Zizek on Populism

From page 61 of First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. I wonder whether this describes all too much of the tea-party/anti-Obama opposition.

Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry"I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!" Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess -- which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required. Therein, in this refusal-to-know, resides the properly fetishistic dimension of populism....what fetishism gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. That is why, to put it in Nietzschean terms which are here highly appropriate, the ultimate difference between a truly radical emancipatory politics and a populist politics is that the former is active, it imposes and enforces its vision, while populism is fundamentally re-active, the result of a reaction to a disturbing intruder. In other words, populism remains a version of the politics of fear: it mobilizes the crowd by stoking up fear of the corrupt external agent.

Zizek goes on to identify this perceived "refusal-to-know" with what his master Lacan described as "a disproportionate growth [of knowledge as an instrument of power] in relationship to the effects of power." In practical terms, Zizek refers to the anti-democratic tendency to reserve important decisions to experts on the basis of their superior if not exclusive knowledge. He sees a contradiction between knowledge as an argument for deference, an apparently increasing inability of common people to make informed decisions in the political realm, and the liberal capitalist affirmation of freedom of choice. People are pressured to exercise their agency and make choices "when we lack the basic cognitive coordinates needed to make a rational choice....We thus find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge." By adopting what Zizek describes as the fetish of the imagined external enemy (e.g., the Jew), populists too often simply abandon the task of understanding the situation. In the U.S. today, that fetishism takes the vaguest of forms in tirades against "the Elite." We are still tempted to blame people or factions instead of an overarching system that might only be amenable to radical change. Obsessing over whom to blame may leave us all to blame for what happens in the long run.

Anti-war Opinion Resists Categorization

After the President's speech last night I did a bit of channel surfing across the news networks. The most interesting thing I found was Rep. Dennis Kucinich's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor. Two things were noteworthy about this interview: Kucinich's apparent endorsement of the Cato Institute's position on Afghanistan (hinting at an antiwar coalition of progressives and libertarians) and the congressman's resistance to the host's attempt to force the Afghan issue into a liberal-vs-conservative paradigm. O'Reilly wanted to know why two liberals (Kucinich and the President) should disagree on Afghan strategy, but Kucinich was quite insistent that the war issue had nothing to do with conventional categories of liberals and conservatives. I'll put up a transcript or a video clip of the interview later when I have a little more functionality, but I wanted to emphasize the significance of this moment right away.

The American Bipolarchy as presently constituted thrives on the perception that, between them, liberals and conservatives (represented rightfully by the Democratic and Republican parties) have the answers to all political questions, and that all political questions can be reduced to liberal and conservative options. Any acknowledgement that this is not so is a wake-up call for the American people and a crack in the bipolar consensus that renders the Bipolarchy impervious to challenge. Ever since 2001, the War on Terror has met opposition across the present ideological continuum, from the "anti-imperialist left" to "paleoconservatives." Because opposition is concentrated outside the complacent "center," it is often dismissed as fringe opinion when it isn't smearingly attributed to anti-Semitism. But what if the appearance of antiwar opposition at both "fringes" actually proves that the "center" is less central and less representative of American opinion than many like to assume? Arguably, the antiwar phenomenon (however modest it looks at this point) is the one force in American politics that exposes the totalizing tendencies of both Democratic liberals and Republican conservatives as fraudulent. As a force more likely to unite dissenters from divergent ideological backgrounds than to divide them on self-defeating ideological lines, antiwar opposition should be a formidable organizing element for third parties in 2010. As always, of course, that will depend on people's priorities, and the war is bound to weigh less on voters in more local races. But the peculiar antiwar coalition, which still may not be aware of its own existence after eight years, should inspire more people trained to believe that theirs and other ideologies are irreconcilable to start asking what else they all may agree on, and what else they all can oppose.

