And Now We Are Sad Again: Reflections on the Midterm Elections

Posted by Eli S. Evans on Nov 29, 2010 in Zeit | 2 comments

Assuming its intent was to provide a kind of push-back, heading into the midterm elections, against the right wing momentum generated by Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s pre-election Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive served as a useful reminder that the discourse of fear is not one that favors the left. But it doesn’t seem to have served for much more than that. John Boehner – yet another Republican whose name reminds us of a sexualized part of the human anatomy – is the new face of political power in the United States, which is bad news for progressives unless they happen to be of the smarmy t-shirt making variety (and for those who are, I offer up the following t-shirtable slogan, free of charge: “Put a Dick and Bush together and what do you get? A Boehner!”).

As for the part of things the Stewart/Colbert rally seemed to get right, the reasons for this are effectively and polemically synthesized in Alain Badiou’s recent book on France’s rich, xenophobic dickhead of a president Nicolas Sarkozy, The Meaning of Sarkozy. In remarks delivered during a seminar just after the aforementioned rich xenophobic dickhead’s election in 2007, and later rewritten as the second chapter of the aforementioned book, Badiou offers an “analysis of the electoral context” in France that could just as easily be applied to the recent electoral context in the United States. “[T]he situation,” Badiou writes of the campaign cycle that ended with Sarkozy’s triumph, “was one of a conflict between two fears, an original fear and a derivative one. The original fear belongs to the section of the population who dread something happening that will precipitate their decline, and it is, Badiou writes, “focused on the traditional scapegoats – foreigners, the poor, distance countries that we do not want to resemble.” This “original fear,” according to Badiou, is the “passion,” when it comes to fear, of the right. By contrast to this “original fear,” Badiou describes a “derivative” fear, or “second fear,” that is in fact nothing more than a “fear of the [first] fear, the fear of what this original fear will lead to.” This second, derivative fear, Badiou writes, is the “passion,” when it comes to fear, of the left: the fear that is proper to its political program.

Where a political battle – an electoral cycle, in this case – entails a confrontation of these two fears, Badiou contends, the “original fear,” and the political orientation to which it corresponds, is in almost all cases bound to prevail, and moreover “not without a certain logic. If you have to be afraid, then it’s better to be afraid of something other than simple fear.” I agree with the advantage Badiou ascribes to the right, in this context, but think of it somewhat differently. Persisting in the bellicose metaphorics he suggests, I would argue that when fear provides the rhetorical framework for the kind of democratic or pseudo-democratic political “confrontation” Badiou describes – that is to say, a campaign or electoral cycle – the left finds itself at any apparently insuperable disadvantage. This disadvantage works roughly as follows: If voters, rather than one another, are the target of the respective polarities in such a confrontation, such that, as in an old-fashioned hunting contest, the side that bags the most of them wins, then the situation seems to be that the left, given the past horrors wrought by the politics of fear, has, in the form of its “derivative” fear, something like a rocket or a really big grenade it can toss into the mass of voters to take out a whole lot of them at once. By contrast, the right’s “original” fear will never be as powerful as the left’s “derivative” fear, but it is endlessly renewable, like some sort of magically bottomless box of bullets. After all, nearly anything – and anyone other than those who are currently in charge – has the potential to disrupt the situation as it currently stands and in so doing, since the future is always up for grabs regardless of how carefully we might try to calculate it, potentially make it worse. Perhaps you’re not afraid of the blacks, for example, marching into your neighborhood and raping your women and pillaging your property (or children), but in that case you may very well be afraid of illegal immigrants barnstorming the border and, with a work ethic girded by the desperation of their provenance, taking the jobs that should rightfully be yours. And if you’re not afraid of illegal immigrants – for one could very well argue that the jobs they take are often jobs the rest of us would not, and moreover for less money – taking a job that ought to be yours, then perhaps you will be afraid of socialists who make it their job to take the money you’ve earned at the job you already have, money that is rightfully yours, and dole it out to lazy minorities and hapless hippies. And if you’re not afraid of that – since there are plenty of arguments to be made for the collective benefits of at least some redistribution of wealth – then you will almost surely be afraid of Muslim terrorists, who don’t so much want to take what’s yours as just blow it all to smithereens. And even then, even if you’re not afraid of Muslim terrorists, perhaps you’ll be afraid of Jesus swooping on down to punish you – because he will be punishing all of us, and you are a part of all of us – for the sins of abortion and homosexuality and God (and, apparently, a disproportionately large number of powerful evangelical and Catholic priests) knows what else. Each one of these potential threats is, for the right, like an “original” fear bullet, and since the supply is unending they can just keep on shooting them until, long after the left’s big fear of fear rocket-grenade has done its damage, they’ve picked off every voter still standing.

