Bush and Identity
Bush Himself: Neoconservative Method and Identity
Bush Himself: Neoconservative Method and Identity
The foolhardy search for a silver lining on any of the clouds now crowding the global-political sky has led me to hope (again, I stress, foolishly) for the demise of a certain kind of large-scale planning. The absolute dominance of the unforseen in world events has led authorities of every kind - even and especially academics and journalists - into an ever-intensifying orgy of predictive hubris. The more obscure the future becomes, the more politicians, planners, and observers compulsivley try to predict it - sometimes with shocking arrogance. The recent examples of obvious and definitive failures of such large-scale predictions (on all sides in the debate surrounding the invasion and occupation of Iraq) do not seem to discourage anyone. But this is a neccessary consequence in a world where nearly everyone is wrong. We end up, as we often have, with all surviving authorities claiming predictive victory, claiming that they “knew it would happen like this.” The truth, of course, in its obvious ambiguity, defying all sides, shows itself as the essential failure of the debate. It manifests itself as the greif of survivors of global catastrophe who never had the chance to exercise an armchair (or battleroom) ‘predictive authority.’
All this might add up to the utter disgrace of the “command and control” ethics of political, cultural, and scientific expertise, if only we had not learned this very lesson on so many previous occasions over the course of the last century. Still, such lessons continue to resonante even when they seem to be forgotten. The myth of objectivity, which is the central tenet of all practical varieties of expertise, has faded more quickley in recent years - especially in the mainstream news media. We only need to think of the verbal promise of Fox News of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting- which started in 1999 as a falsity, but had become a gross irony or an ‘open lie’ by 2003. Without realizing it, this kind of ‘journalism’ has helped out and even necessitated the growth of its market nemesis in the form of blogging culture, which threatens to democratize published discourse among the upper-middle classes of the world. In this trend, and in Michael Moore’s uncanny rhetoric of non-objectivity, along with the Bush Administration’s flippancy toward the expert-defended Kyoto Protocol, we have begun to see a strangley ‘editorial’ cultural climate emerging on both sides of the Atlantic.
I begin to suspect that the only regime-change that has been successfully accomplished in recent years is the replacement of a supposedly knowledgeable body of ‘Experts’ in every field with an army of frankly conjectural and openly biased ‘Opinionates’ outside every field. This shift in the bio-political power dynamic can be observed in most discourses. It is not that expertise is no longer a strong cultural currency (expertise as academic specialization is still in the first stages of ascendency), but rather that the ascendency of the unforseen as such has intensified dramatically in recent years, and has given confidence to many who have been excluded from the ground of experrtise in one way or another.
It is easy to see how this may all contribute to the creation of a more open society. However, no one has exploited the tragic hubris of expertise to more distinct advantage than the most powerful opponent of open society in the world, the Bush Administration. The most difficult detail of the situation is that, while using the anti-intellectual momentum of the public mistrust of experts, the Administration at once employs the rhetoric of predictive expertise for its own purposes. The first evidence of such a dynamic is suggested by the assymetric presence of leagues of theory-based academics in an administration led by a president who, as the late Hunter S. Thompson observed, ‘talks like a donkey.’ The second clue comes in the paradox of a Yale-educated billionaire from a ‘great’ Connecticut family, who was himself born in New Haven, speaking with a rural, Texas accent. Out of such uncanniness, a picture quickley emerges of a meticulously engineered attempt to produce an image of a leader who fits a viscious stereotype of damaged masculinity and outright stupidity. In this context we might substitute the most common of Shakesperean observations, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't,” with “There is method in the stupidity.” Whose method, though? Bush’s? Bush Senior’s? Or his cabinet? Among those who have observed this dynamic, the most common answer is Karl Rove. This question is impossible to answer decisivley. But even if we never have our answer, even if it is ‘no one’s’ method in particular, and this is the sticking point, the method still remains a method.
How does the method work? It’s goal is to subvert the pretence to expertise shared by the upper-middle class, liberal intelligensia of North America and Western Europe, who comprise an increasingly large percentage of the population in these tiny corners of the world. Such a method begins by seeing the liberal intelligensia as a new universal class, with the power to historically outmode such instituions as the church, pure capitalism, fundamental rights, and (now) security. This point of view is not wholly different than that of many 19th Century Russian Nihlists like Pisarev and Chernyshevsky. But unlike the Russian Nihlists, the ‘enactors’ of the neoconservative method (and this is where they get tricky) perform a counter-imitative negation of the values of the liberal intelligensia which spawned them. This is to say that the modern neoconservatives reverse the values of their class while actually reinstating them in ever-purer manifestations.