Obama's War Begins

The President is expected to announce a new deployment of 30,000 Americans to Afghanistan for what reporters are calling an "endgame" to the war against the Taliban. He can be expected to argue that doing this is essential to American national security. That argument depends on the premise that a Taliban restoration would make terrorist attacks on the United States significantly more likely. It might be reasonable to ask whether historians now believe that the safe haven provided for Osama bin Laden by the Taliban prior to the 2001 invasion was necessary to the success of the September attacks on New York and Washington. A secondary argument might be that a Taliban victory would destabilize Pakistan and put that country's nuclear weapons within reach of Islamic extremists. Those weapons are most immediately a threat to India, but an American politician will want to argue that a jihadist regime in Pakistan would distribute nukes to terrorists. This was the argument against allowing Saddam Hussein to acquire nukes or other WMD, and remains the most compelling argument against Iran's acquisition of such ordinance. A common subtext is the presumed undeterrability of Muslim nations. Pakistan is deterred by India, in the first place, and by the reasonable assumption that any act of nuclear terrorism worldwide could be blamed on a theoretical jihadist regime. Iran is theoretically deterred by Israel and by a similar assumption of culpability should any of their terrorist clients use nukes at some future point. Before the invasion of Iraq it was argued that, even in the worst case, Saddam was deterred in the same way, but advocates of invasion argued that he, not even a religious fanatic, could not be dependably deterred. Around the world, Muslim hostility toward the United States and our allies is attributed to superstitious fanaticism or simple insanity. The implicit assumption is that there is no good reason for them to be hostile (instead, they "hate our freedom" or crave a Caliphate out of sheer criminal lust for power). Thus Americans can convince themselves that there is nothing that needs to be negotiated between the U.S. and Muslim nations -- which is a good thing if you believe that there is nothing negotiable in the American stance toward the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent. Once you assume that Islamists are undeterrable and impossible to negotiate with, you can only feel secure if they renounce their ambitions or are crushed to the brink of annihilation. And you'll probably prefer crushing them since you can't trust the word of such fanatics that they renounce their insane agenda of conquest. To the extent that Americans think this way, they'll expect nothing short of the extermination of the Taliban from Obama's escalation of the Afghan war. Any promises or demonstrations of a more stable Afghan government will appear chimerical as long as people believe that the Taliban is still out there. But given so many Americans' need to believe that the world is full of bogeymen who envy them and want their stuff, what evidence would satisfy them that the Taliban has been defeated? The nearest thing to objective proof would be a decisive decline in attacks on Americans, which requires Americans to be there for the sake of the experiment. This, I thought, was George W. Bush's unspoken if not unconscious strategy in Iraq: to sacrifice American lives until an exhausted enemy realized that American will was stronger than theirs. Obama now apparently intends to adopt Gen. Petreus's counterinsurgency principles as practiced in the 2007 Surge, the object being to secure territory rather than kill the enemy. I worry that this will be a counterintuitive approach if Americans believe that their own security depends on killing terrorists. Obama's war is likely to please no one unless it includes some dramatic coup that would convince American observers that a mortal blow has been struck. Republicans will second-guess every step he takes (as is their prerogative), while leftists, old-school conservatives and many libertarians will most likely renew their opposition to the War on Terror as a whole. It seems to me that all this could be avoided if we treated Muslims like any other foreigners, but Islamophobia is at least as real as "Islamofascism." One can't be discussed without the other, and trying to blame one on the other is a chicken-and-egg enterprise. Maybe there won't be any answer until Americans start asking themselves "Why do we hate them?"

Is Capitalism an Ideology?

Slavoj Zizek's newest book is First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. The title refers to recent history repeating itself, the tragedy being the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the farce being the 2008 economic crisis. Together, Zizek claims, the two events undermined the post-Communist "end of history" consensus and threw the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism into doubt. He warns readers against capitalist attempts to impose a narrative on the past decade that shifts the blame from capitalism itself to other malign forces. In the course of this he attempts an expose of capitalist ideology in order to refute claims made by capitalist apologists that their preferred economic system is not an ideology but simply a practical system proven to work. He quotes one such apologist, the economist Guy Sorman, who laments the fact that capitalism never seems to arouse the same passions that ideologies do:

From the intellectual and political standpoint, the great difficulty in administering a capitalist system is that it does not give rise to dreams; no one descends to the street to manifest in its favor. It is an economy which changed completely the human condition, which has saved humanity from misery, but no one is ready to convert himself into a martyr of this system. We should learn to deal of this paradox of a system which nobody wants, and which nobody wants because it doesn't give rise to love, which is not enchanting, not a seducer.