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It cannot be emphasized enough that the left’s “derivative” fear rocket, or grenade, or whatever you want to call it, really is a ferocious one. Consider, as a measure of its power, that in these last elections, much as in all of the Bush era elections (including the disputed first), Democrats bagged nearly half of all voters. That’s a lot of voters to take out with a single shot. The problem for the progressive political polarity, however, is that nearly half is not nearly enough when you’ve already used up your entire arsenal and the other side can just keep on blasting away. This means that if the left is going to have a chance in the ongoing politico-culture war in which the recent midterm elections represented only the latest battle, the rhetorical framework within which future battles play out – the terms of the “confrontation,” as Badiou describes it – is going to have to be shifted to one in which it, rather than its adversary, holds the advantage. Otherwise, simple mathematics declares that, despite a few inevitable aberrations here and there, the right, with rich xenophobic dickheads like Badiou’s Sarkozy leading the way, will ultimately prevail.

The first condition of any such shift, of course, is the construction of an alternative rhetorical framework – a language, other than the language of fear, for voters to think and talk politics in, particularly during an active political confrontation such as a campaign cycle. This, I think it is fair to say, was the essential proposition of the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive: to both offer up and argue for the rhetoric “sanity,” precisely as opposed to that of fear. The apparent need, however, to build, albeit in farcical form, this fear into the very performance of the rally in order to give it traction, however, revealed its failure in advance. Indeed, if Stewart’s “sanity” was a notion that could not so much as be articulated except by explicit reference to the kind of right wing fear-mongering his partner-in-comedy Colbert has made a career spoofing, it is because it was, despite so many claims to the contrary, nothing more than a derivative of it: precisely, in fact, the  “derivative” fear Badiou describes in his book on, or against, Sarkozy.

Given this fundamental failure of the biggest left-wing political event of the recent campaign cycle to so much as offer an actual alternative to the language of fear, no less one that would be more appealing to voters than the language of fear, it can hardly come as a surprise that those elections were, for the Democratic Party and progressive Americans who just two years ago thought we had finally seized control of the future of our country, a bloodbath. Even the President, who two years ago rode into office on the crest of an unprecedented wave of liberal optimism, had seen it coming. Before the dust had so much as had a chance to settle on his fallen pseudo-liberal comrades in the House and Senate, Obama stepped forward to assume responsibility for their demise. “The message of the election,” he affirmed in a post-election speech that had surely been written pre-election – a speech during which he was described by perhaps a few too many media writers as “chastened” – “is I need to do a better job.”

