instead of blaming systemic wrongdoers. Absent from the space of appearance but everywhere threatening the American dream were the irresponsible persons, the opposite of the virtuous “people.”

House Minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) sounded a different tone focused on the distance between “people” and government by positioning the liberal governing apparatus in opposition to “one that works; one that helps small businesses; helps

American families; helps create jobs and preserve jobs in America; and what we see with their plan is a lot of spending that I just don’t think will work.”48 After this set of critiques, Gregory references Obama’s infamous first meeting between the President and

Republican leadership where the president cut off discussions with a terse “I won” in response to partisan criticism. Gregory then asks exactly what leverage the GOP has, given the massive Democratic victories in November. Boehner’s response:

Listen, we've made it clear -- we want to work with the new president. He's made clear he wants to work with us. That's why we laid out our ideas at his invitation the other day. And we want to continue to work with him to help fix this economy. David, this isn't about Democrat or Republican at this point. We have some serious problems in our economy, and, believe me, all of us want the president to succeed. We want this plan to work. There is no real daylight between the president and Republicans on the Hill. There may be some disagreement over how much spending or how much in the way of tax relief, but, at the end of the day, we want him to succeed, because America needs him to succeed.49

Here Boehner sounds the same tone found in the public framing of the 2008 election: a sincere hope that the moment may transcend typical political coordinates, and instead usher in an era of where bipartisan interests of the common good trump typical political division and balkanization. Mere paragraphs later, however, Boehner again attempts a

180 discursive recapture of “the people” when the discussion turns to TARP funds. Boehner claims, “somebody has to be looking out for the taxpayers. And I’m going to tell you what—Republicans are going to be there to look out for American taxpayers.”50 Even the debate about the stimulus bill cannot avoid the TARP discussion; in some ways the idea of government spending itself, even in the form of a stimulus, seems influenced by the TARP narrative. The same economy of scarcity characterizing the raucous debate over the auto bailout and TARP, which suggested that there was a finite amount of public goods and that the public was not receiving them, was mapped over into the stimulus controversy, as Boehner’s comments that generated a separation between American taxpayers and those who would benefit from the stimulus indicate. Opposition to spending is constructed as the just denial of enjoyment to others, that is, as ensuring that the irresponsible do not get to enjoy themselves, almost as a sort of sadistic punishment, as here we see how a lack of enjoyment is a way to talk about the moral necessity of a major economic collapse, which is what many economists thought would result if the government did not act to bailout the auto industry or stimulate the economy.

This rhetoric of “the people” was sown on fertile ground here because one could distinguish between a responsible “people” and irresponsible “persons”. Public discourse fetishizing unity and harmony made this outcome more likely, because such conditions rarely if ever characterize democratic polities constituted through difference. Public discourse either displaces public anxiety by chalking up such concerns to the presence of an adversarial Other whose existence explains the persistent instability in identity or sublimates these uncertainties through a political avatar whose coherence reassures the public of their own solidity and existence. Because “the people” were constituted through

181 their negative construction against conflated aggregate of government and business elites locked into a mutually enriching but corrupt relationship, the same configuration of public discourse that made the auto industry persona non-grata tarred and feathered the stimulus bill. “The people,” once positioned as the gatekeepers of moral justice with regards to responsibility, tolerated no forays into what was understood as “rewarding the irresponsible,” a rather curious way of understanding undertaking initiatives to protect the general economic good. This suggests a monolithic public operation of “the people,” one that can be explained by looking at how discourses of unity and togetherness, especially those of post-partisanship, attempt to domesticate the messy differences of democracy in the name of unity. Ultimately, as I will show in the case of the stimulus bill, unity itself becomes the object of politics rather than a more result-oriented understanding of the common good. Once the goalposts were moved to judge success on the basis of an agenda’s ability to generate unity rather than how it provided for the public good, populist rhetoric that could operate without respect for policy nuance had an opening.

Moreover, this fetish for unity was indivisible from a certain kind of attachment to notions of political control that suggested a masculine political logic.

Stimulus in the Body Politic

The bipartisan consensus regarding the necessity of harmony and unity can be read as a reaction to a gendered demand for totality endemic to, if not intrinsic to, the

American body politic. The concept of the polity is attached to notions of totality and the fantasy of reducing many parts into one total community. The persistence of populist and collective rhetorics testifies as much to the hold of this fantasy as it does to its “actually existing” failure in democracy. Political frames of harmony indicate that this hope for

182 totality and unity (e pluribus unum) has a persuasiveness in its appeal: by offering the transcendence of existing particular political coordinates, belonging affords a kind of fantasy of immorality that accords not only with the contingent hopes of the American dream but also the abstract appeal of the idea of democracy. At the heart of this notion is a sort of fetish for unity and totality suggested by the routine circulation of metaphors of totality, collectivity, and body. For example traditional discourses of citizenship describe citizens as having a “part” in the nation, a word which itself suggests the presence of a whole. As Shane Phelan has observed, rhetoric of the body politic “Structures concerns for (among others) integration, boundaries, power, autonomy, freedom, and order. Thus the idea of the body works both to delineate who shall be a member of the polity and to prescribe the nature of the polity itself.”51 The appeal of these corporeal metaphors is that they suggest both a “real” materialized existence of the body politic but also its limits.

Where the body of the king suggested a finite and determinable end to questions of authority, democratic narratives of distributed freedom produce more, not less, anxiety about where power truly lies. In A Grammar of Motives Kenneth Burke employs metaphors of corporeality to explain the relationship between metonymy and synecdoche, where metonymy is to “convey some incorporeal state in terms of the corporeal” while synecdoche is about placing a “part for the whole.”52 It is not accidental that the metaphor trades in the language of the corporeal, because such interest in corporeality discloses an interest in unity. Bodies, however ontologically phantasmatic, exist so that they may claim to be known. Once there are claims to knowledge of the body, these claims then sustain further arguments, arguments that often work from the principles of the “real knowledge” of the contours of the body. Sometimes these discourses segregate and

183 discriminate against black bodies by claiming to know their most savage impulses. Other times, the body’s incapacity to control itself and its desires is used as an excuse or explanation for acts of sexual violence. In both cases the existence of the body serves to naturalize, and hence justify, certain arguments that require a natural certainty to function.

Similarly, fantasies of harmony seek to simultaneously eradicate particular bodies but also to generate a real and total body politic. These two demands may run in tension but are also mutually constitutive. As Michael Warner has observed, the so-called “mass public” generates its coherence against bodies that can be seen.53 The desire for totality, whether it underwrites public discourse, tropological theory, or accounts of political exclusion, remains central. Hence “deviant bodies” must remain outside the “mass public,” lest their nature threaten to overrun the rationality of public reason.

Such desire is configured by gendered expectations reflecting the latent content of the public sphere. Melissa Deem suggests that the “political sphere has been constituted via the naturalized historical link between masculinity, political agency, and speech.”54

Fascination with the idea of totality, represented in public discourse’s obsession with the body in the case of the John Bobbitt controversy, suggests a link in our imaginary between traditionally understood “masculine” characteristics like deep speech, mastery, power and reason and the constitution of actually existing democratic life. The democratic imaginary’s fascination with “the possibility of the successful suture” suggests a double gesture of mastery aiming to secure the coherence of the political even at the same moment that the gesture itself is underwritten by a democratic ethos of openness. Force cannot legitimately domesticate democracy’s pluralizing spirit

184 suggesting that it is repeated figures and tropes that calcify structures of privilege that mediate the relationship between imagined and actually existing democracy.55 Deem’s account echoes Phelan’s claim that democratic citizens are permanently perched on the edge of victimage and “must constantly ward off threats to the autonomy and sovereignty of the body, both the personal body and the body politic, in order to establish his own autonomy and sovereignty. Citizenship is about virility, active defense of that which is threatened rather than being the victim.”56 Totality, or a secure body, is not an actually existing political state, but instead an ideal that drives the necessity of permanent, aggressive action, actions that then tautologically (but performatively) fail to achieve total agency but also reify it as a driving ideal. Similarly, the exercise of democratic power comes with the understanding, however deflected or displaced, of its contingency and impermanence, which poses a specific kind of threat to subjects, especially subjects whose interactions with the world are often colored with a capitalist language of immortality and labor. Because democracy often suggests a fantastic appeal of totality, a unified demos speaking “the people’s” truth, acts of public constitution also serve to both tame and exacerbate anxieties about the body politic.

The desire to make the polity whole, embedded both in the Obama administration’s push for a stimulus and in the Republican attempt to generate a populist opposition to the bill at first appear to be opposed. Calls for political harmony attached to the passage of a certain policy can not, at first blush, be squared with a political vision that conjured up a responsible and furious citizenry who disagree with the policy at hand.

What remains of note is the shared structure of the demand, which in both cases is indexed by a belief and support for a kind of harmonious democratic imaginary. There

185 may be disagreements about the content of “the people” but neither side disagrees that they are out there. The difference instead is in the manner of description: the pro-stimulus crowd is hardworking and virtuous, finding the American people prone to falling down but also capable of getting back up, while the GOP opposition suggests that, as in the case of the debate over the auto loan, the market offers an accurate reflection of capacities, albeit one that has been at times too distorted by governmental intervention. In the former account, the threat to America comes from within the body politic as articulated to civil society, but also the solution: “the people” can redeem themselves. In the latter case, “the people” are defined more narrowly through a direct articulation to their status as taxpayers, and their interests lie not with rededication and renewed effort, for both of these characteristics they are implied to possess in spades. Instead, ensuring that the apparatus of governmental sovereignty operates in lockstep with the wishes of this citizenry is key. The administration’s position takes for granted that during exceptional times exceptional government action may be called for, while the GOP position offers an ethical refusal of this exceptionalism by enunciating an extremely democratic (vox populi, vox dei) view of the circumstance.

Indeed, while the bill passed, public discourse judged it a near defeat based on its inability to heal the sutures of democracy and create a neat, agreeable polity. It passed but did not constitute a “people.” As CNN reported:

This is still a stinging victory, I guess, instead of a stinging defeat. They won. A win is a win. But it's not how they wanted to win. They wanted the first initiative from the president right out of the gate to be an overwhelming bipartisan win. Instead, this is a party-line vote. It looks like something that would have happened in the Bush era. And it doesn't look like the kind of sort of the turn the page and change the tone in Washington that the president has been pledging.57

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By framing the goal of politics as one of harmonious transcendence, the administration was hoisted on their own petard as media accounts could defend partisan vote counts not as expressions of a kind of systemic political logic but instead as evidence of the Obama administration’s failure to live up to its own promises of being “post-political.” Feeding this concern was the general suspicion about lack of popular representation lingering after the TARP debacle. GOP arguments about representing the taxpayer had worked a kind of metonymic magic, suggesting that the absence of bipartisanship on the bill was correlated with not a single political Democratic win but instead an absence of conservative/popular representation within the government itself. Indeed, reports on the vote are filled with these suggestive caveats: when the House approved a version of the stimulus bill on

January 28th, CNN reported the bill as a partisan swipe rather than a political necessity.

Campbell Brown said “Yes, tonight’s House vote on the stimulus bill did go the president’s way, but without a single Republican voting yes. And that is after…Obama went to Capitol Hill to lobby congressional Republicans in person, which was very unusual.”58 New York Times coverage of the bill’s passage notes throughout the prominent absence of GOP support for the bill.59 Fox News framed the policy as more of the same “old-fashioned sausage-making. Pet provisions were coming to light that had not been included in the original bills that passed the House or Senate -- or that differed markedly from earlier versions. Some appeared to brush up against claims of the bill's supporters that no pet projects known as "earmarks" were included.”60 Ian Welsh at the popular left-leaning blog firedoglake uses a similar political ends-means calculation, framing the bill’s compromises as a loss for Democrats.61 Influential conservative blogger Allahpundit insisted on linking the stimulus back to the TARP plan, placing it of

187 a kind and in a sequence with a continuing cronyistic relationship between government and business, explaining how major media outlets “are already anticipating Stimulus II, in fact, presumably to follow hot on the heels of TARP III. And all this while he’s planning to, er, balance the budget. Reminds me of one of those physics problems where water’s pouring into a sink at a certain rate and you have to figure out how big the drain needs to be to keep the sink from overflowing.”62 Veronique de Rugy of Reason opposes the bill while noting how it creates hundreds of possible pathways for government spending, making accountability difficult, echoing the TARP debate.63 In each case political unity presented as an ideal and then fragmented by the political process.

The stimulus debate created an opening for a competing populism that saw “the people” unrepresented in the mass public. Warner does not focus on what happens when the public prophylaxis of a body politic goes missing in public. However, if “mass publicity promises a reconciliation between embodiment and self-abstraction” then the absence of a “mass public” not only threatens to eradicate the political but also retroactively to delete the individuals who depend on imagining a mass public with which to project themselves forward.64 This suggests where anger and frustration simmer, they mail boil over, and demand productive democratic routes through which to sublimate.

President Obama, because of his race and also perhaps because of his rhetorical dedication to post-partisanship, was not that figure. America wanted a figure that could channel their anger. What they got was Rick Santelli.

“The Real Silent Majority”

Following the passage of the stimulus bill, the Obama administration announced a second measure intended to alleviate economic difficulties: a plan that would assist

188 homeowners struggling with their mortgages. Called the Homeowner Affordability and

Stability Plan, the bill offered measures to forestall and even avoid foreclosures in order to keep families in their homes and neighborhoods stable.65 For many, the dire economic straits warranted the passage of this and other bills to help out “ordinary Americans” struggling to keep afloat.66 In the context of the economic tribulations facing America, the Act made for a strange target. After all, it combined a strong regulatory approach for lending banks with support and refinancing opportunities for homeowners. That it became a target indexes some representational curiosities of American politics rather than the legislation’s policy merits.

President Obama announced the plan on February 18th. On February 19th, an obscure economic analyst exploded on a CNBC morning show. Santelli, a CNBC contributor, was previously a relative unknown (along with, frankly, the channel CNBC, who had only seen an uptick in ratings as the financial situation of America deteriorated).

Santelli, the former VP of a hedge fund, made his usual appearance on the CNBC morning program Squawk Box. To all appearances, it would be just another humdrum

(and poorly rated) morning for CNBC. When the Squawk Box hosts asked for Santelli’s opinion about the administration proposal, however, his response was immediate, impassioned, and polemical:

The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications…I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?67

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In the visual frame behind Santelli there is activity on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile

Exchange, where the morning trades serve as the backdrop for his reporting daily.

Initially they background workers remain focused on their jobs, but as Santelli builds to a modest crescendo, his “drink the water” call is met with a smattering of applause from the gallery and at least one cheer of approval (“Hey, that’s a novel idea!”) The show hosts half-jokingly observe Santelli’s numbness to the paradox of a speaking Silent

Majority.

Three important elements in Santelli’s speech demand attention: the formal performance of his anger as a “rant,” his distinction between “winners” and “losers,” and the embodied nature of his populist performance. By turns these three moves help explain why Santelli’s performance gained such immediate notoriety amongst the media and public, and why his call to dump derivatives into Lake Michigan gave fuel to the Tea

Party movement.

First, there was appeal intrinsic to his form of objection, the rant. Scholars of rhetoric tend to describes rants in an offhand manner rather than theorize it explicitly as a rhetorical form. Perhaps the rant is a subset of the polemic. Indeed, Reason magazine’s

Samuel Staley called Santelli’s performance a “very effective polemic.”68. Rand defines the polemic as a rhetorical form containing “alienating expressions of emotion, non- contingent assentation of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics.”69 Santelli’s speech meets the latter three criteria but fails on the first, because his expression of emotion is an appropriate gesture of rage- based identification with an audience rather than an accusation of immorality. For Rand, the alienating element of the polemic is very important in how it constitutes the ultimate

190 virtue of the polemic, that is, its unfinalizable and productively ambiguous effects, which are not entirely predictable and may shift not from context to context but indeed may reshape and reconfigure contexts. This is what makes them properly queer, that is, disruptive of normativities.70 The element of decidability in Santelli’s speech gestures at the key feature that defines the “rant” from the polemic. Scholarship in rhetoric has undertheorized the rant. For example in an essay about Audrey Lorde, Lester Olson suggests that the American mass public understood Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright’s angry speech as “rants” articulated to the figure of the “angry black male.”71 Olson’s characterization of the public discourse surrounding Wright is accurate but leaves unanswered formal questions about the features of the rant. Similarly Catherin Batt labels a key section of a medieval legend a “rant” but does not define what constitutes a rant.72

Don Waisanen writes an extensive article on Dennis Miller’s “ranting” rhetorical persona, but his definition of a rant is drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary, suggesting the need for more study.73 The ease of the use of the term “rant” suggests its definition bears investigation.

I want to suggest that the rant is a spontaneous variant of polemical expression that generates authenticity on the basis of its supposed organic emergence around four nodal points. Characterized by anger, energy, a certain kind of “off-the-cuffness,” and masculinity in terms of appearance and form, the rant is a kind of speech which emerges when the body can no longer contain the mind’s ideal truths and someone feels compelled to “speak their mind” even when circumstances or situations suggest that one ought to hold their tongue. Rant, are angry, signaled with yells, shouts, and combative language. Additionally, they are also adrenaline-soaked, with their messy and sometimes

191 incoherent delivery and content evidence of a circumstance that has almost worn down a speaker and their audience. Also, the rant is spontaneous, emerging as if it were not staged or planned. One remembers the 1970’s film Network, featuring aged news anchor- turned-oracle Howard Beale losing it on television, yelling “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Finally, the rant is gendered. Phelan, drawing from a long tradition of feminist scholarship, notes how historically “Men, guided by inner imperatives and directed by reason, find their goals and their way without deviating” with a corresponding “disdain shown to men who notice and fashion their bodies…these gendered associations play off the idea that masculine bodies and minds are fixed, stable, self-maintaining, and invulnerable.” On the other hand, women’s reason is “fickle, both in thoughts and desires” and its tendency towards questioning is a sign of woman’s susceptibility to bodily and environmental conditions that overwhelm rational faculties.74

In this formulation, “woman” cannot speak her mind but instead her spontaneous performance would index her inability to withdraw from a localized circumstance and produce a rational, reasonable, and global view of a given situation, whereas Man is empowered to speak “truth to power” in a moment where the mind’s keen grasp of the situation is drawn out into public discourse in an enriching fashion. The masculine character of Santelli’s rant, combined with the visual frame of other men, contributes to my suggestion that the circulating rant contained ineffable marks of gender.

Second, Santelli’s speech persuades by manufacturing a distinction between the ideal “winners” responsible for American prosperity and the “losers.” Everyone who is a

“loser” is guilty of bad behavior, configuring the imagined “we” as those who made the right decisions while the wrong suffer for the indignities of their rational choices. Vikki

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Bell suggests that” liberalism sustains its appeal by promising an agenda of negative liberty and individual ingenuity while conflating the exercise of individual capacities

(free thought, movement, and action) with the attainment of success and prosperity.

There is a promise of both equality on the front end (equality of capacity which implies an equality of opportunity) and an equality of outcome (the idea that everyone benefits from the free market.) Actually existing politics, however, is marked by routine crises for liberalism, such as moments that highlight political and economic inequalities. These moments of difference between subjects, while also authorizing the imagination of the

“level playing field” that operates as the imaginary starting point for society in the minds of many are moments of opportunity for critique as well as the reification of individualist ideology.75

Santelli’s discourse works because of a lack of faith in the Other (“losers”) but also provides a moment where the failure of Others could be taken to index an ideological problem of liberalism itself. After all, if the general incapacity of the individual to perfectly apprehend the terrain of the market and society can be stipulated to be a common rather than a particular problem, then an inductive rejoinder to ideological stories about faith in the individual is implied. As I have detailed, the Obama administration’s rhetoric failed to take advantage of the potential destabilization offered, doubling down on the faith in the individual falling a rhetoric of responsibility and

American exceptionalism back down a capitalist rabbit hole. Santelli’s dichotomization between “winners” and “losers” further served to frame the key question in the aftermath of the financial cataclysm of “user error” rather than a matter of systemic problems. The

193 winners and losers dynamic is also fundamentally -driven, premised as it is upon denying the “losers” any enjoyment.

What this suggests is that both Obama’s earlier vision for a prosperous America and Santelli’s vision of an America of prosperous winners actually draw from the same wellspring of political imagination, as both posit utilitarian arguments for general prosperity in order to warrants their claims. Even the Obama administration’s stimulus push was based on a rhetoric of the equality of opportunity, which still leaves space for a performance like Santelli’s which succeeds on the basis of its capacity to understand actually existing economic inequality as a result of individuals making the wrong choices. Indeed, rhetoric about the equality of opportunity continues to abstract individuals as sharing a certain set of innate characteristics, which suggests inequality is earned (“losers”) rather than a systematic or chance result.

Santelli then amps up his performance. Having already implied his alignment with the virtuous elements of American society by positioning them as the ingenious and capacitated “winners”), the employees of the exchange throw out phrases behind Santelli, sarcastically saying things like “How ‘bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.” With the support of the crowd behind him, Santelli then turns to a frame of common sense, summarizing for his studio and television audience his main point:

“Listen, all’s I know is, is that there’s only about 5% of the floor population here right now, and I talk loud enough they can all hear me. So if you want to ask ‘em anything, let me know. These guys are pretty straight forward, and my guess is, a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.” Rebecca Quick, a CNBC commentator, quips “Not so silent.”

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The irony was lost on Santelli, and indeed, much of America. Media actors and individuals rapidly consumed and disseminated Santelli’s “rant.” The influential Drudge

Report flagged it as “the rant heard round the world.” Kathryn Jean Lopez, an editor and contributor at the National Review, playfully suggested a Palin-Santelli presidential ticket, while explaining the immediate surge of interest in Santelli’s rant as a result of people being “hungry for someone who is fed up with the way things are and who seem to believe in something enough to know there is an alternative worth fighting for. Some of the voices may be far from perfect, but Americans are looking for signs of the life of an alternative...if a representative pops up…folks will cheer them on.”76 The video was also a viral sensation, circulated extensively on twitter and other social media platforms, as users consumed it on YouTube, Facebook, and other forums. Chicagoist, a local paper, described Santelli’s rant as “glorious.”77 Financial analyst Larry Kudlow wrote at

National Review about Santelli’s performance being an accurate summary of the unfairness of America where income distribution “from the responsible 92 percent of home-owning mortgage holders” to “the irresponsible defaulters who bought more than they could ever afford” predominates.78 These comments are echoed in a Heritage

Foundation paper that notes “Santelli’s criticism of the mortgage bailout plan is dead on:

The plan treats borrowers who sacrificed to pay their mortgages on time the same as those who…stopped paying their loans.”79 Conservative media was in love.

Interestingly, centrist and even liberal media explicitly and implicitly validated if not the content, at least the sentiment of Santelli’s anger. Mike Rowan of Daily Markets noted, “Santelli hit a nerve that gave proof to the building public sentiment that a housing bill should not bailout irresponsible borrowers.”80 Yahoo! News, which is not a reliable

195 conservative bastion, situated Santelli’s protest as part of a growing popular discontent with the economic situation, drawing attention to “protest rallies in Seattle, Denver” and other locations.81 The Washington Independent, a liberal minded production, observed that part of what drove the popular circulation of Santelli’s comments was that Santelli was “tapping into something that’s real, a resentment of being forced to pay for someone else’s mistakes. I’ve heard the same sentiments from friends who rented or remained cramped in smaller houses as their families grew.”82 National Public Radio’s Mara

Liasson also worried that the populist tones of Santelli’s rant posed a threat to the president. She argued “About this populist backlash, I think they’re worried…and rightly so…you want to be dishing out the populism if you’re the president. You don’t want to be on the receiving end.”83 Even MSNBC got in on the action, as Hardball host Mike

Barnacle, filling in for Chris Matthews, snagged an interview with Santelli on the day of his rant. He specifically praised Santelli because he “spoke for a lot of people,” implicitly authorizing the populist frame that attended with Santelli’s performance.84

Santelli’s populist performance configures the interpretive frame used to evaluate his performance. Despite the paradoxical status of his performance (a speaking, yelling

“silent” majority?), the anger, fury, and frustration are read as genuine and meaningful emotional reactions. What’s more, Santelli’s appearance and the context of his performance are not incidental in explaining the uptake and circulation of his “rant:” they are in fact critical because they index the public (or perhaps counterpublic) within which the performance circulated. Santelli’s performance requires a sanitized field of America where “winners” are aligned with the proper citizens and the “losers” are those whose economic rationality has been founding wanting. In fact, the “Silent Majority” as

196 envisioned by Richard Nixon and his staff offered a neutral democratic fantasy of belonging that could effectively neuter and neutralize charges of racism circulating in the tumultuous polity of sixties America. As Jeremy Engels observes, the “silent majority” was fueled by a white resentment of those bodies that could appear in public (gendered, raced, agitationist, and uncivil). By enabling resentment to function not as a temporary state of subjectivity but instead a permanent condition for possibility for thinking about the self, Nixon’s rhetoric crafted a persuasive account of how victimhood, typically understood as a minoritarian experience, could instead be understood as a majoritarian sentiment, conducting a symbolic incursion into an imagined American polity where victimage had begun to serve as a politically powerful wedge issue.85

Third, Santelli’s body is also on display in the performance, and this is not incidental, because his circulation indexes the bodily poverty of the American political imaginary throughout the difficult economic times of 2008 and 2009: with the demand for some sort of reminder that “the people” had a place in the body politic, Santelli produces a kind of corporeal counter-imaginary in which “the people” have found their appropriate expression of anti-institutional sentiment in the space of public discourse. Not only does he respond to the desire for some sort of body, the masculine character of the rant helps to explain its appeal: it offered to suture the body politic into a real material form, instead of offering the dizzying but temporary heights of Obama’s rhetoric.

Moreover, his capacity to embody the polity was suggested by bipartisan rhetoric on both sides, which understood that there was an angry American “people” out there and also that it could be found (and importantly, distilled into an angry but harmonious form).

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Santelli’s embodied rant about winners and losers, and especially his paradoxical performance as a speaking member of the Silent Majority, responded to two anxieties about public agency. He not only satisfied a demand to conjure some kind of public, which satisfies the drive for public appearance associated philosophically with the idea of immortality and practically in late modernity but his performance also spoke to a need for reassurance about economic agency.

First, anxiety about appearance was rampant in February 2009. Because the seat of democratic power was now occupied by a figure whose quintessential embodiment of the American dream interrupted the publishing of a traditional mass public constituted as a disembodied whole against affiliations of difference, especially race and class, the

Silent Majority that had dominated American politics since 1968 was confronted with a representational crisis The generative contrast between the impossible to find Silent

Majority and the loud, raucous, and uncivil particularities of the non-mass public was thrown into question by Obama’s election. The constitution of the mass public operates because it “promises a reconciliation between embodiment and self-abstraction. That can be a powerful appeal, especially to those minoritized by the public sphere’s rhetoric of normative embodiment.”86 Warner’s residue of “unrecuperated particularity” suggests that subjects have an uneasy relationship with the mass public as members of the “in- group” as well: the body, as the inassimilable particularity, suggests to the members of the mass public that their belonging is contingent at best or mendacious at worst. Engels analysis of Nixon’s rhetoric suggests that his rhetorical brilliance lay in his ability to convert that anxiety about belonging into an index of the Silent Majority’s paradoxical position as the “true” set of Americans even as they were being victimized by

198 majoritarian political elements.87 Resentment about their own existence and its presupposed but non-existence universality enabled the perpetuation of the Silent

Majority, as it was sustained precisely by the fact of its inability to appear in public but the promise that it might still exert control. Engels draws liberally from Nietzsche in his essay, and I suggest we might supplement his approach by examining the role of sexual difference and morality. Engels draws from the Nietzsche of On the Genealogy of

Morals to suggest that morality emerges as a compensatory structure to account for

Christianity’s lack of power. The denial and ascetism associated with the priests turned away from “Bacchanalian festivals and other forms of reverie” as “the first priests made themselves impotent.”88 In the structure of Engels’ essay it becomes apparent that the same feeling of powerlessness also creates the power of the silent majority: their renunciation of speech and appearance constitutes their claim on the political. The triumphant silent majority’s ascetic renunciation of appearance sustains itself by repeating the fact of its disembodiment and disincorporation, suggesting that what is seen iswhat really is. Nietzsche’s own account of the human fabrication of ideas holds that out of resentment are ideals like justice and goodness made. Of course in the name of goodness and justice they will destroy, because these concepts have no ethereal basis but only a human one.89 The absence of any external source for these concepts is compensated for by the insistence in their totality and existence, confirmed through the exercise of their authority.