Zizek doesn't buy this:

This description is...patently untrue: if there was ever a system which enchanted its subjects with dreams (of freedom, of how your success depends on yourself, of the run of luck which is just around the corner, of unconstrained pleasures...), then it is capitalism. The true problem lies elsewhere: namely; how to keep people's faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis has brutally crushed such dreams? Here enters the need for a 'mature' realistic pragmatism: one should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness and accept bitter capitalist reality as the best (or the least bad) of all possible worlds.

It looks to me that Zizek is trying to fit under the "capitalism" label a lot of attitudes and "dreams" that pre-exist that particular economic construct. There are other cultural influences that make people resist dreams of perfection, particularly the Christian belief of inherent imperfectibility based on original sin but also an irreligious skepticism grounded in cynical misanthropy. But capitalism, of all systems, should be capable of pitching itself differently to different audiences. It can offer the sort of dreams Zizek describes to plain materialists (though not the martyrdom-inspiring dreams Sorman seems to envy) while offering the more intellectual likes of Sorman the consolation of believing that they are undeceived by those other dreams. It can also co-opt more hot-blooded dreams, love of country especially, to keep people motivated to defend capitalism against "alien" influences. It's still worth asking whether we're still describing capitalism at this point or some other cultural construct or ideology that finds capitalism its ideal organizing instrument. I've still got plenty of this current Zizek to read, and I'm waiting to see if he gets this all sorted out.

Bipolarchy Logic: The 'Perils of One-Party Control'

Gary Andres has just published a routine op-ed warning the Democrats against overconfidence in assuming that the 2008 elections represented a long-term political realignment in the U.S. He has nothing really special to say apart from his curious suggestion that the major parties' aspiration to control all branches of the government is self-defeating.

"[T]his year revealed that controlling all levers of power endangers a party's political health. It haunted Republicans in 2006 and Democrats in 2009," Andres writes. But how can that be? Shouldn't that represent total victory? Instead, Andres hints that victory guarantees eventual defeat. Why? Apparently because the party with exclusive power is stuck with exclusive responsibility for anything that goes wrong in the country. Thus the Republicans were blamed for Hurricane Katrina and the near-collapse of the Iraqi occupation and lost Congress in 2006, then the White House in 2008. While Andres snarkily remarks that the "mainstream" media isn't as quick to blame President Obama for this year's national blunders as they were to blame previous ones on Bush, he seems certain that if conditions remain bad or grow worse, the Democratic party will be blamed and will pay at the polls in 2010 or 2012.

Obama himself may see things the same way. That might explain why he seemed so desperate to apply a patina of bipartisanship to his major legislation. Republicans may believe it as well, which would explain why they've refused almost all such invitations from the President. As the minority party, the Republicans are officially irresponsible; they are not to be blamed if government measures fail. They are reborn in innocence as soon as they're cast from power while the opposite party takes its turn as the scapegoat. The opposition party is under no obligation to contribute constructively to necessary national projects. The logic of the Bipolarchy requires them to assume adamant opposition so that they can claim innocence at the next election. For voters, Bipolarchy logic dictates that all national failures are the fault of one party or the other, and can be remedied by switching from one party to the other. But too much success, resulting in "one party control," tips the balance the other way and threatens each party in turn with scapegoat status.

