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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

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Detailed, embodied, sexualized bottom-line evil appears in From's account of his role in constructing Bush's 2002 State of the Union address. Frum notes his reservations regarding what exactly to say about Saddam Hussein given that children might be watching the television speech with their parents: "Did we realy want the president describing how Sadda:m murdered his enemies by burning them alive in acid baths? Or broke their nerve by forcing them to watch as his soldiers raped their daughters and wives? Or cut of the hands and ears or gouged out the eyes of soldiers he suspected oflack of courage?"22.

These same reservations did not restrain Bush's State of the Union address. In this address, Bush mentions children being tortured while their parents are forced to watch. He lists various methods (harsh interrogation techniques?) used in the "torture chambers of Iraq'': electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on skin, mutilation with electric drills, and cutting out tongues. And he concludes his list by saying "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning:'23

More needs to be said about the details of evil and the role of these details in creating a habitat for the language of evil in political discourse (the de<sup>vil</sup> is in the details). The matter is not, however, one of uncovering dogmatism. I say this because the interesting and thoughtful account of the modes and genres of political moralizing ofered by Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro overlooks the appeal of moral certainty in politics. For them, moralizing refers to "a style of speaking, writing, and thinkg that is too confident about its judgments and thus too punitive in its orientation to others:'24 This overconfidence, they continue, cslips easily into dogmatism." Under communicative capitalism's intensive and extensive circulations of media, though, getting a message to register or holding an alliance together may wel require strong, clear positions. There are also times when the political situation requires lines to be drawn and stands to be taken, when partisans cannot welcome every view and should not acknowledge the validity of every opinion. The right knows this-and has used the left's disregard of this crucial fact of politics to dismantle basic social welfare provisions and install a neoliberal regime of greed worse than that of the gilded age's robber barons.

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Deployments and incursions of "evil" in political language are resolutely, profoundly, deliberately dogmatic. "When Bush uses the term evil, he announces that he knows that there are circumstances where dogmatism is necessary. After all, the right has not hesitated to use the word revolution -Reagan revolution, Gingrich revolution-to name their triumphs. The excess that dogmatism denotes ("over confidence" and a ((too punitive orientation" in Bennett's and Shapiro's words) is the key to its appeal. For those who find it appealing, or even necessary, dogmatism is a strength, a virtue. What is needed, then, is closer consideration of the settings within which dogmatism becomes attractive and reassuring.

A. look back at appearances of the word evil in presidential speeches is one way to get a sense of the settings of dogmatism's appeal. The speeches considered here suggest an inverse relation between dogmatism and signification. The stronger the chain of significations articulated with evil, the less dog1natic is the use of the term. More simply put, when "everybody knows" what evil is, when its meaning is clear and seemingly widely accepted, then its use in a presidential speech describes an object. Yet \_when "evil" is amorphous and unclear, its appearance in a presidential speech says something not about an opject but about the (dogmatic) conviction and resolve of the subject willing to name evil.

Presidential Evil

Evil has long been at home in presidential rhetoric, easily adapting to its changing demands. Taking up the Puritan political sermon or jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch specifies the role of this rhetoric in producing ((America" as a symbol in the country's early decades.25 My account begins in the Depression and period directly prior to the Cold War. As president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt turns to evil as he leads the country out of the

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Depression. He links evil with capitalist excess and the poverty it engenders. His successor, Harry S. Truman, continues to associate evil with poverty even as he worries about the potential for evil linked to technological development. At the same time, his language comes to express the polarities that will structure the Cold War. Evil, however, is not an element in this articulation. Thus, while evil's primary rhetorical host is economic distress, a secondary variant of evil also emerges in the initial years of the Cold War. This evil rides in on complexity and its challenge to power in a democracy.

Roosevelt's 1933 inaugural address is known primarily for its oft-repeated line "the only thing we have to fear is fear itsel<sup>£:'2</sup>6 Evil, then, is nothing to fear. Government can address and manage evil. Performing this address and management, Roosevelt speaks of evils in the plural and expels these evils to the past. He observes that there are two safeguards against a return of the "evils of the old order:" strict supervision of al banking, credits, and investment and an end to speculation with other people's money. In Roosevelt's second and third inaugural addresses, evil inhabits the same rhetorical environment. Not only does Roosevelt continue to criticize those who "betray for profit the elementary decencies of life" but he also notes that Americans no longer tolerate abuses of power and heedless selfinterest, "evil things formerly accepted" but now not so easily condone& The third inaugural address announces that the country has survived its crisis and "put away evil things:'