A second anxiety is associated with the decline of agency in the wake of neoliberalism. Elizabeth Anker avers in an essay in Theory & Event that identifications with higher order sovereign power structures like the government are compensatory to

199 the radical decline in individual agency felt under conditions of neoliberal ideology, which promises on the one hand to radically unleash the power of the individual but in fact radically circumscribes individual agency by filtering power ever-upwards. Anker reads post-9/11 support for government action as a case where “Americans who supported expansive state action may have done so as an expression of their own individual power, as an attempt to experience individual mastery over lived experiences of social powerlessness.”90 Anker’s observations come in light of rising income inequality and wage stagnation since the 1980s. Drawing on Freud’s The Ego and the Id,

Anker argues identifications with the state promote fantasies of mastery that write over the ever-complicated and agency-circumscribed “actually existing” political reality.91

Both Anker’s essay and the original Freud underscore common wisdom about the relationship between politics and “the people:” because politics is an operation that mediates the relationship between a citizenry and its imagined self. Anker (and many others) suggest that thinking about the relationship between politics and citizenry requires taking a detour through Freud’s discussion of object theory: that is, because there is no unmediated access to the levers of governmental power for the citizenry, scholars and critics are better off asking how it is that communities cope with that lack of direct access to power, and what sort of fantasies and figures become objects of public investment. The authority and genuineness ascribed to Santelli’s performance suggest him as one avatar for a certain vision of “the people” to assert control over a fluid and fear-ridden political circumstance. His masculinity is no accident, suggesting his utility for the bedrock group of conservatives whose political position Obama threatened.

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There is also a striking absence of feminine/maternal elements during Santelli’s performance. Not only are there no feminine styles at work (no rhetorics of compassion or care), there are almost no women, besides one female studio anchor who for one brief moment chides Santelli. This absence does not, as one might suggest, reflect the irrelevance of the maternal or feminine to the moment. As Claire Sisco King suggests, moments, where masculinity seems almost indomitable in its capacity to overdetermine and explain a circumstance or situation, we actually find the key to masculinity’s weakness. In the context of especially white masculinity, King suggests that it sustains its privilege by behaving as “an abject ideological formation. For instance, while the dominant fiction that constructs hegemonic white masculinity may claim to be one of inviolable, impenetrable, closed-off male bodies, this phallic narrative more precisely serves as a ‘cover’ for masculinity’s dependence on openness, instability, and ambiguity.”92 What this suggests is not that masculinity succeeds in cancelling its dialectical relationship to the feminine, but instead that in performing a variety of subject positions (including, and perhaps, especially that of the victim) white masculinity attempts (and fails) to scrub away its reliance on the feminine to generate its coherence.

Several elements circulating in public at this moment also threatened to underscore the emptiness of white masculinity. A black president in the White House underscored the vacuity of whiteness’s claim to monopolize political speech. Meanwhile conservatism’s own attempt to play the game of identity politics by nominating Sarah

Palin to the vice presidency had gone disastrously, underscoring the political complexities presented in a heterogeneous polity. The economy continued to struggle, no doubt increasing the psychological burdens on men who bore a disproportionate burden

201 based on their imagined role as breadwinner. Santelli’s rant could do work for all these constituencies: by speaking politically against Obama, by recentering the white, well-off male as the central figure for American conservatism; and, also, by serving as a point of identification (and perhaps vicarious enunciation) for those struggling economically. In a passage directly after the “I can love you” that functions in the titular role for Anker,

Freud suggests that in the process of sublimation, that is, the process of attachment between subject and object, it is implied that there is “an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization.”93 It would not be right to suggest that Santelli’s move to national prominence constituted a moment of sublimation, because his move acted to shore up conservative identities rather than undermine the sexual economy that attempts to privilege white masculinity. Instead, Santelli’s performance suggests a blending between subject and object wherein the sexual aim, here conceived of as the production of difference between “winners” and “losers,” asserts its function in the process of its own production.

Santelli’s body and anger satisfied several demands circulating in the public affective economy for many conservatives but also perhaps for some on the political fence. First, his “rant” offered masculine-marked political judgments that gestured at the possibility of controlling a world whose complexity and tragedy had outstripped the power of “normal” subjects. In this way the anxiety and fear associated with late modern economic anxiety, emotions experience corporeally, I might add, found their expression in a public avatar whose body could no longer control a overwhelming, common-sensical reason that resonated with the general sense of anger and disaffection about the TARP deal. Second Santelli’s language about winners and losers also flattened out the terms of

202 debate more simply in a way that worked to shore up liberalism against moments of doubt rooted in the relation between Self and Other (namely, by doubling down on suspicions of the Other as a “loser”). Third, Santelli’s appearance satisfied a demand for representation presented at two levels of politics, both the structural and syntactical.

Structurally, democracy demands the production of an avatar outside of “the people” who can nevertheless represent them. Contextually, Obama’s measured bipartisan rhetoric of harmony prevented him from being an unambiguous demagogic object of identification.

The circulation and uptake of Santelli’s performance satisfied both demands by generating him as a “man of the people” who was identical with a certain economically and culturally idealized version of the American “person” but who could also be distinguished bodily from the office of the president. In this way a democratically constrained objection to the president (the U.S. was only two months removed from his overwhelming election) could appear as the naturally emergent voice of an angry

“people” rather than sour grapes about an electoral result.

Conclusion

Santelli’s call did not go unheeded. His suggestion that Americans might go throw derivatives into Lake Michigan was ultimately a proposition that framed and structured the emerging conservative resistance to the Obama presidency. In giving a voice and a body to the silent majority Santelli resolved a pressing contradiction that had pushed and pulled conservatism since the late 1960s: namely, his performance dissolved the tension between disembodiment and appearance that lent the silent majority its tautological coherence. His appearance both confirmed the existence of the silent majority even while it threatened to cancel the privilege that authorized it to speak for

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“the people,” as both its capacity to speak and appear rendered it as not silent, and minoritarian, as that which is capable of appearing is that which is not public. Media accounts tend to focus on the Santelli moment as either a neutral expression of honest

American political sentiment or as a key moment in the expression of this new conservatism that would propel the GOP to enormous victories in the 2010 midterm. I want to suggest three different ways of thinking about this moment. First, the moment represents the performance of a male body in crisis, and as such, indexes a catastrophic moment for the conservative political imaginary that results not from some content- related objection to conservative politics but instead reflects the necessity of political opposition to embody itself to make claims. Second, the moment inverted the traditional economy of appearance in public space by producing as the opposite of the “mass public” an exteriorized white, masculine, and upper class subject that had historically been granted the privilege of disembodiment. In this maneuver, the fact of appearance itself came to function as what Wendy Brown would call a “wounded attachment” that served to compensate for the threat of irrelevance suggested by not only the substantial 2008 electoral victory of the Democratic Party but also the continued uncertainty about individual agency in the wake of the financial crisis. Third, the victory was ultimately

Pyrrhic because the corporeal counter-imaginary enacted by Santelli could in fact be located in space in time in such a way that it implied conservatism was no longer

“conserving” anything besides its own hopes of political relevance.

First, the public sphere is structured by a masculinizing logic that privileges control and dominance.94 However, such logics are forceful only so long as they enact themselves through technologies of disembodiment and disincorporation. Melissa Deem

204 suggests that the prophylaxical function of majoritarian discourses are thus fragile rather than robust in terms of their power: to the extent that they are sustained through their continued arbitrary exercise, interruptions in their force constitute existential rather than contingent problems for masculinity writ large. Deem draws on the public anxieties cathected in the castration dramas enacted by Valerie Solanas and Loren Bobbit to argue that wounds to male bodies suggest insights about the odd status of the male body in our political imaginary. Feminism is contained and reduced to the status of a complaint in a public sphere where its insights only circulate to the extent that they are coded as minoritarian demands. The feminine is selfsame with the minorities. But Deem argues

“making the male body achingly and visibly vulnerable is more eloquently a refusal of the will-to-pain of feminist politics than any speech yet known to feminists.”95 Making visible the vulnerability of the male body interrupts the domesticating power of discourses of mass publicity by articulating their claims not by seeking redress from network of discourses and identities that takes for granted the subjugation of so-called minority discourses but instead exercises its own authority without concern for how the rhetoric of the “mass public” might judge it.

Deem’s examples are provocative but also perhaps caution inducing. In the years following her two case studies Solanas’ brand of feminism found struggles both personally (culminating in Solanas’ own act of violence against Andy Warhol) and politically, as the decade after her heyday saw the failure of America to pass the Equal

Rights Amendment following a combination of male backlash and the new conservative feminism of figures like Phyllis Schalfly. Meanwhile, a combination of Clinton-era conservative moralism and groups for both “men’s rights” and masculine civil society

205 organizations like the Promise Keepers insisted repeatedly in the 1990s that masculinity had to be respected and honored. Even films like Falling Down proved capable of coopting a politics of victimage and pain, articulating their claims by producing a fantasy of fulfillment and success and chalking up the non-universalization of success to networks of non-normative actors. Sally Robinson observes in her book Marked Men that other popular literary, cinematic, and cultural texts reflect the capacity of masculinity to coopt rhetorics and affects of victimhood. On Robinson’s reading, the popularity of novels like The World According to Garp and films like Disclosure already anticipate the kind of “eloquent refusal” championed by Deem. By depicting male bodies and psyches as wounded, confused, and threatened, America’s masculine midlife crisis is turned from a moment rife with potential for “perspectives by incongruity” into a symbolic plane where the threat of violence is made meaningful by its content (violence) rather than its target (the phallus).96 These narratives translate guilt over one’s privilege into a wounding pain, making responsibility and culpability into painful sentiments that demand an external explanation. In both the political context of masculine revanchism but also in the case of Robinson’s literary targets the narratives of masculinity generate their coherence through various avatars of femininity run wild, whether the conniving and seductive antagonist in Disclosure or the “man hating feminazis” so often conjured by

Rush Limbaugh. In the case of Santelli, however, we have an achingly visible male body whose force comes not from his contrast with some other figure but instead through his ability to serve as a condensation point for political anxieties. Santelli’s circulation suggests that one even more sinister component of the capacity of masculinity to render itself victim is the ability to generate that wound not as the result of a racial or gender

206 injury. Instead, the wound appears as a neutral expression of economic injustice that sees fit to reward and punish individuals on not on the basis of merit but instead on arbitrary capriciousness. In this way Santelli’s anger derives not from the poisoned “political” economy of race, class or gender, but instead from the considerably more naturalized

(and ideologically well defended) bulwark of liberalism

Second, one part of the appeal of Santelli’s performance lies in how it cultivates what Wendy Brown calls a “wounded attachment” to its own victimized status. Identities

“structured by ressentiment at the same time become invested in” their “own subjection.”97 Democracy is in its own way invested in the idea of victims, as the democratic imaginary demands notions of the powerful and the powerless to animate its imaginary. Santelli’s appearance reflects a change in the modal management of this victimage question. The old strategy of a disembodied silent majority found proof of the existence of a white masculine victim in their absence from the public space of appearance, which in turns constituted the “mass public” over and against the bodies that could appear. So long as differential bodies circulated, this public would reproduce itself rather efficiently. The Santelli performance represented an even more straightforward kind of investment in one’s own subjection, albeit one with an explicitly visual component because the appearance in public proves that one is not a member of the mass public. Performances of corporeality underscore the contingency and threat of exclusion posed by political space. Thus being in public “threatens to devolve into the appearance of the vulnerable private individual caught out in public.”98 Santelli’s performance not only activated corporeal political logics which suggest his expulsion from the body politic, but appearance itself also comes with the vulnerability associated with giving up

207 the privilege of seeing associated with being disembodied: that is, it connotes a reduction and perhaps cancellation of the capacity to see and know (and hence master) the political.

The anxiety then is not only a worry about the particular relationships to threatening differences (race, gender, and class) but also existential, to the extent that it forces an admission of disempowerment and marginality associated with forswearing knowledge, and hence, power.

The dynamic between publicity and appearance underscores why the righteous indignation of Santelli might have helped prompt a certain kind of political resistance movement but also why the victory might prove Pyrrhic. By adopting a politics of embodiment the stage was set for a confrontational and agitationist turn on the part of conservative politics. But conservative politics had for so long sustained itself on the proprietous and decorous norms of the public sphere that they unwittingly assumed the social position of the various clusters of left-liberal progressives whose identities had been marked by their appearing and being in public. With a mixed race president whose narrative and background were quintessentially American yet still oddly other, the traditional technologies of decorporealization could not sustain themselves without constituting a direct break with democracy not tolerable in the immediate aftermath of an election. Embodiment then resolved the demand for oppositional identities to somehow

“matter” while at the same time tacitly admitting that conservatism was no longer

“conservative” in the sense that it sought to preserve existing institutional arrangements and social orders but instead it sought to conserve a certain kind of identity that had been thrown into a political crisis by a combination of financial cataclysm and electoral defeat.

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This suggests that, as Brown warns, politics had become about reifiying and reassuring identities of their existence rather than some other bolder goals.99

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CHAPTER VI THE TEA PARTY AND THE FORM OF POPULAR

FRUSTRATION

Introduction

When a small number of protestors gathered in Green Bay, Wisconsin on March 8

2009, the main theme on display at the rally was about the disconnect between government and the American “people,” thematized specifically as concerned middle class taxpayers. Matt Belin, a local volunteer, complained at the rally that “most politicians are in Washington, D.C., and they don’t know what’s really going on in small towns, really.”1 Sarah Boyd’s reporting framed the rally as different in degree but not in kind from the patriotic acts of the American founders: “Though the amount of actual tea tossed into the Fox River was substantially less than that during the historic 1773 protest, the disapproval toward government spending of taxpayers’ money was similar to that of the Boston Tea Party.”2 Meanwhile on February 27th, Chicago had hosted the first Rick

Santelli-inspired Tea Party, and while only 200 people showed up, accounts of the rally circulated out of proportion with the number of physical protestors. For example

Founding Bloggers circulated pictures and video accounts of the rally, featuring citizens holding signs opposing bailouts along with America flags. One sign reads “Wake up,

America, your liberty is dying,” suggesting dark times ahead for the nation.3

Media accounts of these protests often acknowledge the central irony of these protests: conservatives, usually defenders of the social order, taking to the streets. Media narratives shift in and out of two parallel tracks, one locating these protests in a tradition of civil disobedience linked to the Revolutionary War while others dip into a well of sixties nostalgia. Columnist Oliver Burkeman observed in a widely circulated piece in the

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British media that some were “predicting a Rand-style revolution, in which those tired of supporting their fellow citizens” might stop giving their labor and refuse to pay taxes.4

The Tennessean reported on the Tea Parties by drawing lines of continuity between the protestors and America’s own revolutionary heritage, allowing the first person narrative of local resident Mindy McAlindon to drive the story, “McAlindon and others frustrated by the federal government’s decision to spend hundreds of billions of dollars financing public projects and shoring up failing companies are making their feelings known…McAlindon is leading a slightly different push to dump tea in protest…aimed at protesting federal stimulus spending.”5 Reports such as these typified the media’s relationship to the Tea Party in its early stages, not quite sure what to think, but willing to draw from a wellspring of historical understanding to frame the movement.

As the Tea Party took shape in the months to come it became a lightning rod for controversy. While it is now apparent that much of the support for the Tea Party came from well-connected financial elites, including forces like the Koch Brothers and Big

Tobacco, at the time its emergence was considerably messier. Its policy demands remained thinkable in mostly negative rather than positive terms, animated with general claims for fewer taxes and less government. Some commentators suggested a return to the conservative fountain of anti-intellectualism, others noted its demographic homogeneity, surely no accident in wake of the election of the first black president.6

Public debates persisted about whether the Tea Party was the first great post-Reagan conservative movement, evidence of conservative AstroTurf, a “real” populist movement, or an illogical movement of high comedy built on contradictions between elite and

211 cultural conservatism, and the movement would dominate the new cycle and national imagination.7

The media’s formal move to frame the Tea Party as a classic example of burgeoning social outrage suggests a formal expectation of totality that not only attends to but also performatively institutes an expectation for the appearance of “the people” as a whole. The classical frame of social protest rhetoric has been mostly discarded by rhetoricians, outsourced to scholars interested in counterpublicity, subaltern identity, performative citizenships, and vectors of the quotidian, among others. Why turn to a frame that has been largely abandoned in rhetorical studies? I want to suggest that the outdated biases of the old rhetorical approach to social movement, which did not float far enough from the 1960s, approximates the frame of analysis used by the media that reported on the Tea Party. In this sense, I take Michael Calvin McGee’s assessment of rhetorical and social theory quite seriously, because he argues that conceiving of movement as a phenomenon conflates the existence of disagreement with sweeping political change.8 As he suggests, “movement is our fondest wish, our dream, a reason to continue living in human society or it contains an affirmation of human significance” and this assertion drives McGee’s suspicion about the easy circulation of social protest rhetoric.9 Attachment to form trades off with key contextual work that situates the intelligibility of a movement and its conditions of possibility, key political questions.

Because the form of “the people” as an appeal suggests the fulfillment of democracy’s demand to hear the will of “the people,” the Tea Party’s emergence as an “authentic” expression of popular frustration suggested an organic and hence legitimate movement.

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This chapter proceeds in five steps. First, I suggest rhetorical form’s constitutive element as both noun and verb grants it a unique role in writing the democratic imaginary. Second, I engage in rhetoric’s older debate about social movement to read movement as a form. Third, I examine the Tea Party’s emergence through the lens of older rhetorical social movement theory, suggesting public discourse lags behind rhetorical theory. Fourth, I suggest visual rhetoric scholarship indicates that “pure” visual populism upsets the careful balance between grammars of the collective and particular.

Finally, I closely read the public record of the Tea Party, identifying major characteristics that shaped public understanding of the movement. I conclude by noting three major defining characteristics of the emergent Tea Party: 1) a populist demand for totalizing fulfillment and control of politics, 2) a tendency to lean on the collectivist side of the democratic paradox, and 3) its authenticity signaled by the media’s move to frame it as a social movement. I conclude by suggesting that the Tea Party’s formal appearance as a social protest movement harnessed post-TARP political frustration to produce legitimacy for conservative populism.

Form

Expectations and desires do not pre-exist the world but instead are products of the formal characteristics of a given situation or cluster of discourses. Form refers not to the arrangement of elements within a story but instead to how the relationship between elements configures the anticipation of an audience in relationship to a story. The form of a text directs the audience, suggesting that some elements of a scene are worth of attention while others are not.10 In his discussion on form in Counter-Statement, Kenneth

Burke suggests “form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the

213 adequate satisfying of that appetite.” 11 Burke distinguishes psychology of form from the psychology of information, with the former suggesting an ability to show an audience something so that they may intuit it, as opposed to mere data transmission.12 Burke suggests an inversely proportional relationship between form and data, where “The hypertrophy of the psychology of information is accompanied by the corresponding atrophy of the psychology of form.”13 Reliance on form, then, also suggests atrophy in the subject’s capacity to process information, in the sense that the formal characteristics of the narrative will exert an excessive force on the interpretative apparatus of the subject.

Form, as both verb and noun, suggests the capacity to mold and shape the world while also bringing in more traditional understandings. Erin Rand suggests that form explains the means by which a text becomes intelligible to an audience, and hence the ways in which speech and discourse are regulated through the perceptual apparatus of a text-making subject. As she notes, “the textual conventions of institutions” of form “are therefore both productive (they enable the force of a text) and constraining (they determine the limits of intelligibility).”14 In this sense they write the parameters of a rhetorical economy, suggesting what could be made to matter to an audience and perhaps even the intensities of those expectations and attachments.15 Indeed, form is about not only how certain discourses are made intelligible by audiences, but also to how those audiences are themselves constituted.16 Joshua Gunn suggests that Burke did not take his focus on desire far enough, and requires a supplement that pays close attention to how form does not just act “on” bodies but also constitutes them and their emotional receptivities.17 Gunn argues that between form and subject there is “a dialectical relation:

214 not only do the excitations of repetition act on a body, but also they bring a body into being.”18 That is, form does not just “create an appetite” in the “mind of an auditor” but actually serves a constitutive function with respect to the subject.19 Freed to think of form as constitutive, our watchword is expectation. The attitudes and affects suggested by discourses shape the contours of the political imaginary. Form conditions our civic reading strategies, writing the intelligibility into the public narratives that emerge. The form of social movement, premised on the existence of agitation, victimhood, protest, and discontent, creates the expectation in public discourse of some wrong done.20

Social Movement and Form

Rhetorical studies shifted from a definition of social movements that animated efforts in the sixties and seventies to bring some kind of understanding to a rather tumultuous political present. This movement reflected both a modus vivendi with those who called for the voices of social movements to be heeded, but also reflected a concern within rhetoric that the interest in the formal characteristics of social protest movements was obscuring other important factors contributing to social change. Largely, rhetorical studies remains committed to the study of social movements, but now does so not through a strict focus on the general characteristic of a social movement but instead working inductively from social movements. Critics continue to examine traditional- seeming social movement actors like Larry Kramer, hackers, WTO protestors, and Alain

Touraine. But these figures are articulated rarely to the older body of social movement literature and instead filed under headings like counterpublicity, performative citizenship, queer theory media studies, and more.21 In this respect, rhetoric could be said to have

215 never studied social movements as much as it does today, even as attachments to the old understanding of social movements wain.

The old meanings of social protest were narrow, and misleading. First, Michael

McGee argues in “Social Movement: Phenomenon or Meaning” that in alighting upon images and imaginations of agitating protestors and groups lobbing demands, rhetoricians had conflated the presence of political complaints and disagreements with the presence of social change. However, relation of agitation and social change is not causal. Much as he suggested that scholars should examine “the people” as neither open and shut cases of

Marxist mystification nor as a purely logical operation McGee suggests scholars focus on how various interpretations of phenomena come to predominate over others. By mapping meanings rather than data we might understand that “’Social movements(s)’ are not phenomena as a matter of fact, and creating a theory from such a conception is to create the sociological or rhetorical equivalent of ‘faculty psychology’…No error is involved in seeing a parade of picketers as a ‘social movement.’…The mistake is treating the meaning as if it were itself a phenomenon.”22 Understanding movement as a phenomena and conflating the presence of movement with evidence of agitations risks fallaciousness; the metaphor of movement makes sense only if one can imagine motion on a continuum, but the meaning of these protest movements is actually found in the role they play in the public sphere’s political imaginary: they cannot “move” along this continuum at the same time that they contribute to its intelligibility through their existence. In short, paying attention to the popularity of syntaxes and repeated rhetorical maneuvers does more to establish the character of the “actually existing” polity than does a survey of the streets and newspaper headlines.

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Second, there were scholarly suggestions in the same issue of the Central States

Speech Journal that rhetoricians should be wary of movement’s ability to self-report.

Zarefsky observed that rhetoricians, in their haste to study social movements, had confused the movement’s possession of a series of formal characteristics with that movement’s legitimate status as political outsiders. He observed that“ Groups may adopt anti-institutional language for strategic purposes” in order to present themselves in the appealing position of an underdog struggling against institutionalized authority.23 Indeed, the appeal of the status of the “outsider” is central rather than incidental in accounting for the appeal and persistence of a certain vision of social protest in relationship to democracy As Zarefsky demonstrates in his study of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great

Society” program, however, movements that operate within institutions can adopt anti- institutional stances. Anti-elite sentiment is open to capture by a number of political factions.

Why then, in this chapter, do I want to return to a dusty archive of discarded social movement theories that may fail to move even the most charitable sociologists? In short, while rhetorical studies has moved beyond the old constraints of social movement studies, while sharpening its own keen eye, the social protest frame remains alive and well in the contemporary news media. The “protest frame” located the legitimacy of a social movement in its formal appearance as oppositional and critical to the existing power structure. The confrontational style of agitative and embodied protests remains salient to not only news outlets but also citizen journalists and photojournalists equipped with digital cameras and a Wordpress account.24 Moreover, the appeal of this frame cannot be separated from the ubiquity of the democratic imaginary, which has its

217 historical roots in the struggle between those who have and those who do not have power.

Democracy is imagined as a struggle between the powerful and powerless. One cannot banish this frame and its appeal.

I also do not want to suggest that the media’s reproduction of formal expectations for social movements is simply a result of their failure to engorge themselves at the trough of rhetorical studies. Indeed, the attachment to a certain vision for social movement as directly attached to public agitation has its roots in a power beyond a sharp essay to completely disturb: nostalgia in collective memory for the rancorous agitation of the 1960s. As Farber suggests in The Age of Great Dreams: America in the Sixties “In our public and private conversations the phrase ‘the sixties’ has a become a beguiling shorthand way for either casting aspersions or offering praise—depending on who is speaking.”25 The sixties are both a moment where Americans took to the streets to oppose injustice even as Nixons’s “invisible Americans” took a stand for civility against the rabbelous mass the disrupted democracy.. Ergo the rise of media reading strategies sensitive to political data echoing the rambunctious past suggests a desire or interest in, if not returning to the sixties, at least the incapacity of our current interpretive frames to make sense of our political moment.

Moreover, the easy application of the protest frame by the news media suggests that part of its appeal lies in its ability to simplify overwhelmingly complex phenomena.

Indeed, in the half-century since the 1960s, racial animosities have moved from explicitly polemical exchanges to antagonisms cloaked in a rhetoric of colorblindness. Class consciousness has seen its role on the public stage shrink even more more, and the

“culture wars” have sapped much of the universal potential from political axes of

218 identity. In addition, as the Cold War fades further from sight and post-9/11 “security fatigue” accelerates, simplifying the chaotic world of politics by reference to external enemies grows more challenging by the day. Reducing complexity on the basis of formal interpretation eschews interrogating the messy contours of present politics in favor of presenting a clearer, if more politically troublesome, picture.

In the next two sections of this chapter I read the emerging narrative of the Tea

Party in March and April of 2009, from major media outlets, local media outlets, and the visual self-reporting of Tea Partiers. The media framed the Tea Party’s emergence through stories of its organic emergence, resistant nature, and historical reference to social movements. The Tea Party’s demands became public not only as populist demands but also constituted a kind of demophilic claustrophobia that positioned “the people” as making insistent demands.

Taxed Enough Already

Following Rick Santelli’s rant, anti-government political organizing by

Americans began in earnest. The Star Telegram reported “His plan to throw some sort of tea party in Chicago to highlight the issue could grow into a high-profile national protest.”26 This account, like many others, focuses on the public emergence of a mood of dissatisfaction about the direction of the country. This account was confirmed and supported in even center to left quotations, as NPR contributor Mara Liasson noted,

“About this populist backlash, I think they’re worried [at the White House] and rightly so…in this kind of situation, you want to be dishing out the populism if you’re the president. You don’t want to be on the receiving end.”27 Liasson’s words give legitimacy and naturalize the existence of the good, giving it a populist veneer. Other outlets

219 suggested that Santelli’s “increasing famous rant…has struck a chord with those

American livid about bailout after bailout from Washington.”28 That essay, entitled “A

Revoltin’ Development: Obama’s Housing Crisis Solution is Sowing Seeds of Dissent,” appeared in the Augusta Chronicle and suggests growing public anticipation of resistance and anger to the Obama administration. Later the piece reports that “Grassroots anger at the ‘Bush-Obama Bailout Parade’ has already erupted in rallies in Seattle, Denver, Mesa and Kansas” while raising doubts about further spending, asking “whether Americans will stand for that.” Even Salon’s Gary Kamiya, who earlier predicted the failure of this new conservative resistance, admits, “In principle, Santelli’s resentment is not entirely unjustified. Many people did take on mortgages they couldn’t afford…it’s understandable that some people who were informed and responsible…are unhappy at the prospect that the government is bailing out some people who weren’t so informed or responsible.”29

The language featured in these articles includes words like “revolt,” “resentment,”

“backlash,” and “protest,” calling to mind a historical legacy of social protest and resistance.

Media coverage activates two historical continuums. First, the idea of the Tea

Party signals a revolutionary legacy. Second, such language ineffably summons up the heady days of the sixties’ social protests and agitation. Despite the complexity that marks the sixties, narratives often summon these tumultuous times to stabilize the polity of the now while flattening out the past. Jacquelyn Hall argues that memory flattens and suppresses the power of the civil rights movement, suggesting we summon the memory of the 1960s to prevent “the most remarkable mass movement in American history” from speaking effectively” in our contemporary moment.30 Public memory flattens the sixties

220 down into either a narrative about protests that succeeded in pulling American in a better direction, or a tumultuous moment eventually put to bed by the rise of the silent majority.

In fact, both narratives can be active at once: the juxtaposition of figures such as Martin

Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X suggests that the sixties support the notion that some social protest can be good even if that which descends into the improprietous and uncivil threatens the social contract. The ease with which media accounts circulate language talking of protest, revolution, and social agitation suggests a neutralization of the more radical narrative of American’s tumultuous past but a retained fascination, or even attachment to, moments in the past in which agitation’s success can be taken as proof of the healthy and vitality of American democracy.