This is arguably how a Bipolarchy works in a period of national decline. Gone may be the days when one party could ride sustained prosperity to sustained hegemony. If the nation remains stagnant or slips further, each party may get more turns in power and lose power more rapidly as each takes blame for failures that are national rather than partisan. The cycle will accelerate, perhaps without limit, so long as voters continue to believe the myth of the defeated party reborn in innocence through opposition. So long as each party can blame the other for whatever goes wrong, the larger system can go without the critical examination it needs or the critical reconstruction it may need. The cycle can be broken, one hopes, if people can be made to remember that both parties have failed before, and to understand that in crisis times to stand aloof and claim innocence, as the opposition party now does, is also failure. No third party will accomplish this if it only offers more of the same of one sort or the other, exaggerated "liberalism" or exaggerated "conservatism." Despite the illusory comprehensiveness of the choice offered by the Bipolarchy, someone needs to say that both "liberalism" and "conservatism" (not just Democrats and Republicans) have failed enough already, and that there has to be another choice if the country is to survive.

Not That Kind of Black Friday

The stock market closes early today, which may prove to be a lucky break considering the grim financial news coming out of Dubai, where overextended state-run businesses are having problems making their scheduled debt payments. I've heard that anywhere from $60 to $100 billion may be in jeopardy, though this Bloomberg report warns that things could be worse yet. The last NYSE quote I saw had the market down by more than 150 points, but it could have been worse and might have gotten worse had the market kept open for normal hours. In any event, I'd like to see someone blame this one on politicians forcing the poor old banks to give mortgages to poor people.

Doug Hoffman Re-Concedes

For a week a flame of hope flickered for Doug Hoffman's Conservative party campaign for New York's 23rd Congressional District. A recount in some voting districts appeared to put Hoffman close enough to Bill Owens, the Democratic Representative-elect, for the outcome to be changed, in theory, by a count of absentee and military ballots. Hoffman went on Glenn Beck's radio show to "un-concede" the election and resumed fundraising.

Yesterday, with less fanfare, Hoffman again conceded the election to Owens. It was not, however, as complete a concession as objectivity might require. On his website, Hoffman wrote:

[My supporters] proved that average Americans can stand up and make their voices heard, all the way from Watertown to Washington. They proved that the voters are sick and tired of wasteful government spending, high taxes and an ever growing deficit. And most importantly, that when it comes to politics: principles do matter. While we may have lost the election, this race proved that Americans are sick and tired of the status quo in both Albany and Washington.

What Hoffman's supporters proved and what the voters proved are two different things. The Hoffman movement did prove that an ideologically motivated group can mount a credible challenge to their Bipolarchy minders (the Republican party in this case) and drive a major-party candidate from the field. That deserves recognition and a degree of respect, regardless of your opinion of what Hoffman stood for. But Hoffman's supporters, in the end, were a minority of voters in the 23rd District. It could be argued that a Democratic victory in a district that had been Republican almost since the party's founding proves the opposite of what Hoffman claims: that voters are not sick and tired of what Hoffman claims to be wasteful spending, excessive taxes, etc. Does the fact that Hoffman lost prove that Americans are not sick and tired of the state and national status quo? I wouldn't go that far. But the fact Hoffman still refuses to concede is that his was the one race in the nation that was a referendum on movement conservatism rather than an alleged referendum on the Obama administration, and the movement lost. Until he admits that, the campaign really isn't over; it's only segueing into 2010 mode.

Land Mines: Another Obama Cop-out

A bipartisan consensus exists on at least one issue in American military and foreign policy: land mines are essential to national defense. As a result, President Obama joins his two predecessors, fellow Democrat Clinton and Republican Bush, in refusing to sign the Ottawa Treaty, also known as the Mine Ban Treaty. Your safety, the Obama Administration will have you believe, depends on our unrestricted ability to blow the legs off people. But is it our safety, really, that matters? Consider the explanation given by this Obama spokesman: "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defence needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention,"

Minimal research reveals that one friend in particular is the object of American concern: South Korea. The Korean DMZ is one of the few areas on Earth where people still anticipate an old-school human-wave tank-supported invasion of one country by another. Since 1997, the United States has demanded that the Ottawa Treaty include an exception for Korea on the ground that South Korea's right to self-defense, and America's right to defend South Korea, entitles them to the presumably unrestricted use of land mines to thwart North Korean invaders. Denied the exception, the U.S. implicitly affirms the right to use land mines in all circumstances, and surrenders any moral authority to reprimand anyone who uses them in any circumstance.