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Looking back with the perspective offered by a few weeks and a few new tidbits of information – a recent poll indicated, for instance, that over 50% of Americans don’t realize that Republicans have taken control of the House – I agree that the President needs to do a better job. But I’m not convinced he understands at exactly what. Obama was elected not only because of the – at the time – undeniably palpable failures of the outgoing Republican administration led by a man who could surely be described in the terms in which Badiou describes France’s current president in The Meaning of Sarkozy: a “little president.” He was also, and perhaps above all, elected because he succeeded, precisely where Stewart and Colbert failed, in proposing an alternative rhetorical framework within which for voters to think and talk and ultimately decide the election’s determining political questions: the rhetoric of what he and his campaign team called – and, perhaps more to the point, branded – “Hope.” Within this rhetorical framework, as it turns out, the left holds a distinct advantage over the right, and one moreover that is in many ways analogous to that held by the right when politics is hashed out within the framework of fear. The hope that is, to use Badiou’s language, the “passion” of the left, is, like the fear that is proper to the right, essentially interminable: an endlessly renewable hope that the world might yet get better, more just, happier, healthier, than it already is, in countless possible or imaginable ways, and along countless fronts. Meanwhile, the hope that is the “passion” of the right, the passion of conservatism, is a big grenade-sized hope, but ultimately, like the “derivative” fear that is the passion of, and proper to, the left, both singular and, it seems, not quite powerful enough: the hope that things will not get worse.

Of course, whether a given political confrontation is framed within the rhetoric of hope or fear is all but irrelevant when it comes to dyed-in-the-wool liberals and conservatives – in this country, your party-line Democrats and your party-line Republicans – because, their passions perfectly aligned with one political polarity or another, they’re going to vote the same way regardless of where, and when, and in what language, a given political confrontation takes place. For them, moreover, a choice between a rhetorical framework that puts their side at the advantage, and a rhetorical framework that puts the other side at the advantage, they – or we, since I, despite frequent dissatisfactions, identify as an essentially party-line Democrat and at least theoretically a straight ahead progressive – is in fact not a choice at all but a given, a decision taken in advance. But such is not the case when it comes to that little handful of people whose passions don’t perfectly align with those of one political polarity or another – the ones, when elections are near, that the people on TV call the “swing voters,” and on whose decisions, all seem to agree, the results of elections inevitably ride. These people – perhaps they, in fact, are the real targets in the electoral hunting competition I describe above, and the rest of us only more or less ineffectual soldiers – are people who, for example, might fear something, or someone, more than they fear what a politics of fear will lead to. But at the same time they may hope that something, somehow, will get better – health care, the justice system, education, our shared sense of brotherhood – with far more passion than they hope that things will simply not get worse. As these two passions correspond to two different political polarities, the rhetorical framework within which the people who simultaneously hold them think through a given political confrontation, like an election, may very well determine to which party they concede their vote. Even more, as they are not attached to one political polarity or another, when they are faced with the option between multiple rhetorical frameworks, it is not given in advance that they will prefer that which puts their side at the greatest advantage: rather, they are free to choose.

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For years – certainly since September 11^th of 2001, and probably from before that time – there was no viable alternative, when it came time to think and talk politics, to the rhetoric of fear. It was not, perhaps, the only rhetorical framework in which people could think and talk about politics, but the alternatives that existed – Badiou himself, for instance, with his figure of “minimal difference” as the foundation for emancipatory politics, might be thought to have provided one such alternative – were generally, in one way or another, specialized and demographically circumscribed. Then, the Obama machine – a political and branding machine rolled into one with almost terrifying efficiency – offered us this other space, this other framework, the language of what they called “Hope,” and lo and behold their man won. He won not because party-line Democrats, committed progressives, and dyed-in-the-wool liberals voted for him. This, we know quite well, is not how elections are decided. He won because those people in the middle, the people whose passions don’t perfectly align with one political polarity or another, voted for him. But what he and his people seem not to have realized is that those votes in themselves, in swinging the way they swung, reflected – after perhaps just a few too many years of having no discursive space but that circumscribed by the idea of fear within which to think and talk politics, a few too many years of being told day after day by Bush and his cohorts what we needed to be afraid of now, and what we needed to be afraid of next, and what we might need to be afraid of in the future, and what we should have been afraid of already, and of having no viable alternative to thinking and talking about every political question, every political controversy, every political decision, within that discursive space – a collective choice on the part of those so-called swing voters, when given the option between the two, to think and talk the defining questions of that political confrontation in the language of hope, rather than that of fear. For had they chosen otherwise, they would have voted differently, and Obama would not have – could not have, according to a certain logic – prevailed.