Undoubtedly, this Janus-faced attachment to protest strengthened the populist framing of the Tea Party movement. Meanwhile the political organization of this resistance began in earnest. Touting its support for “the grassroots movement growing nationwide in opposition the Obama administration’s relentless march to enact endless

‘bailouts’ and ‘economic stimulus’ packages” the Tennessee GOP called for Americans to “gather to protest and hold symbolic ‘Tea Parties’ inspired by CNBC reporter Rick

Santelli.”31 The news blast emphasized that “’This is not about political parties or partisanship” but instead “about the future” of the nation. A series of letters to the editor at the Chicago Tribune suggest the bipartisan nature of this sentiment as they appraise

Rick Santelli, alternately, as “someone who is in touch with the real America,” “one of the few telling the truth…a straight shooter,” and “Santelli is RIGHT ON!...Giving the people back more of their OWN money to spend and not punishing productivity is what will get the economy back on track.” The letters that are anti-Santelli, on the other hand,

221 rely on defining Santelli as a member of the upper class, as a “fat-cat crook” and a

“loudmouth” who spews “such rancorous drivel,” and might “represent the clowns that put me in this situation.”32 While taking issue with the person of Santelli, the oppositional discourses agree with the sentiment behind his channeling of Howard Beale. Another

Chicago Tribune article that takes aim at Santelli for his heartlessness admits that

“Santelli raised a legitimate point…any assistance the government gives to borrowers will have to come from taxpaying American who have managed to avoid overextending themselves…Santelli’s comment that…’You can’t buy your way into prosperity’ does reflect a deep and widely shared fear about the president’s economic program.”33 One may not agree with Santelli, but one understands what he is aiming at harnessing: public frustration.

By February 27th, protestors began to rally. Frustration ruled the day,

Conservative blog Digital Journal framed the emerging discontent noting, “nearly 40 protests were held across the country addressing impending high taxes, government waste, and bailouts for businesses and irresponsible homeowners. It began with the Bush signing pork laden bills into law and continued under Barack Obama who has ‘upped the ante’ when it comes to government spending.” Forty protests only five days after

Santelli’s rant suggests substantial discontent. Moreover, political demonstrations are increasingly uncommon in America, or at least, the reporting of them is. The piece also noted that the protests generated minimal news coverage, suggesting again a kind of underdog theme.34 The equivocation of Bush with Obama gestured against the central animating thesis that had driven the Obama campaign, his post-partisan nature, and also suggested that his radical promise for the polity was belied by his rather centrist policy

222 stances. The movement’s organic emergence is supported by the coverage in The Atlanta

Journal Constitution, which said that Santelli’s Tea Party idea “took on a life of its own…tea party protests were held in Nashville; Jacksonville; Wichita” and numerous other sites. Those protesting are compelled to protest as a matter of principle. Take

“Allen LaBerteaux, 41…’My concern is that this country is going down a dangerous path toward socialism and that’s not what my forefathers, or my ancestors, fought and died for.’”35

A little more than a week later came more protests and news stories. Tom Barnes of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on a Tea Party that took place in Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania. The first graph suggests the animating motive behind the movement is anger at bailouts and government spending. In a trend that would become the norm for

Tea Party reporting, the reports present quotes from Tea Partiers and offer little in the way of either criticism or an opposing voice. Take this quote from the Commonwealth

Foundation (a Pennsylvania conservative group) presented with no criticism or commentary, that the people at the Tea Party “are people who believe in federal and state government, but who think government has overstepped its limited role in our lives.”36

Frustration itself authorizes the movement’s sentiment. The article also briefly draws the mind back to the “famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, where Bostonians protest the

English government’s taxes.” Lines are being drawn from the America of today and the iconic revolutionary struggle.

The history of the sixties also continues to seep into the public transcript. The

Connecticut Post opens its Tea Party story as follows:

They carried signs, chanted slogans, urged motorists to honk horns. There was even a folk singer urging the audience to “take back” the country. Sounds like

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your average protest, right? The difference here: many of the protesters were political conservatives who had never felt it necessary to take to the streets before. And yet there they were, about 300 strong, lining both side of Main Street…for a “Tea Party” protest against President Barack Obama’s $3.5 trillion budget and the government’s effort to “stimulate” the sagging national economy through spending.37

The piece’s structure, which emphasizes the “surprise” involved in a conservative social protest movement, suggests again the role of form in structuring public discourse.

Language about how they “never felt it necessary,” locates the need to protest not in some sort of political calculation but instead in an emotional or sentimental reaction.

Later passages in the piece support this interpretation, as in the brief biographical sketch of “Jim Troyer, a 53 year old financial advisor from Bridgeport” who “had also never attended a political protest. Unchecked government spending got him off the couch and into the movement.”38 Then there is retiree David Francis, who says “The average person who is conservative, not just Republican, but conservative—they’re not flag-wavers or placard-carriers—they’ve just started to realize that if they don’t do things they’ve never done before, the country is going to be taken away from them.”39 The reporting sets the stage to interpret the emergence of the Tea Party as an expression of an authoritative populist sentiment, an emerging mood of “the people.”

Both the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Connecticut Post articles include quotes front and center that display citizens concerns about government spending rather than taxation. Even though the Tea Party’s connection to the past is rooted in a controversy about revenue collection (“No Taxation Without Representation!”) these articles foreground spending as the source of concern. The post-bailout sentiment was structured at least in part around neoliberal discourses of responsibility that gestured at an ideal where responsibility corresponded with material success. Focusing on spending

224 instead of taxation foregrounds the concept of irresponsible expenditure as central to the movement ideology, manufacturing conservative’s affective avenues to conflate all spending, whether governmental or private, with the spending that followed the financial crisis in the fall.

By the end of March, media outlets began discussing not only the content of the movement but also its disproportionate invisibility in public media, drawing out shades of the victimized status articulated by Santelli a month earlier. Despite the fact that in

October the nation raged against a “Wall Street” gone wild, Santelli’s frustration had somehow become a legitimate public sentiment. The Investor’s Business Daily suggested that the mainstream media were ignoring “a grass fire movement against government spending…showing up with hand-lettered signs were people not often seen at protests,” and that “national TV and print media are conspicuous by their absence…the real reason why major media aren’t interested in these protests is that they don’t agree with them…these affairs are really taking issue with the political party they helped elect without hiding bias in the last election.”40 The article, “Tea Parties and Thugs,” suggested that unlike liberal political organizations like ACORN, “the tea parties are national, growing, and indicative of a shift of public sentiment.” Movement invisibility indexes the press’s disconnect from “the people.” Portland Press Herald editorialist M.D. Harmon said the protestors were evidence “that not everyone is sleepwalking down the path toward beggaring their children, their children’s children, and the offspring of alien races on the far side of the galaxy.” It was this concern that led to “spontaneous demonstrations…appearing cost-to-coast.”41 The Hartford Courant echoes the spontaneity point, taking the case of Tanya Bachan, who “has always been interested in

225 politics, though she viewed it as largely a spectator sport…as she grew increasingly alarmed by the billions of dollars the federal government was spending on bailout and stimulus packages, Bachand was driven to act…’I felt a responsibility, as a parent and as a citizen, to do something.’”42 The title of the Courant piece: Rebels With a Cause. Not only does the headline smack of the Civil War, surely no accident, but 1960s protestors are rarely called “rebels”, instead often called activists or protestors: “rebels” summons up a deeper wellspring of frustration.

Proliferating stories about the Tea Party typically personified the movement through a single figure, and that figure’s testimony served to justify the movement as representative against later criticism of its “Astroturf” nature. By the time tax day approached, the movement was in full swing. The USA Today had a large feature that narrativized the Tea Party through the story of Jenny Beth Martin, who “remembers the day she became a protester. Her husband’s business had gone under, and the two were cleaning houses in Atlanta to stay afloat. That was when they heard about a tirade against

President Obama’s mortgage bailout scheme by a financial news analyst calling for a modern-day Boston Tea Party revolt. ‘We had just lost our house and had…moved into the rental house…I didn’t want other people paying for my mortgage, and I wanted to prevent that in other places.’”43 Later in the piece Martin suggests that the Tea Party is

“not your hippie protesters…It’s people who are working hard for their families and they don’t want their money taken away from them to be given to people who aren’t working hard.”44 Here the formal entailments of the appearance of a social protest movement are engaged, as Martin suggests that the Tea Party draws from a tradition of social agitation

226 that carefully takes the good (the idea of patriotic dissent by hardworking Americans) but leaves the bad (the image of the lazy hippie).

In general, the media coverage attached to the emergence of the Tea Party naturalizes its expressions of opposition as healthy elements in a vibrant democratic polity, and also suggests the legitimacy of these protests is derived not from the logos of their argumentation but instead their sentimentally authentic frustration. Moreover, the language attached to articles, both in titles and texts, of “revolution,” revolt,” and

“protest” gestures at a dual continuum of imagination in which the detritus of America’s revolution against British tyranny meets the more recent history of American social protest. The mixture of protest and revolutionary frames should not surprise; as David

Noon observes, as reality is a messy archive of difference rather than a smooth space of pure persuasion, we should assume that “the production of metaphor and analogy” which

“aspires to consensus…is continually haunted by the possibility that analogies might fail to seal the gap between present and past” in such a way that a mixture of history should come as no surprise.45 That our milieu is a mélange suggests the necessity of politicizing histories, for there are, in the words of Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, only “partisan” memories in the classical sense of being “symbolic, and hence, partial” perspectives.46

For rhetoricians, “public memory” should be the key venue for rhetorical investigation owing to its relationship with “constituted audiences, positioned in some kind of mutuality that implicates their common interests, investments, or destinies, with profound political implications.”47 Form can operate as such a common element because it can bridge contradictions by gesturing towards a common agreement about the elements

227 present in politics even as its work is partisan, in the sense of dividing and perspectivizing politics.

These media accounts reveal that the form of social protest is one of the common investments in the public circulation of the Tea Party. Both the media and the Tea Party find the description apt. A begrudging but nevertheless accepting account in Salon, for example, suggested this in reporting upon a tax day Tea Party in New York City, suggesting that “This city has seen plenty of protests, from the massive anti-war demonstrations in the Vietnam era…But it’s not used to ones that involved well-dressed

Republicans talking about smaller government and lower taxes. Still, a decent-sized crowd gathered”48 In acknowledging the Tea Party as a protest movement the article activates a shared understanding of the Tea Partiers as protestors.

The activation of this shared understanding and the application of the social protest frame enabled configured the Tea Party in public discourse in ways that dodged what were three major barriers to its emergence. Those three barriers were 1) Its initial avatar, Rick Santelli, was poorly positioned to be a representative for the movement owing to his background in the financial industry, 2) reacting viscerally to a president who had been in office only a little more than a month threatened to paint the Tea Party movement as a short-sighted reaction to an election loss rather than a meaningful movement, and 3) the social and racial homogeneity of the Tea Party was a threat, especially given that America had its first black president.

The frustration that highlights the majority of the media accounts of the Tea Party contributed to its growing legitimacy, as the emerging public anger suggested the authentic roots of the movement. In interpreting the Tea Party as a phenomenon akin to

228 past social protest movement, the media suggest the natural emergence of a “people,” and linking this “people” to a rich legacy of revolt and social protest legitimized the movement further. Fleshing out “the people” in a broader section of bodies expanded the narrative of discontent and public anger but moved away from the single, overly reductive (and controversial) body of Rick Santelli, sustaining the sentiment of anger and frustration that he channeled. By depicting the movement as organically popular, Santelli would not serve as the movement’s avatar but instead a simple expression of what every

American was feeling. Santelli could thus inspire but not embody the movement.

Furthermore, the move away from Santelli and his suited cohort of day traders would benefit the movement by creating a distance between the movement and those kings of finance thought to be behind the 2008 financial crisis.

Second, the protest framed resolved a major problem for the Tea Party, namely that any movement objecting so vociferously to a president who had only been in office for one month could be read as opportunistic rather than genuine. How, in a democracy, does one oppose a figure recently elected with a very robust majority? “The people’s” frustration disproved Obama’s claim to have transcended partisan politics at the same time that it constituted “the people” against him. Moreover by appearing as the vox populi, the Tea Party would derive its legitimacy from its position in discourse as “the people” (and hence outside the government) enabling them to tap into a fertile rhetorical reservoir of anti-elitism with deep historical roots. This led credence to stories about “real

America” that might otherwise come off as cultural tribalism. As Zarefsky suggests, being able to tap into a rhetoric of “outsideness” to the system counts for more than a careful report about who is or is not a member of the system, generating substantial

229 rhetorical appeal on the basis of one’s exclusion from and victimization by the political system. In this way “the people” opposed to the bailouts could be the same “people” opposed to government spending of all sorts, whether the stimulus or mortgage assistance. That these outsiders were, in fact, “real Americans” suggested the powerful force of the “movement” frame as a tonic to cure the disease of contradiction that might otherwise have submarined conservative populism.

Third, the social protest frame helped to inoculate the Tea Party against charges of racism. Warner suggests that logics of disincorporation for a long time supported the reproduction of a mass public that was defined “by a logic of abstraction that provides a privilege for the unmarked identities: the male, the white, the middle class, the normal.”49

The corporeal realization of the white body carries with it the implication that

“whiteness” was in some ways decentered by the election of Barack Obama. While eventually opposition to Obama could condense around policy objections, a scant month into his administration that row proved more difficult to hoe. As I observed in Chapter 4, the election of Obama was framed as America’s achievement of a “post-racial” moment that realized the nation’s promise. In these early stages, then, opposing Obama so quickly brought with it more than just the suggestion of racism. Because the democratic polity is constructed on the rather frail basis of collective human action, even norms that survive for a long time are subject to revision and collapse. Burke suggests that the appearance of familiar forms can index the character of a collective at a given moment. Meaning or symbolism becomes a central concern precisely at that stage when a given system of meanings is falling into decay. In periods of firmly established meanings, one does not study them, one uses them: One frames his acts in accordance with them.”50 Burke goes

230 on to suggest that the emphasis of similarity in historical continuity suggests a political alignment between the critic and projects of human-centered continuity guided by the

God term of a “norm, the notion that at the bottom the aims and genius of man have remained fundamentally, the same, that temporal events may cause him to stray far from his sources, but that he repeatedly struggles to restore, under new particularities, the same basic patterns of the ‘good life.’”51 Instead of understanding movements as expressions of systemic or structural considerations, movements are placed on a continuum with an idea of progress which, “when approached from such an angle, seems to have cloaked one long hysterical attempt tot escape from a grossly mismanaged present.”52 In this case, the mismanagement is not only that the president is an ethnically heterogeneous and progressively framed Democrat, but also the previous absence of any kind of public body for conservatism as detailed in Chapter 5. The resulting demand is for conservatism that can appear in public without cancelling its own commitment to democracy by opposing a very recently elected president. With a “grossly mismanaged present” characterized by the inversion of the traditional structure of the mass public, the emergence of a social protest frame drawing heavily on nostalgia for the Sixties could point to a moment in

American history when racism operated more explicitly and intentionally, drawing attention away from the problematic racial politics of the Tea Party.

The media framed the Tea Party as a movement with historical roots in American social protest and resistance. The application of this formal frame positioned that Tea

Party on a continuum with other efforts of social agitation in America’s history, distracting from other possible interpretations of the Tea Party. However, media reporting alone does not determine the public frame and expectations surrounding the Tea Party.

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To interrogate further, I examine the visual self-reporting of Tea Partiers themselves and the contours of visual politics.

Visuality and the Democratic Paradox

Public rhetorics sustain themselves by balancing competing tensions. Specifically, the liberal public sphere positions the autonomous liberal individual against collective grammars in such a way that discourses of either pure individualism or collectivism face a rather difficult row to hoe. As Chantal Mouffe suggests in The Democratic Paradox, critics should examine how these discourses are or are not imbalanced in public discourse.53 These conditions remain true for images. In order for images to constitute a public, they must balance between showing enough of the individual that their appeal may be somewhat universal, but at the same time they cannot swim too close to their particularities lest a mass audience be alienated. As Robert Hariman and John Louis

Lucaites put it in their study of iconic photography, No Caption Needed, iconic photographs “provide precisely the means both for personal identification with the specific individual being represented and for assuming a broad field of action on the basis of that identification.”54 Iconic photographs balance the tensions between self and collective totality.

While Hariman and Lucaites focus on iconic photographs, I examine a different set, the self-reported photographs of early Tea Partiers. These photographs do not balance between self and collective identifications, instead they generate snapshots of a certain set of citizens at a given moment. They are vernacular self-reports of a certain subset of the nation, though they often claim to represent the totality. Citizen photojournalists built these archives to provide representational snapshots of the Tea Party movement. These

232 efforts place citizen photojournalists front and center. Mortensen’s review of visual rhetoric suggests that the rise of this new brand of citizen photojournalism threatens the ethical norms of traditional journalism because of how it might blur “boundaries between those documenting a conflict and those participating in it, even though this is a decisive step away from the ideals of the photojournalist as an objective observer.”55 Especially during the early days of the Tea Party, when its media coverage remained relatively localized, citizen photojournalists had the task of producing the representations of the movement that would circulate publicly. Those taking photos were often activists themselves. Indeed, the visual design of the various Tea Party websites lacks the slick professional touch of groups like Organizing for America., lacking the flash and panache associated with slick political web operations like that of the Obama campaign. Such design suggests an association with spontaneity rather than a carefully calculated political movement. Whether this design was intentional or not is beyond the point: it has the effect of positioning the movement as a homegrown and organically emergent movement that considered self-image as an afterthought rather than as a primary concern. The photo galleries suggest that, whatever one’s disagreements with the movement’s content, the sentiments and commitment of the movement are authentic. Such a framing intensified the formal desire associated with the emergence of a social protest movement, which is characterized by an organic, indeed, almost inevitable expression of some discontent that can no longer go on unacknowledged. Rick Santelli’s “rant,” which itself appeared to emerge spontaneously as a voice for those who “could not take it anymore,” works concomitantly with this apparent spontaneity.

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Hariman and Lucaites suggest that the power of photography is its capacity to suggest but not cancel existing visions of public life. Building on Warner’s approach, they argue, “the publics need media that can articulate the impersonal categories of public identity through the embodied features of social identity, without each canceling out the other…The abstract forms of civic life have to be filled in with vernacular signs of social membership.”56 Iconic photographs, then, must respond to two different demands that circumscribe the liberal democratic rhetorical situation: the demand for collective imagining but also an exclusive and concretely “real” body politic. Images can suggest that a public has been “found,” whereas demands for representation sometimes go unheeded, but they also give a concrete body to the public, refuting claims that public ventriloquisms have no backing in “reality.” In this case the Tea Party images do not attempt to resolve the contradiction between the particular and the universal through balance, but instead simply suggest a coincidental point where the “ordinary citizens” express themselves as the appropriate vessel of “the people.”

Images also offer the capacity to more quickly express complexity than words.

Messaris argues that images have the power to suggest quickly and powerfully an entirely different world and ensemble of beliefs. By offering actors, scenes, and relationships in one shot, images can fill out a world more quickly than some discourse.57 Moreover, these visual images retain an element of intrinsic persuasivity owing to the linkage between realism and photography. As Finnegan suggests, belief in the visual as an ultimately reliable mode of rhetorical identification has increased, not declined, with the rise of digital mediation of the visual.58 Finnegan suggests the “naturalistic enthymeme” governs the interpretation of photographs, where what is in the picture is simultaneously

234 assumed to represent a naturalized “reality” out there, but at the same time configures photographs as easy targets for suspicion and criticism, owing to the intrinsic manipulability of photographic technology. A largely visual element in the early emergence of the Tea Party suggests the salience of it as a category to understand their emergence.

Visual Emergence of the Tea Party

The Tea Party hung its hat on its own visual power. Influential conservative activist and writer Michelle Malkin, for example, compiled photographs from the first day of Tea Party rallies, taking pictures from sites as far flung as San Diego, Tampa,

Cleveland, and Shelby, Alabama. Makin, a self-described “mother, wife, blogger, conservative syndicated columnist, author, and Fox News Channel contributor” represents a typical type of conservative public intellectual, having gotten her start as a syndicated columnist but moving on to becoming a conservative hero of sorts for writing books like In Defense of Internment, which addressed the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Japanese internment in World War II. Malkin’s position as a movement leader in the conservative blogger/activist infrastructure suggests that one can capably interpret these photographs as an accurate representations of how conservatives conceived of the

Tea Party and its meaning. The post on Malkin’s website is entitled “Tea Party photo album: Fiscal responsibility is the new counterculture.” Because many conservatives have complained that the mainstream media’s selections of Tea Party imagery are tainted by liberal bias, I have tried to choose a representative sample of photographs that are constituted by conservative self-reporting to get a proper of index of how the Tea Party imagines itself. To this end I examine photographs from the three tax day protests, in

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Cleveland, Chattanooga, St. Louis, and Des Moines. Three of these four cities are cities in swing states, and both Iowa and Tennessee have substantial enough ties to rural areas of America that the sample should prove roughly representative.

The presentation underscores a key component of the Tea Party’s configuration in public discourse as formally organized by a logic of social movement that resonates within an American tradition of civil disobedience and political resistance. Indeed, the title of the post ”suggests that the majority of Americans are financially irresponsible, untrustworthy, and immature. The majority has been drowned out by the decisions of a minority, and now feels compelled to speak. This supports that worldview, but it also induces a pause: does not the word “counterculture” summon images of Abbie Hoffman and yippies being chased with tear gas, and rock and roll music at Woodstock?

Some might suggest this is just more data in a long running study on the powers of capitalism to commodify opposition and criticism. Indeed, conservatism has demonstrated a capacity to make its opponent figures who represent change even once those avatars have so insinuated themselves into system of power that they no longer can be thought of as intrinsically “outside” the system. In a longform essay in The Baffler,

Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland suggested in “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent” that

Our notion about what's wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven't changed much in thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the ‘countercultural idea.’ It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over- organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian.59

We have, according to the authors, lost the time when being counter-cultural meant something, as “its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture.”60 By coopting

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“hip” and “cool,” corporate powers have transformed those concepts into weapons for consumerism in the war on subjects who might attempt to be otherwise. Frank and

Weiland are focused on corporations, but Malkin’s efforts to frame the Tea Party as countercultural suggests that the appeal of being “against the system” infiltrates even conservative political vocabularies as well. Though conservatism previously articulated its opposition to the system through vocabularies opposed to “political correctness,” government bureaucrats, the Tea Party found considerable appeal in describing itself as an anti-systemic and grassroots organization of “ordinary people” who defined themselves against a system that was extraordinary in its commitment to greed and irresponsibility. Indeed, those who attended a Tea Party would hear speeches railing against government spending, high taxes, bailouts, and a rising culture of American irresponsibility. At the same time, the dark side of counterculture and the threat that it posed to order and established conservative hierarchies such as race could also be neutralized through the appropriation of these forms and the draining of them of their radical content i.e. mapping them onto orderly white bodies.

A person scrolling through Malkin’s post would observe, in quick succession a cross-section of the frustrated American “people:” a photograph of a mass of people in

San Diego, shot slightly out of focus so that their signs are unreadable, another shot of the same crowd featuring white men and women holding signs reading “Repeal The $Pork$ or Your Bacon is Cooked,” and “Proud American Capitalist,” shots or protestors on a street corner in North Carolina, one far out featuring the figure of the size of the national debt ($3,000,000,000,000) and a smaller shot of a young girl wearing a t-shirt reading

“OBAMA! Get your Hands Out of my Piggy Bank!.” Then we are transported to

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Nashville, where protestors have signs reading “Bailouts=Robbery” on the steps of the capitol building while they have “Free Markets Not Free Loaders” signs in the office of

Congressman Jim Cooper. Then we move to Portland where a small group gathers by the river before heading to Shelby, Alabama where six individuals sit out on a glum rainy day with signs reading “No Pork 4 Catfish,” attached to a narrative suggesting the bravery of those went out in a rainstorm. Other shots follow, from Lansing (“Born To Be

Taxed to Death!,” Cleveland (“No Taxation Without Deliberation,”) Denver (Stimulate

Business Not Govt,) and yes, Chicago, the site of the Santelli inspired Tea Party (“No

More Bailouts.”)61 The self-portrait of a nascent movement painted by these photographs is one of a restless and frustrated citizenry, one tired of governmental priorities and spending that are out of touch with the average Americans.

The aggregated photo albums produce a populist miasma which suggests the formal demand for the appearance of “the people” configures dominant interpretations of the Tea Party. First, they contain photographs that produce a kind of “populist claustrophobia” in which a mass of people crowd the photo lens, and broader perspective is mostly lost, with the lens caught up with bodies. Second, there is a standard load of patriotic images, often constructed in alliance with signifiers of revolution, for examples the famous “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag super-imposed on an American flag.

Many markers and signs signal a kind of nostalgia, either for America’s revolutionary past or for a time of normalcy when ideographs like “freedom” are positioned as lost to the trauma of recent politics. Third, there are an abundance of signs and images associated with anxieties about communism, mostly articulated to Obama, i.e. the Obama

“O” covered with a hammer and sickle.

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Populist Claustrophobia

In figure 1, taken from the Cleveland Tea Party, there is no distance between the crowd and government buildings, suggesting a “people” crowding the government. In figure 2, the people crowd the buildings while facing the camera holding more intelligible signs and shirts, including “Obama Won, America Lost,” and “Stop Bailing Out

Failure.”62 Both shots suggested calculated informality.

Figure 1

Cleveland Tax Day Tea Party Listens to Speaker

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Figure 2

Cleveland Tax Day Tea Party Faces Opposite Capital

Here the silent majority speaks, hemming in the seat of government and crowding it with its presence. The aggressive, presenced, and activated shot of “the people” brings to mind the classic trope of demophobia, or fear of “the people.” As old as democracy itself, demophobia derives from the undecidability that exists at the heart of democratic politics: the promise of rule by “the people” offers to project the self into the seat of power, but also raises the darker possibility of a disjunct between one and the many.

Robert Ivie suggests the American founders were mindful of this concern: they strongly

240 shared it and developed a republican governmental structure to choke out the various malaises of democracy.63 While the presentation of “the people” by citizen photojournalists satisfies the desire to find the exact people victimized by the financial crisis and resulting bailouts, “the people” unites these various demophobic fears, however displaced. The location of “the people” in one spatio-temporal coordinate corresponds with the evacuation of democracy’s second promise, that of accepting and embracing heterogeneity. Hariman and Lucaites indicated that effective public photography should serve to constitute a balanced tension between particularity and universality. These photographs read like the fever dreams of the imaginary of the mass public, where the public appears as Warner suggests it has often been imagined: white and male. Of course, it also differs from the previously mass public of Warner’s world in another sense: it appears. This observation is not incidental. It is constitutive of the peculiar paradox suggested by the photos suggested by these citizen photojournalists. The disincorporated compact that sustained the mass public is broken.

The scene both suggests and conceals the opposite of that most modern of terrors, totalitarianism by big government. Gilles Deleuze suggests in Cinema 2 that a key development in modern cinema and visuality was its relationship to the rise of Hitler, which “gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject but the masses subjected.”64 For Deleuze, then, “the people are missing” in the Western imaginary to the extent that they are figured as victims of politics. The public appearance of this people attempts to negotiate that democratic paradox, that “the people” are both the object of politics but also its creator. This paradox runs deep, especially how since the 1960s the

American “people” tend to be defined against rather than with the government. Fear of

241 government is embedded not only in the mythology of the revolutionaries, but also in the ties that America has to opposing totalitarianism, both in the German and Soviet cases.

The paradox was that “the people” were thought to be out of power but of course they are positioned to make demands precisely because they are “outside” of power. Producing a people simultaneously victimized by but also resistant to the government pilots the imaginary through this contradiction: positioning the people as emerging explicitly in opposition to the convergence of elite power in government suggests that the “people” have agency but also legitimate claims of disempowerment. Activation of “the people” trades in demophobia to remind us that “the people” can act and that those actions may be the dangerous or even exuberant expressions of a “people” that cannot be controlled.

The claustrophobic “people” of these photographs suggest that the threat of violence found in both the demophilic and demophobic accounts of politics may actually stem from the same source: “the people’s” role as a function rather than a fact in politics.

Recall the Rousseauian paradox outlined in Chapter 3, that “the people” may not emerge as a whole from either the outside of the political system (for this would locate their source in an anti-democratic place “outside” the position of “the people”) nor may they emerge only from within “the people” (because their emergence would necessitate alighting on one single definition of “the people” and as a result contradicting a democratic ethos positioned as, in the abstract, friendly to all difference.) “The people” exist neither as a natural voice “out there” in the democratic wild nor do they ever attain the hegemonic force that would render them the invisible structuring principle of the political. The claustrophobic and crowding “people” call to mind the kind of mass envisioned by demophobes, but at the same time this particular mass does not violate the

242 compact of decorum as a routine matter. Their formal appearance, suggesting an enthymematic opposition to the idea of authority embedded in the concept of “the state” and its representatives, offers a position with the universalizing appeal of the fact of appearance itself. The violence they threaten is actually violence of indistinction, as their almost uniform racial makeup and lack of radical political markings suggest. It is the dual violence of both a popular tyranny read into their uniformity but also the violence threatened by the absence of particularity. Public discourse that finds “the people” threatens not only the government but those who lie outside the taken-up concept of “the people,” using a democratic guise to smuggle in an antagonistic but democratically legitimized claim.

Nostalgic Markers

Other symbols suggest that the Tea Party’s continuity with past American social movements. At the Chattanooga Tea Party, in figure 3, there is a sign scrawled in response to worries that the Department of Homeland Security announced early in the

Obama administration, the fear of right wing political activism or terrorist.65 The sign suggests that “right wing extremism” is to be feared, but not for the reasons iterated in the

DHS report. Instead, right wing extremism is what made America, as testified by the historical references to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other American founders.