This is the very essence of the concept of the counter-imitative, as introduced to sociology by French theorist Gabriel Tarde: in our opposition or resistance, we are guided by the logic of our opponents, and we are either conscious of this or not (this can be used against us, or not). Of course, the ascendency of G. W. Bush at first seems to occur as a negation of the academic socialism, liberalism, and neo-liberalism of North America and Western Europe - until we begin to pay attention to all the tiny details that don’t seem to fit in the story. (These details, I might add, have become enormous unseen chasms for would-be critics of Bush) Firstly, the administration seems, like Odysseus, to sail everywhere by paradox. This is announced in the frankly oxymronic banner of “compassionate conservatism,” since it is well known that of all conservative state governors, Bush Jr. was the very least compassionate (having conducted hundreds of questionable and useless executions). The contradictions in the cultural position of neoconservatism are present everywhere, precisley because they have been carefully nurtured everywhere.
It is not entirley the “smart people” behind Bush who are responsible for this strategy of counter-imitation, but very probably Bush himself. His case highlights the fact that speech pattern and accent are no longer determined (if they ever were) by class, ethnicity, and geography. In the present day United States, a Connecticut Yankee billionaire, whose father has the dominant North-Eastern accent, can decide that he’s a working-class Texas cowboy, adopt the accent, and rise as high as the Presidency in public visibility, without anyone pointing out that this is fraudulent. Bush Jr. was intimate, throughout most of his childhood and early adulthood, with the elites of the New England Liberal intelligensia - not as hated enemies, but as important teachers and even as friends. It is inconceivable that he could have managed to escape Yale without vast experience in the same culture and vernacular that produced the Clintons and their allies, just as he did not escape his brief stays in Texas without a (somewhat forced) working-class West Texas accent. As many have pointed out, his policies and cabinet appointments show a similar counter-imitation: appointing more ethinic minorities to his cabinet than Clinton, allowing openly gay soldiers to serve in the military, giving the go-ahead to gay civil unions, impeding nearly all first-amendment rights, and intensifying the Blair-Clinton policy of turning the Anglo-American organism into a global police entity. These were each and all, according to their conservative opponents, treasured items on the Democratic Clinton platform. In the ‘changed world’ of post-9/11 however (where the sun rises in the West and salt tastes like sugar), all political ‘binaries’ such as right and left, north and south, and so on, are open, not for chatoic displacement, but for careful replacment by those who have the power to negotiate their own identity. In the fluidity of his personal identity, Bush has created a visage of conservatism that simultaneously enacts huge swaths of the ‘liberal’ agenda. It is not at all that he is actually a conservative capitalist in opposition to the upper-middle class expert intelligensia in North America and Western Europe, but that he can suddenly enact many of thier most cherished policies without them even noticing. This appropriation of liberalism’s most rhetorically-cherished (but not most important or most radical) agendas serves to confuse the rhetoric of effective resistance.
While Blair and Clinton employed similar strategies of appropriation (of conservative agendas), they have both been dramatically less successful at disorienting the rhetorical stances of their opponants. What gave Bush this rhetorical edge is (precisley) the plausibility of his identity as a brainless, illiterate vulgarian. While subsuming elements of the Clintonian-Blairite agenda within himself, he simultaneously gathers alienated religious fundamentalists, nationalists and damaged middle-aged males of every ilk, closer to him by appearing to share their anti-intellectualism, their contempt for expertise, and their alienation from language games played by the intellectual elite. This, in turn, redirects popular ‘liberal’ critique against these same ‘conservative’ alienated cultural elements, while high-level critique of “the issues” by democratic politicians are robbed of their ‘moderate,’ timid, campaign platforms. This is the impossible rhetorical situation In which John Kerry found himself in the campaign of 2004.
To this end, Bush is completely dependant for his popularity on discourses of anti-americanism, on the domestic and international image of Bush as the King Idiot at the helm of the Ship of Fools (America). These twin tactics of rhetorical deflection and deflation seem to be Bush’s own personal and decisive contribution the success of the single most destructive and regressive administration in American history.
