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Sep 06, 2011

The Tea Party's prison

Andrew ApterAndrew Apter is professor of history and anthropology at UCLA. He's on sabbatical with a Guggenheim Fellowship for the 2010-11 academic year.
 
It is now becoming painfully clear that the only radicals in America today are on the far right of the political spectrum. What began a few years ago as a bunch of mad hatters invoking the Boston Tea Party to wage war against the state has evolved into a major political force that has effectively subverted bipartisan governance. Many of us still left on the left, who were raised on Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and Lukács, and now enjoy the privileges of academic tenure, quietly confess a begrudging respect for the Tea Party zealots who are reshaping our society. While we talked revolution as students in the 1970s, these guys actually put their words into action. They have had a huge impact on the budget, forcing unprecedented cuts in government spending without allowing any increase in taxes. They appear to have paralyzed President Obama. With their populist appeals to Second Amendment solutions, they attract gun fanatics, conspiracy theorists, and domestic terrorists worthy of the Weathermen.
 
If anyone is palling around with terrorists, it is Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint and the cathectic Sarah Palin, who were not only eager to blow up the economy by forcing a default on the national debt, but have also inspired the likes of Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six Americans and wounded thirteen in his assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Gifford.
 
Loughner may be dismissed as clinically insane, but his thinking warrants closer examination precisely because it resonates so closely with the core anxieties of the Tea Party patriots. Loughner attended a prior campaign event held by Gifford, where he asked her the deceptively simple question, "What is government if words have no meaning?" Angered by what he considered her inadequate reply, Loughner decried her as a "fake" and would soon gun her down. The question of his motivation will be debated in court. To date, explanations range from paranoid schizophrenia to Palin’s congressional crosshairs map with its disturbingly prescient "RELOAD" command.
 
Whatever Loughner’s clinical state of mind, however, it is the method of his madness that speaks volumes about the political right. Not the strategy and tactics of insurgency, but the framework that shaped his understanding of political reality. The question "What is government if words have no meaning?" is no mere tripped-out provocation. It identifies the central problem of the social contract theory developed by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, each of whom explored systemic relations between meaning, money and legitimate government. It may come as a surprise that the major enlightenment political philosophies begin with theories of language, investigating how words and signs convey different forms of value, including truth value (meaning), exchange value (money) and political representation. The preconditions of Hobbes’ political covenant — the surrendering of individual freedom for protection against the state of "warre" — required collective recognition of the meanings of signs.
 
What is government if words have no meaning? For Hobbes, it was either tyranny or anarchy, and he preferred the former with the sovereign as "supreme author," whose utterances were true by definition or fiat precisely because signs are arbitrary and require arbitrary powers to fix their meanings. With Locke, the collective deliberation of meaning could take place when the propertied classes shaped the properties of signs. Rousseau’s more revolutionary contract reestablished conventional meanings between social and political actors who were alienated from their natural state and perfected by the imperatives of the General Will. In each of these theories, a notion of natural meaning based on gestural communication (indexicality in the terminology of modern semiotics) is replaced by a conventional meaning based on arbitrary signs, meanings which must be fixed in some fashion, by communitarian consensus or despotic decree.
 
What do these 17th and 18th century concerns tell us about the Tea Party today?
 
The radical right yearns to return to a mythic state of nature in which the word of God and the value of gold establish natural relations between meaning and money. During the 1990s, several survivalist and white supremacist groups actually minted counterfeit checks and bills while living off the grid. In this mythic world of unfettered markets unperturbed by government taxes, private gain equals public good, thanks to hard work and nature’s abundance. In this Edenic paradise, the problem of debt represents a satanic disconnect between natural labor and artificial gain, between the wages of work and those wages of sin based on borrowed money and borrowed time. Never mind that capitalism as a productive system pits capital investments against capital gains, in which the labor of the worker is embedded in global forces beyond his or her control. Or that the production of goods and services today is largely outsourced overseas. These historical dynamics and their domestic implications are too complex and abstract for Tea Party activists to grasp, except in the inverted ideological forms of a predatory state that sucks up taxes to give to the poor — in social programs misconstrued as giveaways to illegal immigrants and other undeserving people of color, even when directed toward the health, education and welfare of the nation.
 
The real giveaways, which the Tea Party supports, are the corporate tax-breaks and subsidies that hard-working Americans now provide for the upper one percent. In this massive redistribution of resources to the top, the middling classes now underwrite the rich, who today enjoy an unprecedented concentration of wealth and the lowest tax-burden since the Great Depression. Ironically, it was the very deregulation of government oversight that allowed the speculative bubble-to-balloon under Bush-Cheney before its foundations of toxic debt so dramatically collapsed. In its inverted mirror image of reality, however, the Tea Party’s mythic state of nature represents the problem backwards. For them, government regulation is the problem, not the solution, while the top one-percenters are the solution, not the problem. In the Tea Party’s trickle-down theory on steroids, the really rich should not be taxed because they are today’s innovators whose investments in the US economy are necessary for building the road to recovery.
 
It does not take a rocket scientist, or even a social scientist, to see the folly of this thinking. We in the academy shake our heads in disbelief as the closing of the American mind that Allan Bloom attributed to the left has slammed shut under the ranting and raving of the right. It is no surprise that education has no place in the Tea Party’s vision of national recovery. That Boehner takes his cues from Limbaugh is the final reductio ad absurdum.
 
How can we explain the lamentable myopia of the Tea Party radicals and their misguided agenda? Here I will end with an image from Plato’s myth of the cave in Book VII of the "Republic." In this passage Socrates describes how ordinary people are like prisoners chained within a cave, forced to watch shadows cast on a wall which they mistake for the actual objects blocking light. Those manipulating the objects casting shadows are likened to puppeteers, who stand in front of a fire to perpetrate their artifice. Only with training in philosophical dialectic can the prisoners break their chains, freeing themselves from illusion by turning to see the actual sources of intelligible illumination, moving from the fire in the cave, up further to the sun in the outside world, and finally to the Good as the source of all forms governing the empirical manifestations of ideas and objects. The sensible world of appearances for Plato was a pale reflection of more abstract forms (eidos) that only philosophical training could bring into view. For the prisoners, however, the illusory world of shadows and reflections is mistaken for the bedrock of reality. Within their cave, the real relations between objects and images, causes and effects, are reversed.
 
Today’s Tea Party zealots are like Plato’s prisoners, absorbing a steady diet of media mush which they mistake for objective reality. The "swift-boating" of Senator John Kerry during his 2004 presidential bid was only the most egregious expression of the widespread dissemination of false claims and accusations by the Fox propaganda machine. The fact that the bigoted fulminations of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have achieved mainstream credibility only proves the extent to which false consciousness informs the American way of life. Whose interests do these screaming heads serve? The little guy on Main Street or the corporate interests on Wall Street? Is it not obvious that Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, Halliburton and Shell-BP are the puppeteers of populist rant, which the Tea Party misapprehends as God’s truth?
 
If one thing is clear, it is that the Tea Party faithful are impervious to dialectic. And they are doing their best to keep it that way.