University of Iowa

Iowa Research Online

Theses and Dissertations

2013

Imagining American democracy: the rhetoric of

new conservative populism
Paul E. Johnson
University of Iowa

Copyright 2013 Paul Johnson

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

Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

Part of the Communication Commons

IMAGINING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: THE RHETORIC OF NEW

CONSERVATIVE POPULISM

by
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

Copyright by
PAUL E. JOHNSON
2013
All Rights Reserved

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.

ii

The considerations about the possible danger of uncontrolled metaphorsreawakens 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

iii

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, nave, 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

iv

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

vi

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 Reagans America ............................................................. 73
CHAPTER III

FINANCIAL CATACLYSM AND AN ANXIOUS "PEOPLE .. 83

Introduction .............................................................................................................. 83
Too Big, Too Fast .................................................................................................... 85
Liberalisms Promise ............................................................................................... 90
Elided Non-Moments ............................................................................................... 94
Bailout Nations 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

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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 Palins 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 Im Paying Your Mortgage...249
8. No Socialism, Comrade......250
9. Tea Party as People.....275

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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

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 Santellis slick appearance, lack of selfreflexivity, and his almost cruel attitude towards the losers in his speech was starkly
dissonant with what I thought was the mood of the country. Wasnt 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 Werent 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.
Santellis 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

suspicious of Santellis 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 Santellis 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 Santellis 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 Americas 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 Americas 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 movements appearance and
influence leave lingering questions. Namely, why did American conservatism make its

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 Partys 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
populisms 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 Partys 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

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 McGees 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

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 subjects investment in imagined unicities. From the perspective
of unicity then, rhetoric is pharmakon: it is both the poison and the cure. Rhetoric

7
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 subjects 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 projects
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 Warners 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 Warners 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. Nonappearance 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

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 Partys 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 movements 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 Partys rise during a casual encounter with the media.
However, there is a necessary slippage, one that mirrors the complex and fragmented

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
medias interpretation of the Tea Party, nor is it an attempt to articulate some unicausal
theory of either the movements 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 DiMaggios 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 Partys 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 Partys 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 Partys 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 medias 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 Partys public circulation was to reaffirm and
strengthen the market fundamentalism that DiMaggio analyzes. But in part this effect was
a result of the Tea Partys 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. DiMaggios 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 Americans conservatisms
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 footingtheres no denying that racial animus fuels the movements
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, rst 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 presidencys
symbolic function is ultimately one of homogenization rather than diversification: out of
many, one is the master phrase of the presidency.

15
The twice-racialized character of the state then explains both some elements of

the Tea Partys white demography and also the presence of elements of the movement
that challenged Obamas 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 RepublicansIt 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 Wanzers
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 DeLucas 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

16
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 Americas 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 Warners 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:
Theres no comparison. Ive gone through many news reports from 2005, and
while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I cant 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 cant bring real pitchforks, so these just
make a statement, not that she wouldnt like the real kind. Weve 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 Partys
ultimate telos is a destructive and authoritarian negativity. Locating (partly right, in my
view) the Tea Partys 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 Partys 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 Partys discontent suggests an inability to engage in what

19

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 Jrgen 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.
Mouffes 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
historys 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 presss concerns about the decline of civility and public reason
and Mouffes own more critical concern about public deliberation circle around the same
anxiety: namely, democracys 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 Santellis demand that America see his pain and
Bill Clintons 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
Partys 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 orders 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 Partys 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 Partys 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 1950s, 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 Reagans 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.

23
Chapter 2 jumps ahead to the Tea Partys self-proclaimed starting point, the 2008

financial crisis and the governments 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 Foucaults 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 Obamas 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 Obamas election. With the public raging, the elections became a moment to
reinvigorate the idea of America. Barack Obamas 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) Obamas
elections became framed as an eventual moment of national exceptionalism. However,
Obama and the medias 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 Pelosis 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 Americas 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 Santellis 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 Americas 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. Santellis

26

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

outsider.
Santellis 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 Partys 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 movements 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 Palins 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 Partys relatively immobile policy positions.
This dissertation argues that new conservative populisms 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 statephobic pose a threat to political argument and public policy. Finally, I outline a working
theory for rhetorical critics called attitudes towards democracy. Following Kenneth
Burkes 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 Partys 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.

29

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 Jacksons 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 figures 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 Progressivisms
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

31

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. Reagans 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. Reagans 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.

32
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 Nixons addresses to the Silent Majority and the forgotten
American. By making the invisibility of these Americans into the prime evidence of
their existence, Nixons 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 ones input into the public but instead became evidence of the
truth of conservatisms 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 Kazins 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 Kazins 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, Jacksons 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 Waras 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

35

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
Hofstaders 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 styles 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 powera 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 nonpartisan 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 Peoples Party more specifically.13
Indeed, the Peoples Partys 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 <sic> 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 Peoples 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

38
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 producers 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

41
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 1950s 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 Courts 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, Eisenhowers 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.