Bush Himself: Neoconservative Method and Identity
The foolhardy search for a silver lining on any of the clouds now crowding the global-political sky has led me to hope (again, I stress, foolishly) for the demise of a certain kind of large-scale planning. The absolute dominance of the unforseen in world events has led authorities of every kind - even and especially academics and journalists - into an ever-intensifying orgy of predictive hubris. The more obscure the future becomes, the more politicians, planners, and observers compulsivley try to predict it - sometimes with shocking arrogance. The recent examples of obvious and definitive failures of such large-scale predictions (on all sides in the debate surrounding the invasion and occupation of Iraq) do not seem to discourage anyone. But this is a neccessary consequence in a world where nearly everyone is wrong. We end up, as we often have, with all surviving authorities claiming predictive victory, claiming that they “knew it would happen like this.” The truth, of course, in its obvious ambiguity, defying all sides, shows itself as the essential failure of the debate. It manifests itself as the greif of survivors of global catastrophe who never had the chance to exercise an armchair (or battleroom) ‘predictive authority.’
All this might add up to the utter disgrace of the “command and control” ethics of political, cultural, and scientific expertise, if only we had not learned this very lesson on so many previous occasions over the course of the last century. Still, such lessons continue to resonante even when they seem to be forgotten. The myth of objectivity, which is the central tenet of all practical varieties of expertise, has faded more quickley in recent years - especially in the mainstream news media. We only need to think of the verbal promise of Fox News of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting- which started in 1999 as a falsity, but had become a gross irony or an ‘open lie’ by 2003. Without realizing it, this kind of ‘journalism’ has helped out and even necessitated the growth of its market nemesis in the form of blogging culture, which threatens to democratize published discourse among the upper-middle classes of the world. In this trend, and in Michael Moore’s uncanny rhetoric of non-objectivity, along with the Bush Administration’s flippancy toward the expert-defended Kyoto Protocol, we have begun to see a strangley ‘editorial’ cultural climate emerging on both sides of the Atlantic.
I begin to suspect that the only regime-change that has been successfully accomplished in recent years is the replacement of a supposedly knowledgeable body of ‘Experts’ in every field with an army of frankly conjectural and openly biased ‘Opinionates’ outside every field. This shift in the bio-political power dynamic can be observed in most discourses. It is not that expertise is no longer a strong cultural currency (expertise as academic specialization is still in the first stages of ascendency), but rather that the ascendency of the unforseen as such has intensified dramatically in recent years, and has given confidence to many who have been excluded from the ground of experrtise in one way or another.
It is easy to see how this may all contribute to the creation of a more open society. However, no one has exploited the tragic hubris of expertise to more distinct advantage than the most powerful opponent of open society in the world, the Bush Administration. The most difficult detail of the situation is that, while using the anti-intellectual momentum of the public mistrust of experts, the Administration at once employs the rhetoric of predictive expertise for its own purposes. The first evidence of such a dynamic is suggested by the assymetric presence of leagues of theory-based academics in an administration led by a president who, as the late Hunter S. Thompson observed, ‘talks like a donkey.’ The second clue comes in the paradox of a Yale-educated billionaire from a ‘great’ Connecticut family, who was himself born in New Haven, speaking with a rural, Texas accent. Out of such uncanniness, a picture quickley emerges of a meticulously engineered attempt to produce an image of a leader who fits a viscious stereotype of damaged masculinity and outright stupidity. In this context we might substitute the most common of Shakesperean observations, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't,” with “There is method in the stupidity.” Whose method, though? Bush’s? Bush Senior’s? Or his cabinet? Among those who have observed this dynamic, the most common answer is Karl Rove. This question is impossible to answer decisivley. But even if we never have our answer, even if it is ‘no one’s’ method in particular, and this is the sticking point, the method still remains a method.
How does the method work? It’s goal is to subvert the pretence to expertise shared by the upper-middle class, liberal intelligensia of North America and Western Europe, who comprise an increasingly large percentage of the population in these tiny corners of the world. Such a method begins by seeing the liberal intelligensia as a new universal class, with the power to historically outmode such instituions as the church, pure capitalism, fundamental rights, and (now) security. This point of view is not wholly different than that of many 19th Century Russian Nihlists like Pisarev and Chernyshevsky. But unlike the Russian Nihlists, the ‘enactors’ of the neoconservative method (and this is where they get tricky) perform a counter-imitative negation of the values of the liberal intelligensia which spawned them. This is to say that the modern neoconservatives reverse the values of their class while actually reinstating them in ever-purer manifestations.