By framing the resistance of the Tea party on a continuum with the actions of those who rose up against the British, the movement activates a frame of historical understanding that confers legitimacy onto the Tea Party cause.

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Figure 3

Sign Referencing Founders at Chattanooga Tea Party

In figure 4 one of the only clearly visible signs in this shot from the Cleveland Tea Party is a sign written on a painted fake parchment reading “220 years to build the REPUBLIC

1 Month to Destroy It.” The scroll of parchment clearly harkens back to the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution, and through its juxtaposition of time frames

(220 years/1 month) it produces a threatened history, with the archive of American’s greatness under assault from, by enthymeme, the election of president Obama. The stimulus bill passed roughly one month after Obama was inaugurated. In this way the undertones of frustration appear in a callback to a time when revolution was legitimate.66

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Figure 4

Cleveland Tea Party Finds Republic Under Threat

Threat of Socialism/Redistribution

Another common theme is iconography associated with a suspicious of communism and/or Socialism. These appear along with a number of envy-ridden suggestions about the zero-sum relationship of citizens in a polity constituted around a discourse of scarcity rather than a discourse of abundance. The socialism charge was sounded often on the 2008 campaign trail, with its representative anecdote a figure named

Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher, or “Joe the Plumber” as he was summoned on the campaign trail by John McCain, discussed briefly in an earlier chapter. Wurzelbacher had a chance to meet Barack Obama on the campaign in Ohio, a crucial swing state, and he confronted

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Obama’s plan for new taxes by suggesting that it would raise taxes on people like himself, a small business owner. Obama’s response was to suggest, “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I think when you spread the wealth around that it’s good for everybody.” While Obama suggested his plan would be better for more people because it would give a tax cut to even more Americans, the McCain campaign boiled down his response to that and widely circulated it, hoping to generate opposition to Obama by drawing on a lengthy American history of opposition to communism.67 The spirit of Joe the Plumber, the put-upon small businessman, animated many Tea Partiers.

In figure 5 a new Uncle Sam holds a sign reading “Tax Money for Veterans Not

Wall Street.” Drawing on the simmering resentment over the bailouts, the sign configures

American politics as one structured by an opportunity cost where priorities compete, in this case the needs of the patriotic veterans of wars against the (implicitly) avaricious fat cats of Wall Street. In figure 5.6 we see a sign reading “Proud American Capitalist.”

Historically, rhetorics of pride are associated with subaltern identity groups, whether in music (“Say it Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”) or gay pride parades. Pride serves as a mechanism for resisting general disfavor, skepticism, and prejudice from the normative mass public, a way of refusing the offer of indignity gestured at by either the ignorance of minorities in mass discourse or the slurs and slanders offered in such discourse. The necessity of the appearance of a “Proud American Capitalist” suggests anxiety about the status of the capitalist, as somehow threatened and/or peripherized by the newly constituted mass public of Obama.

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Figure 5

Uncle Sam at the Des Moines Tea Party

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Figure 6

Proud American Capitalist at Des Moines Tea Party

Two more signs suggest the contours of the emerging discourse. One sign (Figure

7) reads “Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage,” an explicit reference to Santelli’s rant.

Such messages seem to confirm the identities of those protesting, suggesting their position on the “winner” side of the imagined civic ledger. Moreover, they suggest that those who are “losers” in America are proud of this fact, rather than shameful, indicating an additional level of brazenness for those who would ruin America. In either case, the implications are rather malicious for democracy, as the sign suggests an antagonistic resource war waged between citizens. The second sign, Figure 8, reads “Comrade Obama

We Don’t Want Your Socialism.” The derisive borrowing of the term “Comrade,” a

Russian mode of civic address under communism positions Obama as an outsider, a

248 foreigner whose socio-economic views identify him as un-American. Moreover, metonymically painting Obama as a socialist produces a frame of the bailout and mortgage plan as part of a broader plan for governmental control of society rather than exceptional measures responding to an exceptional circumstance. At first, these claims might strike one as banal, the detritus of a conservative imaginary struggling for originality almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War. There is perhaps more than a hint of truth in such an observation Barack Obama earned these responses because he failed to channel a populist anger and become the leader American wanted, making the move to a populist visual tone all the easier: if he did not share “the people’s” frustration, his position on the interiority of the governing apparatus alone could confirm his opposition to the vox populi. The formal appearance of the Tea Party as a social protest movement gives an additional heft or leveraging role to these signs: they participate in a rich tradition of American criticism of elitism and connect opposition to that elitism to opposition to the presidency in a manner that constructs a kind of nefarious progressivism that is at best a stone’s throw from communism. The mixed-content of these discourses, which includes a healthy dose of red-baiting and references to the housing crisis, suggest the remnants of the Cold War political imaginary that had long served conservatism well.

Here the communist enemies of the cold war are confronted with the figure of the

“welfare queen” or the “takers” (rather than makers) who have ruined America.

Suggesting both that Obama was a socialist and also that capitalists were victims offered the easy identitarian out of not “floating too far” from conservative politics as it had been historically configured following the rise of the New Right, by constructing a “people” whose ingenuity and heterogeneity was threatened by a collectivist logic being

249 administered by a technocratic administration unresponsive to the needs of “the people.”

Such claims resonated with many still somewhat sensitive to memories of the Cold War.

Figure 7

Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage

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Figure 8

No Socialism, Comrade

Conclusions

The Tea Party embodied public frustration. In the months that followed the

American political scene became rife with explosions of civic discontent and the airwaves were saturated with debate over the nature of the Tea Party. I suggest that the emergence of the Tea Party discloses two major characteristics of conservatism and the public sphere going forward. First, Rather than performing a kind of tightrope walk between the democratic demands for both individual and collective representation, the

Tea Party emerged as a full-throated expression of a “people” characterized not by a canny assemblage of difference into a whole but instead a whole that was the meaningful difference. The power of the visual to reduce quickly complexity through shorthand aided

251 this process. Second, the media’s insistence on utilizing formal categories with historical callbacks to a rich history of American social protest conflated the phenomenon of social movement with the phenomenon of societal shifts in opinion. This suggests that the media put the cart of appearance before the horse analysis of broader syntactical changes, producing an expectation of a populist whole that was then satisfied by the Tea Party’s emergence. What this also indicates is that the form of popular protest itself carried with it a claim of legitimacy that could be severed from any of the content or petitions of the movement. In the coming months, while many would wonder what the Tea Party was all about, the visual archive suggested not only that it existed but it existed as a politically legitimate rather than presumptive improprietous movement.

Three reasons exist for the nascent Tea Party’s almost immediate legitimacy.

First, the visual archive of the Tea Party self-reported in these photographs suggests with confidence that “the people” can in fact be found. Between the Cold War callbacks found in crowds of people opposed to socialism, the shots of people teeming and filling up the camera lens, and throwbacks to the united patriots of the Revolutionary War, there are both subtle and explicit gestures in the direction of a unified “people.” The socialist shots at Obama draw on a Cold War imaginary that allows for no grey area, where a “people” are opposed to the dour totalitarianism of Eastern Europe. Words such as “socialism” may strike critics as inappropriate or wrongheaded when applied to Obama, but such self- satisfied reactions do not negate the fact that the notion of collectivism as anathema remains a powerful motivating force in the American political imaginary. The crowd in the camera, similarly, may activate something primally democratic as well, as reflected in the smooth transition in the “social movement” lens applied by the news media to the Tea

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Party’s emergence. Images like these primed the media to work not inductively from the demographics, contents, and petitions of the Tea Party but to instead conclude deductively that to consider the Tea Party movement akin to a history of social protest was no categorical error. Finally, the unmodified and modified Revolutionary War images and references to a “lost” Republic annihilate the potentially dialectical elements in the movement and instead produce one plane of reality. As Roland Barthes suggests, the turn to mythical images and their naturalized deployment “abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.”68 The act of imagining contemporary protestors who are of a kind with actors in America’s revolutionary past creates a scene awash in American history, suggesting that a break with the Tea Party would involve a displacement from the shared space of America itself. Democracy, after all, appeals on the basis of appearing to be whole while massaging from vision the contradictions and exclusions circulating in any

“actually existing” polity.

Emerging self-descriptions of the Tea Party in the months that followed would support the implication that the mythic people were rising. Even in these media accounts, there is a rising organic narrative of “ordinary Americans” who were not “disposed to politics” but were “called to action” by extraordinary circumstances that demanded a rise of the spirit of America. The visuals also only identify single individuals to the extent that they summon up an ideal collective of people trampled by politics, whether the sign

253 reading “Honk If You’re Paying My Mortgage” or the sign reading “Proud American

Capitalist.” Both of these signify a collective move in the direction of establishing an

“authentic” (read: responsible) American people. By summoning up either a responsible homeowner or an industrious captain of industry, these messages do pull on the individual but only to suggest their membership in a collective (American capitalist).

Instead of proceeding from individuals in the manner of an inductive logic (presenting a diverse multitude of characters) the visual and ideological similitude in this sample ironically suggests a collectivist expectation in association with the Tea Party’s rise. In some ways the embodied move performed by Santelli in his rant, which suggested the ability to find the “people” in an avatar was transferred to a collective vessel of the

“people” agitating and protesting. In this way, the anger and frustration salient in the wake of the bailouts could matriculate from a representative who was, being charitable, a curious avatar for the new populism to an unusually literal “American people.” Of course, writing over the democratic paradox only suggests its displacement, investing in a collective vocabulary for politics where the tensions intrinsic to political representation will again boil over. One does not want to suggest that images participate in a kind of primitive emotional activation that language can simply not be bothered to lower itself to, but pictures do come with a presumption of “realism” as suggested by Finnegan. Reading visual images of collective crowds suggests a kind of “natural” appearance that sustains rather than disrupts a democratic imaginary that doubles down on the democratic rather than the republican, because a naturalized people constitutes a kind of confirmation about the democratic fantasy. This papering over would configure future debates about the Tea

Party by suggesting “the people” were found.

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Second, the media conflated the form of social protest movements with the content of social change, giving faith to the self-reporting of the members of the movement without really questioning what “power” or “establishment” the Tea Party was struggling against. The presence of a phenomenon with markers made familiar by shared history and memory (signs, agitation, frustration, masses grouped in public places, and musical artists) suggests that the form of the movement created anticipation for its existence in a continuum with past experience of protest. Many initial media reports as a result focused on the fact of the phenomenon’s emergence, i.e. the fact of its appearance rather than its demands or its demography. These moves would come, to be certain, but the immediate result of this media frame was to position the Tea Party in opposition to a cluster of elites, government officials, and irresponsible Americans. Once the Tea Party was set up as a social protest movement, this frame would continue to set the agenda regarding the public debate about the Tea Party. As the movement grew and critics developed various lines of objections, whether based on the Astroturfy roots of the group or its homogeneous demographics, these objections would have to navigate a rhetorical situation wherein the presumptive status of the Tea Party as a protest movement.

Moreover, protest movements are located outside of the seats of power in a democratic polity. Thus the movement frame implied that the Tea Party’s existence was fundamentally anti-systemic, and also that they had been denied some role in the space of appearance. Their emergence validated the victimized performance of their hero Rick

Santelli, whose claim explicitly to speak for the new silent majority was a rallying cry for this new movement. The borrowing from history, whether the tradition of the

Revolutionary War or more recent social protests, added fuel to this fire of exclusion by

255 suggesting either a lack of representation in the Revolutionary idioms or a lack of justice in those drawn from the sixties. The Tea Party’s theory of who had the power did not rely on sociological studies, surveys of decision-making influence, or even a complex critique of interest group politics. Instead, their appearance constituted their status as the victimized group and set the stage for their critique of a system that excluded their voices.

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CHAPTER VII MELANCHOLIC POPULISM IN THE TEA PARTY

Introduction

Following the April 15th Tea Party rallies in 2009, a long and hot summer for

American democracy began in full swing. The Tea Party had broken through the media’s consciousness. Nascent Tea Party groups swarmed newspaper editorial sections, like this one in the Charleston Daily Mail:

With a heavy heart I write this letter, for I will be branded a radical right-winger. But I am among the flood of neo-independents that are abandoning partisan politics because of liberal policies and blathering buffoons in our Congress and Senate along with our socialistic president…we must get the attention of the smug self-serving politicians by introducing them to fear…Nothing will frighten these smug, crowing, cowardly politicians as a surge of independence. That spirit is surging in Democrats and Republicans alike.1

That letter’s somewhat non-partisan tone represents a typical approach taken in these letters, which underscored the non-partisan character of popular frustration.

Meanwhile politicians and reporters were called to comment on the Tea Party.

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer interviewed governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) and raised the concern that rather than putting on a unified front the Tea Partiers were “varied. I mean, some of them were showing up to protest the government bailouts. Some of them were standing up protesting any increase on taxes, even for people making more than $250,000 a year. Some were showing up to protest government growing in some way. So which part of this do you think can help recapture the energy for the conservatives?” Brewer’s questions followed a line of thought that had become prevalent: wasn’t the Tea Party, for all its energy, an illogical enterprise full of contradictions? Sanford suggested policies, not ideologies, would build a big tent, because “the two things that you're alluding to really are in essence major structural beams to what has historically grown the

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Republican Party and built the conservative movement, and those have been the ideas of lower taxes and less government. And it seems to me that umbrella or that -- that tent is the beginning starting point of where you go as a GOP.”2

Even as Sanford pivoted to a big tent, the Republican governor of Texas, Rick

Perry, alluded to the more revolutionary elements of the Tea Party, suggesting he

“expects to see a number of states follow his home state of Texas in pushing resolutions that will ‘assert their independence from the federal government.’”3 Many read Perry’s comments as secessionist dog whistles.4 Whether phrased as the productive reconfiguration of the Republican party or the first step in a more radical conservative movement, there was a palpable sense that conservatism was agitating as were “the people,” and they were meeting at a coincident point.

As suggested in the last chapter, the Tea Party’s emergence was conditioned by

America’s rather friendly and nostalgic relationship to the idea of social protest and revolution. Once unleashed, these agitationist ideas may float far from their original contexts. The idea of social protest carried with it more than a whiff of the fetish for “the people” discussed earlier. Public discourse continued to describe the investments of the

Tea Partiers as honest and genuine, suggesting that their legibility derived from their position outside centers of political power. This interpretation resonated with the proud tradition of American populism. Whether found in the words of The People’s Party, the

Progressives, the New Right, the Civil Rights movement, and now the Tea Party, populism conceives of itself as external to the existing political order. The coherence of populist appeals derive from this external position: “the people” may rule in our imagination but at the same time their presence outside the system, a situation intrinsic to

258 the mode of populist address, also suggests an outsider status vulnerable being dismissed on the basis of its enunciation from an outside position. Such tendencies inhere in any kind of conflict between a center and a margin.

Many modes of American populism politicized economic matters. Whether reflected in Huey Long’s program to Share the Wealth, The People Party’s demand for public ownership of the railways, or even George Wallace’s class-conscious appeals to poor Southern whites, historically populism threatens economic interests. The Tea Party certainly claimed, on one hand, to oppose economic elites, owing much to the furor and anger over the bailouts of September 2008. But the Tea Party’s grammar indicated a commitment to not only capitalism but also a particularly intense variety of capitalistic thought that finds individual liberty to be the key logic for both life and politics.

This chapter examines how the calcification of the Tea Party in public discourse both influenced and was perverted by the imaginary firmament of the idea of democracy itself. The “Tea Party ethos” consisted of a peculiar kind of anti-governmental populism specific to American conservatism. This mode of populism suggests a barely calibrated relation between a fired up people external to the center of power. The fuel for this populist fire, I believe, was the production and circulation of a threatened vision of the individual. The insistence by the Tea Party that they had no real leader suggested a kind of radical populism that allowed for no permeable membrane between “the people” and

“the government.” The result was to install a melancholic style of populism that turned suspicion of government into a constitutive notion that was activated and reactivated as the Tea Party attempted not to reconcile with democracy’s limitations but plunged fully

259 into a mode of politics which attempted to take “the people” as the psychoanalytic love object of the movement.

I proceed in 3 steps. First, I examine the summer of 2009 as the Tea Parties gained steam, reading their concretization alongside rhetorical work on populism to suggest that they followed a traditional populist script with an American twist of antistatism. Second, I examine representative key literature of the Tea Party, including Dick

Armey and Matt Kibbe’s Give Me Liberty to suggest one of the key elements of the Tea

Party ethos was its commitment to the belief that no one body could represent the movement, suggesting its pure negativity in connection with an American revolutionary tradition. Through psychoanalysis, I suggest that the fantasy of a leaderless movement also contains a demand for the purification and annihilation of the political. While many did identify with particular figures like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, these avatars were often taken for their capacity to represent the “real” Americans. Finally, I examine Sarah

Palin’s 2010 Tea Party convention speech in Nashville, Tennessee, arguing that the emergent mode of argumentation in that speech, what I call the populist deductive, represents a natural outgrowth of this commitment to a pure American species of populism that works through a grammar of collective individualism. This mode of address mixes with the ideology of neoliberalism, presumptively eradicating any element of publicness through the paradoxical constitution of an American “people.”

Tea Party Rising

May 2009 saw an outpouring of Tea Partiers writing letters to the editor. These letters suggest “the people” have a monopoly on reason by virtue of the extreme circumstances that call them to protest. For example, a letter to the editor in the

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Providence Journal tells the story of a civil Tea Party protest that showed the best of

America:

Profound statements by the speakers…struck a sensitive chord with many who are clearly disenchanted with the representation we have in government. It was interesting to observe the behavior of the crowd. This gathering large as it was did not require a police detail to keep order. The people did something we don t see much of any more in this country. They sang God Bless America and saluted the flag with reverence. Later they were asked to pause for a full minute of silence for all those who serve our country. It was a moving moment.5

The letter does not position “the people” as an angry mob or a dangerous mass. Instead, the letter foregrounds a ritualistic devotion to civil religion. Nostalgic references to the past warrant a claim of popular virtue. This letter is one of thousands published in the month after the tax day Tea Parties, each one of which follow the form of praising “the people,” invoking an exceptional sense of American identity, and explicitly or implicitly critiquing the government and/or a leftist model of political protest. The Journal piece makes little to no mention of the policy aims of the Tea Party. The Washington Times interviewed Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity and one of the movement’s informal leaders. He suggested ’’There is no central governing body behind this…It's a genuine grass-roots movement, so I think you will continue to see an array of grass-roots protests giving voice to their concern that they have of losing their freedom, specifically their economic freedom.’”6 Freedom here has two senses, both as freedom from government regulation and the freedom that accompanies a generally healthy economy.

Both articles locate the virtues of freedom in lockstep with a vision of a liberated and empowered good American “people.” Michael Lee outlines the structure of the populist appeal, suggesting, in line with Michael Kazin, that populism is not a political

261 ideology but instead a mode of appeal subject to appropriation by many different political stripes. The first major characteristic of any populist argumentation is that “The

‘people’…are rendered as ordinary, simple, honest, hard-working, God-fearing, and patriotic Americans. Commonality among these ordinary folks is evident in their similar ways of life.”7 Lee’s comment about commonality should, be underscored, because any

“people” can exist not as persons but instead as a consubstantial bunch bound together through the production of similarity. Commonness itself is a kind of virtue drawing on our latent fascination with the argument ad populam, an argument form ascendant since the time of Andrew Jackson.8

Moreover, these letters to the editor suggest the threat to the “people” is to their freedoms and that it comes from the government, for example in Raines’ worries about

“liberal policies and blathering buffoons in our Congress and Senate along with our socialistic president.”9 Meanwhile Tea Party Patriot Leslie Bronken rails against politicians who “are simply interested in taking and spending more and more of our money, and in leaving our children with the burdens of their excess.”10 A widely circulated letter to the editor by Robert Hunt underscores the irresponsibility of those in government, noting, “The issues which cause the anger today are so many and so varied, but boil down to congressional irresponsibility and ignorance. More specifically, the bailouts give money away without serious supervision and invite (and get) misuse.”11

Politicians have confused the public good with their own self-interest and perspective.

More to the point, the politicians have the capacity and power to act. Hunt’s inability to list all the issues but instead to refer back to the bailouts suggests a disconnect between

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“people” and government (and consequently, the lack of power for “the people”) as the driving issue.

Not only does the government act without regard for the popular will, but they also have broken with a vital American tradition of liberty, leading folks like Carolyn

Flynn of Greenfield, Indiana to suggest that the Tea Party is neutrally constituted by plain old “Americans who want our country back.”12 The implication, that the country has been taken over, is part and parcel of what Lee identifies as the second key maneuver of populist argumentation, where “The ‘people’s’ collective fantasy is a narrative of unseating an enemy that has an unyielding commitment to hoarding power and to the destruction of ‘traditional’ values.”13 Here the question of what values, precisely, beyond the ideographs of “freedom” and “liberty” remains unanswered, suggesting that the violation is not in any specificity but instead a sense that the country has been ineradicably changed into a version less connected to the vision of its citizens.

Defining the System

With a “people” disempowered and a nation ruined, the populist movement is articulated against the “system,” amalgamated institutional and governmental structures.

Defining the system, however, is tricky, and contemporary conservatism conflates the government and “the people” to define the system. Following Margaret Canovan, Lee suggests that it is not enough to indicate that key institutions have been captured by nefarious forces, but “populists also define the forum in which competition between ‘the people’ and their enemy occurs.”14 While this forum is usually the various organs of the state (the judiciary, the legislature, government agencies, etc.,) the right turn in American populism complicates this story because it positions the state itself as the enemy of “the

263 people.”15 So where, say, The People’s Party suggested a state ruined by cronyism but ultimately redeemable, conservative populism suggests through cagey references to

Founders that the system that has been corrupted is not government, but instead a

“people” whom an overreaching and overly powerful government have put down through an overly active bureaucratic apparatus. In this way the system corrupted is “the people” rather than the government. The health of the economy corresponds with the imagined health of the American “people,” whose capacity to act as their own entrepreneurs is taken as a key marker of their fitness and health as a “people.” A bad economy may not only reflect poorly on political actors or economic elites, but also suggests an inability of consumers to properly judge their own self-interest and contribute appropriately to the economy. The special kind of market fundamentalism that developed as a response to the fifties consensus about Keynesian spending and government intervention into the market was itself a populism, one that constituted itself against the government’s separation from not only the subject position of actors who existed “within” the market but also with a basic incommensurability thesis at work about the capacity of the government to pass judgment on the legitimacy of popular reason.

Moreover, under neoliberalism “the people” have also been conflated in public discourse with the health of “the market.” In this way while many populisms offer the possibility of an internal resolution to the sickness that ails the polity, conservative populism has an undomesticatable element of externality in its demand: the suggestion that a popular sovereignty animated by the proper spirit of “the people” might triumph over government, which itself constitutes an ideological expression of opposition to the democratic idea of “the people.” This element explains why politics can sustain an

264 otherwise illogical relay between conservative populism and neoliberal economics: by insisting that the opposite of a virtuous “people” is not a corrupt state but instead any state beyond a very limited near-libertarian vision, the fact of government’s existence itself goads the movement. Moreover, a set of conservative anti-government tropes about how reliance on the government hollows out the citizen sets up a pre-packaged response to some of the most demophobic reactions to the prospects of populism by suggesting that “the people” are not intrinsically bad but instead suffering a malaise caused by Big

Government.16

“Give Us Liberty…”

One might expect this variety of populism to produce more vituperative public deliberation because of its deep-seated opposition to the public good. The hot summer of

2009, which was supposed be a showcase for the Obama administration’s push for health care reform, ended up hosting some very heated town halls. These town halls became sites for Tea Partiers to confront their representatives, as Paul Krugman summarized in an early August opinion piece, “at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting ‘This is America!’ — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.”17 The Waterloo Regional Record reported that the town hall protests emerged as part of a coordinated effort to submarine “extensive and deep debate and discussion” of the sort in town halls where citizens might bring “their concerns to the town hall meetings” in a practice “consonant with the best American tradition, a good and appropriate way for voters to question and challenge their congressional representatives. But that's not what they are doing. Their literature makes plain that their

265 purpose is to harass and disrupt their political opponents whom they demonize.”18 The appearance of “the people” threatens civil deliberation not because of the “uncivil” form of the participants’ behaviors, but instead because of their presumptive commitment against any government action, a presumption nursed by the hostile identification of a citizenry against the government.

These conflicts point towards the fourth vector of any populist strategy, conjuring an “apocalyptic confrontation” that “is presented as the vehicle to revolutionary change.”19 While these town hall fights themselves were not apocalyptic, they joined with calls to “Take Our Country Back”, constants at Tea Party rallies, to suggest a future where the stakes moved from being about one piece of legislation to becoming much greater: about control over not the country, but instead the very idea of a country where the government could act. Having shown that the Tea Parties continued to develop as a unique form of populism with a constitutive rather than contingent set of issues with the state, I want to move from this examination of populism in their public performances to an examination of Tea Party ideology. To do so, I turn to key internal literature including the Freedom Works book Give Me Liberty…A Tea Party Manifesto.

“…Or Give Me Death”

Freedom Works, a political organization favoring limited government and run by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, was one of the early forces that leapt into action following Rick Santelli’s February rant. Following the rise of the Tea Party,

Freedom Works began to offer its resources to Americans who associated with the Tea

Party. Along with similar but unaffiliated groups like Americans for Prosperity,

Americans for Tax Reform, and various independent Tea Party groups like the Tea Party

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Express and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom Works was a coordinator of Tea Party activism.

Published in 2010, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto is Armey and co-worker Matt

Kibbe’s attempt to explain the spirit of the Tea Party while giving citizens a handbook for activism.

The spirit of the Tea Party is linked directly to the American founding. Armey and Kibbe dedicates the book to “the sons and daughters of liberty who did not die with

Sam Adams but are active and organizing across the country to protect our freedoms to this very day.”20 The book builds off the spirit of the Founders that animated Tea Party efforts. The book was released in 2010, after the Tea Party had been active for more than a year, and it plays up its connections to the American Revolution. Interestingly, initial

Tea Party gatherings featured less in the way of colonial garb, with participants going more in for signs. But as the movement gained steam, colonial dress also became more popular, perhaps in part as a way of keeping the democratic potential of the Tea Party within the safe confines of shared memory, where the American Revolution functions as an agreed-upon safe space of myth rather than signifying the threat of massive structural change. The book underscores this move, dedicating its chapter to the American

Revolutionary model and with section headers like “Sam Adams, Community Organizer” both suggesting a tradition of political activism going all the way back to America’s founding and also indicating that the left (and President Barack Obama, a Saul Alinsky trained community organizer) has perverted what the Founders built.21

The colonial throwbacks, however, are only part of what Armey and Kibbe call the “Tea Party ethos.” Certainly, the revolutionary liberty-loving fire is part of it.

“America was also founded, literally, on the revolutionary principle of citizen

267 participation, citizen activism, and the primacy of the governed over the government.

That’s the Tea Party ethos.”22 Indeed, in the chapter titled “What We Stand For” Kibbe and Armey (almost) refuse to give a list of what the Tea Party stands for, because “It just doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we should just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others.”23

However, they do still list four principles: 1) The Constitution is the only acceptable blueprint for good, and limited, government. 2) Personal responsibility is key: actors should face consequences, good and bad, for their actions. 3) The government spends

“too much while unfairly expecting our children and grandchildren to pick up the tab.” 4)

American bureaucracy has simply grown too big to work.24 In this brief section they outline a vision of liberty that starts with the individual, and constructs collectivity as a

“people” constituted only through an aggregation of individuals. That is, their interests extend to ideas of negative liberty, a “freedom from” government action and intervention.

Rather than articulating this “people” to any specific content, the idea is simply that “they be left alone.”

One tends to associate certain populist styles with specific policy content.

Certainly, that content may change over time, which is why Michael Kazin argues that populism is a rhetorical style rather than an ideology.25 For example, the People’s Party demanded the nationalization of the railroads, Progressives supported labor rights, Huey

Long pushed hard for policies to spread wealth, and George Wallace’s pro-segregation stance, while morally reprehensible, was a policy position. In each of these examples the specific policies can be tied back to a kind of political imagination that links populist policies with a future. However, the Tea Party manifesto suggests not so much a set of

268 policy goals but instead an attempt to unleash the Tea Party ethos on the governing apparatus.

In fact, besides specific opposition to health care reform and the bailouts, one struggles to find in this book a comprehensive policy agenda. Such an agenda is not the goal of the text, which is to fill out that American spirit of liberty so that its

“constituency” can stand “at the dead center of American politics. This is a true bottom- up revolution. It does not need formal leaders or a hierarchy; all it needs it sound limited government principles and a dash of practical American intuition.”26 Rather than arguing for a certain set of positions, the authors suggest that a sentiment and attitude are key policy guides. That sentiment, according to Give Us Liberty, is a repudiation of the kind of elite, out of touch big government politics represented by the bailout.

The attacks on elitism attempt to rebut the charges that the movement is partisan.