44

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 Weavers 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 individuals 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 1950s 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

45
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 states 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 ones 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 individuals 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 Schoenwalds typology is
helpful inasmuch as it traces three different modes of reasoning with respective to the

48

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

50

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 modernitys 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 nations 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 Americas 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 areasantistatism 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 anticommunisms 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 Kennedys 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 anothers 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
ones (indeed, an others) 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:

55

Barry Goldwaters 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 Warrens 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 democracys 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 democracys 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 humanitys 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 ones 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 Arendts insight about the politicals
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 Peoples Party socialists in the 1890s 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 states 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
ones private existence will only be an amplification of ones 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 Americas 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. McGirrs 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 concernsconcerns about
the states 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 ones opponent an enemy or unAmerican 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 democracyfor 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 Rights 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 Goldwaters excess that had alienated the broad middle of the
electorate that conservatism could return to the drivers 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 Europeanstyle 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 Reagans 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 Reagans appeals to the mainline conservatives and
centrist Democrats throughout the rest of the 1960s.
A Time for Choosing
A Time for Choosing was Ronald Reagans 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 Reagans 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 Goldwaters 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 ignoringor even
arguing againstthe obvious needs of many audiences he addressed.70 Even the most
successful elements of the Goldwater campaign, including his capacity for identifying
with audiences 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 Reagans 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 Reagans
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 nations
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 Reagans
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

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opposed to freedom and liberty. Reagans 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, Weve never had it
so good. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isnt 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 collectors 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 Were at
war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from
the swamp to the stars, and its 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 migr 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 peoples lives. Reagan is careful not
to construct the American people as a mass, which would threaten to activate
enthymemes associated with Americas 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 havent applied to ourselves in America.
Reagans 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 Johnsons 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 Reagans 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
well ever see on this earthproliferating 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 mans 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, were 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
Well preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or well sentence
them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.80
Reagans speech was moderated from his ordinary stump speech to conservatives,
but his speechs 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 Eisenhowers 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 Reagans 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

71

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, Reagans 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 Rights 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

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elevation of the individuals 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 detre 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. Reagans 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

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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
Reagans 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 anothers enjoyment could be rationalized as a necessity
rather than an overreaching.
Conclusion: Nixon and Reagans 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 Governments 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

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configure the peoples absence as proof of their suitability for public life. Crucial to
this understanding is Michael Warners 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. Reagans use of affective
conflation previews the success

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

Reagans Time for Choosing and Goldwaters 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 ones 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
Warners 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 Johnsons withdrawal from the election as a validation of Nixons 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

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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 Nixons 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 audiencethe
silent majorityas 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 majoritys 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.

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What distinguished Nixons 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, Nixons 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 ones 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 Nixons 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

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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 Reagans 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 Nixons 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

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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 fears
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 futurityfear 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

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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 Warners mass public becomes most clear. Warners
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

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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.
Nixons 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 Reagans flourishing
question Are you better off than you were four years ago? was seen as a high point,
with Reagans you calling out again to that mass of Americans whose economic
situations at the moment indexed, in Reagans 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
Americas 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

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appears, only introduced once at the very end of the advertisement which features his
face on a campaign button. The mass public of Reagans America was patriotic, quiet,
businesslike, and persistently productive (whether in terms of family or labor). With the
advantage of incumbency Reagans 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 Reagans
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.

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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 neoliberalisms 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 Americas promise in the circumscription of individual

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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 Obamas campaign speech A Rescue Plan for the Middle Class,
from the period of September 13th, 2008 until October 13th, 2008, the date of Obamas
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

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circulating fear and anxiety, first the development of the Main Street/Wall Street binary,
and then Obamas attempts at mortification. Because the Wall Street/Main Street binary
only works by implying a deficit in Main Streets 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 Lehmans 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-Constitutions Jay Bookman put it, even
Alan Greenspan sound<ed> downright grim in noting that this <financial collapse> is
in the process of outstripping anything Ive 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

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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 epidemican 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.
Greenspans comments particularly resonated amongst the moneyed and pundit classes:
as the architect of, more or less, twenty years of economic prosperity in America,
Greenspans 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 playbookand 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 Poors, suggested,

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marketsare gyrating ever more wildlyInvestors are like hyperactive first graders
playing musical chairsThere are a lot of investors that dont want to miss the absolute
bottom.7 Stovalls 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 Streets professional optimists have given up predicting exactly when their
industry might stabilize. One senior executivespeaking 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

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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 its painful. But thats
how the system works.9 Sohns 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. Sohns 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 markets existence.
Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, had another naturalistic take on

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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 thingwe 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 Lehmans debt might still do business
with other banks taking a hit from the bankruptcyeverythings connected to everything
elseIts a real witchs brew.12 Other articles asked the question What does the Wall

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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 economyThat 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, theyre hesitant to lendThe 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
havent been great this year. So, when the big investors are having problems, and theyre
the ones with the knowledge, its 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.
Liberalisms 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

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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 1980s-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. Its 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

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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 selfsufficient 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 languageof 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

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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 onechoice. 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 publics soft presumption to
interpet ones social location or position to act as an index for their worth as an individual

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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 Algers Ragged Dick to Will Smiths 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

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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 citizenrys faith in the
good consciences of those who govern. That liberalism rests upon this capacity to
promiseis the locus between liberalisms present and its futureits visioncreating 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. Bushs 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, liberalisms promise rests in the giving of free choice to an almost
countless number of subjects. That is, the often unexplored other side of Bushs 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

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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 anothers promise, is a
moment that liberalism can containbut it is also the more fearful moment for the liberal
machineryliberalism contains a necessary but potentially destabilizing point at which
the ability to make promises joins the ability to hesitate andto 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.
Bells 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

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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 markets
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 ones
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

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

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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 publics 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