This is the very essence of the concept of the counter-imitative, as introduced to sociology by French theorist Gabriel Tarde: in our opposition or resistance, we are guided by the logic of our opponents, and we are either conscious of this or not (this can be used against us, or not). Of course, the ascendency of G. W. Bush at first seems to occur as a negation of the academic socialism, liberalism, and neo-liberalism of North America and Western Europe - until we begin to pay attention to all the tiny details that don’t seem to fit in the story. (These details, I might add, have become enormous unseen chasms for would-be critics of Bush) Firstly, the administration seems, like Odysseus, to sail everywhere by paradox. This is announced in the frankly oxymronic banner of “compassionate conservatism,” since it is well known that of all conservative state governors, Bush Jr. was the very least compassionate (having conducted hundreds of questionable and useless executions). The contradictions in the cultural position of neoconservatism are present everywhere, precisley because they have been carefully nurtured everywhere.
It is not entirley the “smart people” behind Bush who are responsible for this strategy of counter-imitation, but very probably Bush himself. His case highlights the fact that speech pattern and accent are no longer determined (if they ever were) by class, ethnicity, and geography. In the present day United States, a Connecticut Yankee billionaire, whose father has the dominant North-Eastern accent, can decide that he’s a working-class Texas cowboy, adopt the accent, and rise as high as the Presidency in public visibility, without anyone pointing out that this is fraudulent. Bush Jr. was intimate, throughout most of his childhood and early adulthood, with the elites of the New England Liberal intelligensia - not as hated enemies, but as important teachers and even as friends. It is inconceivable that he could have managed to escape Yale without vast experience in the same culture and vernacular that produced the Clintons and their allies, just as he did not escape his brief stays in Texas without a (somewhat forced) working-class West Texas accent. As many have pointed out, his policies and cabinet appointments show a similar counter-imitation: appointing more ethinic minorities to his cabinet than Clinton, allowing openly gay soldiers to serve in the military, giving the go-ahead to gay civil unions, impeding nearly all first-amendment rights, and intensifying the Blair-Clinton policy of turning the Anglo-American organism into a global police entity. These were each and all, according to their conservative opponents, treasured items on the Democratic Clinton platform. In the ‘changed world’ of post-9/11 however (where the sun rises in the West and salt tastes like sugar), all political ‘binaries’ such as right and left, north and south, and so on, are open, not for chatoic displacement, but for careful replacment by those who have the power to negotiate their own identity. In the fluidity of his personal identity, Bush has created a visage of conservatism that simultaneously enacts huge swaths of the ‘liberal’ agenda. It is not at all that he is actually a conservative capitalist in opposition to the upper-middle class expert intelligensia in North America and Western Europe, but that he can suddenly enact many of thier most cherished policies without them even noticing. This appropriation of liberalism’s most rhetorically-cherished (but not most important or most radical) agendas serves to confuse the rhetoric of effective resistance.
While Blair and Clinton employed similar strategies of appropriation (of conservative agendas), they have both been dramatically less successful at disorienting the rhetorical stances of their opponants. What gave Bush this rhetorical edge is (precisley) the plausibility of his identity as a brainless, illiterate vulgarian. While subsuming elements of the Clintonian-Blairite agenda within himself, he simultaneously gathers alienated religious fundamentalists, nationalists and damaged middle-aged males of every ilk, closer to him by appearing to share their anti-intellectualism, their contempt for expertise, and their alienation from language games played by the intellectual elite. This, in turn, redirects popular ‘liberal’ critique against these same ‘conservative’ alienated cultural elements, while high-level critique of “the issues” by democratic politicians are robbed of their ‘moderate,’ timid, campaign platforms. This is the impossible rhetorical situation In which John Kerry found himself in the campaign of 2004.
To this end, Bush is completely dependant for his popularity on discourses of anti-americanism, on the domestic and international image of Bush as the King Idiot at the helm of the Ship of Fools (America). These twin tactics of rhetorical deflection and deflation seem to be Bush’s own personal and decisive contribution the success of the single most destructive and regressive administration in American history.
posted by peritropist at 4:57 PM
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