Armey and Kibbe go to great lengths to locate the roots of the Tea Party not in February rant by Rick Santelli but instead in the organized effort to stop the passage of the bailout bill in the fall of 2008.27 After noting how the first bailout bill was defeated in the House, the authors observe, “In retrospect, September 29th is clearly the day the Tea Party movement was reborn in America. You can almost hear Samuel Adams calling us into action: ‘ If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude, than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms.

Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!’”28 The Tea Party, it seems, did not start as just another kind of reactionary politics, but tapped into a deep American spirit.

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The book does not succeed in defining the movement as operating in advance of

Obama’s presidency. In fact the book struggles to distance itself from Rick Santelli’s

Howard Beale style rant. Give Us Liberty… cannot scrub its relationship to the odd tensions and contradictions his figure highlights in a populist movement. Specifically, it highlights how an element of individualism, rather than collectivism, animates this particular breed of populist agitation. In this way the movement is more subject to criticisms about how it politicizes “the people” over and against the leaders’ insistence that the movement represents a pure distillation of American liberty. Armey and Kibbe need this argument because it allows them to insulate the Tea Party from suggestions that it is nothing more than a sour grapes response to the 2008 election. To attempt to show how “ordinary” the Tea Party is, the book finishes up with a practical guide for how to become a Tea Partier but is littered also with small, several paragraph stories about “real

Americans” who felt called to action. Over half of these anecdotes quote approving from people who were inspired to act by Rick Santelli. The other half include a Harvard trained lawyer, and homeowners galled about the bailouts. These anecdotes do little to support their broader point that the movement emerged from all strata of society as a non- partisan reaction to broader political problems.

Populist claims are made on the basis of their clarity and obviousness; the

“common sense” of “the people” cannot be denied, especially with conditions so worsen that “the people” are roused from their slumber to demand liberty. As I suggested in the last chapter, when “the people” emergence their emergence itself testifies to their legitimate frustration. The fact of “the people’s” appearance warrants the legitimacy of their claim. The insistence on the authorizing power of “the people” suggests an odd

270 coincident point with radical democratic theory, one that may explain why the argument ad populam maintains its broad appeal.

Ontologizing Synecdoche

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason suggests that populism is a centrally important concept for theorizing democratic struggle because “the people” is a concept that both suggests and undermines its own totality. In this way “the category of totality cannot be eradicated but that, as a failed totality, it is a horizon and not a ground.”29

Laclau’s account resonates with McGee’s understanding of “the people” as a big tent for identification. For Laclau “the people” is “essentially catachrestical” in that is consistently and regularly misnaming things as representative of the vox populi but this error has productive rather than deleterious effects.30 “The people” are productive because the figure systematically misses its mark.

Laclau suggest synecdoche as the master trope of his own system of democratic signification. In order for the part to stand in for that whole it must be the case that “one particular difference assumes the representation of the totality that exceeds it” and this function is synecdoche which has a “different ontological function” from its companions of metaphor and metonymy.31 The suggestion of an ontological distinction between metonymy and synecdoche mistakes the existence of a “whole” as a naturalized truth rather than a retroactive effect of signification. He places the economy of circulation outside the political economy that he seeks to critique, rendering non-political precisely the economy of desire (or affect, which he suggests is crucial) that renders certain differences metonymic, metaphorical, synecdochal, etc. 32 In short, Laclau has smuggled

271 in the assumption that the affective economy generated by rhetoric of “the people” is somehow more genuine than other attachments.

Give Us Liberty suggests a similar theory of correspondence between “the people” and their political causes. Laclau, by labeling ontological the distinction between synecdoche and other tropes, suggests that there is not only a special but fundamental and perhaps natural explanation for the resonance of certain concepts over others. Nowhere is this point clearer than in the repeated insistence by many that the Tea Party is a truly leaderless movement. This notion is explored in the ninth chapter of the book, called “We

Are a Movement of Ideas, Not Leaders” where Armey and Kibbe suggest the unique element of the Tea Party is its radical undecidability:

We agree on the first principles of individual freedom, free markets, and constitutionally constrained government, but when it comes to how to best advocate these ideas, best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at Tuesday book clubs or on Twitter feeds. That’s why the Tea Party ethos gives the political establishment—Left and Right—such uncontrollable fits. They don’t know what to make of it. They don’t know what to call it. They want to talk to the man in charge. If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or her. They could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party…its harder to demonize millions of patriotic citizens, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents fearful that their great-grandchildren will never live the American dream.33

Quite explicitly, the Tea Party has adopted the attitude that they have no leader, but in fact that the leader of the movement is “the people” themselves. While most populist movements claim to represent “the people,” American history is replete with populist movements that hitched their wagon to a leader, whether Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, or

William Jennings Bryan.

There are potential virtues to populist movements with leaders. Chief among them is that having a leader offers the movement routine reminders about the limits and

272 circumscriptions actually existing politics places on populist demands. This insight is especially useful for post-TARP America, where everywhere frustration seemed to attach to attempts to describe the faults of politics at large. Hannah Arendt articulates two modes of populism in On Revolution: one that buys fully into the fantasy of “the people,” and suggests their true spirit can not only be found but also harnessed in the cause of good government; and the American model, where the animating spirit of the Founders was a spirit of conviction and commitment to the ideals of the revolution itself rather than to attempt to find the spirit and demands of “the people” in what occurs. Arendt suggests that the former strategy courts disaster by misunderstanding politics as a repeated series of failures wherein “the people” do not realize their will and are again sought after in a sequence of purges as in the case of the French revolution, whereas the American attitude which takes a tempered and measured revolutionary spirit as key enables a more productive relationship to the failures that are inevitable in the case of building a national polity. What distinguished, in her view, the European and American revolutions was the

Tocquevellian sense that American agitation has always been in the name of democracy while European revolutions were about the pleasure of revolting, of revolution itself.34

Arendt suggests that the real danger of populism is that it puts the cart of the public before the horse of the shared actions that found that very public. By claiming to have found public space in advance of the production of public-constituting claims, revolutions that begin from the presumption of their own revolutionary character have anchored themselves to the pleasure of agitation rather than genuine public concerns.35 As she puts it, the danger would be “that all power had been given to the people in their private capacity and that there was no space established for them in their capacity of being

273 citizens.”36 Pure populism in this sense may be less mutable and subject to change because it acknowledges no limitations to its reason, only instead persistent encounters with its non-universal status. These encounters confirm rather than deny the central tenet of the movement, namely, that “the people” have not yet been actualized but that their actualization would reduce popular frustration.

The confusion of a populist revolution with political action certainly attaches to the Tea Party’s self-understanding. Take Armey and Kibbe’s suggestion that the Tea

Party will succeed because it is impossible to demonize any one member: the driving idea behind that suggestion is that the key power of the movement is its collective character.

While nominally articulated to theory of individuals operating collectivity, the homogeneity of the Tea Party’s individuals exacerbates the risk identified by Arendt: when they say in their subheader “We Are A Movement of Ideas, Not Leaders” one is reminded of course, this suggests the movement is bigger than any one person. The animating ideals of the Tea Party, commitments like liberty and freedom, certainly cannot be killed but it is not because of their infinite persistence. Rather it is because of their dogged indeterminacy, emptiness, and malleability: one person’s individually coded freedom to choose is the actually existing constraint upon another subject’s economic freedom.

What is truly fascinating about Give Us Liberty is that as it builds to its grand finale, it begins to unspool a linkage between the figure of the American “people” and market rationality. Drawing from the economic theories of figures like Ludwig von Mises and Friederich Hayek, the authors defend the Tea Party’s seemingly incoherent and empty populism as a kind of “beautiful chaos” that resonates with the “spontaneous

274 order” found in economics where “decentralization of persona knowledge is the best way to maximize the contributions of people, their talents, and the total productivity of any enterprise, no matter how big.”37 The authors find a kind of populist beauty in the dictates and reality produced by economic rationality, suggesting that when one product succeeds and another fails we are in fact seeing the invisible hand not only of the market but also of the American “people.” Elsewhere Ronald Walter Greene has suggested that we are seeing in American politics a nefarious formulation called “Money/Speech” where the world of political action is reduced to economic formulations that turn communication itself into a commodity.38 Here we see at least one moment in the further development of this paradigm, where the existing arrangement of the world itself, with its hierarchies, priorities, demands, and complaints, comes to be understood as an expression of the vox populi and the market at a point of perverse convergence. The inability to distinguish between the rationalities that judge stocks and those that make government suggests a kind of political category error, one that believes that merely attaching the phrases “popular,” “populist,” or “public” to a phenomenon makes it so. Nothing could be further from the truth. Publics are not constructed around the idea of the public itself; this was the category error of a number of European revolutionaries, who supposed that each time their socialist revolution at its own it was simply a case of having found the wrong iteration of “the people” rather than a matter of a larger philosophical question about the non-existence of “the people” as anything beyond a rhetorical figure.

The rhetoric of a leaderless movement was picked up, with outlets like The Daily

Caller reporting on the “leaderless” aspect of the movement as central.39 A popular diarist at the conservative blog Red State suggested, in a leaderless movement “nobody in

275 particular speaks authoritatively for the movement. No one person controls or directs the movement.”40 Many visual images that circulated also emphasized this element, with at least one (figure 9) suggesting the radical indeterminacy of the movement.

Figure 9

Tea Party as “People”

The move to a leaderless populism structured around demands for not only less government action but less government authority raises a question that follows from

Laclau’s work on populism. For any movement to succeed in Laclau’s world it must produce demands that are the differences that make a difference; that is, there must be

276 specific causes, demands, and/or slogans that resonate enough that a movement generates legitimacy. One example, of many, is the classic case of a demand for bread, which might of course stand in for any number of gripes of a citizenry, and in so doing becomes not just about a demand for bread but also its articulation to a constellation of other political concerns. Coalitions might then emerge which, while seeming not to have anything

“naturally” in common, are bound together affectively by the promise of the demand.41

Key is that the bread retains its status as bread but also that it mean something else. In

Laclau’s words, “the totalization of the popular camp—the discursive crystallization of the moment of fullness/emptiness—can take place only if a partial content takes up the representation of a universality with which it is incommensurable.”42 Laclau’s implied suggestion that the synecdochal nature of say, bread, expresses something ontological may be misguided, it does not cancel the fact that some particularities become more important than others for their ability to meld together political coalitions.

However, the Tea Party’s key goals are in some ways as indeterminate as the question of their leadership. The case of the former is, in fact, connected to the latter.

Sometimes a movement may lack content because a charismatic leader and his or her capacity to bring justice to “the people” may fill out a movement. Josh Gunn suggests as much in his study of charisma and demagoguery in the case of Huey Long, who he suggests succeeded by both offering to “spread the wealth” to his impoverished Louisiana constituents but also remained at a calculated distance from them, sustaining a relationship of leader and movement that left the audience always wanting more. Just as bread both has to retain both universal appeals and particular appearances to sustain itself as a political demand, the populist demagogue succeeds “only to the extent that audiences

277 derive pleasure from never truly getting what they are promised.”43 Gunn, like Laclau, utilizes a psychoanalytic architecture to undergird his claim, and in both cases the question of desire is foremost: whether an anecdote or a leader, a movement’s cause must keep its members at a distance but not too far a distance to sustain the movement.

Leaderless populism structured around demands for negative state action creates a set of conditions that trouble these models. For example, if the Tea Party’s key rallying point is antipathy for the TARP bailouts then how do those bailouts both become the symbol for the movement but also remain partial? Another way of putting this is to suggest that if “the people” are constituted on the basis of their collective opposition to elite political cronyism, and the specific entity that stands in for that antipathy is the bailout, then how does the bailout both signify universally and partially? Give Us Liberty suggests that the representative element in bailout opposition is the anger and frustration outlined in the earlier chapters of this dissertation. That is to say, the affective work being done is to be found in how the demand against the bailouts configures the attitude of the political opposition. As I have repeatedly suggested throughout this document, anger about TARP was, by turns, about mollifying individuals’ senses of powerless under the conditions of neoliberalism, rehabilitating the American Dream, and animating a politically conservative definition of “the people” intrinsically rather than contingently opposed to government action. The empty element in bailout criticism is the element of powerlessness signified by the disconnect between the will of “the people” and the actions taken by the government. Claims following the bailout about the need for a

“bailout for the American people” on one hand but also the Tea Party’s resolutely libertarian “no help for anyone” attitude could both alight upon the bailout debate. At the

278 same time the demand for no bailouts is contrasted with its particularity against a political system that does not have “the people’s” interests at heart.

What this reading suggests is that the bailout antipathy that births the Tea Party structures populist demands in such a way that the emergence of a “leaderless movement” as the key sigil of this frustration suggests the mainstreaming of the conservative populism that defines “the people” against the threat of big government in general. Such discourses presume against government intervention as a matter of course.

They also suggest that the object of the Tea Party’s politics is not any specific proposal but instead the elevation of “the people” to the seat of power against which they are defined. There is no object or mediating force through which this populist energy can be cathected and dissipated. This is an especially pure populism: that suggests not just discontent at government actions but a presumptive opposition to government for its specific role as the enemy of “the people;” and its reliance on empty signifiers like

“liberty” and “freedom” articulated to pure individualism explicit indicate not the waning but the banishment of the idea of a collective public as anything beyond aggregated individuals.

If the difference that makes a difference is the frustration of “the people” this gives rise to a paradoxical problem of public production, wherein the effect of the impossibility of the totalization of “the people” is understood not as an effect of representation/signification but instead as an expression of the frustration of an authentic democratic “people” that exist out their in the firmament of the political. To suggest this suggests a category error, a misidentification of the function of the popular imagination as conflated with a phenomenal interpretation of “the people” as thing which. Of course,

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“the people” are not a thing and to understand them as such courts the tragic version of populism outlined in Chapter 4 of this work. “The people” operate at moments perhaps as an imaginary space or perhaps even a form with a democratic function, but they do not exist in a real sense except for in their moments of having been lost in one of two ways: either through mournful moments of identity-construction where their absence is explained in their knowing integration into a subjectivity, or in the melancholic moments where their loss is constructed as a naturalized vanishing whose role in structuring subjectivity remains but is denied. Psychoanalysis suggests the form/function boundary persists because of, not in spite of, the opposition between the two modes of populism.

The unacknowledged longing for a perfect “people” configures actually existing politics as a disappointment in the same way that reconciling with the fact of “the people’s” loss sets pragmatic political expectations for the mournful democracy.

On Democratic Objects

Democracy without difference does not exist. As Chantal Mouffe suggests, there can be no “democracy in which justice and harmony would be instantiated. Perfect democracy would indeed destroy itself.”44 Instead, circulating discourses bring the idea of the public into being by marking an ostensible boundary between the public and the private which suggests which questions are and are not the source of legitimate political discussion. This boundary is impermanent and permeable rather than fixed. Nancy Fraser argues that “merely private interests were to be inadmissible” to sustain the apparetly apolitical nature of this public/private divide.45 That which is civilized and thus capable of being legitimately ruled is included while that which is beyond the scope of the law to manage is relegated to the private. Fraser’s account suggests that the cost of civic action

280 in institutionalized liberal democracy is one’s private and “pre-political” self, a cost disproportionately born by women, blacks, other people of color, the poor, and GLBT figures. As Iris Marion Young suggests, those behaviors, attitudes, and styles which are most valued in actually existing democracy constitute a version of “systematically distorted communication” that “make it difficult to think critically about aspects…social relations or alternative possibilities of institutionalization and action” because they appear as the ordinary and routine “common sense” of public sphere which unequally requires subjects to bracket their private selves to participate in public.46 Michael Warner suggests that the political rather than pre-political character of these private figures can be seen in the way that the bracketed element seep into the “mass public” to suggest a relationship between public and private that is not properly represented by two distinct spheres but instead a Venn diagram with mobile contours to its inner oval. The political’s inability to completely writer over these differences suggests a return of the repressed, albeit one where innate characteristics are not buried by normative discourse but instead where the contingency of the differences themselves escapes capture even in moments of disincorporation.

The Tea Party was very careful to push to the side concerns about controversial social issues. Individuals who came to Tea Party meetings in homes or showed up to protests were encouraged to bring signs only about issues related to the economy and individual liberty. As Kate Zernike of the New York Times reported, “Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous d ebts to future generations. But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues.”47 The Tea

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Party’s definition of “the people” was strategically narrow but also broad, conceiving of the vox populi as all those who are affected by a sluggish economy and thus implying a definition of the public sphere as a place where “the people” gather to discuss economic matters. By settling on a highly neutral definition of “the people,” however, the Tea Party was extremely susceptible to critiques about its own homogeneity, because the potential for any non-economically driven concerns to be political (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) would threaten to expose the Tea Party as either a narrow interest, or worse, merely a continuation of traditional Republican politics against which they tried steadfastly to generate distance.

This strategic choice is also reflected in the language of the Tea Party and its institutionalized advocates in Congress. Ideographs and empty signifiers like “freedom,” liberty,” or unironic full-throated endorsements of the constitution proliferate. For example the Contract from America, started by Houston attorney Ryan Hecker, was considered a companion and improvement upon 1994’s Contract with America that was part of the GOP’s successful midterm campaign strategy. Suggesting that the failure was in the preposition “with” which signaled a dialectical relationship between the governors and the governed, the Contract with America comes from those American “people” who are ready to dictate terms to Washington D.C. The contract opens with a preamble defending three principles, individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom. That these three principles mean more or less the same thing suggests the general tendency of the Tea Party to proliferate many different versions of the same story about individual liberty.48 Another example is the “Pledge to America,” put together by the Congressional GOP to capitalize on the Tea Party wave. The document (much

282 ballyhooed before its release and considered unremarkable or worthy of comment afterword) opens proudly with a shot of the statue of liberty before jumping right into a narrative proclaiming American as the land of opportunity, a liberal utopia where there is an equality of opportunity.49 There is no compromise in this document. “Rising joblessness, crushing debt, and a polarizing political environment are fraying the bonds among our people and blurring our sense of national purpose” even as the authors inveigh in favor of policies that almost no politician could speak against (generic causes like liberty, opportunity, defense, economic growth, and governmental transparency).50 One could walk through this document, pointing to every invocation of the people and

American exceptionalism, but such an exercise would take many moons. Better to say that the simple word “people” as a generic marker naming the mass of liberty loving, god fearing and hardworking Americans appears in a 47 page document 54 times, and each of these uses is both unironic and a sincere summoning of the people (rather than an incidental, impersonal use). Ideological documents from both the group up and institutionalized sources reflected the movement’s simultaneous emptiness but also its serious passion about its cause. Such a state indexes the depth of frustration surrounding the ongoing financial crisis but also the difficulties in reconciling this frustration with a political field that resists the problematization of individual agency that contributes to such financial catastrophes.

One wonders why the incessant calls for liberty, freedom, and less government did not result in some sort of rhetorical burnout. Would not the same empty rhetoric about liberty and the Founders age quickly? Moreover, populism generates its appeals on the basis of positioning “the people” as a disempowered mass against figures who occupy

283 institutional places of political power. Being outside and disempowered may be appealing for a little bit, but also threatens to remind subjects that they are outside the symbolic seat of power. As Michael Warner suggests of those who are the embodied particulars against which the mass public is defined, their claims operating on the basis of “status categories” have often “presupposed the bourgeois public sphere as a background” suggesting that the fact of exclusion is ineffably attached to a need and desire to belong to the mass public, to imagine that one’s particularity has been transcended.51

The continued appeal of the Tea Party’s populism derives from populism’s capacity to both suggest and cancel its own constitutive power. This derives from the interpellative power of the populist fantasy to both point to its own appeal but also suggest its own constitutive limits. There are qualitative differences in how this relationship to democracy is navigated. Any relationship to an impossible ideal, whether perfect democracy or a pre-social self, is mediated according to Freud through the logic of objects. Objects become routes for the energies that are stored up and frustrated to connect to and at the same time to discharge (with more and less success depending) the anxieties and frustration of subjects. Rather than directly encountering the pain of the originary self’s impossibility, subjects attach to love object that they invest with energy to compensate.52 Taking objects is the means by which the subject does (or does not) live

“normally” in light of this formative wound. Subjectivities are “reaction(s) to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”53 Even this loss is imagined, however.

Similarly, the loss of democracy is imagined as well, suggesting an earlier proposition about the doxastic functionality of “the people” rather than their articulation as a noun.

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The objects that are chosen, then, are not chosen in the wake of a loss. The choice of object is co-constitutive with subjectivity itself, and it is the objects and the attitudes towards the objects produced by rhetoric that makes the loss intelligible. Joan Copjec explains elegantly:

One of psychoanalysis’s deepest insights is that we are born not into an already constituted world that impinges on our senses to form perceptions, but in the wake of a primordial loss; it is not, then, our relation to the order of things, but our relation to das Ding that decides the objectivity of our reality or its collapse. In Freud’s commonly cited by imperfectly understood formulation, objective reality is not where we find objects, but where we re-find them. By object Freud meant something distinct from a hallucination, but by qualifying objects as refound he declined to sever reality completely from the pleasure with which hallucination was associated. Das Ding is roughly equivalent to the maternal body, more specifically to that experience of pleasure it once provided, though Freud maintained from the very beginning that this maternal object has no existence anywhere before it is lost.54

The selection of objects is not an arbitrary process, but instead defined by the quality and character of the pleasure provided by the encounter with object. As Copjec says it, “not just any object will do.”55 In the case of democracy, subjects route their understandings through objects, whether movements, politicians, ideas, images, or news reports in ways that contour and give shape to democratic life, even as the contours of that democratic life are consistently distinguished from an ideal or perfect democratic life that is not attained.

How subjects relate to the impossibility of the democratic ideal is the central question. Politics acts to mediate this relationship, but can do so in different ways. In an earlier chapter’s discussion of Freud’s work in Mourning and Melancholia, I attempted to suggest that the question for any subject is not one of relating to a true or false past ideal, but instead was a matter of having the capacity to distinguish between whether or not a loss has occurred. Mournful subjects are openly working through a loss, while

285 melancholics “seem puzzling” because “we cannot see” the loss that so absorbs them.56

Their loss, rather than finding the world to be impoverished, suggests an impoverishment of their own ego, and inability to incorporate the loss into their understanding of the world. Where the mournful subject can reconcile with the impossibility of finding their past, ideal self (or, in our analogy, to access perfect democracy) through what we might commonly call a process of scapegoating, the melancholic subject’s relationship to reality is qualitatively different because there is no capacity to acknowledge the distance between that ideal world and the subject. Mournful subjects abolish the distance between actually existing subjectivity/democracy through the taking of objects that effectively substitute for the loss. Crucially, the taking of an object does not satisfy the same path of desire established by the loss, but retroactively works to suggest different contours to the loss.

Melancholics do not incorporate loss into their ego. Their sense of self is, as a result, permanently wounded in a way that cannot recognize its own impoverishment because it insists on its completeness over and against the incompleteness that accompanies all subjectivities. In terms of object choice, the melancholic can admit to no compromise. While the mourning subject’s object choice is such that “the object is finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses” the melancholic finds only objects that are different from the one that they would choose.57 In this way the melancholic subjectivity is capable of interpreting any object as evidence of a tragic failure of reality to live up to their own fantasy, meaning that the impoverishment of their own ego, unacknowledged, functions like a kind of cathective black hole which sucks in any available object and spits them out for their failure to live up to the fantasy of a whole or total self, wherein,

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“The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathective energies—which in the transference neuroses we have called ‘anticathexes’—from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.”58

“The people” remains a fertile but troublesome staging ground for these dramas of the self. After all, actually existing democracy and one’s attitude towards it might disclose symptoms of democratic mourning or melancholia. And if it is the case that the melancholic’s attitude, in favoring sublimation, “so wills what it finds” then it will never find “the people” as an object, because “the people” cannot be found. On the other hand, the melancholic outlook, which locates a tragic impoverishment in its readings and interpretation of actually existing democracy, suggests not only a repetitive enactment but also an explanation for why that repetition continues to be performed. The Tea Party’s repeated insistence to be “the people,” suggested not only by their rhetoric of a leaderless movement but also the nearly endless proliferation of empty signifiers like liberty, freedom and small government, suggests that the Tea Party’s rhetoric attempted to take

“the people” as its object, carrying with it the dangerous misrecognition associated with conceiving of “the people” as a thing rather than a function.

Populism without an object risks careening into the realm of pure tragedy. By holding out hope for the universalization of unrealizable fantasies (whether the pure original self uncorrupted by society or the ideal of perfect democracy) all politics can become understood as a tragic exercise in failing to live up to the promise of the democratic fantasy. The open wound of melancholia is sustained and fueled by these failures, as it generates more and more evidence for the failure of reality to live up to the perfect fantasy of democracy. This theory might also explain the Tea Party’s

287 indiscriminate circulation from issue to issue following the same script of anger: whether the TARP bailout, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the mortgage help plan, tax hikes on the wealthy, or a number of other government policies, the Tea Party’s answer was the same resounding “No!” This theory also suggests why the Tea Party’s populism sustained itself, because the gesture in the direction of “the people” but confirms but also places under erasure the concept: “the people” are summoned as an ideal even at the same time that their existence is denied by “actually existing democracy” and the stain of difference that has ruined perfect democracy. On this view, actually existing democracy has failed because of user error rather than imperfections in the idea as such. Finally, this mode of reasoning not only installs popular reason as a key virtue, it also insulates that reasoning from dialectical exchange because it immediately finds opposed modes of rationality to be corrupted or ruined not on the basis of their content but on the basis of their position of enunciation: that is, from a position outside the position of the melancholic populist. The melancholic wound described by Freud functions on a parallel track to the kind of victimized ethos that followed Santelli and shadowed the Tea Party’s sense of frustration and anger: the permanence and routine encounters with this anger could serve to testify both to “the people’s” absence from politics at the given moment but generate the appeal of “the people” as an escape from the trauma (whether felt economically or on other identitarian terms) of actually existing democracy. In this way membership amongst “the people” could be experienced through a minoritarian path of victimization even as the gesture of control contained with “the people” suggested majoritarian aspirations.

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As the Tea Party set itself up to permanently make “the people” its tragic object, the Tea Party continued to gain steam. The next section examines a moment where this logic reached its end point: Sarah Palin’s plenary address to the national Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sarah Palin’s Populism

When the Tea Party decided to host a major national rally in Nashville,

Tennessee, Sarah Palin was a natural choice to headline the event. Sarah Palin’s meteoric rise (and for some, fall) after she was selected by John McCain as his vice presidential candidate in the 2008 presidential election was fueled by her regular use of populist argumentation tactics. Despite disastrous interviews with major news outlets during the

2008 campaign, Palin remained consistently popular with a portion of the conservative base that enthusiastically championed her folksy brand of American common sense. As her broad appeal shrank, her specific appeal became more intense. We can attribute this success to Palin’s virtuosic deployment of Lee’s populist style. Palin’s anti- intellectualism became an asset for her most ardent supporters; her aversion to monkish details marked her as an authentic member of the public, positioned against the elitist machinations of Washington insiders whose disdain for the hoi polloi represented what was wrong with “Big Government” politics, a critique with which many members of the

Tea Party movement shared sympathies.

Because of these circumstances it is little surprise, then, that Palin’s speech oscillates between a baroque celebration of the virtues of the purified American people and diatribes positioned against big government. Palin’s speech uses two major techniques: 1) a critique of government familiar to the American populist tradition, which

289 positions the government as a force of business cronyism that has lost touch with the common sense virtues of the American people, and 2) an imagining of a future government in which the common sense that governs American households and other private and individual zones of human existence displaces the bureaucratic judgments of the government. The result is that Palin’s speech produces a “people” whose coherence is found not in their commitment to a particular political program, but instead in the simple coherence of the idea of “the people” itself: they simultaneously appear to attack the policies of the Obama administration while offering themselves as the solution to said problems.

These characteristics can be found in the way Palin opens the speech, with a curious call and response:

Do you love your freedom? If you love your freedom, think of it. Any of you here serving in uniform past or present, raise your hand? We are going to thank you for our freedom. God bless you guys. We salute you. We honor you. Thank you. I am so proud to be American. Thank you. Gosh. Thank you. Happy Birthday,Ronald Reagan.59

Palin’s opening is strange, not the least for how she opens with a question whose answer seems self-evident: “Do you love your freedom?” Her call inverts the typical economy of enthymematic logic found in stump speeches: ordinarily, notions like freedom or liberty remain the assumed end points towards which politicians and political discourses aim.