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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.
Americas 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: Americas 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 namethe street of
streetsit 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 Stones attempt to stage a morality play about Americas
ethically questionable financial center backfires because the slick and charming Gekkos
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 Streets meltdown sent the stock market reeling which left Main
Street with one sobering throughout: It isnt over yet. Burns 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 gameeverythings connected to everything else. 40 Mike Allen of Politico reported
not only could Americas banking instabilityupend 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
<crisis> hasnt shaken Main Street nearly as much as Wall Streetbut unless the
financial markets and the housing markets stabilize, thats got to be reverberated back to
the other aspects of life in the economythe worst-case scenario is that this is a black
holethats 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
stopsSmall businesses cannot get the loans they needIndividuals cant get the loans
they needand 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 outWall 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 worstcase 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 Streets 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

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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. Pelosis partisan
speech had poisoned the well on Boehners 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 bills failure argued Because somebody hurt their
feelings, they decided to hurt the countryThats 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 Streets Great Unwind the result of
investors and speculators, including scores of American financial institutionstak(ing)
<sic> unprecedented risks(s) <sic> 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 Bells 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 blamethey 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 bills failure as a necessary mechanism to promote personal
responsibility and free enterprisewe 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 creditthe 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 pickfor a Wall Street giveaway. Moderate
Democrat Howard Gittleson shares Boehners critique of Pelosi, asking that she put
country about party instead of putting partisan politics above the nations needs.
Shirley Conley of Gardena said Congress took a three-page bailout proposal and turned

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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 Its 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 Americans 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 satisfactionas 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 whitecollar 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 Harborit 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 foreclosureHouse 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 its the rich people
and those friends in high places. Now its a crisis I think thats really sadSomebody
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 its not for Main
Street either. Its for K Street. Its 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

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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. Browns 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. Liberalisms 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

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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 sameWe
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

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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 nations 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 Americas 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 Streets 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 choices 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 liberalisms 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,
liberalisms promise. The resulting attempt by public actors to suggest a bailout as a

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necessary evil but without offering a major attitudinal and ideological course correction
threatens liberalisms 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

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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 Americas 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

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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. Youve got auto plants here in Ohioclosing their doorsYouve lost

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one of every four manufacturing jobsthe question isnt just are you better off than you
were four years ago, its 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 earthIt wont be easy, but theres
no reason we cant 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,
were going to lose. Senator McCain may be worried about losing an election, but Im
worried about Americans who are losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life
savingsthey cant 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 dont 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. Weve 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 ones
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 ones 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 emergencywe have to break that cycle of
debt. Our long-term future requires that we do whats 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, Obamas 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, Obamas 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 ones self with an ongoing economic catastrophe requires the

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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. Obamas 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
Obamas 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

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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 Obamas 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 lions 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 Streets toxic shock,
however, ran into an unforeseen barrier. Wall Streets 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

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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 governments 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 Americas
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 Obamas speech offered an opportunity

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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 Obamas 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 Shomes 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 Shomes 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

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propounds to examine how public discourse configured the moment and aftermath of
Barack Obamas 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 subjects 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 Shomes work. Rather, they were embodiments of a
certain kind of normatively idealized American subject: white, often male, and
economically secure. Shomes 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 Obamas

victory speech, newspaper coverage the day after, and Alexandra Pelosis 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 peoples 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 Obamas race. Second I look at Obamas 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 elections
result and the role of conservatism in American political life, explaining that the public

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conflation of the peoples 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 Obamas electoral victory a realization of
the American Dream. The perfect circumstances of Obamas 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 Journals 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
Obamas 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 <sic> 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 Stuckeys remarks,
while in the context of partys 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
Beasleys 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 Beasleys 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 everyones first black president. Media
narratives deployed a frame that placed race at the center of a story about American

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redemption. An evolving racial consciousness is placed parallel with Obamas 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 Obamas 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 Its a feeling we feel all the way inside
Lord, were 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. Obamas 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. Obamas 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 nations fraught racial history.10 (emphasis mine)
The condensations of what Obamas 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 loadbearing 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

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represent American. For example a Philadelphia Inquirer piece that leads with Obamas
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 Obamas 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
Tribunes 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
Obamas election helped not only to rehabilitate Americas 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 Obamas 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, Obamas race was
central to the story of his election. But in the media coverage, the warrant for this claim
of racial advance was Obamas success at triangulating and connecting with the middle
class. Obamas 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

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suggests that Obamas 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 Obamas racial background bore little clear relationship to the economy in
chaos did not seem to trouble the narrative. In part the need to affirm Obamas
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 presidencys 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. Obamas 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, Obamas race often only mattered to the extent that it could validate
Americas greatness rather than functioning as a signifier to trouble rather than stabilize
American identity. The American publics normative attachment to a certain white vision
of politics had not lapsed but Obama was a capable leader despite his racial background

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rather than because of it. Obamas 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. Its 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 Obamas 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 Its 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 Obamas speech gestures in the
direction of a democratic understanding exemplified in the writings of Jean JacquesRousseau, 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 Obamas speech contravenes one of Rousseaus 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 Obamas 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
democracys 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

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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 democracys 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.
Obamas 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 Whitmans 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 somethings 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.
Obamas 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:
Its 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. Its 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 Obamas own diverse background but also the people
who saw fit to elect him. This data suggests Muckelbauers 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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Obamas 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 Obamas 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