Even as evil is cornfortable in the register of past economic practices no longer threatening America, an evil variant appears in the · second inau;. gural address. Evil remains something to be managed through governance, but its temporality changes. Rather than banished to the past, it is pro-F�cted into a sort of indefinite future-present, the universal extratemporal;. ity of moral engagement. Suggesting that the strength of democracy stems from the power lodged in the people, Roosevelt advises that "as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase, power to stop evilj power to do good:'

In his first years as president, Truman reiterates Roosevelt's associations of evil with poverty. His 1948 State of the Union address refers to economic distress as a "disease whose evil efects spread far beyond the boundaries of the aflicted nation:' The following year, in a general treatment of economic and social problems such as low minimum wage, growing monopolies, prejudice, and intolerance as opportunities for the Congress and the president to work together for the good of the people, he underscores that "our first great opportunity is to protect our economy against the evils ofboom and bust."

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In addition to linking evil to poverty, Truman also employs the evil variant that appeared in Roosevelt's second inaugural address, positing evil as something in the future, something to be resisted or overcome through the power of the people. His State of the Union address in 1950, aluding to scientific, technological, and, presumablYi military developments associated with "opening the secrets of nature," announces, "Man must create the moral and legal fram.ework for the world which will insure that his new powers are used for good and not evil. In shaping the outcome, the people of the United States wil play a leading role:' Like Roosevelt's speeches, Truman's establish a fitting rhetorical habitat for evil. Povercy, economic inequalicy, and the unchecked pursuit of profit are matters appropriately designated evil. At the same time, evil also appears as the object of a project for the future, one associated with the moral strength of democratic governance.

Nevertheless, along with the political climate, the discursive environment of the late 1940s was changing. One site where the change can be detected is in a speech Truman gives before a joint session of Congress in 1947. In that speech, Truman requests economic assistance for Greece and Turkey (and elaborates what would become known as the Truman Doctrine) . 27 He also uses the term evil and suggests a vision of the world as split between freedom and oppression. Rather than explicitly tied to Sovi�t communism, however, evil remains articulated with poverty. Truman asserts: '�t the present moment in world history nearly eve.ry nation .must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one:' On one side is a way of life based on the wil of the majority and "distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual libercy, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression:' On the other side is a way of life that "relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms:'28 Despite this characterization of Soviet communism, Truman refrains from referring to either the regime or the ideology as eviL Instead, evil retains its link with economic deprivation: "The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife:' Evil flourishes in fetid zones of neediness, brutality, and despair. With this variation in the rhetorical environment established, Truman's image of the conflict in Korea as an "evil war by proxy" in his 1951 State of the Union address is not surprising.29

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Eisenhower drops from his rhetoric the social and economic sense of evil, embracing instead Truman's opposition between freedom and slavery. Speaking within the symbolic frame of the Cold War, Eisenhower depicts this opposition in terms of a moral struggle between good and evil, although like Truman he refrains from caling the Soviet enemy itself evil. Additionaly, even as Eisenhower adopts more religious language than his two immediate predecessors, the link they make between scientific and technological pow·er and the chalenge this power poses for future paths toward good or evil nevertheless continues to inhabit his speeches.

Eisenhower's first inaugural address establishes the rhetorical patterns for his presidential speeches. 30 He begins by asking his audience to bow their heads as he utters what he refers to as "a little private prayer of my own:' (That Eisenhower refers to a prayer said in a public ofice-taking ceremony as "private" deeply challenges the notion of private, particularly given that he speaks the prayer .aloud and asks the audience to join him in bowing their heads. Stil, the very fact that he felt compelled to refer to his prayer as "private" suggests the continued presence of some sort ofboundary separating personal expressions of religious.faith from public responsibility. In other words, were he to have no sense of the importanc� of a separation between church and state or faith and politics, Eisenhower would not have paid lip service to the distinction between public and private acts.) He then testifies to the significance of the present moment in American history: "The world and ·we have passed the midpoint of a century f continuing challenge. We sense with al our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. This fact defines the meaning of this day. We are summoned by this honored and historic ceremony to witness more than the act of one citizen swearing his oath of service, in the presence of God. We are caled as a people to give testimony in the sight of the world to our faith that the future shal belong to the free:'31 Having grown in strength and responsibility in the course of confronting wars and economic depression, the United States finds itself calling upon God for guidance and "groping to know the full sense and meaning of these times:' Is the world heading toward darkness or nearing the light? This particular time of trial "comes at a moment when man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of al ages:' Yet the very hopes and promises that mankind's scientific and technological achievements have enabled now imperil life itself. The proper response to science, the only response adequate to the threat of darkness and annihilation facing the world, is faith.