The U.S. isn't the only power refusing to sign the treaty. Perhaps predictably, neither Pakistan nor India have signed, but neither has China and Russia. Isn't that excellent company for our progressive land? As I understand it, Senator Obama of Illinois once voted in favor of ratifying the Ottawa Treaty. Some observers will point to his current policy as proof that power makes idealists like him more responsible and realistic about security and military force. But isn't there something else power does to people? What did Lord Acton say...?

"Botax:" A Brilliant Idea and its Critic

Sound the alarm! Now the mean old government wants to tax plastic surgery. Sounds like a good idea to me, but as soon as someone proposes any tax, even one that can be justified as a luxury, "sin" or even vanity tax, someone else pops up to explain how it will hold back economic growth. Sounding the alarm this time is Christopher Beam, a writer for Slate, whose main argument against taxing these procedures (apart from a lame attempt to claim that poor people have them, too) is that plastic surgery makes people more successful and, arguably, more productive. He can't even make that claim too confidently; objectivity compels Beam to acknowledge skeptics who suggest that prettier people may make more money due to favoritism rather than increased industriousness. But he thinks that the possibility that plastic surgery may improve productivity is reason enough to give up any idea of taxing the procedures. Best of all, though, this tribune against taxation wants Congress to commission a study on the subject before voting on the so-called "Botax." That sounds like money well spent, but where's it going to come from, genius? Maybe I should be more charitable this week, but Christopher Beam sounds like an Idiot of the Week candidate.

A "Brutal Choice" Between Values.

David Brooks attempts an objective look at the long-term stakes involved in the debate over health-care reform in his latest New York Times column. He usually comes across as a moderate conservative, but what's interesting about this article is that his either-or choice isn't necessarily in sync with Republican-vs-Democrat or conservative-vs-liberal dichotomies. The choice he sees us facing is between "vitality" and "security," but who'd object to either one? The problem, Brooks claims, is that there has to be a trade-off, despite the optimistic hopes of Democrats that they could reform health care without imposing extra costs on the productive economy. Brooks credits them with facing up to necessity by advocating higher taxes, but he warns that the current plan will divert resources from the productive economy (i.e. "vitality") to the less productive, with uncertain consequences to American vitality.

Brooks concedes that it's natural in the course of history that nations will want more security for their citizens to make up for the "large amount of cruelty and pain" that came with dynamic economic expansion. He admits that "poor people living in misery" and "workers suffering from exploitation" were part of the price of early American vitality, and that it's inevitable that nations "use money to buy civilization" in the form of social welfare programs, (i.e. "security"). But he worries that drastically expanding health-care costs, despite the Democrats' honest efforts to control them, may undermine our economic vitality in some undefined way. His point is not that health-care reform will fail to provide what it promises; he actually believes that the current legislation "would almost certainly ease the anxiety of the uninsured ... without damaging the care the rest of us receive." He simply believes that, with rare exceptions in history like the U.S. in the mid-20th century, security (or "civilization") comes at a cost to vitality, just as vitality often comes at a cost to security.