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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 thats 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 Obamas 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
Obamas 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 Palins arguments and the circulation of
Wurzelbachers 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 Pelosis 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
voicewere not trying to spoof them; were trying to show their side.27 Despite
Pelosis 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

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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 doesnt know real America. Hes 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 Palins 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 McCains 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

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moments for McCain/Palin on the campaign trial, where an angry agree at a rally yells
that Its time you two are representing us leveling the candidates down to the level of
the people. Another clip shows a frustrated voter stating John McCainhes the right
man for this countrybut people cant see it locating McCains 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 postelectoral discourse. For example, one telling quote from a representative of the American
citizenry who chalks up Obamas victory to an irrational youthful charisma: Its 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 soldour enemies
are dancing in the streets. At least we here in Oklahoma know a snake oil salesman when

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we see oneI 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
Obamas victory is a result of charming snake oil salesmanship rather than his ability to
legitimately gather political support.
When Obamas 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 Medias Roger Aronoff suggested Obamas 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 necessaryThe evidencecontinues to pour in.32
Eagleburgers 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
partys 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 himthe pressure within the news business to diversify and be
politically correct means more minorities, women, and young people are being
hired<they> 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 Obamas charisma or perverse market incentives
in the newsroom, the coherence the narrow version of conservative identity is sustained
rather than negated by Obamas 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 Obamas 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 doesnt 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 Americas political future. The election not

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only discloses data about Americas 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 Obamas 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 Obamas 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 Obamas 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 Obamas 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 Im not going to write Obama
off as a Bad Man because of his beliefs, contrary to the wishes of my former commenter.
And Im not going to write him off as a Bad Man or the majority of his supporters as
bad People based on what Ive seen to date. So far, as Ive said, I see him as a
basically good and decent man who, like many politicians, has engaged in some highly

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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. Ill never be a fan, but I swear Ill never take a nutroots posture either
in relishing his failures because it helps my party. Like it or not, hes 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 Obamas 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 Obamas
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 Pelosis
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 dominancethe 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

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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 Obamas 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, democracys 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 inclusions 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 subjects affectation in Pelosis documentary suggest an orientation towards
the democratic gap as a trauma. While this may initially seem an odd move, consider our

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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 humans come to
know the contours of their own bodies in such a way that Painseems 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
subjects energies do not become invested in an external object, but instead are
withdrawn into the ego.46 In either case the objects function remains the same:
loving it affords a corporeal experience of the self, indicating that the investment in the

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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
ones fixed membership in a certain idea of the nation to a rationalized attitude towards
actually existing democracy.
Stories about Obamas 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

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over democracys absence metonymized through a democratic election that could not be
understood as such. But, as Pelosis documentary suggests, the mood reflected not a
grievance over democracys 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 Obamas 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 communitys 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

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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 Obamas 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

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legitimacy of Obamas 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 ones 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

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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, Santellis 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, Santellis 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. Santellis 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 administrations push for a stimulus
bill. I use Kenneth Burkes 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 Santellis 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

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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 secondrate.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 Macleans, outlines the special
relationship between cars and American identity. Detroits 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
Chryslers Made in Detroit campaign featuring Michigan residents like rapper Eminem
and Detroit Lion Ndamokuhn Suh capitalize on Detroit and the automotive industrys
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 wouldnt have tanked and the auto industry wouldnt 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 industryhave 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 Detroits 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 wont 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 Investors 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 Dodds 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

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and their concerns. Senators Bob Shelby (RAL) and Bob Menendez (DNJ) advanced
two of these visions. Shelby frames the hearings as in the interest of the American
taxpayerI opposed the creation of the TARP. Applying the same standard, I intend to
oppose bailing out the Big Three auto manufacturersa 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.
Shelbys distinction between taxpayer interest and accounting for the inevitability of
failure, indeed, failures 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 agreedupon 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 Others enjoyment, whatever the cost. Because TARPs
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. Lacans 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 liberalisms fantasy of universal equality fails because of the subjects
self-interest, but because the subjects 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 Shelbys concern that the people get whats 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

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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 selfs supposed coherence becomes seemingly more real the
more it is contrasted with the Other. In this way the Other indicts the selfs 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 envys 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 (Dont 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

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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

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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 publics 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 selfs 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 Obamas 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, efficiencyrelated, 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

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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 worlds leading automaker. Were here
today because we made mistakes, which were learning from; because some forces
beyond our control have pushed us to the brinkandbecause savingall 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, Wagoners 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.
Wagoners 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 sacrificesthere
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 planWere 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

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economic apparatus that caused the problem but located inside enough to be affected.
Finally, Moodys 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 theres 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

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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 antibailout 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

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governments 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

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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 Obamas presidency would provide the necessary
cathective thoroughfare. However, because Obama remained committed to a post-

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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 vacuumthe 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 Obamas 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

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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 Obamas 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 Obamas 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 Obamas speech implicitly repudiated many
Americans 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

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themselves by arguing for a deliberative focus on the future rather than a forensic account
of economic tragedy.
Media accounts of Obamas inaugural reinforced the non-polemical and inwardlooking character of the speech. David Sanger, writing his account of the speech in The
New York Times, noted Obamas 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
expediences 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 Obamas 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 moments considerable uplifting power rather than its political context:
conservative columnist Kathleen Parker was awed by the speechs 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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Obamas 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 Obamas 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 havent heard a thousand times already
from the campaign trailIts 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 Obamas 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 bloblike spread of socialism and think: Yes, the world has changed, but not for the better.40
The somber state of Obamas inward looking prose also struck a chord with conservative
columnist Michael Barone, who though Obamas tone was far more somber than the
mood of the crowd of 2 million on the Mall.41 Obamas speech either soared or sunk but
either way it had little content.
Obamas 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 Obamas political performance unwisely doubled down on an American political