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For Eisenhower, it is time for America to reafirm and proclaim the faith of the free in man's deathless dignity as governed by eternal and natural law. "This faith defines our full view of life;' he declares. "It establishes, beyond debate, those gifts of the Creator that are man's inalienable rights, and that make all men equal in His sight:' Enemies of this faith worship force and torture truth. America's destiny as the leader of the free world is thus to confront these enemies with confidence, conviction, moral strength, and1 again, staunch faith. Al Americans must be united as they renew their faith and devote themselves to the nation's fundamental precepts: "No person, no home, no community can be beyond the reach of this call. We are summoned to act in wisdom and in conscience, to work with industry, to teach with persuasion, to preach with conviction, to weigh our every deed with care and with compassion. For this truth must be clear before us: whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America:' The United States stands on a moral precipice facing the ultimate confrontation between good and evil. What Roosevelt and Truman p,rojected into the future as the possible object of a collective project confronts America as a problem now, in the present. Evil is that in opposition to which America can know and realize who it is.32

John F. Kennedy's inaugural address ("ask not what your country can do for you . . :') adopts a tone decidedly diferent from Eisenhower's. Rather than emphasizing a fundamental division in the world, Kennedy appeals to hopes for peace, to civility, to arms control, to scientifc wonder (rather than terror), and to shared struggle against common problems of disease, poverty, and war. Kennedy's language is also far less religious than Eisenhower's (likely because religious language from Kennedy would suggest his Catholicism and could occasion anxiety about papal influence).

These changes do not lead to a discursive environment completely inhospitable to evil-but close. In two speeches given in June 1963, Kennedy refers to communism as an evil system. But he qualifies these remarks, noting that "no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue" and bracketing the attribution of evil as words of "a few who saY:'33 Such qualification may have enabled the mutated evil that appears in his address on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This �peech links evil neither to America's moral destiny nor to economic and social ills. Rather, evil appears as a judgment in non-American eyes, as how others may see Arierica. The president notes: "These tests befoul the air of all men and all nations, the committed and the uncommitted alike, without their knowledge and without their consent. That is why the continuation of atmospheric testing causes so many countries to regard all nuclear powers as equally evil; and we can hope that its prevention will enable all those countries to see the world more clearly, while enabling all the world to breathe more easily."34 Kennedy's language suggests that if America looks at itself from the perspective of nonaligned nations, it might well recognize a more complex moral world than the one governing its prior assumptions of right.

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Lyndon B. Johnson retains this �ore complex vision, one less suited to a language of "evil:' His "Let Us Continue1' speech, given soon after IZennedy's assassination, doesn't declare war on evil or attempt to unite Americans in steadfast dedication to evil's eradication. Johnson holds that the challenge is not to linger over this "evil mon;1ent" but instead to move forward. To this end, he urges Congress to increase taxes and enact a civil rights bill. Johnson concludes: "The time has come for <sup>.Ari\_,</sup>ericans of al races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and respect each other; So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil an<sup>d</sup> violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from th apostles of bitterness and bigotrY:'35 Finding evil's proper home in the extreme speech of fanatics, Johnson attempts to weed it out of political speech.

Yet he can't eliminate it entirely. Evil sometimes appears in its older form as a social and economic evil, as lack and deprivation.36 Evil also sprouts up in Johnson's 1967 State of the Union address, albeit sheltered within a quote from Thomas Jeferson: "It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compeled sometimes to choose . a great evil in order to ward of a greater evil:' Johnson here uses Jeferson's words to justify the choice to fight a limited war in Vietnam.

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Perhaps because evil has become, at least in this specific rhetoric, something America chose, that is, an acknowledged although dreaded attribute of Arn.erican actions, it only rarely occurs in the speeches of the three presidents who follow Johnson. For the most part, these presidents actively and consciously employ a political language designed to lessen political tensions. For example, in his first inaugural address, Richard Nixon reiterates Johnson's attempt to produce a m.oderate political language even as he distances himself from Johnson's war. Drawing from Qp.aker belief in simplicity, quietude, and responsive listening, Nixon suggests that answers to America's problems might be found if Americans looked within themselves for "the simple things, the basic things" such as "goodness, decency, love and kindness:' To listen responsively, moreover, requires that Americans stop shouting. Nixon notes, '�erica has sufered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading:' As "we;' the American people, learn to speak quietly, government1 also identified as "we;' wil listen: "We will strive to listen in new ways-to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without words, th.e voices of the heart-to the injured voices, the anxious voices, the voices that have despaired of being heard:'37 In the environm.ent responsive listening creates, evil has no place.