There's an implicit premise behind the article, which is that security ultimately depends on vitality. Brooks would probably argue that the country acquired the means to make itself more civilized and offer more security to citizens only because of its early economic vitality, regardless of the costs it seemed to impose in the form of personal insecurity, cruelty, exploitation, etc. He would most likely also argue that security can be pursued by governments to a point when the expenses involved would sap economic vitality so badly that security, too, would be impossible. Would he go further and argue that some personal insecurity is the price we must pay to maintain the economic vitality necessary to guarantee at least some security? I think he might if he could phrase the argument in order to portray the perfect as the enemy of the good. But there's also an unexamined premise in his article, or at least a vagueness about what, exactly, constitutes desirable vitality. "The unregulated market," he notes, "wants to direct capital to the productive and the young." But productivity is one thing, youth another, -- and greed another thing yet. Brooks might ask himself whether greed directs capital to itself in the unregulated market in a way that has nothing to do with productivity and thus could be reformed or dispensed with to allow a sufficient flow of capital toward both vitality and security. He might not think so, but I'd like to see him address the point.

In any event, Brooks sums up the matter in a manner admirably free of the usual ideological cant. He doesn't call this a choice between "freedom" and its opposite, or between "personal responsibility" and "dependence on big government." Nevertheless, Brooks says we face what he calls a brutal choice:

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one. We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.

To see how people are responding to Brooks, here's a link to readers' comments on the article from the Times website.

The Right Hand Doesn't Know What the Left Hand's Doing

I don't know whether to be amused or annoyed whenever someone calls the President a socialist or says that he's out to "destroy capitalism," as Mr. Right put it recently. Comments like those are put in their proper absurd light when real leftists comment on the Obama administration. Here's Alexander Cockburn, for instance, in the newest issue of The Nation:

It's exactly as I predicted from the start. The past year has yielded one surrender by the administration after another -- whether it be renditions, phone-tapping or an accelerated schedule in giving the finger to organized labors, whose troops had done the most to put Obama in the White House. Even before his election last November, Obama extinguished all hopes -- risible though they were to those who had followed the senator's brief political career -- that he would harvest public fury at Wall Street and curb the power of the banks. He voted for the Bush/Paulson bank bailout and then hired Lawrence Summers -- one of the prime architects of the country's economic death plunge -- as his chief economic adviser.

You would think that people would take the word of authentic leftists that Obama is no leftist, but writers like Cockburn are dismissed as extremists or fringe elements. No one will deny that Cockburn himself is a leftist, but leftists apparently have no say in saying who's a leftist and who's not. That responsibility has been claimed by the right, the Republican party and the radio talkers. The left is whoever they say is the left. So Katha Pollitt's complaints against Obama and the congressional Democrats in the same issue are also irrelevant. "If I ever give that woman another dime," she writes, referring to Claire McCaskill, a supporter of the Stupak Amendment, "shoot me." Pollitt feels sold out by the Democracy, believing as Cockburn does that progressives effectively elected Obama only to be betrayed by concessions to Blue Dogs. She'd probably agree that Obama is not a man of the left, but who even reads or hears these complaints without subscribing to progressive media or publications. When in the "MSM" is a conservative calling Obama a leftist or socialist challenged by someone ready to criticize Obama for not being one?

It's no wonder that Americans feel that their options are limited, or don't know that they have more choices. Why should they look up genuine leftist organizations when they're told that the Democrats are the leftist party, and that a choice between Left and Right is perfectly represented by the American Bipolarchy of Democratic and Republican parties? The Bipolarchy is a two-way street, of course, and Cockburn also warns against identifying the Republicans with the conservative fringe. Using C. Wright Mills's terminology, he predicts that "the 'sophisticated right' equipped with big Republican money will assert its power over the 'wild-eyed Utopian capitalists.' Glenn Beck will burst the envelope he's already pushing or be impaled on some disclosure from his fraught psychic past. Sarah Palin will be similarly discredited as a public figure." As a result, he predicts, the GOP will retake the House of Representatives next year. In this case, he expects the Democrats to be complacent in their belief that they'll face easy targets in 2010. In Cockburn's view, they'd be buying into their own propaganda that the Republican party as an institution represents the far right. It serves their interests to persuade people that the likes of Beck or Rush Limbaugh are the true face of the Republican party (rather than representatives of grass-roots reaction that isn't necessarily powerful in its own right), because that's preferable to what Cockburn implies is the truth: that the true faces of both major parties look more alike than either would admit.