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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 Obamas 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

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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 administrations push continued to focus on responsibility. Economic adviser
Larry Summers spoke on Meet the Press about Obamas 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 problemsThe 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. Obamas earlier notes about the irresponsibility of
opposition work with Summers comments to emphasize that opposing Obama is
tantamount to threatening the nations 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
iswhy 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

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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 dont think will work.48 After this set of
critiques, Gregory references Obamas 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. Boehners 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

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discursive recapture of the people when the discussion turns to TARP funds. Boehner
claims, somebody has to be looking out for the taxpayers. And Im going to tell you
whatRepublicans 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 Boehners 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

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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
agendas 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

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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

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discriminate against black bodies by claiming to know their most savage impulses. Other
times, the bodys 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 discourses 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 imaginarys 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 democracys pluralizing spirit

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suggesting that it is repeated figures and tropes that calcify structures of privilege that
mediate the relationship between imagined and actually existing democracy.55 Deems
account echoes Phelans 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 peoples 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
administrations 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

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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 administrations 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
administrations 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, tonights House vote on the stimulus bill did go the
presidents way, but without a single Republican voting yes. And that is afterObama
went to Capitol Hill to lobby congressional Republicans in person, which was very
unusual.58 New York Times coverage of the bills 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 bills compromises as a loss for Democrats.61 Influential conservative
blogger Allahpundit insisted on linking the stimulus back to the TARP plan, placing it of

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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 hes
planning to, er, balance the budget. Reminds me of one of those physics problems where
waters 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

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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 legislations 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 Santellis
opinion about the administration proposal, however, his response was immediate,
impassioned, and polemical:
The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly dont 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 modificationsIll tell you what, I have
an idea. You know, the new administrations big on computers and technology
How about this, President and new administration? Why dont 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, thats a novel idea!) The show
hosts half-jokingly observe Santellis numbness to the paradox of a speaking Silent
Majority.
Three important elements in Santellis 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 Santellis 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 magazines
Samuel Staley called Santellis performance a very effective polemic.68. Rand defines
the polemic as a rhetorical form containing alienating expressions of emotion, noncontingent assentation of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of
enemies, audiences, and publics.69 Santellis speech meets the latter three criteria but
fails on the first, because his expression of emotion is an appropriate gesture of ragebased 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

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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 Santellis 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 Obamas pastor Jeremiah Wrights
angry speech as rants articulated to the figure of the angry black male.71 Olsons
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 Millers 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 minds 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

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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 1970s film Network, featuring aged news anchorturned-oracle Howard Beale losing it on television, yelling Im mad as hell, and Im 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 bodiesthese
gendered associations play off the idea that masculine bodies and minds are fixed, stable,
self-maintaining, and invulnerable. On the other hand, womens reason is fickle, both
in thoughts and desires and its tendency towards questioning is a sign of womans
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 minds keen grasp of the
situation is drawn out into public discourse in an enriching fashion. The masculine
character of Santellis rant, combined with the visual frame of other men, contributes to
my suggestion that the circulating rant contained ineffable marks of gender.
Second, Santellis 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
Santellis 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
administrations 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. Santellis 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

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winners and losers dynamic is also fundamentally -driven, premised as it is upon denying
the losers any enjoyment.
What this suggests is that both Obamas earlier vision for a prosperous America
and Santellis 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 administrations stimulus
push was based on a rhetoric of the equality of opportunity, which still leaves space for a
performance like Santellis 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? Its 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, alls I know is, is that theres 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 Santellis 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 Santellis 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 upfolks 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 Santellis rant as glorious.77 Financial analyst Larry Kudlow wrote at
National Review about Santellis 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 Santellis 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 whostopped 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 Santellis 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

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conservative bastion, situated Santellis 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 Santellis comments was that Santelli
was tapping into something thats real, a resentment of being forced to pay for someone
elses mistakes. Ive heard the same sentiments from friends who rented or remained
cramped in smaller houses as their families grew.82 National Public Radios Mara
Liasson also worried that the populist tones of Santellis rant posed a threat to the
president. She argued About this populist backlash, I think theyre worriedand rightly
soyou want to be dishing out the populism if youre the president. You dont 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 Santellis performance.84
Santellis 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. Whats more, Santellis 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. Santellis 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

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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, Nixons 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, Santellis 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 Obamas 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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Santellis 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 Obamas 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 spheres rhetoric of
normative embodiment.86 Warners residue of unrecuperated particularity suggests
that subjects have an uneasy relationship with the mass public as members of the ingroup 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 Nixons rhetoric suggests that his rhetorical brilliance lay in his ability to
convert that anxiety about belonging into an index of the Silent Majoritys paradoxical
position as the true set of Americans even as they were being victimized by

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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
Christianitys 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 majoritys ascetic renunciation of appearance sustains itself by
repeating the fact of its disembodiment and disincorporation, suggesting that what is seen
iswhat really is. Nietzsches 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

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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 Ankers observations come in light of rising income
inequality and wage stagnation since the 1980s. Drawing on Freuds 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 Ankers 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 Freuds 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 Santellis 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 Santellis