Palin, however, introduces the possibility of reflecting and deliberating over the desirability of freedom itself. The effect is to unhinge at least one conventional presumption useful to analyze democratic discourse: that all involved in deliberation share the same end point, or in the words of Robert Ivie the goal of a shared space.60

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This invocation of the very idea of the possibility of a freedom hating people works in tandem with Palin’s immediate reference to the armed forces: by calling to mind the Bush-era meme that terrorists “hate us for our freedom,” Palin produces a domestic variant of the enemy: a subject who possesses freedom, but does not love it. These subjects always use their freedoms but refuse to acknowledge their possession of it. Palin then contrasts the freedom lovers with the freedom haters by establishing the identity of the Tea Party as a “ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business.” Her summons pits the Tea Party against a “top-down model” of political action embodied in “big government “ approaches typical of political liberal- progressivism: here, specifically, the bailouts and stimulus programs of George W. Bush and Barack Obama respectively.61 Crucially, her critique is not limited just to the TARP and stimulus packages: instead, all government action is intrinsically suspect because it emerges not from the vox populi but from the structural position of the government, linked in Palin’s discourse to a perverted “crony capitalism.” For Palin, suspicion of government is an inherent political philosophy; she subscribes to the Reagan-era dictum that “the government that governs least, governs best . . . the Constitution provides the best road map towards a more perfect union . . . only limited government can expand prosperity and opportunity for all . . . freedom is a God given right.” Because a support for freedom is given to those “real Americans” capable of seeing the ruse that is centralized governmental action, Palin’s speech cements a belief that through negative governmental action, the natural good of the U.S. people (understood as equivalent to market forces) can be unleashed to do its “God given” work. By placing presumption against governmental action, Palin gives her audience an inventional resource that

291 interprets the messy and complex economic crisis as an effect of the separation of governmental will from popular influence. Instead of assuming that some governmental actions retain legitimacy naturally, all governance is rendered suspect. Palin solidifies this point by producing a timeline reaching from “Washington to Lincoln to Reagan and now to you” that grounds the contemporary support of limited government into a history of rebellion against injustice.

Typically enthymemes do this work, playing on audience expectations to introduce easy and unreflexive deductive and inductive moves that naturalize political enemies. In this case, however, Palin hides no premises, explicating them fully, moving from Point A (freedom haters exist) to Point B (they are the government) to Point C

(government must be radically reduced in size). Her discourse reflects plain and simple reasoning anyone ought to be able to follow. Americans have their freedom, have thought about their freedom, and decided that they like it. While we tend to talk often of the abolition of the distinction between form and content, Palin’s speaking style performs said abolition, proceeding in a logically straightforward manner consistent with her ideological critique of progressive managerialism.

Her populist discourse embeds the characteristics of populist style explicated by

Lee through what appears to be a simple maneuver: labeling the system and the un- people as the same, and defining “the people” in opposition to both. Palin’s definition of

“real people” in her speech is as follows, they are: 1) “not politicos, not inside the beltway professionals, they come out and stand up and speak out for commonsense, conservative principles,” 2) they are not “a charismatic guy with a teleprompter,” 3) they

“grow our food and run our small businesses, they teach our kids and fight our wars.

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They’re folks in small towns and cities across this great nation who saw what was happening and they saw and were concerned and they got involved,” 4) they are not

“people on Wall Street,” and 5) they are “not all gathered in Washington D.C. It is here in our communities where families live and children learn and children with special needs are welcomed in this world and embraced.”62 These spatial rhetorics disperse “the people” and their opposite into particular spaces to enable the easy functioning of logics of negative definition by pointing out that “the people” are not in D.C. and do not occupy the office of the President.

Palin also identifies a number of government policies, including the stimulus package, the bailout packages, and moratoriums on oil drilling as illustrative of programs not based in common sense. Palin’s critiques of these policy choices remains generic and anonymous; she complains of kickbacks to a “Democratic pollster,” and “disrespect” to

“the Tenth Amendment of our Constitution” in the form of stimulus money to the states that “didn’t create a single job.” Washington, D.C. becomes a site of bureaucratic incompetence, special interests, and the functioning of a managerial logic that tries to pull a fast one on the American people.

After locating Washington, D.C. as a key site of a freedom-hating and perverted rationality, Palin’s second rhetorical technique imagines a reversal in which the common sense of the American people inhabits the federal government. Palin’s use of discourse trades heavily in the claims that the distance between D.C. and “the people” is critical in the former’s lack of political judgment. Palin’s rhetorical maneuver elevates local and domestic judgments into modes of thought suitable for utilization for effective political governance. This technique “transfers the qualities and characteristics of “ordinary

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Americans” into a political rationality making that point that Washington government could be otherwise. As she notes, if Washington bureaucrats could just “get government out of the way” growth would “roar back to life” but they won’t consider “these common sense broad based support ideas.” In her worldview, regulatory easing and spending cuts are “common sense steps towards reform” that Washington is constitutively incapable of understanding. Palin cites her own personal experience to show how real people would respond to the current crisis with common sense solutions:

So see, it’s easy to understand why Americans are shaking their heads when Washington has broken trust with the people that these politicians are to be serving. We’re drowning in national debt and many of us have had enough. Now the foundational principles in all of this, it’s easy to understand. It really is even though I think D.C. would just love for us to believe that this is all way over our heads. Somebody in Tennessee, somebody up there in Alaska, she’ll never understand what we are talking about here in D.C. No, this is all pretty simple stuff. When our families, when our small businesses [sic] we start running our finances into the red, what do we do? We tighten our belts and we cut back budgets. That is what we teach our children, to live within our means. That is what Todd [her husband] and I do when we have to make payroll, buy new equipment for our commercial fishing business. We have to plan for the future, meet a budget.

Palin herself occupies a paradoxical position by virtue of her speech text: she is an

“extraordinary” American by virtue of her very ordinariness.

According to Palin, complex political problems can be resolved with calls for the institution of a common sense in governance that would be similar to the principles the

American people use within their own homes. The space between home and politics becomes blurred in a rhetorical indistinction that presents “the American people” as an unqualified political good, whose full-throated success is capable of remedying pressing political problems of the day. By coding this rationality as common sense, Palin invests it with the unassailable virtue of the American people, so that it appears as a widely held

294 truth rather than political belief. In this way, her importation of a “common” rationality into the political sphere helps to secure the wisdom of “the people” as a self-affirming virtue of a new conservative politics.

Conclusion: Towards the Populist Deductive

Palin’s argumentative tactic is what I will call the “populist deductive:” a method of argumentation that has the following characteristics. First, it proceeds from the presumption that the American people can do no wrong, presenting any failings or weaknesses of America as a perversion of the otherwise great works done on a regular basis by its people. While I label it a deductive because of its broad capacity for reduction, it is worth noting that Palin’s actual speech blurs the line between deduction and induction by tautologically locating the wisdom of “the people” in their own existence as a “people” contrasted against the institutionalized government in

Washington. The existence of “the people” is proof of their own good, and their own good is proved through their non-coincidence with the government in Washington.

Secondly, the populist deductive advocates implicitly the universal judgment of the vox populi as a technique for managing any number of political issues, whether economic, military, or social. Third, Palin’s speech dodges the central criticism that the Tea Party is a purely negative force by offering a positive political future of governance through common sense. The three characteristics of this argumentative style produce a popular rationality hermetically sealed from any outside discourses that might offer any sort of dialectical push or pressure; in fact, by blurring the line between private rationality and the public business of government, the only available public reason is one equivalent to the voice of the American people, represented by Palin. The development of this new

295 method of “populist deductive” is distinct from previous populist discourses because it buys fully into the structural opposition of the government and the figure of the liberal individual. Where previous populist discourses, like those of the American progressive party, positioned “the people” as aggrieved in relationship to corporate interests but not exclusively the state, this form of conservative populism aggressively positions “the people” and government as absolute opposites.

Palin blames societal ills on the failed universalization of the popular will. Thus, the failings of the status quo are symptoms of a disjuncture between the acts of the government and the will of “the people.” In the eyes of the populist deductive, the issue is never that there is a gap in the public’s understandings that must be bridged: instead, “the people” by their nature possess common sense wisdom and only need their voice amplified. One effect of the populist deductive is to make politics into a self-fulfilling prophecy of pollsters and political temperature takers. To the extent that the will of “the people” becomes sacrosanct, politics becomes about constructing and rationalizing a set of outcomes that are fait accomplis given public attitudes. A second effect, related to the first, is to disable opposition to policies articulated as popular: any opposition functions as a de facto rejection of the popular will. The result is that the presumption against government evidenced in Palin’s speech becomes replicated as a presumption for the argument ad populam. To the extent that observers and critics complain that Palin’s discourse represent just another set of populist diatribes where specific policy alternatives are absent, they miss the point of her arguments. Palin’s argumentation is not rational according to the standards of argument theory, but by the political metric of ideological

296 success, its rationality is effective precisely because it seals off its audience from a dialectical process of exchange.

Here the rubber of Ernesto Laclau’s suggestion that synecdoche functions ontologically hits the road of “actually existing democracy” and the implications of an investment in a total notion of “the people” that underwrites the democratic fantasy. As I noted earlier, his suggestion is that certain articulations might facilitate the production of a “people” functioning ontologically. That is, synecdoche deserves a special status above over tropes like metaphor or metonymy because the relationship between part and whole generated in such a case was peculiarly special. The ability of new conservative populism to generate a “people” relies not only on the imagination of a “people” out there with the common sense and power to reasonably guide America’s direction, but also on the naturalization of the existence of that “people” to animate the fantasy of attraction between those who identify with the movement. In the context of a post-Cold War

American political imaginary, “the people” are increasingly defined against the government. Moreover, “the people” are capable in these discourses of doing incredibly heavy lifiting: they do not require a leader to organize and they do not require any recommendations or suggestions on policy from the experts that inhabit Washington,

D.C. In order to understand that some populist accounts function ontologically, one is naturalizing the ideology that underwrites the process of collective identification.

Because collectivity is often now defined as a collectivity against the government, the risk in applying Laclau’s work to the ongoing saga of American populism mistakes the appearance of the Tea Party as the expression of an ontological expression of a kind of truth drawn from the natural separation between people and government.

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Leaderless populism represents the ultimate in this tantalizing logic of pure democracy, one that conflates in practice the promise and practice of calibrating the will of the “people” against the systemic logics of the government. As Gunn suggests in his essay on the charismatic power of populist leaders like Huey Long, populist movements are prolonged by the capacity of the leader to balance between acknowledging their audience but also leaving something out, in withholding so that the audience is left wanting more.63 That is, the circuit of desire between the ideals of a “people” and their actually existing discourses is never closed by a promise of totality, but instead the door is left ajar a little bit, with a few reminders that there is a real distance between leader and

“people.” In a leaderless populism, the desire for completion and totality remains, but rather than being interrupted by a gap between leader and “people,” “the people” find themselves in discourse through tautological references to their common sense, special rationality, exceptional character, and unique position of power in a democratic polity.

What Freud could not recover in his dream analysis of his patients, the source of their repetition compulsion, remains the same thing that democratic theory struggles to locate in its analysis of actually existing democracy: the source of the demand for location of

“the people” where they are constantly escaping, effervescent, and absent. The production of leaderless populist discourses conflates the phenomenal object of “the people” with the process of populist constitution, rendering the affective charge that drives the demand for a complete “people” indistinct with their production in actually existing political discourse. In this way the Tea Party’s emergence signaled a serious evasion of the central question of the democratic paradox: rather than productively making politics out of the tensions between individualism and collectivism, the Tea Party

298 reduced the latter into an expression of the former, setting up a dangerous negative feedback loop of agitation and identity. By confusing object and function, a rising tide of melancholic populism that sustained itself on the basis of its own victimized status drew strength from democratic scripts that valorize the work of the underdog, eventually culminating in a historic 2010 electoral victory. “The people” were thought to have spoken.

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CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION: ON MELANCHOLIC POPULISM

Rising Partisanship

The Tea Party wave crested with historic victories in 2010. Needing only 39 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, the GOP took 65 seats in an almost unheard-of electoral tally. The press described the victory as a “broad rebuke to President

Obama’s agenda” that substantiated the Tea Party’s anti-government agenda.1 Openly conservative but generally careful Real Clear Politics pundit James Ceaser remarked upon the historical scope of the victory, noting that this midterm victory “seems to be exactly what the public had in mind in 2010, ending liberal hopes that Obama’s presidency would inaugurate a “new” New Deal.” He went on to say that “If 2010 represents the future in American politics, it is not the one Progressives expected…the results of the 2010 election changed the landscape of American politics.”2 Two years after a substantial electoral victory, the Democratic Party found itself bruised and battered, the Obama mantra of hope and change rendered dingy by cynicism and politics.

The government now formally divided (the GOP had been able to use Senate procedure to slow the Democratic agenda, but now controlled the House), partisanship, division, and factionalism also grew at a historic pace. The temptation, of course, is to temper proclamations about apocalyptic partisanship. Politics is necessarily divisive.3

However data indicate that the polarization after the election of President Obama is very unique. Whether measured in terms of party line voting, use of the filibuster, or party identification numbers polarization was on the rise even before the emergence of polemical movements like the Tea Party, but has spiked to all times highs during the

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Obama administration.4 Perhaps nothing underscores this fact better than the 2011 debt ceiling fiasco.

In August 2011, the American economy teetered on the brink of catastrophe.

Congressional deadlock over whether or not to legally authorize America to borrow more money (the vote on the so-called “debt ceiling) threatened the nation’s fiscal viability: failure to raise the debt ceiling entailed America defaulting on its loans. The Los Angeles

Time, articulated this as a popular concern, noting that a “default on U.S. debt could weigh on people's financial lives in a myriad of ways, such as boosting interest rates on mortgage loans and denting already fragile retirement accounts if the stock market continues to tumble.”5 Observers remarked upon two causes of the controversy; the first related to parliamentary procedure, the second related to the politics of the moment.

Procedurally, the debt-ceiling vote is a holdover from the First World War, where

Congress faced daily spending pressures.6 Rising institutional partisanship is the second cause. Empowered by their midterm gains, Congressional Republicans leveraged the urgent debt-ceiling vote, attempting to extract concessions from Barack Obama and the

Democratic Senate. By refusing to raise the debt ceiling until the Democrats agreed to substantial spending cuts, the GOP sought policy victories by playing chicken with the

American economy.7 Never before had debt ceiling stakes been so high.

The press and political flacks both rushed to find a cause. Democrats blamed

Republicans. Republicans blamed Democrats. The press blamed both, with occasional broadsides against the GOP punctuating the usual unctuous “a pox on both their houses” routine.8 Curiously, nobody blamed the American “people” although it was they who had, according to much media kerfuffle, created this divided government with their

301 repudiation of Obama and decision to stack America’s political institution with political opponents. This suggests even more the weight of a central political truism in modern

America: critique and oppose “the people” at your own risk.

Of course, both populism and extreme partisanship have a place in America’s past. Since Andrew Jackson there has been a populist style, and various populisms have been extremely influential. Representative Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, once caned

Charles Sumner following a heated debate about where Kansas would be admitted to the union as a free or slave state. More broadly, the civil way suggests that the depths of partisanship in America go well beyond an overly itchy filibuster trigger finger. But historic levels of political gridlock, and historic levels of citizen polarization, give pause to even the wariest anti-nostalgic and political scientist alike.

This dissertation has suggested that the wave of populism that swept across the country during an economic catastrophe and Barack Obama’s presidency is a populism unique in America’s history. It is politically, stylistically, and ideologically distinct from other forms. It constitutes the first explicit conservative populism, distinguishing itself from Nixon’s silent majority and Reagan’s “Morning in America” because both of those modes of address relied on an America whose virtues could be seen everywhere but whose Americans were strangely absent from the screen. Stylistically, it relied on not suggesting that the system of government had been corrupted and needed to be retaken to serve “the people,” but instead defined the system as “the people” themselves, belying a powerful strain of demophilia that confused the movement’s goal (improving the betterment of “the people”) with the movement’s means (a rule of popular sovereignty).

Moreover, the movement could no longer channel its populism through active networks

302 of existential fear and anxiety as it could during the Cold War, but was left to generate its notion of “the people” against American citizens who were either unfit to be members of

“the people” because of the economic fortunes or perhaps because of increasingly suspect attachments to a “Communist” leader in Obama. Ideologically, the movement was distinct because its political platform was almost entirely negative. “The people” of the

Tea Party wanted to repeal Obamacare, prevent tax hikes, reduce the size of government, and protect America. The movement was fighting a perpetual vanguard action of pure negativity rarely seen on the American political front, where our institutions of republican representation typically filter out these pure negativities.

With unique populism comes a unique set of challenges and questions for democracy. This specific variant of populism suggests a melancholic rather than mournful relationship to “the people” predominant not only in the movement but also in

America’s political and popular culture. The manner in which public frustration immediately signaled a rising American “people” dissatisfied with the direction of the country suggests that, while “the people” may be permanently lost, this has not in any way dissuaded pundits and critics from trying to find them. Rather than reconciling ourselves to “the people’s” absence, public discourse suggests that our national identity is struggling not because it has yet to overcome the loss of “the people” but because it cannot recognize that they have been lost. This suggests “the people’s” role as a doxastic function is commonly misunderstood as a thing rather than as verb.

The level of intensities associated with this permanent absence of “the people” may wax and wane. After all, it is not as if earlier epochs in American history came to some grand realization that “the people” were a fiction. But there are reasons to believe

303 that the aftermath of 2008 constituted a perfect storm for the emergence of this melancholic populism. First, the scope and magnitude of the economic crisis precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers was beyond that of every economic disaster in

America since 1929. Because concepts of individual resourcefulness and upward mobility are central rather than peripheral narratives in American life, the economic crisis did not only threaten to take people’s homes and livelihoods, it also suggested a larger crisis rooted in the tensions between liberalism’s promises and how actually existing politics circumscribes individual agency. The result was that the figure of “the American people,” long disembodied but testified to by a robust and redoubtable economy, could not longer be safely grounded in good economic data. Second, the 2008 election acted as a moment for civic definition where it could be said what values, bodies, and attitudes accurately described American identity. In this moment, the nation elected a multi-racial man who promised to return America to its core values. However his chief political asset, his charisma, activated toxic demophobic anxieties relating to democracy’s inability to perfectly domesticate difference, if not a systematic need for democracy to be permanently wounded. Not only was Obama black, but also his rhetorical strategy both during and after the campaign was characterized by post-political gestures in the direction of bipartisanship and harmony as goods in and of themselves. These apolitical gestures threatened to dissolve the common space of the polity by abolishing rather than recognizing difference, suggesting to Americans who remained invested, even after disavowals, not only in their particulars but also on the oppositional relationship between their own identities and those individuals who represent them in government.

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America in early 2009 faced a unique representational crisis. As the economy continued down the tubes, “the people’s” frustration emerged at illogical sites, with the populist anger at the prospect of an auto bailout one of the most visible examples of the vox populi yelling loudly to the face that it ought to cut off its nose. But the frustration lacked the capacity to appear at any central site. This incapacity is a feature, rather than a bug, of our democratic software. Media accounts reported on the influence and force of

“the people” in blocking legislative action on the auto bailout. Elsewhere, there were hopes that Obama would adhere to the will of “the people.” Yet “the people” themselves were conspicuously absent from the proceedings in any representationally stable way.

What was constant was the frustration, the sense of their absence that instead informed the proceedings. The fact that public talk about the financial crisis was centrally tethered to the Troubled Assets Relief Program and its commission as a crime against the taxpaying American “people” certainly suggested that their absence was reflected in the political system’s inability to represent them.

The American “people” were wounded. But the wound was not, in fact, the wound of their absence, of their having been pushed offstage by some series of forces beyond their control. That is the traditional story, and it is a story that will continue to play itself out in public over and over. The wound cuts deeper; it is not a clean incision, and it is not the sort that we eventually find forgotten, and scarred over. Instead, the wound is renewed daily, picked over, and examined, as we wonder about its cause. “The people” did not exist only to be squashed. And conversely, “the people” do not remain a pure fiction, standing outside the stage of politics. Instead their role is central but they act as a mechanism for both producing and cancelling commonality. This is why the

305 democratic wound festered. We do not, and cannot, inhabit a “perfect democracy” where difference has been annihilated in what Jürgen Habermas once worried would be a day when “an emancipated human race could encounter itself with an expanded space of discursive formation of will and yet be robbed of the light in which it is capable of interpreting its life as something good.”9 The idea of the body politic, with its suggestion of totality and fullness, suggests that we might find “real” community but even a body has limits, and the idea of a body also summons that which is not of the body, that which both escapes the limits of the body but perhaps also serves to define them.

Rick Santelli’s rant was a galvanizing moment because it could not only gesture in the totalizing direction of a “people” that could be located finitely in time and space, but it did so in ways that signaled the possibility for control and appearance in a moment where both had a real appeal. Of course, it should also be said that control and appearance, rather than being two distinct concepts, overlap and inform one other in their respective functions: even as one’s public appearance or identification with a public figure produces control in one way, that is, a defense mechanism against the anxieties over disappearance that Warner calls a fetish for what is embodied, the fact of that public appearance also cruelly suggests a certain kind of evacuation of control, of being in public and thus existing outside the privilege of disembodiment. Santelli’s masculinizing gesture and his callback to the silent majority offered both a fantasy of democratic control that also cancelled its own power, as the attempt to represent “the people” in a single figure may both remind of the enormous power the figure itself holds but also the curious paradox of its impossibility.

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In the months that followed the Tea Party sharpened its organization, its public face, and its message. But all of these elements never floated too far from a central populism emphasizing that the movement was composed of “ordinary Americans” who felt “called to act as never before” as a result of the “extraordinary circumstances” that had irreparably distanced the folks in Washington from the “real Americans” who truly represented the nation. Public discourse almost never failed to frame the movement’s relationship to “the people” as one that was more legitimate than not. Even outlets that had found Santelli’s performance ridiculous had admitted that he was on to something with his populist fervor. Members circulated photographs from rallies, complete with visual evidence of not only the size of their events but also the general frustration they felt. These photographs accurately represented the movement’s demographic, presenting mostly white, middle-aged and elderly individuals concerned about the direction of their country.

Social movement theory often suggests that movements will “triangulate” in order to increase their political power, even at the expense of watering down their initial list of demands in order to build a bigger tent. Such movements risk cooption by more powerful forces or other politico-social factions who take the energy and sentiment behind their appeal and direct it to other ends. But the Tea Party never triangulated in the way that rational-interest theory would suggest. Instead of broadening its policy and social focus, it remained committed to its vision of individual liberty as a prime principle above all others, and it remained committed to advancing this principle through the collective language of “the people.”

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The public mood and reaction to the Tea Party suggested that the Tea Party was not a representative of “the people” but in fact was “the people.” While critics complained that the Tea Party’s policy suggestions were hollow and that it was nothing more than a reaction to the election of Obama, its melancholic attachment to “the people” explains its persistence and success. The argumentative structure of the Tea Party was organized around the threat to the totality of “the people” posed by particularity. Whether this was the threat to render permeable social class by suggesting governmental intervention into the economy, the threat to an abstracted white “people” posed by

Obama’s blackness, or the social inequality signaled by the push for the Affordable Care

Act, Tea Partiers, the media, and pundits often configured the movement as the opposite of these other forces. The result was a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) suggestion that, whatever the policy or rational merits of the Tea Party, that its position as the vox populi was legitimate and authentic, as it tapped into the universal (but representationally impossible) power of “the people.”

This claim then, goes beyond the oft-parroted lines in public discourse about how the Tea Partiers were “delusional” for thinking that they were members of “real

America.” My suggestion, leaving the individual psychology of Tea Partiers aside, is that the collage of public discourses belies a sense of America that itself believed the Tea

Partiers represented an authentic populist movement, by giving them the formal position in public discourse that is ordinarily attributed to the agency of “the people.” This also suggests why attacking the Tea Party as an “Astroturf” organization not only failed as a strategy but was in fact counter-productive, because it suggested that a force which was operating constitutively as “the people” was in fact only masquerading as the popular

308 agent. The structure of such a claim required anyone who did not already believe that the

Tea Party represented “the people” to look at the anxious chaos on the American political scene and simply declare it to be an epiphenomenal expression of false anger rather than an authentic-seeming outrage that emerged organically from one of the worst economic crises in the nation’s history. The misidentification intrinsic in the maneuver to suggest that a level of anger and frustration was the Tea Party discloses the key aspect of the melancholic relation. For the melancholic subject, there is, in the words of Barbara

Biesecker, “No time for mourning” in the sense that the object to which the melancholic is attached cannot be perceived on its own terms but instead is understood only for the lack and failure it carries with it.10 Melancholia is an object loss that is an unconscious, unknown, loss. Because the subject cannot comprehend the permanent loss of the object, the subject continues to seek it, finding only particular failures which each testify further not to the essential and permanent loss of the object but instead only reinscribe the false hope that the object might be found. Such a process produces subjects hostile to the mode of dialogical reason we often project onto or, at least hope, accurately describes politics in actually existing democracy. Reasons are given, and refined, and the personal investments that might otherwise ruin political deliberation are bracketed at the door.

Where the polity is caught up in melancholia, however, each political issues serves only to confirm the attitude of the melancholic citizen-subject, for as each particular issue or policy is discussed and debated, they suggest the existing limits to the supposedly universal franchise of the political. Because deliberation begins from a position which presumes the non-universality of the political (i.e. there are problems in need of a political solution) it is a position that feeds the resentment of the melancholic citizen

309 because it provides data that suggests the full universalization of “the political” has not occurred. But where the deliberative citizen might deduce from this fact the need for more debate and dialogue, for the melancholic citizen this simply confirms the poverty of the political, reifying the coherence of the democratic wound of the citizen. Thomas

Frank puts it nicely in Pity the Billionaire, his take on post-2008 American populism.

While I disagree with his assessment that the ideology of capitalism entirely explains what has occurred, he is right to say “it should not surprise us to see people retreat into pure utopianism, to cling to the ought-to-be when the actually-is really sucks.”11 In this case, however, the utopianism is not merely an imagined future where the economic have-nots can join the haves, but in fact the utopianism of pure democracy, of an equality so stark that it cancels the differences that make politics necessary in the first place. The melancholic demand is, first and foremost, a demand that reality be other than it is in a way that fundamentally misunderstands reality as an impoverishment derived from the failed universalization of a particularity. This could not be farther from the truth. Reality is the failed particularity of a universalization, namely, the impossible and paradoxical demand for government by “the people” when “the people” may only be constituted over and against differences that both warrant and delegitimize “the people’s” gesture in the direction of universality.

Intensified political polarization and partisanship reflects the incentive structures attached to a politics which must make this fundamental democratic wound a structuring point around which political appeals are built. Melancholic affect runs counter to the practice of democratic agonism which holds that shared democratic practices should be

“inscribed into shared forms of life and agreement in judgments.”12 This process is

310 preferable to antagonism, where instead of having clashes within a shared space, enemies clash in an attempt to annihilate one another. Under conditions melancholic for “the people,” the commitment to shared space exists only at the abstract level of a commitment to the populist ideal, but in practice no space can meet the criteria implicitly established for a “legitimate” space because each is found lacking in comparison to the universal appeal of “the people.”

Melancholic populism, then, poses a challenge for democracy, not to mention for critics and scholars committed to analyzing and improving democratic life. Melancholic populism threatens not to partially derail policy discussions but to reroute them into identity-confirming feedback loops. Rather than reading frustration as either an epiphenomenal expression of unquestionably legitimate anger or as a purely passionate threat to democracy, an alternate reading strategy would seek to understand the form of frustration itself as intrinsic to democracy, and would also suggest that the divisions it signals represent neither unqualified peril nor pure political promise. Following Kenneth

Burke, I want to suggest an alternate mode of reading democratic discourses.

Attitudes Toward Democracy

Kenneth Burke entitled one of his earliest manuscripts Attitudes Toward History.

This work contains some of his most important ideas, including especially his discussion of two competing frames of interpretation for human action, the tragic and the comic. For

Burke, the tragic frame understands imperfections and flaws in the world to exist as a result of human imperfection. In so doing, the tragedian radically scales up the capacities for human agency by understanding human circumstances as effects of human action.

These causal relationships are relatively unsophisticated in a certain sense, having fallen

311 into what Burke suggests are “vast metaphysical structures that eventually imposed scientific concepts of causality upon” the circumstances.13 Because existing imperfections stem from human failings, it is implied that humans may prove capable of remedying these problems. Within this frame there is a powerful element of intentionality and agency that is both implied by the narrative but then also undermined by its structure: the tragic carries with it the connotations that humans are omnicompetent figures capable of calculating and reasoning so effectively that they may avoid making mistakes. But because “the people” is a concept that both summons and cancels itself, “the people” as a concept is fated to failure as the particulars of a given articulation fail to live up to the universalizing and abstract appeal within the notion.

In contrast, Burke suggests that in comedy “emphasis shifts from crime to stupidity.”14 In the comic genre, humility is important because it emphasizes not only the complexity of the world but also the difficulty involved in drawing causal chains between actions and consequences. As a result Burke suggests that “The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious but as mistaken.”15 The comic distributes blame differently than the tragic by raising questions about why one would even worry about the distribution of blame in the first place, suggesting that situations often are as they are for a panoply of reasons that work against reduction to one single cause. Indeed, to try and reduce a circumstance to any one cause directly tied to human action suggests a rather powerful magnification of the power of a single agent, in line with the “heroic frame” that Burke also criticizes in Attitudes towards History. As Burke suggests, investment in an individual’s agency proves a seductive path for identification, not least because it offers the suggestion of the powers

312 and capabilities of those who identify with the hero. But this leaves unanswered the question of how the heroic concept of the individual can survive circumstances and situations that underscore the limitations of the agency of any one individual.

