Hi folks. Two Scoops will return, but he has checked into a rehab facility for addiction to baconnaise. (It’s the silent killer.) For now, you get me, Gyp the Blood. My sentences aren’t complete, and I don’t have no fancy videos. I’m less interested in delivering thoughtful commentary than I am in thinking out loud. But I’ll try to keep it short, and develop my ideas over several posts. It’ll be better than peopleofwalmart.com, maybe.
I want to talk about the election, and I want to start by saying that the Tea Party - a term that will I lazily employ to describe anyone on the right, in middle America, red-state-land, or on Fox News - is irrational. Its members cling to guns and religion. They're racist. And they vote against their interests. How else do we explain Rand Paul’s election on Tuesday, and the election of hundreds of other “insurgent” candidates in state and federal government positions?
I don’t disagree with any of these statements; they’re sorta cool, actually. They feel good when you say them, at least. But they don’t do much. How do we really understand the anti-progressive movement in America? And what do we, empowered citizens of the world, do about it? How can the left make sense, without appearing as “elitist” or out of touch, or worse: un-American?
The Tea Party has succeeded by tapping into a collective memory that resides within the American body politic which defines “America” -- or “Amuurrricca” if you will -- as a homogenous nation of independent, rugged individualists. Cowboys, if you will. This is putting it a little too simplistically. But what is certain is that they have elevated a certain conception of America, and of Americans. They consistently use historical narratives, particularly those of the nation’s founding, to legitimate their politics. (It is the Tea Party, after all.) This conception of the nation is itself historically constructed, of course. It is by no means static or platonic; no conception of any nation ever is. And at different times in the history of the United States, different groups of people have been able to lay claim to belonging within the bounds of Americanness.
This is tricky stuff -- what is a “nation,” how is it conceived, what is "collective memory" -- and I’ll return to it in future posts. But let’s start here: Jimmy Carter, the United States’ most venerated ex-President, got into some hot water for calling critics of Obama racist. Others have followed suit, in critiques of the Tea Party, and they haven’t fared so well. After all, don’t we all live in a post-racial society? And what do I, a white middle class American, care about race anyways?
What Carter and other commentators failed to do -- and thus suffered a backlash because of their comments -- was to understand how ideas about race operate in terms of how people think about the “nation.” People don’t intend to be racist when they claim that the United States is a country that “they don’t recognize anymore” since Obama became president. But they are. Their racism is tied to their understanding of the nation. And race, far from just defining color, describes a set of values and behaviours. (Consider: in the early part of the 20th century, there was an explicit understanding that Scandinavians, Eastern and Southern Europeans were not white, largely because their religious traditions and perceived inclinations towards radical politics contrasted with the standard Ango-Saxon American model.) This matters, even if you’re a white guy like me. And it has nothing to do with “white liberal guilt.” It matters because the racialization of norms limits the ways that we can talk about ideas within discourses that privilege a particular kind of the nation -- a particular Americanness.
[We might think about G.W.’s recent admission that he was hurt and shocked at Kanye West’s accusation that the former President did “not care about Black people.” G.W. thought that he had a strong record of race relations (nevermind his notorious record of denying the NAACP’s invitations to speak to them). But us readers are not surprised that a cowboy president would rub African Americans the wrong way. This is because the politics of the right, as they adopt certain tenets of Americanness such as a focus in individual choice and responsiblity, take on a kind of racial identity.]
The only way for the left to succeed - in my humble opinion - is for politicians, journalists, and cultural critics to address the ways in which the nation, or Americanness, is constructed in ways that validate particular narrow ways of thinking: that is, thinking like independent, rugged individualists. Cowboys. White guys. The left needs to question the sacred tenets of Americanness -- those which emphasize civil liberties, democracy, freedom, etc etc -- and to begin to try to talk about how our understandings of these terms operate in the 21st century, in ways both good and bad. Only when we recognize that ideas about Americanness are constructed, racialized, romanticized and fetishized -- and this sort of critical discussion find a place somewhere in mainstream political discourse -- will progressive politicians be able to combat claims of “un-Americanism.” Or worse: Kenyan anti-colonialism. More to follow...
Hey Two Scoops, how do I put clever tags on this thing?
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2 Response to About Last Night...er, a Couple of Nights Ago Now That I've Gotten Around to This Posting
From the Betty Ford: I think you put them in the "labels" box on the bottom right-hand corner. I got too lazy to keep labeling the posts.
I'm not sure if this is entirely relevant, but the post makes me think of a question Asad posed when discussing Muslims in Europe: "What kind of conditions can be developed... in which everyone may live as minorities among minorities?" Could the Left work to create a vision of America wherein there simply was no hegemonic culture--no racialized notion of "Americanness"--to "defend"? I think it's a provocative idea, though one that is admittedly hard to conceptualize.
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