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 masculinitys
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 masculinitys 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 whitenesss claim to monopolize political speech. Meanwhile
conservatisms 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

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based on their imagined role as breadwinner. Santellis 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 Santellis 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, Santellis 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.
Santellis 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 Santellis language about winners and losers also flattened out the terms of

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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, Santellis 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, Obamas measured bipartisan rhetoric of
harmony prevented him from being an unambiguous demagogic object of identification.
The circulation and uptake of Santellis 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
Santellis 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 contentrelated 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

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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.
Deems 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 mens rights and masculine civil society

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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 Robinsons 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, Americas 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 ones 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 Robinsons 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. Santellis 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

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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 Santellis 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 Santellis 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. Santellis 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 ones 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 Santellis 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

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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 dont know whats really going on in small
towns, really.1 Sarah Boyds 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 Americas own revolutionary heritage, allowing the first person narrative
of local resident Mindy McAlindon to drive the story, McAlindon and others frustrated
by the federal governments decision to spend hundreds of billions of dollars financing
public projects and shoring up failing companies are making their feelings
knownMcAlindon is leading a slightly different push to dump tea in protestaimed at
protesting federal stimulus spending.5 Reports such as these typified the medias
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

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cultural conservatism, and the movement would dominate the new cycle and national
imagination.7
The medias 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 McGees 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 McGees 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 democracys
demand to hear the will of the people, the Tea Partys 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 forms constitutive

element as both noun and verb grants it a unique role in writing the democratic
imaginary. Second, I engage in rhetorics older debate about social movement to read
movement as a form. Third, I examine the Tea Partys 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 medias move to frame it as a
social movement. I conclude by suggesting that the Tea Partys 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

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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 subjects 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:

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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 traditionalseeming 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

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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 psychologyNo 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 spheres 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 movements ability to self-report.

Zarefsky observed that rhetoricians, in their haste to study social movements, had
confused the movements possession of a series of formal characteristics with that
movements 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 Johnsons Great
Society program, however, movements that operate within institutions can adopt antiinstitutional 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

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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 medias 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 praisedepending on who is
speaking.25 The sixties are both a moment where Americans took to the streets to oppose
injustice even as Nixonss 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

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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 Partys emergence
through stories of its organic emergence, resistant nature, and historical reference to
social movements. The Tea Partys 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 Santellis 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 theyre worried [at the White House] and rightly
soin this kind of situation, you want to be dishing out the populism if youre the
president. You dont want to be on the receiving end.27 Liassons words give legitimacy
and naturalize the existence of the good, giving it a populist veneer. Other outlets

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suggested that Santellis increasing famous ranthas struck a chord with those
American livid about bailout after bailout from Washington.28 That essay, entitled A
Revoltin Development: Obamas 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 Salons Gary Kamiya, who earlier predicted the failure of this
new conservative resistance, admits, In principle, Santellis resentment is not entirely
unjustified. Many people did take on mortgages they couldnt affordits understandable
that some people who were informed and responsibleare unhappy at the prospect that
the government is bailing out some people who werent 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

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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 Americans tumultuous past but a retained fascination, or even
attachment to, moments in the past in which agitations 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 administrations 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 trutha 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,

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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 pointany assistance the government gives to borrowers
will have to come from taxpaying American who have managed to avoid overextending
themselvesSantellis comment thatYou cant buy your way into prosperity does
reflect a deep and widely shared fear about the presidents 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
Santellis 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

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stances. The movements organic emergence is supported by the coverage in The Atlanta
Journal Constitution, which said that Santellis Tea Party idea took on a life of its
owntea 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, 41My concern is that this country is going down a dangerous path
toward socialism and thats 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 movements sentiment. The article also briefly draws the
mind back to the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, where Bostonians protest the
English governments 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 Streetfor a
Tea Party protest against President Barack Obamas $3.5 trillion budget and the
governments effort to stimulate the sagging national economy through
spending.37

The pieces 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 conservativetheyre not flag-wavers or
placard-carrierstheyve just started to realize that if they dont do things theyve 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 Partys 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

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instead of taxation foregrounds the concept of irresponsible expenditure as central to the

movement ideology, manufacturing conservatives 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, Santellis frustration had
somehow become a legitimate public sentiment. The Investors Business Daily suggested
that the mainstream media were ignoring a grass fire movement against government
spendingshowing up with hand-lettered signs were people not often seen at protests,
and that national TV and print media are conspicuous by their absencethe real reason
why major media arent interested in these protests is that they dont agree with
themthese 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
presss 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 childrens children, and the offspring of alien races
on the far side of the galaxy. It was this concern that led to spontaneous
demonstrationsappearing cost-to-coast.41 The Hartford Courant echoes the
spontaneity point, taking the case of Tanya Bachan, who has always been interested in

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politics, though she viewed it as largely a spectator sportas she grew increasingly
alarmed by the billions of dollars the federal government was spending on bailout and
stimulus packages, Bachand was driven to actI 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 figures 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 husbands 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 Obamas mortgage bailout scheme by a financial news analyst calling for a
modern-day Boston Tea Party revolt. We had just lost our house and hadmoved into
the rental houseI didnt 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 protestersIts people who are working hard for their families and they
dont want their money taken away from them to be given to people who arent 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

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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 Americas
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 consensusis 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 mlange 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