Democracy offers itself as a situation that can be interpreted through either tragic or comic means. One story, the tragic, shares much with the melancholic populism I have detailed throughout this manuscript. Populism, after all, starts with the commission of a crime: “the people” have been victimized, regulated, and trampled by a government that has taken their concerns and deposited them stage left. The forces that have committed this crime can be identified, they are the enemies of “the people,” whether bureaucrats, cronies, economic elites, or external agents. For this story to cohere, “the people’s” agency must be magnificent: they must be virtuous, brilliant, and strong all at once, capable, if given the reins, of righting the direction of the polity. The troubles of the polity are the result of human error, and so a return to “the people” will cure what ails the polity. One cannot help but notice in this account as well the way in which the collective capacities of “the people” seem to reflect the latent content of America ideology of individualism, which often elevates the powers and capabilities of a single person into great tools that should prove capable of overcoming challenging and dire circumstances.

However, as I suggested earlier in this manuscript, “the people” are not an accessible whole. Indeed, Rousseau saw fit to introduce a foreign founder for exactly this reason: by ruining and staining democracy with a difference and failure instituted from a higher power, democracy would not be hoisted on its own petard of unity but instead could be lowered down to the realm of humans enough for them to argue about its particular content rather than to inveigh emptily in favor of the term itself. By

313 understanding democracy not as a perfectible regime but instead as a rhetorical situation marked by indeterminacy, chaos, and fluidity, it becomes easier to stomach the inevitable imperfections of the polity. This is not to suggest that a comic attitude towards democracy is equivalent to simply throwing up one’s hands in the face of injustice and inequality. Instead, it suggests that injustices and inequalities may be understood on their own terms not as enemies of unity but instead as enemies of an idea of democracy that stands for fighting against the calcification and sedimentation of hierarchies. In so doing we might suggest that it is the idea of unity that has to be pried away from democracy, rather than that we ought to radically intensify our investment in what lies behind the idea of democracy itself.

This suggests critics and media alike should adopt a comic frame when interpreting the relationship between “actually existing democracy” and “the people.”

Rather than understanding each instance of politics as somehow suggesting the frustration and victimage of “the people,” we might understand each moment to disclose a certain kind of relationship to both the appeal of totality but also the imperfections and failed totalities that attend to public discourses which work, over and against themselves, to deny their own failure and incompleteness. In this sense, the circulation of explicitly populist rhetoric and the attendant ideographs like “freedom” and “liberty” suggest fruitful paths for rhetorical critics to examine how these terms and concepts fall in on themselves rather than articulate to specific political agendas. By counteracting the case that one faction or party might hold a monopoly on “the people,” something like the shared space of which Mouffe speaks highly might become more thinkable. As is, “the people” serve as a mechanism to smuggle in antagonism under the guise of democratic

314 equality, with the claim to be arguing ad populam working often to silence and browbeat critics who would dare oppose “the American people.”

Moreover, a shift to a comic reading strategy would also suggest that democracy’s impossibility is no longer understood as a crime scene. This is especially pressing because of how new conservative populism suggests that the problem lies not with who runs the government but in the fact of government itself, which marks a serious break with earlier American populisms and suggests a latent antagonism for all versions, rather than just some versions, of public policy. That the state victimizes “the people” incorporates this element of injury into almost any public policy issue because the intervention of the government is read as a cause for injury rather than another political fact about which deliberation is necessary. Current understandings of “the people” as an absent force that needs to be put in power configures actually existing democracy as a crime scene where the murder of “the people” is implied if not outright suggested. The result is to make public determination about the legitimacy of political injury into a game of indeterminacy. After all, membership in “the people” is not determined on any basis other than the basis of performative utterance. This suggests that the rhetoric of victimology is a tragically democratic rhetorical resource, because the crime of “the people’s” absence demands some form of investigation, if not compensation. Where “the people’s” absence is not immediately claimed in the inductive service of populist victimage rhetoric, other claims to injury may have a better chance of circulating and gathering attention. These points also suggest avenues for future research which would seek to insist upon new politics of populism as worthy of interrogation for their failure, rather than their success, in living up to their aspirations.

315

Avenues for Future Research

The proliferation of accounts of “the people” suggests numerous avenues for further work. The fact that the Occupy Wall Street movement sought to channel resentment of elites in a far direction than the Tea Party suggests there might be avenues for examining how the public discourse configured Occupy differently than the Tea

Party. How did the Tea Party’s capacity to conflate all government action as part of a Big

Government agenda compare to Occupy’s supposedly “agenda free” demands? How were both movements articulated to the 2008 financial crisis? How was Occupy’s relationship to social heterogeneity and particularity different from the Tea Party’s?

A second avenue involves the relationship between rhetorical theory/criticism and political theory. In general, I have made extensive use of political theory in this manuscript. Insightful books like Democracy and the Foreigner, On Revolution, and germinal texts like those of Rousseau have provided clarity and help in my work.

However, political theory remains, it seems, suspicious of reading contemporary political discourse as an object. One positive aspect of the field of rhetorical studies is that it considers holding objects at an arms length to be anathema. Reasoning from case studies to inform political theory might do good work to better connect the two fields in a conversation.

A third avenue or direction might suggest reversing the claim and warrant in

Warner’s work on disembodiment and privilege. That is, Warner suggests that it has historically been the case that disincorporation has benefited the straight, white, and economically privileged individuals the most by ensuring that the “objects” of politics against which the mass public was constituted were subjects that could be discriminated

316 against on the basis of their particular marks. But the success of the Tea Party suggests that it is perhaps not so much the move of disincorporation that generates the privilege, as it is the power relations and privileges that are attached to those positions. That is, when the Tea Party appeared in public they not only got the ethos boost associated with being a social movement making legitimate claims, but they also better dodged charges that they were uncivil, rancorous, or were otherwise ill behaved.

These are only some potential avenues, and they are not exhaustive. “The people” retain a special place in our political and social imaginary. But a large part of that power derives from the investment in their totality as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Understanding democratic life as a complicated process with no clear end rather than as a long running tragedy that features a “people” constantly frustrated by outside agents offers many benefits to scholars, critics, and political actors alike. It is in this sense that I inveigh that we should encounter “the people” for what they are, that which can generate a fleeting if powerful sense of collectivity, rather than for what they are not, a permanently evasive but sublime genius merely waiting to be unleashed from a cave where some despot trapped them.16

317

NOTES

Introduction

1 Patrick McCain. 2009. "Rick Santelli: CNBC Obama Rant," Right Pundits, February 19. Accessed November 10th, 2011. http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=2921

2 Jon Hilsenrath, Damian Paletta, and Serena Ng, "Worst Crisis since '30s, with No End in Sight," The Wall Street Journal, September 18. Lexis-Nexis.

3 Rick Perlstein. 2008. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Scribner, New Yor. p. 88.

4 Mary Lou Pickel. "Tea Party at the Capitol," Atlanta Journal Constitution, February 28 2009. Lexis-Nexis. Accessed February 15, 2013.

5 Michael Calvin McGee. "In Search of 'the People': A Rhetorical Alternative," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975).

6 Ernesto Laclau. On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); McKerrow, Raymie. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989); Raymie McKerrow, and Jeffrey St. John. "Critiical Rhetoric and Continual Critic," in Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, ed. Jim Kuypers Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2009; Ono, Kent A., and Sloop, John. "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," Communication Monographs 62, no. 2 (1995).

7 Sigmund Freud. "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Sigmund Freud New York: Random House, 1917; The Ego and the Id New York: W.W. Norton, 1962; Beyond the Pleasure Principle Lawrence: Digireads, 2008; Jacques Lacan. "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty--a New Sophism," in Ecrits, ed. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2004); "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function," in Ecrits', ed. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). In particular I think the “Logical Time” essay offers a novel and useful theory of subjectivity as a production that anticipates its own success in order to succeed and thus operates to elide the non-existent moments of production particularly useful under conditions of neoliberalism. That is, if neoliberalism (or however one wishes to describe very state-phobic variants of late capitalism) functions by producing reality as already coincident with the judgments of the market, then it cannot have a logical account of how moments before the market existed could operate.

8 Christian Lundberg. Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. 179.

9 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics Boston: Zone Books, 2002. 160.

318

10 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 11 Anthony DiMaggio. The Rise of the Tea Party New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. 12.

12 The Rise of the Tea Party (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 13.

13 The Rise of the Tea Party, 45.

14 The Rise of the Tea Party, 123.

15 The Rise of the Tea Party, 51.

16 Kate Zernike and Megan Thee-Brennan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times, April 14 2010. Lexis-Nexis.

17 Jamelle Bouie, "The Tea Party Isn't Racist, except When It Is," True/Slant, June 3 2010. Date accessed June 1, 2013. http://trueslant.com/jamellebouie/2010/06/03/the-tea- party-isnt-racist-except-when-it-is/

18 Darre Enck-Wanzer. "Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism," Communication, Culture, & Critique 1, no. 4 (2011): 24.

19 Zachary Roth. "Doctor on Racist Obama Email: 'I Sincerely Apologize'," Talking Points Memo, July 24 2009. Accessed July 3, 2012. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/doctor-on-racist-obama-email-i-sincerely- apologize

20 Jacques Lacan distinguishes between three levels of understanding in his schema of identity, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The Real is an ineffableness that marks the internal limit of language to effectively write over and explain “reality.” The Imaginary suggests the ideal image of an Other to whom the concept of the “I” owes an ineffable debt of gratitude, for without an Other an Other can be no Self. The Symbolic is the realm that marks the subject’s disavowal of this relationship, where the entry into language configures subjectivity against this Other in ways that structure the Other as a permanently unreachable and distinct entity whose separation from the Self is conceived of as natural within the realm of language. For more see Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function." In Ecrits', edited by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

21 Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 69.

319

22 Kevin DeLuca. "Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice," Philosophy and Rhetoric 32, no. 4 (1999): 346. 23 Thomas K. Nakayama, and Robert L. Krizek. "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 297.

24 Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008. 77.

25 The Birth of Biopolitics New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008. 187.

26 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (Boston: Zone Books, 2002).

27 Paul Krugman. "The Town Hall Mob," The New York Times, August 6 2009. Lexis- Nexis.

28 Kate Zernike. Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America New York: Times Books, 2010. 148-49.

29 George Lundskow. "Authoritarianism and Destructiveness in the Tea Party Movement," Critical Sociology 38, no. 4 (2012): 532.

30 Chantal Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox New York: Verso, 2000. 130.

31 Ibid.

32 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract, or, Principles of Political Right, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York: Constitution Society, 1762).

33 Robert Ivie. “Prologue to Democratic Dissent in America,” Javnost, 11, no. 2 (2004), 21.

34 Jacques Ranciere. "Democracies against Democracy," in Democracy in What State?, ed. Amy Allen New York: Columbia, 2011, 77.

35 Vikki Bell. "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Notes for Chapter 2

1 As Jacques Ranciere suggests in Hatred of Democracy, actions taken in the name of “the people” betray a certain demophobia, of the sort found in the risk intrinsic to the idea of “the people” themselves, namely the risk that one account of democracy might win out over another. See Jacques Ranciere. Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso), 2006.

320

2 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (Boston: Zone Books, 2002), 169.

3 Publics and Counterpublics Boston: Zone Books, 2002, 168.

4 Lauren Berlant. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press Books, 1997), 3.

5 Michael Kazin. The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Cornell University Press), 1998. 3.

6 The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Cornell University Press, 1998), 19.

7 Jennifer R. Mercieca. "The Irony of the Democratic Style," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 447.

8 Richard Hofstader. "The Folklore of Populism," in American Populism, ed. William F. Holmes (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1994), 161.

9 Christopher Lasch. The Agony of the American Left (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).

10 Charles Postel. The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007), 3-4.

11 The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007), 11-12.

12 The Populist Vision, 5.

13 The Populist Vision, 269.

14 The Populist Vision, 43.

15 Ibid.

16 The Populist Vision, 70.

17 Lawrence Goodwyn. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1978), 169.

18 Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, 42.

19 The People's Party, "The Omaha Platform," in A Populist Reader, Selections from the Works of American Populist Leaders, ed. George Brown Tindall (New York: Harper and Row), 1966, 91.

321

20 Bruce Palmer. "A Critique for Industrial Capitalism," in American Populism, ed. William F. Holmes (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1994), 186. 21 The People’s Party, "The Omaha Platform," 92. Found online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/

22 Postel, The Populist Vision, 270.

23 Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 180.

24 Postel, The Populist Vision, 271.

25 Sheldon Stromquist. Reinventing" the People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (University of Illinois Press), 2006. 34.

26 Reinventing" the People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 55.

27 Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, 55.

28 The Populist Persuasion: An American History, 63.

29 Stromquist, Reinventing" the People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, 193.

30 Reinventing" the People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, 202.

31 Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Inuaugural Address," in The Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel Rosenman (New York: Random House), 1938.

32 Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

33 Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, 4.

34 Richard Weaver. The Ethics of Rhetoric Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1953, 57.

35 Daniel Bell. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas (Free Press, 1965), 94.

36 Douglas Ehninger. "Argument as Method: Its Nature, Its Limitations and Its Uses," Communications Monographs 37, no. 2 (1970): 104.

37 Chantal Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox Verso Books, 2000. 68.

322

38 Kenneth Burke. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1954. 119.

39 Jonathan Schoenwald. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2001), 19.

40 Michael Calvin McGee. "The "Ideograph": A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology." Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (1980), 5.

41 Robert Ivie. "Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War," Communication Monographs 47, no. 4 (1980), 280.

42 David Campbell. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (University of Minnesota Press), 1998. 193.

43 Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 91.

44 Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, 2.

45 Lisa McGirr. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2002), 52.

46 Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2002), 174.

47 Robert L. Ivie. "Speaking “Common Sense”; About the Soviet Threat: Reagan's Rhetorical Stance," Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 48, no. 1 (1984): 40.

48 John F. Kennedy authorized the initial Bay of Pigs fiasco and conducted a relatively hardline public relations campaign during the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.

49 McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 150-51.

50 Robert Mason. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (University of North Carolina Press), 2004, 40.

51 Frank Wilderson III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press), 2010, 11.

52 Joan Copjec. Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2004), 159-60.

323

53 Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press, 2004), 160. 54 Rick Perlstein. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009) 429.

55 McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 166-67.

56 Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 75.

57 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1958, 35.

58 Polly Jones. "From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization," (Routledge, London), 2006.

59 Glen M. Feighery. ""A Light out of This World": Awe, Anxiety, and Routinization in Early Nuclear Test Coverage, 1951-1953," American Journalism 28, no. 3 (2011): 9.

60 I should note this is the case for conservatives: a great many other interests were denied any room in this space of appearance, and many of them would have more legitimate political gripes than those who would drive “New” conservatism.

61 Arendt, The Human Condition, 179.

62 The Human Condition, 58-59.

63 McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 176.

64 Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, 31.

65 Jeremy Engels. "Demophilia: A Discursive Counter to Demophobia in the Early Republic," Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 2 (2011): 134.

66 Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

67 John C. Hammerback. "Barry Goldwater's Rhetorical Legacy," Southern Communication Journal 64, no. 4 (1999): 330.

68 Roosevelt, "Inuaugural Address."

69 Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, 156.

70 Hammerback, "Barry Goldwater's Rhetorical Legacy," 323.

324

71 Kurt Ritter. "Ronald Reagan's 1960s Southern Rhetoric: Courting Conservatives for the Gop," ibid.: 336.

72 Kurt W. Ritter. "Ronald Reagan and “the Speech”: The Rhetoric of Public Relations Politics," Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 32, no. 1 (1968): 54.

73 Amos Kiewe and Davis L. Houck. A Shining City on a Hill: Ronald Reagan's Economic Rhetoric, 1951-1989 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers), 1991.

74 Mark P. Moore "Rhetorical Criticism of Political Myth: From Goldwater Legend to Reagan Mystique," Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991).

75 G. Thomas Goodnight. "Ronald Reagan and the American Dream: A Study in Rhetoric out of Time," The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership (USA: Project in Presidential Rhetoric), 2002. 209.

76 Kenneth Burke. "Terministic Screens," in On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph Gusfield Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 115.

77 Reagan, Ronald. "A Time for Choosing." October 29 1964.

78 Reagan, Ronald. "A Time for Choosing." October 29 1964.

79 Reagan, Ronald. "A Time for Choosing." October 29 1964.

80 Reagan, Ronald. "A Time for Choosing." October 29 1964.

81 Martin J. Medhurst. "Eisenhower's ‘Atoms for Peace’speech: A Case Study in the Strategic Use of Language," Communications Monographs 54, no. 2 (1987): 210-12.

82 Richard J. Jackson. "Genealogy, Ideology, and Counter-Terrorism: Writing Wars on Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr," Studies in Language & Capitalism 1(2006): 170.

83 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (Boston: Zone Books), 2002. p. 171.

84 Rick Perlstein. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. (New York: Scribner), 2008.

85 Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 19.

86 Jeremy Engels. "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times," 314.

325

87 Ibid. 315.

88 Ibid. 321.

89 Brian Massumi. "Fear (the Spectrum Said)." positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 1 (2005), p. 32.

90 Brian Massumi. "The Future Birth of the Affective Fact." Paper presented at the Genealogies of Biopolitics Conference, 2005, 4.

91 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (Boston: Zone Books), 2002. 66.

92 What made the Reagan coalition so strong was how many private and individual concerns were ultimately rendered public. The translation of matters of intimacy into matters of public record allowed for a litany of concerns that should not have been publicly deliberated about to instead become red herrings for public discourse that traded off with more systematic discussions of inequalities. For more see Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.

Notes for Chapter 2

1 Megan Foley. "From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis," Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012); Joshua S. Hanan. "Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010).

2 Peter Siris. "Government Did Not Want to Bail out Lehman Brothers," New York Daily News, September 15 2008. Date accessed May 1, 2012. http://www.nydailynews.com/2.1353/government-bail-lehman-brothers-article-1.322946

3 Jay Bookman. "Cat 4 Hurrican Heads for Wall Street," The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, September 14 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

4 Vikas Bajaj. "A Wall Street Goliant Teeters Amid Fears of a Widening Crisis," New York Times, September 14 2008; David Ellis, "Wall Street on Red Alert," CNNMoney, September 14 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

5 John HIlsenrath, Serena Ng, and Damian Paletta. "Worst Crisis since '30s, with No End in Sight," The Wall Street Journal, September 18 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

6 Justin Fox, "Three Lessons of the Lehman Brothers Collapse," Time, September 15 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

7 Bajaj, "A Wall Street Goliant Teeters Amid Fears of a Widening Crisis."

326

8 Berenson, Alex. "Financial Drama with No Final Act in Sight," New York Times Spetember 13, 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

9 Ibid.

10 Joshua Boak. "Former Fed Chariman Volcker Sees 'Failed Financial Structure'," Chicago Tribune, September 15 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

11 Ibid.

12 Greg Burns. "What’s Ahead?” Chicago Tribune. September 14, 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

13 Kevin Hall. "Q&A: How Will Wall Street Crisis Affect Average Americans?," Knight Ridder, September 15 2008.

14 Lisa Anderson. "In New York, City Brace for Fallout," Chicago Tribune, September 14 2008.

15 For more see Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

16 Sara Murray. "Report Shows Stagnant Upward Mobility in the U.S.," The Wall Street Journal, November 12 2008.

17 For more see http://www.reuters.com/subjects/income-inequality

18 Robert Neeley Bellah. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), viii-ix.

19 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), x.

20 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, ix.

21 This is especially true regarding the economy, which is less subject to collectivist framings than say, foreign policy issues.

22 James Arnt Aune. "Lincoln and the American Sublime," Communication Reports 1, no. 1 (1988): 15-16.

23 Thomas Frank. "The God That Sucked," The Baffler 14, no. 2 (2001).

24 Tammy Duckworth. "Candidate Profile." ABC Local, 2012.

327

25 Bruce Robbins. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4.

26 Vikki Bell. "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 81.

27 "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Barry, Andrew, Osborne, Thomas, and Rose, Nikolas (London: University of Chicago Press), 1996. 82.

28 "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," 83.

29 "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," 86. There is a bigger point to be made here, as well, by turning to the work of Jacque Lacan’s essay on “Logical Time” found in eCrits. There Lacan suggests, through a convoluted parable involving a game between prisoners who must guess how one another has been marked with imperfect access to the marks, that it is anticipatory actions by the prisoner’s the provide a solution to the dilemma, even though the solution itself is logically invalid. The performative actions of the prisoners involved certify the correctness if not the logic of their decisions. Similarly, the market itself is constituted through these same “knowing looks” which may not match up with the “real” value of a certain set of assets or realities but nevertheless constitute economic reality itself, however “invalid.” For more see Jacques Lacan, "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty--a New Sophism," in Ecrits, ed. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2004).

30 Kevin G. Hall. "Q and A: Can Washington End the Financial Crisis?" McClatchy Bureau, September 18 2008.

31 Lori Montgomery. "Lawmakers Left on the Sideline as Fed, Treasury Take Swift Action," The Washington Post, September 18 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

32 McClatchy News Service, "Poll: Americans Appear Pessimistic on Financial Crisis, Government's Action," Chattanooga Times Free Press 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

33 Kenneth Burke. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1954. 92.

34 I do not mean to say that the opposite, subjects simply reasoning from induction, is possible. I am simply suggesting that there is something like an identitarian inertia that configures subjects in more familiar ways.

35 Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 406.

328

36 Steven Fraser. Wall Street: America's Dream Palace )New Haven: Yale University Press), 2008. 1-2.

37 Vincent Canby, "Review: Wall Street," The New York Times, December 11 1987. Lexis-Nexis.

38 Editorial Board, "Crisis Demands Candidates' Answer," St. Petersburg Times, September 18 2008; Jean Chartiers, "Juncker Feels a Rare Degree of Uncertainty," Euroreport, September 18 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

39 Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2008).

40 Burns, "Meltdown Will Continue to Reverberate."

41 Mike Allen, "Candidates Split on Strength of Economy," Politico, September 15 2008.

42 Eric Torbenson and Brendan M. Case, "U.S. Economy Could Weaken Further or Turn around, Experts Say," The Dallas Morning News, September 17 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

43 Editorial Board, "Crisis Demands Candidates' Answer," St. Petersburg Times (Florida), September 18 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

44 Martin Smith. "Experts Assess Impact of Wall Street Meltdown," Voice of America News, September 18 2008. Lexis_Nexis.

45 Editorial Board, "The Issue: The Wall Street Mess," The Arizona Republic, September 18 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

46 MarketWatch, "We're All Treasury Officials Now," MarketWatch, September 25 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

47 Martha Brannigan, "How the Credit Crisis Could Squeeze Main Street," St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 24 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

48 Erika Stutzman, "Oh We Get It, Wall Street; Do You?," Daily Camera, September 25 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

49 Chris Isidore, "Bailout Plan Reject - Supporters Scramble," CNN Money, September 29 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

50 Ibid.

51 Rick Newman, "A New Direction on Wall Street," U.S. News and World Report, September 29 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

329

52 Elizabeth Aguilera, "Cu Profs Certain Bailout Is Coming: One Panelist at Forum Says There Is Plenty of Blame for Consumers, Institutions, and Regulators to Share," The Denver Post, September 30 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

53 Editorial Page, "A Bailout Tossed Overboard," Los Angeles Times, October 1 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

54 Bethany Nolan, "Congressman Walks Streets of Bloomington, Ind., to Get Reaction on Bailout," Herald-Times, October 1 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

55 Bill Engle, "Area Emotions Vary About Bailout's Defeat," Paladium-Item, October 1 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

56 Dale Anderson, "Crisis an 'Economic Pearl Harbor'," The Buffalo News, October 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

57 Mark Silva, Christi Parsons, and Jim Tankersley, "Senate Revives Bailout," Chicago Tribune, October 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

58 Maureen Groppe, "Indiana's Senators Vote for Rescue," The Indianapolis Star, October 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

59 Alan Zibel and Adrian Sainz, "Bailout Plan Offers Vague Help to Homeowners," Associated Press, October 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

60 LaRaye Brown and Ana Radelat, "Mississippians Skeptical About Plan for Bailout," The Clarion-Ledger, October 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

61 Glenn Beck, "Revised Bailout Bill Full of Pork," CNN, October 2 2008. Date Accessed May 3, 2012. http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0810/02/gb.01.html

62 Irwin Stelzer, "The New New Dealers" The Guardian, September 26 2008. Date Accessed April 28, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/sep/26/creditcrunch.wallstreet

63 Mike Ryan and Genie Ryan, "Congress, Bailout Spurs Anger," Albuquerque Journal, October 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

64 Barack Obama, "A Rescue Plan for the Middle-Class," Real Clear Politics, October 13 2008. Date accessed October 30, 2012. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/a_rescue_plan_for_the_middlecl.html

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

330

67 Ibid.

68 Michael Lee. "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006), 370.

69 Kenneth Burke. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1954, xli.

Notes on Chapter 3

1 Raka Shome. "Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An "Other" View," Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 41.

2 "Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An "Other" View," Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 53.

3 Jonathan Weisman and Laura Meckler. "Obama Sweeps to Historic Victory," The Wall Street Journal, November 6 2008. Factiva.

4 Anne Kornblut. "Measured Response to Financial Crisis Sealed the Election," The Washington Post, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

5 Mary Stuckey. "One Nation (Pretty Darn) Divisible: National Identity in the 2004 Conventions," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 654.

6 "One Nation (Pretty Darn) Divisible: National Identity in the 2004 Conventions," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (2005): 646.

7 Vanessa Beasley. "The Rhetoric of Ideological Consensus in the United States: American Principles and American Pose in Presidential Inaugurals," Communication Monographs 68, no. 2 (2001): 174.

8 Vanessa Beasley. You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (College Station: Texas A&M University Press), 2004. 42.

9 Robert Barnes, and Michael D. Shear. "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President; Democrats Expand Control of Congress," The Washington Post, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis

10 Adam Nagourney. "Obama Wins Election; Mccain Loses as Bush Legacy Is Rejected," The New York Times, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

11 Thomas Fitzgerald. "Obama Sweeps to Historic Victory," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

331

12 Mike Dorning and Jim Tankersley. "Obama Shatters Barriers with Resounding Win," Chicago Tribune, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

13 Dana Nelson, Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 22.

14 Barack Obama, "President-Elect Obama's Grant Park Speech," Chicago Sun-Times, November 5 2008. Date accessed January 4, 2008. http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/11/obamas_grant_park_speech.html

15 Ibid.

16 Arend Liiphart. "Constitutal Design for Divided Societies," Journal of Democracy 15, no. 2 (2004): 98.

17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract, or, Principles of Political Right, trans. G. D. H. Cole New York: (Constitution Society, 1762), II.1.

18 Michael Calvin McGee. "In Search of 'the People': A Rhetorical Alternative," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 236-37.

19 "In Search of 'the People': A Rhetorical Alternative," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 247.

20 The poverty of disembodied imagination, of course, is suggested in how Whitman’s notion of the “divine average” was defined through rather conventional categories.

21 John Muckelbauer. The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 153.

22 Obama, "President-Elect Obama's Grant Park Speech."

23 Lyndsey Layton, "Palin Apologizes for 'Real America' Comments," The Washington Post, October 22 2008. Date accessed October 12, 2011 http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-10-22/politics/36799399_1_hayes-bachmann- write-in-campaign.

24 Ibid.

25 Larry Rohter. "Plumber from Ohio Is Thrust into Spotlight," The New York Times, October 16 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

26 Tim Mak. "Joe the Plumber Running for Congress in Ohio's 9th Congressional District," Politico, October 26 2011. Date accessed October 13, 2012. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/66890.html.

332

27 Elizabeth Jensen. "Born to the Left, Aiming Her Camera Right," The New York Times, January 23 2009. Date accessed November 2, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/arts/television/25jens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

28 Michael Leahy, "Tv Preview: Hbo's 'Right America: Feeling Wronged' Dumbs Down the Conservative Electorate," The Washington Post, February 16 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

29 Ben Smith and Emily Schultheis, "'Obamabots' Defend Potus in Twitterverse," Politico, October 18 2011. Date accessed October 31, 2011. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/66890.html.

30 William E. Gibson. "'Change Has Come to America.’”

31 Ron Tanner. "Great Disappointment," The Tulsa World, November 6 2008. Lexis- Nexis.

32 Roger Aronoff. "Media Are Big Losers in Election 2008," Accuracy in Media, November 3 2008. Date accessed January 23, 2012. http://www.aim.org/aim- column/media-are-big-losers-in-election-2008/.

33 Cindy Patton. "Refiguring Social Space," in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 221.

34 Aronoff, "Media Are Big Losers in Election 2008."

35 Douglas MacKinnon. "Media Credibility," The New York Times, November 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

36 William E. Gibson, "'Change Has Come to America:' On a Historic Night, Barack Obama Sweeps to Victory as Nation's 44th President," Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 5 2008.

37 Editorial Board, "The Day After," The Baltimore Sun, November 6 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

38 Patterico, "Thie Site Will Never Be Andrew Sullivan or Balloon Juice," Patterico's Pontifications, November 8 2008. Date accessed February 15, 2013. http://patterico.com/2008/11/08/this-site-will-never-be-andrew-sullivan-or-balloon-juice/

39 Allahpundit, "Congratulations, Obama," Hot Air, November 4 2008. Date accessed February 13, 2012. http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/04/congratulations-obama/

40 Liz Sidoti, "Gop in Tatters, Looks to Regroup after Election," Hattiesburg American, November 6 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

333

41 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1954, 119.