In the years since he did, in fact, prevail – not so many, in final analysis, though the acceleration of history we are all living together seems to render every year somehow longer than the previous – Obama has indeed followed through on some of the most important promises he made as the great candidate of hope. Against powerful opposition, he passed meaningful, if not altogether ideal, health care reform. Of course, the distinction between combat and non-combat troops on which the supposed fulfillment of his pledge to withdraw from Iraq is an awfully shaky one, but all the same there has been a numerically significant reduction in troops there, and by extension the corresponding likelihood of death and injury. The economy remains in shambles here, but it’s pretty much in shambles everywhere but Germany, and although what they call the “recovery” has, it is true, not been as palpable as many who have suffered the consequences of the global economic meltdown most acutely would like for it to be, there have been consistent signs of improvement. So Obama’s failure, I would argue – the one he himself recognized the day after his party was spanked in the midterm elections – ultimately has nothing to do with policy or political efficacy. Rather, his failure is that he has abandoned the rhetorical project that comprised the core – the bloody core – of his presidential campaign: the daily construction, and reconstruction of this other discursive space, this other rhetorical framework, in which to think through and talk about the confrontation between far right and middle-left that is contemporary politics. Once elected, he stopped telling us, every day, over and over again, what we can hope for now, and what we may be able to hope for tomorrow, and what we might yet be able to hope for in the future, and what we perhaps should have been hoping for already, and so there was nothing left but the always stalwart language of fear in which to think and talk and finally decide the latest political confrontation. It results, seen that way, were the only results that could have been.

It is we liberals, we progressives – the reasonable ones, anyway, who never mistook him in the first place for the kind of revolutionary who simply does not come to power by way of peaceful elections – that, by abandoning the rhetorical project of his campaign, Obama has failed. Our hopes, so many years on hold, have already been dashed. In Wisconsin, my home state, we’d secured some $800 million of Federal stimulus money to build a high-speed train line that would connect Milwaukee to Madison, and eventually both cities to Chicago and Minneapolis. For a few months there, we liberals, we progressives, had a vision of a more interconnected and cosmopolitan Upper Midwest, one in which there would be more opportunities for artistic and entrepreneurial cross-pollination, and in which we would not be so confined, during the long winter months, to our little snowed-in islands, but linked by physical bridges that would become creative and intellectual bridges. But our new govern-elect, a proud Republican and no less proud college dropout by the name of Scott Walker, is as opposed to trains as he was, when he ran successfully for Milwaukee County Executive eight years ago, to things like bicycle lanes on city streets and the maintenance of city parks, and he has pledged to send back the $800 million dollars in Federal money and stop this misguided train-building project before it ever starts. And now we, who were sad for so many years, and who then suddenly found ourselves dreaming so big, are sad again. I don’t even live in Wisconsin, these days, and I’m sad – sad, and, as it happens, that much less likely to ever move back.

All that being said, if it is we train- and bike-loving Democrat progressive liberals who Obama has failed, it is nonetheless those poor souls lost in the political middle, and yet whose migrations ultimately decide where the great electoral hunting contests will have to be staged, that he has most profoundly betrayed. And what he owes them, at least as much as us, now that the dust has settled on his first (and hopefully not last) midterm elections and those fallen comrades of his, publicly mourned but in reality not much worse for the wear, have dragged their bodies off to their new jobs as lobbyists or consultants or lawyers, is not the more stimulating economic stimuli, or more finely tweaked health care reform plan, he has pledged to pursue, but rather a renewal of the rhetorical project of his campaign – the project of every day constructing, and then reconstructing, and then reconstructing once more, this happier and, yes, more hopeful alternative to the language of fear and looming threat and imminent danger within which we have all, for too many years now, been held hostage.