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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 eraBut its not used to ones that involved well-dressed
Republicans talking about smaller government and lower taxes. Still, a decent-sized
crowd gathered48 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

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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 movements 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 peoples
frustration disproved Obamas 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

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rhetorical appeal on the basis of ones 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 Americas achievement of a post-racial moment
that realized the nations 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

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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 Americas 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

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efforts place citizen photojournalists front and center. Mortensens 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 ones disagreements with the movements 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 Santellis 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 Warners 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
otherThe 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

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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 Courts decision to
allow Japanese internment in World War II. Malkins 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 Malkins website is entitled Tea Party photo
album: Fiscal responsibility is the new counterculture. Because many conservatives
have complained that the mainstream medias 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 Partys 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 Cant 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 overorganization, 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 Malkins 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 Malkins 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 Dont Tread On Me Gadsden flag super-imposed on an American flag.
Many markers and signs signal a kind of nostalgia, either for Americas 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

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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 democracys 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 Warners 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

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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 peoples 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

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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 Partys 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 Americans
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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Obamas plan for new taxes by suggesting that it would raise taxes on people like
himself, a small business owner. Obamas response was to suggest, Its not that I want
to punish your success. I think when you spread the wealth around that its 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: Im Black and Im 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 Im Paying Your Mortgage, an explicit reference to Santellis 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 Dont Want Your Socialism. The derisive borrowing of the term Comrade, a
Russian mode of civic address under communism positions Obama as an outsider, a

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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 peoples 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 stones 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

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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 Im 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

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this process. Second, the medias 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 Partys
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 Partys 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 selfsatisfied 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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Partys 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 Americas 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

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reading Honk If Youre 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 Partys 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 phenomenons 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 Partys 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

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suggesting either a lack of representation in the Revolutionary idioms or a lack of justice

in those drawn from the sixties. The Tea Partys 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 medias
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 presidentwe must get the attention of the smug
self-serving politicians by introducing them to fearNothing will frighten these
smug, crowing, cowardly politicians as a surge of independence. That spirit is
surging in Democrats and Republicans alike.1
That letters 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.
MSNBCs 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? Brewers
questions followed a line of thought that had become prevalent: wasnt 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 Perrys
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 Partys emergence was conditioned by
Americas 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 Peoples 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

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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 Longs program to Share the Wealth, The People Partys demand for
public ownership of the railways, or even George Wallaces 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 Partys 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 democracys limitations but plunged fully

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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 Kibbes 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
Palins 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 speakersstruck 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
movements informal leaders. He suggested There is no central governing body behind
thisIt'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

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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
peopleare 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 Lees 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. Hunts 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 peoples 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

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people.15 So where, say, The Peoples 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 governments 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

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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 governments 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 administrations 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

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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 LibertyA 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 Santellis 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
Kibbes 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 Americas
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

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participation, citizen activism, and the primacy of the governed over the government.
Thats 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
doesnt 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 Peoples Party
demanded the nationalization of the railroads, Progressives supported labor rights, Huey
Long pushed hard for policies to spread wealth, and George Wallaces 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

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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 bottomup 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

Obamas presidency. In fact the book struggles to distance itself from Rick Santellis
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 nonpartisan 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 peoples appearance warrants the legitimacy of
their claim. The insistence on the authorizing power of the people suggests an odd

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coincident point with radical democratic theory, one that may explain why the argument
ad populam maintains its broad appeal.
Ontologizing Synecdoche
Ernesto Laclaus 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
Laclaus account resonates with McGees 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

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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. Thats
why the Tea Party ethos gives the political establishmentLeft and Rightsuch
uncontrollable fits. They dont know what to make of it. They dont 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
Partyits 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

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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

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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 Partys self-understanding. Take Armey and Kibbes 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 Partys 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 persons individually coded
freedom to choose is the actually existing constraint upon another subjects 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 Partys seemingly incoherent and
empty populism as a kind of beautiful chaos that resonates with the spontaneous

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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

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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
Laclaus work on populism. For any movement to succeed in Laclaus world it must
produce demands that are the differences that make a difference; that is, there must be

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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
Laclaus words, the totalization of the popular campthe discursive crystallization of
the moment of fullness/emptinesscan take place only if a partial content takes up the
representation of a universality with which it is incommensurable.42 Laclaus 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 Partys 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

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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 movements 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 Partys 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 Partys resolutely
libertarian no help for anyone attitude could both alight upon the bailout debate. At the

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same time the demand for no bailouts is contrasted with its particularity against a political
system that does not have the peoples 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 Partys 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 peoples 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. Frasers account suggests that the cost of civic action

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in institutionalized liberal democracy is ones 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 aspectssocial
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 politicals
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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Partys 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 1994s Contract with America that was
part of the GOPs 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

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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 movements 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

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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 ones particularity has been transcended.51
The continued appeal of the Tea Partys populism derives from populisms
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 selfs 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) <sic> to the
loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,
such as ones 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 psychoanalysiss 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
Freuds 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 chapters discussion of Freuds 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

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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 subjects 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 subjects 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
energieswhich in the transference neuroses we have called anticathexesfrom 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 ones attitude towards it might
disclose symptoms of democratic mourning or melancholia. And if it is the case that the
melancholics 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 Partys
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 Partys 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 Partys