42 Interestingly, this observation is the obverse side of Nancy Fraser’s observations in “Rethinking the Public Sphere” where she suggests the ideas of civility and equal communication animating the early Habermas carry with them implicit exclusions whose are normalized and justified by their attachment to the idealism intrinsic in notions like equal communication and inclusion. Given the privilege afforded to many conservatives on the basis of especially their racial status, the logic does not entirely apply but a similar dynamic is at work. For more see Fraser, Nancy in "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig C. Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

43 Susan Bordo. "Feminism, Foucault, and the Politics of the Body," in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1999), 251.

44 Sigmund Freud. The Ego and the Id (New York: W.W. Norton), 1962. 16.

45 Sigmund Freud. "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Sigmund Freud (New York: Random House), 1917. 244.

46 Ibid. 248

47 Joan Copjec. Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Boston: MIT Press), 2004 79.

48 John Sides. "Does Obama Have a "Mandate"?," The Monkey Cage, November 9 2008. Date accessed November 13, 2012. http://themonkeycage.org/2008/11/09/does_obama_have_a_mandate/

Notes on Chapter 4

1 Populism is neither intrinsically right nor left. For more see Lee, Michael. "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame," Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006).

2 Chris Isidore. "Auto Bailout: Showdown," CNN Money, November 17 2008.

3 Brian Ross. "Big Three Ceos Flew Private Jets to Plead for Public Funds," ABC News, November 19 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

4 Colin Campbell. "The Decline of the North American Car," Macleans, December 1 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

334

5 Chrysler, of course, was bailed out in the 1980’s. At the time, however, the move was regarded as a necessary response to another economic exigency: the aftermath of the Arab oil embargoes. Also it bears mentioning that both Eminem and Suh are constructed as public personas ineffably linked to masculinity, and in Eminem’s case the relationship to race is fascinating. For more see Watts, Eric King. "Border Patrolling and "Passing" in Eminem's 8 Mile," Critica Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 3 (2005).

6 Sharon Silke Carty. "Automakers Have 5 Crucial Issues to Address to Get Bailout," USA Today, December 2 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

7 Letters to the Editor, "Auto Bailout a No Brainer," Detroit Free Press, November 30 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

8 Ibid.

9 Sean Higgins. "Big 3 Prepare Their Case for Congress," Investor's Business Daily, December 1 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

10 William E. Gibson. "'Change Has Come to America:' On a Historic Night, Barack Obama Sweeps to Victory as Nation's 44th President," Florida Sun-Sentinel, November 5 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

11 Justin Hyde and Todd Spangerl. "Detroit Autmomakers Warns The Teeter on Edge," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 3 2008. Date accessed January 10, 2012. http://www.post-gazette.com/nation/2008/12/03/Detroit-automakers-warn-they-teeter-on- the-edge/stories/200812030142

12 Gibson, "'Change Has Come to America:' On a Historic Night, Barack Obama Sweeps to Victory as Nation's 44th President."

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Some opposed the bailouts on other grounds, for example, those who suggested they were a moral hazard. See David Brooks. "Bailout to Nowhere," The New York Times, November 18 2008.

16 Joan Copjec. Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2004, 168.

17 Ibid.

18 Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 166.

335

19 Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 167.

20 Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, 164.

21 For example, public discourses suggesting that increased deregulation will unleash the power of the “free market” do so on the basis of a utilitarian claim about the outcome (such move will increase efficiency, reduce cost, increase the availability of a good) but also rely on a rhetoric of equality to warrant the claim (once freed from the distorting force of governmental intervention, the universally distributed capacity to both produce and see the “public good” in the invisible hand of the market will function appropriately.)

22 Kenneth Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 265.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 A Rhetoric of Motives, 266.

26 Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 290.

27 CNN. "Big 3 Bailout Loan." CNN Transcripts, December 4 2008.

28 CNN. "Big 3 Bailout Loan." CNN Transcripts, December 4 2008.

29 CNN. "Big 3 Bailout Loan." CNN Transcripts, December 4 2008.

30 Gibson, "'Change Has Come to America:' On a Historic Night, Barack Obama Sweeps to Victory as Nation's 44th President."

31 Copjec distinguishes between “jealousy” which is a feeling that drives one to want the Other’s enjoyment, and “envy,” which is rooted in wanting to deny the Other’s enjoyment. Demands out to reduce Others enjoyment, which typify certain neoliberal claims to the reduction of public good through governmental intervention, call into being certain notions of scarcity. For more see Chapter 4 of Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation.

32 Lee, "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame."

33 Claude Lefort. The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 299.

336

34 UPI, "Obama-Bush Transition Called Smooth," United Press International 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

35 Barack Obama. "Barack Obama's Inaugural Address," The New York Times 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

36 David Sanger. "Speech Spanned History and Confronted Bush," The New York Times, January 20.2009. Date accessed January 13, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/politics/w21assessS2.html?_r=0

37 Kathleen Parker. "An Awesome Inauguration," Baltimore Sun, January 23 2009. Lexis- Nexis.

38 Rosa Brooks. "Obama's Speech All About 'Us'," Los Angeles Times, January 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

39 Ed Morrisey. "Inaugural Address: Pedestrian," Hot Air, January 20 2009. Date accessed March 2, 2012. http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/20/inaugural-address- pedestrian/

40 Peter Bronson. "Obamarama Is Over: Time for Press to Go Back to Work," The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

41 Michael Barone."The Obama-Kennedy Connection," The Washington Times, January 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

42 Kevin Hechtkopf. "Obama Economic Speech Transcript," CBS News, January 8 2009. Date accessed January 2, 2012. http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-503544_162-503544- 246.html?keyword=Barack+Obama.

43 Gary Andres. "Reasons to Vote against Stimulus," The Weekly Standard, January 26 2009. Date accessed October 11, 2012. http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/01/reasons_to_vote_against_sti mul.asp

44 Editorial Board, "Overstimulating Spending," National Review, January 23 2009. Date accessed February 12, 2013. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226742/overstimulating-spending/editors

45 Jonah Goldberg. "On Stimulus Bill, Centrists Are over the Line," Los Angeles Times, February 10 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

46 David Gregory. "Meet the Press," NBC News, January 25 2009.

47 Ibid.

337

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Shane Phelan. Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 2001, 40.

52 Kenneth Burke. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945, 506-507.

53 Melissa Deem. "From Bobbitt to Scum: Re-Memberment, Scatological Rhetorics, and Feminist Strategies in the Contemporary United States," Public Culture 8, no. 3 (1996): 512.

54 "From Bobbitt to Scum: Re-Memberment, Scatological Rhetorics, and Feminist Strategies in the Contemporary United States," Public Culture 8, no. 3 (1996): 513.

55 Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, (Cambridge, MIT Press), 305.

56 Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship, 59.

57 Campbell Brown. "Campbell Brown," CNN, January 28 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

58 Ibid.

59 David Herszenhorn. "Recovery Bill Gets Final Approval," The New York Times, February 13 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

60 Chad Pegram, "Congress Passes $787b Stimulus Bill; Sends It to Obama for Signing," Fox News, February 14 2009. Date accessed February 4, 2011. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/14/congress-passes-b-stimulus-sends-obama- signature/

61 Ian Welsh. "Stimulus Bill Passes House with 0 Republican Votes," firedoglake, January 28 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://firedoglake.com/2009/01/28/stimulus-bill-passes-house-with-0-republican-votes/

62 Allahpundit, "Obama: Passing This Crap Sanwich Is a "Major Milestone"," Hot Air, February 14 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://hotair.com/archives/2009/02/14/obama-passing-this-crap-sandwich-is-a-major- milestone/

338

63 Veronique de Rugy "Here's What $800 Billion Buys Today," Reason.com, February 13 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://reason.com/archives/2009/02/13/heres-what- 800-billion-buys-to

64 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 181.

65 White House Press Office, "Obama Administration's Home Mortgage Crisis Fact Sheet," The Washington Post, February 18 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/02/18/AR2009021801159.html

66 Edmund Andrews, "U.S. Sets Big Incentives to Head Off Foreclosures," The New York Times, March 4 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

67 Mary. "Rick Santelli: Tea Party." Freedom Eden, February 19 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

68 Samuel Staley. "Michael Barone, Tea Parties, and Rick Santelli's Rant," Reason, June 10 2010. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://reason.org/blog/show/michael-barone-tea- parties-rick-san

69 Erin J. Rand. "An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 301-02.

70 "An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 310.

71 Lester C. Olson. "Anger among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association," ibid.97(2011): 303.

72 Catherine Batt. "Gawain's Antifeminist Rant, the Pentangle, and Narrative Space," The Yearbook of English Studies 22, no. Special Number (1992).

73 Don Waisenen. "Satirical Visions with Public Consequence?: Dennis Miller's Ranting Rhetorical Persona," American Communication Journal 13, no. 1 (2011): 26.

74 Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship, 42-43. The classic psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria are here applicable as well, with the idea that women as hysteric because they lack (phallus, reason, and control) what men have.

75 Vikki Bell. "The Promse of Liberalism and the Performance of Freedom," in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82.

339

76 Kathryn Jean Lopez. "Watch for the Palin-Santelli 2012 Signs," National Review Online, February 19 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/177629/watch-palin-santelli-2012-signs/kathryn- jean-lopez.

77 Marcus Gilmer. "Santelli "Rants," Calls for Chicago Tea Party," Chicagoist, February 19 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

78 Larry Kudlow. "Subsidize Bad Behavior?," National Review Online, February 19 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013.

79 Conn Carroll. "Morning Bell: The Chicago Tea Party," The Foundry, February 20 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://blog.heritage.org/2009/02/20/morning-bell-the- chicago-tea-party/.

80 Mike Rowan. "Rick Santelli: The Chicago Tea Party?," Daily Markets, February 21 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

81 Mark Whittington. "Rick Santelli's Anti-Obama "Rant Heard around the World"," Yahoo! News, February 19 2009. Date accessed April 3, 2013. http://voices.yahoo.com/rick-santellis-anti-obama-rant-heard-around-world- 2697382.html?cat=9.

82 Mary Kane. "The Moral Hazards of Blaming Homeowners," The Washington Independent, February 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

83 Phil Rosenthal. "Rant Raises Profile of CNBC on-Air Personality Rick Santelli," Chicago Tribune, February 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

84 Michael Barnicle. "Hardball," MSNBC, Februrary 19 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

85 Jeremy Engels. "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Rsentment Times," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010).

86 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 181.

87 Jeremy Engels. "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 322.

88 "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority: Rethinking Victimage for Resentful Times," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 309.

340

89 Frederich Nietzsche.. On the Genealogy of Morals Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998, 27-28.

90 Anker’s savvy essay does not linger long enough, however, on a driving element in Freud’s book: the relationship between sexual difference and power. This despite the fact that the titular line of Anker’s work, “You can love me too” is a line bookended in The Ego and the Id by an extensive discussion about the relationship between authority, desire, sexuality, and power. This is a relationship that especially bears mentioning because the Tea Party, while it often had female avatars like Sarah Palin, was demographically made up of a majority of upper, middle-to-upper class males. Elizabeth Anker. "Heroic Identifications; or, “You Can Love Me Too – I Am So Like the State”," Theory & Event 15, no. 1 (2012).

91 Paul Steinhauser, "Who Are the Tea Party Activists?," CNN, February 18 2010. Lexis- Nexis.

92 Claire Sisco King. "It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2009): 370-71.

93 Sigmund Freud. The Ego and the Id New York City: W. W. Norton, 1962, 20.

94 Nancy Fraser. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig C. Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1992.

95 Deem, "From Bobbitt to Scum: Re-Memberment, Scatological Rhetorics, and Feminist Strategies in the Contemporary United States," 512.

96 Sally Robinson. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press), 2000, 20.

97 Wendy Brown. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1995, 70.

98 David Wittenberg. "Going out in Public: Visibility and Anonymity in Michael Warner's "Publics and Counterpublics"," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 430.

99 Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, 76.

Notes on Chapter 5

1 Sara Boyd. "Green Bay Tea Party Rallies against Federal Programs," Green Bay Press- Gazette, March 8 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

341

2 Ibid.

3 Jim Hoft. "Breaking Chicago Tea Party Pictures," Founding Bloggers, February 27 2009. Date accessed March 9, 2013. http://www.foundingbloggers.com/wordpress/2009/04/breaking-chicago-tax-day-tea- party-pictures/

4 Oliver Burkeman. "New Age for Prophet of Self-Interest," The Irish Times, March 9 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

5 Janell Ross. "Franklin Mom Brews up Tea Bag Protest over Stimulus," The Tenneessean, March 15 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

6 Mary Kane. "The Tea Party Revolt and the Politics of Ignornace," The Washington Independent, February 26 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

7 Barnes, Tom. "Harrisburg Tea Party Protests 'Ongoing Bailout'," Pittsburgh Post- Gazette 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

8 Michael Calvin McGee. "Social Movement: Phenomena or Meaning?," in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne State College: Strata Press, 2006, 120.

9 "Social Movement: Phenomena or Meaning?," in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne (State College: Strata Press), 2006, 121.

10 Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931, 33.

11 Counter-Statement Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931, 31.

12 Burke’s example, which is striking, contrasts how one processes the differential relationship between objects in the visual realm: one could either process it through the experience of consuming the art of Cezanne, or one could merely be informed in an almost banal way about the geometry of perspective. Both means transmit the same information but in the former places the audience interior to the reasoning process, while in the case of the latter they are passive recipients of information. Counter-Statement, 32.

13 Counter-Statement, 33.

14 Rand, Erin J. "An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 300.

342

15 "An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency," Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 309. While Rand is focused on the polemic as a “queer form” that “is never fully determined” by its polemical features, other forms may in fact be quite determined by their formal characteristics.

16 Rand and Gunn bring similar approaches to the question. Rand’s approach is constitutive but is invested in theorizing the relationship between form and attitude, while I suggest Gunn’s approach addresses how the economy of the audience’s desire is made.

17 Joshua Gunn. "Marantha," Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 367.

18 Ibid.

19 The constitutive power of “form” suggests it as a better term of analysis than style. Rhetorical accounts of style are either properly political in terms of object choice but too conservative in their theorization of the force of discourse, as in the work of Hariman, or the constitutive definitions of style are accompanied by too broad a focus on objects in the case of Brummett. For more see Hariman, Robert. Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1995; Brummett, Barry. A Rhetoric of Style (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press), 2008.

20 Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books), 2002. Warner’s discussion of circulation and uptake suggests that circulation denotes the attention given to a text while uptake suggests the extent to which a circulated public impacts and configures the imagination of an audience. Publics, then, are made through attention but are filled out (and fill out subjects) through uptake. Also Kenneth Burke’s example of form is drawn from Hamlet, where the audience anticipates but is repeatedly denied the entrance of a ghost, given that moment only when its expectation has receded. But in actually existing democracy there is no single playwright to replace the ghost with a carriage or a Polonius: the desires of the audience are less subject to conscious manipulation and more a co-constituted effect of the processes of circulation and uptake. Form suggests the mediating mechanism that guides and pushes the economy of circulation and uptake.

21 Rand, "An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency; Mitchell, Gordon. "Public Argument Action Research and the Learning Curve of New Social Movements," Argumentation and Advocacy 40, no. 4 (2004); Pezzullo, Phaedra. "Resisting "National Breast Cancer Awareness Month": The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003); DeLuca, Kevin M. and Peeples, Jennifer. "From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the Violence of Seattle," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002); Delicath, John W. and DeLuca, Kevin Michael. "Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups," Argumentation, no. 17 (2003).

343

22 McGee, "Social Movement: Phenomena or Meaning?," 117.

23 David Zarefsky. "A Skeptical View of Movement Studies," in Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E Morris and Stephen H. Browne (State College:Strata Publishing), 2006, 387.

24 Cathcart, Robert S. "Movement: Confrontation as Rhetorical Form," in Readings in the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E Morris III and Stephen Howard Browne (State College: Strata Publishing), 2006; Griffin, Leland. "A Dramatistic Theory of Social Movements," in Landmark Essays--Kenneth Burke, ed. Barry Brummett (Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1993); Franklin S. Haiman "The Rhetoric of the Streets: Some Legal and Ethical Considerations," in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, ed. Charles E. Morris and Stephen H. Browne (State College: Strata Publishing), 2006.

25 Farber David. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York City: Hill and Wang), 1994, 268.

26 Batheja, Aman. "CNBC Santelli Rant Spurs Tea Party Rally in Forth Word," Dallas Forth Worth Star Telegram, February 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

27 Rosenthal, Phil. "Rant Goes Viral, Raising Profile of CNBC's Rick Santelli," Chicago Tribune, February 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

28 Editorial Board, "A Revoltin' Development; Obama's Housing Crisis Solution Is Sowing Seeds of Dissent," Augusta Chronicle, February 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

29 Gary Kamiya. "Who Is the Right Calling "Loser"?," Salon, February 24 2009. Lexis- Nexis.

30 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1234.

31 Tennessee Republican Party, "Tennessee Gop: Invitation to a Tea Party," Targeted News Service, February 24 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

32 Letters to the Editor, "Sounding Off on Santelli," Chicago Tribune, February 24 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

33 Editorial Board, "'A Chicago Tea Party'," ibid.

34 Samantha A. Torrance. "Tea Party U.S.A. Movement Grows," Digital Journal, February 27 2009. Date accessed December 13, 2012. http://digitaljournal.com/article/268180

344

35 Mary Lou Pickel. "Tea Party at the Capitol," Atlanta Journal Constitution, February 28 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

36 Barnes, "Harrisburg Tea Party Protests 'Ongoing Bailout'."

37 Eugene Driscoll. "'Tea Party' Protests Spending to Stimulate Economy," Connecticut Post Online, March 21 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 "Tea Parties and Thugs," Investor's Business Daily, March 25 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

41 M.D. Harmon. "Tea Party Movement Happening under the Media's Radar," Portland Press Herald, March 27 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

42 Daniela Altimari. "Rebels with a Cause," Hartford Courant, March 29 2009. Lexis- Nexis.

43 Dorell Oren. "Tax Revolt a Recipe for Tea Parties," USA Today, April 13 2009. Lexis- Nexis.

44 Ibid.

45 David Noon. "Operation Enduring Analogy," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 342.

46 Greg Dickinson, Carol Blair, and Brian Ott. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 4.

47 Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 2010, 6.

48 Alex Koppelman. "In New York, Tea Partiers Declare, "We Are America"," Salon, April 16 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

49 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 167.

50 Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954, 162.

51 Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1954, 163.

345

52 Ibid.

53 Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox New York: Verso, 2000, 5.

54 Hariman, Robert, and Lucaites, John Louis. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007, 89.

55 Mette Mortensen. "When Citizen Photjournalism Sets the News Agenda: Neda Agha Soltan as a Web 2.0 Icon of Post-Election Unrest in Iran," Global Media and Communication 7, no. 4 (2011): 10.

56 No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, 43.

57 Paul Messaris. "What's Visual About Visual Rhetoric?," Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 222.

58 Cara A. Finnegan. "The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representations in the "Skull Controversy"," Argumentation and Advocacy 37, no. 4 (2001): 147.

59 Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland. "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," The New York Times, November 30 1997. Date accessed March 2, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html

60 Ibid.

61 Michelle Malkin. "Tea Party Photo Album: Fiscal Responsibility Is the New Counterculture," MichelleMalkin.com, February 27 2009. Date accessed March 3, 2013. http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/27/fiscal-responsibility-is-the-new-counterculture/.

62 Photograph 1.2 includes one of the only shots in all the photo galleries of a person of color.

63 Robert Ivie. Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 2005, 14.

64 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 216.

65 Katherine Zaleski. "Homeland Security Report Warns of Rising Right-Wing Extremism," The Huffington Post, April 14 2009. Date accessed March 2, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/14/homeland-security-report_n_186834.html.

66 Another image, one that I declined to include in this essay, is that of the famous Gadsden flag, straightened out so that its resemblance to a phallus is more than passing.

346

It suggests a continuation of the masculine gestures of control operational when Santelli ranted on CNBC.

67 Natalie Gewargis. "'Spread the Wealth'?," ABC News, October 14 2008. Lexis-Nexis.

68 Roland Barthes. Mythologies, trans. Anne Lavers (New York: Jonathan Cape Ltd.), 1972, 143.

Notes on Chapter 6

1 Carleton Rains. "Your Views: Abandon Democrat and Republican Parties for the Tea Party," Charleston Daily Mail, May 15 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

2 Contessa Brewer. "Msnbc Interview with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford," MSNBC, May 14 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

3 Andy Barr."Perry: States Will Assert Independence," Politico, May 14 2009. Date accessed June 2, 2013. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22557.html

4 Nico Pitney. "Gov. Rick Perry: Texas Could Secede, Leave Union," The Huffington Post, May 16 2009. Date Accessed May 2, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/15/gov-rick-perry-texas-coul_n_187490.html.

5 Edward J. Collins. "A Civil Tea Party!," Providence Journal, May 8 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

6 Donald Lambro. "Anti-Tax Crusade to Storm Capitol in Budget Battle," The Washington Times, May 10 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

7 Lee, Michael. "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame," Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 4 (2006): 358.

8 Jennifer R. Merceica. "The Irony of the Democratic Style," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008).

9 Rains, "Your Views: Abandon Democrat and Republican Parties for the Tea Party."

10 Leslie Bronken. "Two Cents: Obama, Pelosi Owe Tea Party an Apology," Deming Headlight, May 14 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

11 Robert Hunt. "Tea Party Editorial Missed the Point of the Protest," The Roanoke Times, May 6 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

12 Carolyn Flynn, "Tea Partygoers Revel in Bipartisan Criticism," The Indianapolis Star, April 23 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

347

13 Lee, "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame," 359.

14 "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame," 360-61.

15 Jonathan Schoenwald. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2001).

16 For more see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave- MacMillan, 2008). Foucault outlines how economic logics are thought to differ in kind rather than degree from political logics, which suggests why governmental intervention into the economy warrants a priori rejection according to modern liberalism. Because economic judgments represent the will and vision of consumers, the economy itself comes to represent the popular will, and also deserve the same respect as the voice of “the people.”

17 Paul Krugman. "The Town Hall Mob," The New York Times, August 6 2009. Date accessed July 2, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/opinion/07krugman.html

18 Harry Rosenfeld. "U.S. Is Giving in to Mob Rule," Waterloo Region Record, August 15 2009. Lexis-Nexis. One such operation, entitled “Operation Embarrass Your Congressman” was a coordinated effort to “expose the arrogance, ignorance, and insolence of our elected representatives.” The website has since been taken down. For more see the insightful masters thesis by Caitlin Duffy, “Vilifying Obamacare: Conservative Tropes of Victimage in the 2009 Health Care Debates.” Also see Joel Lemuel, “The Radical Voice in the Rhetoric of the Tea Party Movement.”

19 Lee, "The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame," 362.

20 Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe. Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

21 Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto New York: HarperCollins, 2011, 29.

22 Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 34.

23 Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 65.

24 Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 65-69.

25 Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History Cornell University Press, 1998, 3.

348

26 Armey and Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 8.

27 No doubt part of the danger that Armey and Kibbe saw in the movement’s intimate connection to Santelli was his similarity to the ideal of the fat cat Wall Street traders against whom the Tea Party claimed to be working.

28 Armey and Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 62-63.

29 Laclau, Ernest. On Populist Reason (London: Verso), 2005, 71.

30 On Populist Reason (London: Verso), 2005, 72.

31 Ibid.

32 Michael Kaplan suggests a distinct but related criticism of Laclau in his essay “The Rhetoric of Hegemony” where he suggests Laclau’s reliance on a “theory of rhetoric as catachresis rules out any sort of persuasion, it deprives him of any way to transform rhetorical ontology into ontic rhetorical practice…his theory must be supplemented with a more robust account of rhetorical efficiency.” To the extent that Laclau has theorized “the people” as radically indeterminate to escape from the classical fight over “determination in the last instance,” he also leaves those interested in energizing politics with no roadmap for constituting a “people” because the success of such a performative relies on a structurally imperceptible factor, namely whether or not retroactively that vision of “the people” will have been right. Kaplan, Michael. "The Rhetoric of Hegemony: Laclau, Radical Democracy, and the Rule of Tropes," Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 3 (2010): 267.

33 Armey and Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 166-67. The use of the gendered pronoun “man” is a result of a calculated choice of the author’s to refer to the inchoate authority figure “The Man” against which sixties radicals agitated. That the pronoun is masculine, I suggest, is no accident, owing to the linkage between historical concepts of political authority and masculinity.

34 Hannah Arendt. On Revolution (New York: Viking Press), 1963, 222.

35 Ibid.

36 On Revolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 1965), 245.

37 Armey and Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, 167.

38 Ronald Walter Greene. "Rhetorical Capital: Communicative Labor, Money/Speech, and Neo-Liberal Governance," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 328.

349

39 Alex Pappas. "Leaders of the Leaderless Movement: Who Are Behind the Tea Party," The Daily Caller, February 19 2010. Date accessed June 3, 2013. http://dailycaller.com/2010/02/19/leaders-of-the-leaderless-movement-who-are-behind- the-tea-parties/.

40 Bill Claydon. "A Leaderless Movement," Red State, October 8 2010. Factiva.

41 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 106.

42 Ibid.

43 Gunn, Joshua. "Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeals, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demogoguery," Western Journal of Communication 71, no. 1 (2007): 14.

44 Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox New York: Verso, 2000, 137.

45 Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig C. Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1992, 57.

46 Iris Marion Young. "Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy," Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 685-86.

47 Zernike, Kate. "Tea Party Avoids Divisive Social Issues," The New York Times, March 12 2010. Lexis-Nexis.

48 http://contractfromamerica.org/home/. Hacker’s path to putting together the contract is interesting; he created a website to solicit suggestions and eventually came up with the list found at the website above.

49 Republicans in Congress, "A Pledge to America," Republican Party, 2010.

50 "A Pledge to America," Republican Party, 2010, 3.

51 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 185.

52 Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id (New York City: W. W. Norton, 1962). 20

53"Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Sigmund Freud (New York: Random House), 1917., 242

54 Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2004.192

350

55 Ibid. 44

56 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 244-45.

57 Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, 38.

58 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 252.

59 Sarah Palin. "Sarah Palin Speaks at Tea Party Convention," CNN, February 6 2010. Lexis-Nexis.

60 Ivie, Robert. Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), 2005, 168.

61 Palin, "Sarah Palin Speaks at Tea Party Convention."

62 Ibid.

62 Gunn, Joshua. "Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeals, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demagoguery," Western Journal of Communication 71, no. 1 (2007): 14.

Notes on Conclusion

1 Gail Russel Chaddock. "On Historic Night, Republicans Sweep House Democrats from Power," The Christian Science Monitor, November 3 2010. Lexis-Nexis.

2 James Caesar. "The 2010 Verdict," Real Clear Politics, November 10 2010. Date acccessed September 3, 2012. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/11/10/the_2010_verdict_107908.html.

3 William A. Galston. "Can a Polarized American Party System Be "Healthy"?," Issues in Governance Studies, no. 34 (2010). Galston’s analysis notes that mid twentieth century centrism is the outlier, but this indicates that “nostalgia” is at least well placed insofar as current levels of partisanship are remarkably high.

4 Ross Douthat. "The Filibuster, Now More Than Ever?," The New York Times, December 29 2009. Lexis-Nexis;, Joe Wiesenthal. "The History of Political Polarization in Congress," Business Insider, August 14 2012. Lexis-Nexis.

5 Walter Hamilton. "How the Debt-Ceiling Crisis Could Affect Ordinary Americans," Los Angeles Times 2011. Lexis-Nexis.

6 Ariana Eunjung Cha, "What's the Debt Ceiling, and Why Is Everyone in Washington Talking About It?," The Washington Post, April 18 2011. Lexis-Nexis.

351

7 Scott Galupo, "End This Game of Debt Ceiling Chicken," U.S. News and World Report, July 12 2011. Lexis-Nexis.

8 Robert Schlesinger. "Both Sides Aren't to Blame for Debt Ceiling Crisis," US News and World Report, July 29 2011. Lexis-Nexis.

9 Jurgen Habermas. Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1990, 158.

10 Barbara Biesecker. "No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror," Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007).

11 Thomas Frank. Pity the Billionaire (New York: Henry Holt and Company), 2012, 156.

12 Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso), 2000, 97.

13 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1937, 38.

14 Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1937, 41.

15 Ibid.

16 I would align my aims with those outlined by James McDaniel in his piece on democracy and sublimity. McDaniel suggests that a democracy dominated by the “death instinct” remains trapped in something of a postmodern house of mirrors. McDaniel suggests sublimation as a key term for rescuing democracy from the tragic death of truth. “The people” and their imaginary work to constitute the polity are a key avenue for producing these orientations. James P. McDaniel, "Fantasm: The Triumph of Form." Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 1 (2000).

352

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