Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

The stakes are high-people's very souls. Mter he urges his audience to stand with him in opposing "the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some;' Reagan shifts, dramatically, to the story of a young father, a father who loves his two little girls so much that he would rather see his "little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God:' The fight against the Soviets is a fight for salvation, eternal life. Reagan declares: "Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in totalitarian darkness-pray that they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of al peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world:' Like the serpent in the garden, an image Reagan also invokes, Marxism-Leninism tempts humanity with false promises of power and omnipotence. But these are not promises any government can keep: true streng�h is spiritual. America, although it needs strong defense, cannot rely simply on bombs and rockets: "The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith:'

Evil is alive in Reagan's speech. It permeates the world in which AI;ri.ericans find themselves and establishes the very conditions that ·give meaning to their lives. These conditions are uncertain and opaque: insofar as there are so many evils-totalitarianism and intolerance, intrusive government and sexual and racial discrimination-it becomes dificult to see what, precisely:, the attribution "evil" signifes. How can Reagan invoke a Christian God� claim that the Soviets are evil because they do not believe in God, and urge tolerance? Reagan's emphasis on tolerance introduces an uncertainty as to what, exactly:, is evil. The American legacy of evil he invokes is rife with division on precisely this point: is what was once understood as the evil of miscegenation now to be recognized as an instance of the evil of discrimination? Vhat about the right to abortion? Might that right be important in ending sex discrimination, another evil that Reagan urges his evangelical audience to address?

110

FOUR

The ambiguity here is crucial: it produces the space for moral will, for decisiveness and action. Reagan knows what evil is. ·When he calls evil by name, he locates himself in a prophetic tradition dear to evangelicals and rooted in American history. He places himself in the position of someone with an ontological knowledge of the truth and with the m.oral courage to speak the truth. Evil's ambiguity thus enables the import and weight of the term, its eficacy, to shift to the one willing to invoke it.

In a later interview, Reagan emphasizes that in this speech the term evil was important not because it rightly characterized the Soviets (although it did), but because it explicitly acknowledged real diferences between the United States and the USSR. Responding to the interviewer's observation that the speech made it seem that reconciliation between the two powers was impossible since a confrontation between good and evil was at stake, Reagan explains: "I think it is somehow lifting that out of context-of this line and this description as the focus of evil and so forth. Certainly their entire beliefs, beginning with the disbelief in God-their beliefs are so contrary to what we accept as morality. Witness a Kampuchea and an .Afghanistan and so forth. But no, what I was pointing out there, and I still believe is time-tested and proven, is not the inevitability of war, but a recognition and a willingness to face up to what these diferences are in our views and between us, to be realistic about it:'46 Realism, for Reagan, involves recognizing the existence of evil in the world and willingly accepting the fact that the world is not a perfect place and never wil be. Reagan is a realist because he knows what the world is like and is strong enough to face this world without blinders.

This conviction, this willingness to acknowledge and name evil ir the world, does not depend on or require the disc rsive environment sustained by the Cold War. In fact, the Cold War's end releases evil from the already weak constraints of the confrontation between the United States and the USSR This spreading, flourishing evil, and the resolve to name it, is an additional aspect of Reagan's speeches flourishing in the rhetoric of George W. Bush. It appears most strongly in a speech Reagan gave in England after he was president and after the end of the Cold War.

On December 4, 1992, Reagan delivered the address, "Democracy's Next Battle;' at the Oxford Union Society.47 Noting that the fight against totalitarianism "was a grand and noble cause, one that united the entire civilized world;' Reagan finds that its end has "robbed much of the west of its uplifting, common purpose:' "Will we turn inward, lulled by a dangerous complacency and the short-sighted view that the end of one Evil Empire means the permanent banishment of evil in all its forms?" he asks. To answer, and in answering restore a sense of mission to the "civilized world;' Reagan returns to ontological evil: "Evil stil stalks the planet:'

RESOLVE

111

Although this evil is not identical to the evil of Marxism-Leninism, although it is not systematic, coherent, or localized, it continues, inevitably, to permeate the world. Reagan declares, "Its ideology may be nothing more than bloodlustj no program more complex than economic plunder or military aggrandizement. But it is evil all the same. And wherever there are forces in the world that would destroy the human spirit and diminish human potential, they must be recognized and they must be countered:' The mission Reagan envisions is for "civilzed nations" to stand "in unison" against "immoral and deadly excesses" around the globe such as those undertaken by Saddam Hussein and in places like Bosnia, Somalia, and Sudan.

Fighting these evils wil require imposing "civilized standards" of inter.: national conduct and enforcing those standards with a fully equipped United Nations force-"an army of conscience." Thus, Reagan chalenges his Oxford audience to contribute to the "age-old battle for individual freedom and human dignity:' The next generations, like the ones before them, have a cause, and service to this cause wil give their lives meaning. They should not forget the victims of sufering �d violence. AB Reagan enjoins, "Do not abandon them to the eVils of totalitarian rule or demo:. cratic neglect:' In this late speech, then, democratic neglect, failure to name and act, is itself an evil, one that Reagan is continuing to fight.