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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 Partys answer
was the same resounding No! This theory also suggests why the Tea Partys 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 Partys
sense of frustration and anger: the permanence and routine encounters with this anger
could serve to testify both to the peoples 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 Palins plenary address to the national Tea Party
convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
Sarah Palins 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 Palins 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 Palins virtuosic deployment of Lees populist style. Palins antiintellectualism 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 Palins speech
oscillates between a baroque celebration of the virtues of the purified American people
and diatribes positioned against big government. Palins speech uses two major
techniques: 1) a critique of government familiar to the American populist tradition, which

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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 Palins 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
Palins 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 Palins 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
theyre doing business. Her summons pits the Tea Party against a top-down model of
political action embodied in big government approaches typical of political liberalprogressivism: 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 Palins 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, Palins 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

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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, Palins 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 unpeople as the same, and defining the people in opposition to both. Palins 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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Theyre 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. Palins 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 didnt 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, Palins second rhetorical technique imagines a reversal in which the common
sense of the American people inhabits the federal government. Palins use of discourse
trades heavily in the claims that the distance between D.C. and the people is critical in
the formers lack of political judgment. Palins 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 wont 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, its easy to understand why Americans are shaking their heads when
Washington has broken trust with the people that these politicians are to be
serving. Were drowning in national debt and many of us have had enough. Now
the foundational principles in all of this, its 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, shell 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

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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
Palins 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 Palins 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, Palins 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

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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 publics 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 Palins speech becomes replicated as a presumption for the
argument ad populam. To the extent that observers and critics complain that Palins
discourse represent just another set of populist diatribes where specific policy alternatives
are absent, they miss the point of her arguments. Palins argumentation is not rational
according to the standards of argument theory, but by the political metric of ideological

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success, its rationality is effective precisely because it seals off its audience from a
dialectical process of exchange.
Here the rubber of Ernesto Laclaus 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 Americas 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 Laclaus 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 Partys 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

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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
Obamas agenda that substantiated the Tea Partys 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 Obamas
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 expectedthe
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 nations 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

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repudiation of Obama and decision to stack Americas 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 Americas
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 Obamas presidency is a populism
unique in Americas history. It is politically, stylistically, and ideologically distinct from
other forms. It constitutes the first explicit conservative populism, distinguishing itself
from Nixons silent majority and Reagans 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 movements goal (improving the
betterment of the people) with the movements means (a rule of popular sovereignty).
Moreover, the movement could no longer channel its populism through active networks

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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
Americas 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 peoples 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 peoples 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

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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 peoples homes and livelihoods, it also suggested a larger
crisis rooted in the tensions between liberalisms 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 democracys 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 peoples 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 systems 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

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democratic wound festered. We do not, and cannot, inhabit a perfect democracy where
difference has been annihilated in what Jrgen 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 Santellis 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 ones 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. Santellis 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 movements
relationship to the people as one that was more legitimate than not. Even outlets that
had found Santellis 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 movements 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 Partys 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
Obamas 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

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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 nations 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

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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 peoples 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

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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

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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 individuals agency proves a
seductive path for identification, not least because it offers the suggestion of the powers

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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 peoples
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 ones 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 democracys
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
peoples absence demands some form of investigation, if not compensation. Where the
peoples 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 Partys capacity to conflate all government action as part of a Big
Government agenda compare to Occupys supposedly agenda free demands? How
were both movements articulated to the 2008 financial crisis? How was Occupys
relationship to social heterogeneity and particularity different from the Tea Partys?
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
Warners 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-teaparty-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-sincerelyapologize
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 subjects 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. LexisNexis.
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

Michael Warner. Publics and Counterpublics (Boston: Zone Books, 2002), 169.

Publics and Counterpublics Boston: Zone Books, 2002, 168.

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.

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
19

Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History, 42.

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 Peoples 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.
Rick Perlstein. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American
Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009) 429.
54

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 Peacespeech: 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 JournalConstitution, 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

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. "Whats 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 Lacans 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 prisoners 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
51

Ibid.

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 Whitmans

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-bachmannwrite-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. LexisNexis.
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/aimcolumn/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 Frasers 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.

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

Chrysler, of course, was bailed out in the 1980s. 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 Eminems 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.

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-onthe-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
Others enjoyment, and envy, which is rooted in wanting to deny the Others
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. LexisNexis.
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-addresspedestrian/
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_162-503544246.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-obamasignature/
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-majormilestone/

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-what800-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/wpdyn/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-teaparties-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/kathrynjean-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-thechicago-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-world2697382.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

Ankers savvy essay does not linger long enough, however, on a driving element in
Freuds book: the relationship between sexual difference and power. This despite the fact
that the titular line of Ankers 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. LexisNexis.
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 PressGazette, March 8 2009. Lexis-Nexis.

341

Ibid.

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-teaparty-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 PostGazette 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

Burkes 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
14

Counter-Statement, 33.

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. Rands approach is
constitutive but is invested in theorizing the relationship between form and attitude, while
I suggest Gunns approach addresses how the economy of the audiences 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.
Warners 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 Burkes
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. LexisNexis.
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
34

Editorial Board, "'A Chicago Tea Party'," ibid.

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. LexisNexis.
43

Dorell Oren. "Tax Revolt a Recipe for Tea Parties," USA Today, April 13 2009. LexisNexis.
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.

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: PalgraveMacMillan, 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 movements 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 Laclaus 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 practicehis 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 authors 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-behindthe-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/. Hackers 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). Galstons 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

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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