Gerald Ford also expresses exhaustion with evil, a sense that words like "evil" should not inhabit political discussion. "Evil" is too extreme and dangerous a term for politics. But even as Ford wants the term eliminated, it undergoes an additional mutation in his rhetoric: evil is how others refer to America. In his State of the Union address on January 19, 1976, Ford complains that Americans have for too long "downgraded" themselves as a nation. "The American people have heard too much about how terrible our mistakes1 how evil our deeds, and how misguided our purposes. The American people know better. The truth is we are the world's greatest democracy:'38 In his oficial speeches as president, Jimmy Carter doesn't use "evil" at all, not in connection with the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the economic hardships brought about by the recession and energy crisis. In his famous "Crisis of Confidence" speech given in July 1979, Carter emphasizes the "paralysis, stagnation, and drift" facing the country.39 Like presidents before him, he positions the United States at a crossroads between two paths of freedom. One path leads to fragmentation, self-assertion, chaos, and immobility. The other is the path to true freedom, one that entails common purpose and the restoration of American values. Evil appears on neither path, but struggle and even sacrifice accompany both.

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Ontological Evil

Ronald Reagan's presidential speeches employ a radically diferent rhetoric from those of his immediate predecessors. On the one hand, the stark divisions of his cold warrior stance create, as did Eisenhower's, a fertile environment for the oppositions of good and evil, free and totalitarian, us and them. On the other hand, Reagan's speeches provide such a fertile political habitat for evil that the term rapidly reproduces and spreads far beyond the initial binary of American and Soviet. Among those itel1S Reagan identifes as evil are dim economic prospects, inflation, stagflation, tetroris!l, deaths of American soldiers in El Salvador, international drug traficking, . "more and more government intervention;' segregation, discrimination based on race, relig�on, and sex, racisin, anti-Semitism, ethnic and religious intolerance, Hitler, and the �olocaust.40 In Reagan's speeches, multiple issues are matters of intense moral conflict. Michael Rogin thus misreads the specificity of evil in Reagan's rhetoric when he views Reagan's associative lists of evil in the world as confusing communism with terrorism and political opposition with crime and disease.41 Contra Rogin, Reagan does not locate evil in a central cause or place. Nor does he roject all that is evil outside the United States and threatening to violate its borders, again as Ragin argues.42 Rather, for Reagan evil is in the very nature of things; it's the setting of humanity's moral struggle.

For Reagan, this condition of struggle is ontological. The world itself consists of great good and great evil. Such an establishing of evil as a fact of existence changes the character of the moral judgment. When evil is a basic aspect of the world, failing to recognize it indicates moral weakness, an unwillingness or inability to face honestly the truth of our situation. Correspondingly, naming evil demonstrates moral strength, courage, and resolve. Reagan's presidential language thus blends two approaches to evil, moral an.d ontological. This blending transforms political Struggles between winners and losers into moral struggles between saints and sinners or, worse, the forces of God and the forces of Satan.43

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Ontological evil pervades Reagan's "evil empire" speech. Reagan delivered it before the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983.4 The first half of the speech emphasizes policies dear to the Christian right: restrictions on abortion and a constitutional amendment to restore prayer to public schools. Although this part of the speech appeals to religious tenets with a long history in American political rhetoric (with cites to William Penn, Thomas Jeferson, and George Washington), it is not itself expressed in the language of religious conviction. That mode of expression appears in the second half of the speech. As Reagan concludes his discussion of every child's right to life, he observes "a great spiritual awakening in America:' Shortly thereafter, he repeats, 'Mn.erica is in the midst of a spiritual awakening:' He then repeats the biblical keynote of the evangelical association's meeting, "Yes, let justice roll on like a river:' These repetitions provide a bridge to a more religious mode of speaking, the transition to a language of faith. Indeed, as Reagan moves to the last two issues of his speech, he calls on philosophy and theology to ground his claims about ontological evil: ''We must never forget that no government schemes are going to perfect man. We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin. There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and t�e Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might:' The world is a moral battlefield, the site of the epochal struggle between good and evil, right and wrong. God commands his people not to turn the other way or shield themselves from evil, not to appease or accommodate their adversaries but to struggle with al their might against evil in this world.

Humanity's fundamental struggle against evil is the setting for the last two issues in Reagan's speech. The first enacts the purification of the soul or the putting in order of one's house that prepares the chosen for spiritual warfare. Reagan tells his evangelical audience that America, too, has "a legacy of evil with which it must deal:' This legacy involves racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, and prejudice.45 He enjoins his audience to transcend these evils: "Use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst. The commandment given us is dear and simple: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself " Cleansed of past sins and girded in moral rectitude, America will have the strength for the ultimate battle, a spiritual battle, against the "aggressive impulses of an evil empire."

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