Since Reagan's presidency ended, conservatives have continued to praise his resolve. Crediting him with bringing down the Soviet Union and, echoing his 1984 campaign theme, restoring morning to America after the "malaise" of the Carter years, those on America's political right celebrate Reagan for the realism and moral strength of his political message. But what is realism? Does "realism" refer to the emphasis oil security characteristic of the realist school of international relations? H so, why are a bifurcated worldview and disdain for arms control realistic responses to a nuclear standof?

A better way to conceive Reagan's realism focuses on his supposition of ontological evil. For Reagan, evil is Real. It flows throughout the world, threatening and subverting the civlzed order. Its pervasive, excessive nature, moreover, makes evil slippery, deceptive. Recognizing it, naming it, thus requires resolve-the will to break with conventional wisdom, to stop paying lip service to the order of appearances, and to reject established political norms (this rejection of norms is a key feature of realist international relations). Insofar as conventional wisdom, the order of appearances, and established norms are ;n.ot to be recognized, insofar as the symbolic order is violated or denied, strength of will is a necessity. Evil cannot just be named. Once named, it must he met, confronted, countered. Responding to evil demands a willingness to "do what is necessary;' to engage in acts and practices that, from the perspective of the symbolic, may themselves seem to he evil.

112

FOUR

Lacanian psychoanalysis holds that the declihe of the symbolic leads to a powerful alliance of the imaginary with the Real. Such an alliance is dearly at work in the Reagan presidency. Fantasy images of Reagan as a cowboy and explicit acknowledgments of his work as an actor accompany the ontological evil he identifies in the nature of things.48 The realism of Reagan's political wil, in other words, is supported by fantasies of figures of strength. Reagan played these roles and, indeed, gestured to them by repeating lines from his movies, perhaps most memorably "Win one for the Gipper:'

American presidents have long found political inspiration in religious language. Twentieth-century presidents have, like those who came before them, used the term evil. But the term. means diferent things in diferent settings-and sometimes it doesn't mean anything at all. Sometimes it points to the wil of the one who speaks it, not the object to which it is applied. The discursive environme^ht supplied by Reagan's speeches difers significantly from that of his immediate predecessors-J(ennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Superficially, it resembles Eisenhower's, but this resemblance is misleading. Eisenhower refers to his inaugural prayer as "private" and refrains from attempting to convert the Soviets from their atheism. He also treats the forces of good and evil as elements within the symbolic order of the Cold War: freedom is good and totalitarian slavery is evil. Eisenhower invokes a symbolically consistent moral world, one where the ambiguities and tensions always subverting attributions of good and evil are repressed, contained. In that moment of history when the world faces a choice between good and evil, America must not give way on its faith in human freedom and dignity. These inalienable rights are gifts of the Creator; the struggle to secure them takes place in the presence of the Creator, and America turns to the Creator for guidance in these times. But Eisenhower does not say that he or America is an instrument of the Creator. He does not say that God has instructed the United States to fight His battle against the forces of evil. In short, Eisenhower's language works within the symbolic order of the Cold War as it presents Americans as subjects with choices and responsibilities. Reagan depicts evil as Real and says that God commands us to fight against it.

RES OLVE

113

The diference between Reagan's language and that of Truman and Roosevelt is also misleading. Like them, he links evil to technological complexity, diminished human potential, and that which is to be fought through the moral strength of democratic governance. Yet what is most striking is what happens to governance in the face of Reagan's ontologization of evil: a radical fusion of previously separate fields and practices. Recal, Reagan finds evil in dim economic prospects, deaths of American soldiers in El Salvador, terrorism, drug traficking, "excessive" government intervention, intolerance, segregation, discrimination, racism, and anti-Semitism. In the Oxford Union speech, moreover, he urges that all such forces must be recognized and .countered wherever they arise. He envisions a UN --backed "army of conscience:' Ontological evil thus overflows already unstable distinctions between war and policing, religion and poli-. tics, justice and administration. In the face of the Real of evil, these divisions fall apart.

Vacuous Resolve

Just as Reagan prays for the salvation of those living in totalitarian darkness, so does George W. Bush find in religion the best response to political troubles. As Howard Fineman observes, "The Bush administration is dedicated to the idea that there is an answer to societal problems here and to terrorism abroad: give everyone, everywhere, the freedom to find God, too:'49 Moreover, like the vision in Reagan's Oxford Union address, so is the world depicted in Bush's speeches the site of a cosmic battle between good and evil (typically formatted through a racial logic of civilized versus barbarian) . Yet Bush expands and intensifies ontological evil as he speaks within the discourse of the pervert.50 The pervert has no doubts; he "brings to light, stages, practices the secret fantasies that sustain the dominant public discourse:'51 The pervert knows what is required and makes himself into that instrument that does what is required. So not only does "evil" inhabit Bush's speeches as an ontological given and thus highlight his resolve in naming it but it works further to designate the subject confronting evil as an instrument of God. Because conviction co.mes from God, the one who names evil serves as an extension or embodiment of divine will. More strongly put, the only way Bush can guarantee that he is chosen by God is by demonstrating the power God gives him to name and confront evil without wavering, with complete and utter conviction (in the face of criticism, facts, and alternatives) . For the responsible will of falible and uncertain political subjects, then, ontological evil substitutes confrontations between objects in accordance with the inevitabilities of the will of God.

114

FOUR

Accounts of the presidential campaign of 2000 emphasize the emptiness, if not downright stupidity, of George W. Bush. Bush exhibited little interest in policy specifics and little knowledge of political issues. Frank Bruni, the New York Times reporter assigned to the Bush campaign and White House, notes that polls taken during the primaries "showed that support for Bush was less firmly grounded in anything real than support for some other candidate was:'52 Respondents found it dificult to give specifc reasons for their support for Bush. Yet Bush's vagueness was useful. Bush was a candidate "whose very lack of bold definition-whose spongy failure to malce an emphatic mark -alowed him to assume the attributes of the scenery around him. It enabled him to be whatever . _,reople were inclined or wanted to see, a Rorschach running for president:'53 A key element of the Republican campaign was thus to rely on images that would afect voters viscerally. The Bush campaign demonstrated, Bruni writes, "how much could be fixed with powder and pufery, how thoroughly a candidate could be transformed from the outside in, how little he had to do but stand on the right set, under the right lighting, and say the right lines. If it was hard to figure out exactly what Bush was made of-and if, by September n, 2001, it was not a whole lot easier-this was a good part of the reason:' 54

Bush's vagueness persisted into the early months of his presidency. Again, he demonstrated little patience with the details of governance or the complexities of public policy. l:Iis few public statements were vapid sound bites; anything more he tended to bungle with the sort of malapropisms one associates with young children. 55 As his former speechwriter, David Frum, emphasizes, "Bush's political vision was unclear:' Bush had political instincts and general beliefs, but in the first half of2oo1 it was nearly impossible to tell what, if any, ideas Bush actually had. 56

RES OLVE

115

Bush's vacuity was coupled with conviction. His personal faith, the salvation experience that led him to quit drinking and get serious about his life, was his most distinct feature. Voters may not have known what compassionate conservatism entailed, but they did know that Bush was a man of convictions, that he was decisive and relied on his gut instincts. The fact of this conviction dominated Bush's speeches and the message his administration sought to impart after 9 I 11. The terms evil and evildoers frequent this rhetoric, as do deeper and more significant religious allusions. 57

Yet the confused and scattered initial reactions of the Bush administration to the attacks of September n should not be forgotten. Speaking in an elementary school in Florida when the planes hit the Twin Towers, Bush didn't return to Washington for over nine hours, flying instead to air bases in Louisiana and Nebraska. To manYi his initial speeches seemed ill-suited to the magnitude of the moment. Early polls S'!J.ggested that barely half the country was "highly confident" in Bush's ability to handle the crisis. 58 The White Hous� staf worked to control the situation by repeating, at every possible moment, that the president was "focused:' and "resolute:' According to Bruni, "The eficacy of even such transparent tactics soon became clear. By using this vocabulary over and over, aides lodged it so deeply in the minds of reporters that these reporters began adopting it without even realizing it. On the morning after Bush's address to Congress, stories in, both the Washington Post and the Times that analyzed his demeanor used the word 'resolute; without quotation marks, in the first paragraphs:'59

Not silrisingl}lj the term resolute and its kin, resolve �d resolution, feature prominently in Bush's address to Congress on September 201 2001. They characterize what Bush asks of the American people as they enter into "civilization's war," a war that divides the world into those who stand with America and those who stand with America's murderous enemies. They also characterize Bush's own rhetoric: he is certain. He knows-the rightness of the war, even the end of the war. As he testifes, "The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them:'60 Bush doesn't know the course of the war, but that sort of detail doesn't matter. "What matters is Bush's certainty that God is on America's side and that God's side always wins. After the speech, confidence in Bush jumped to 86 percent (an extraordinary number for an American president) and remained over 8o percent during the next several months.61

116

FOUR

Such confidence in Bush results from the combination of vacuity and resolve. The content of Bush's speech registers less than the fact that he demonstrates resolve, strength, command. · This is not surprising: as the media said over and over, Americans were looking for leadership-or perhaps someone through whom they could enact revenge for the attacks. Nevertheless, the emptiness of Bush's expectatioq.s for Americans is notable. Am.ericans were to show resolve, too, but in what? In going about their everyday lives, returning to business, loving their families, hugging their children, and shopping. Bush gave Americans permission to do what they want to do. Doing what they want became their patriotic duty.

Media emphasis on Bush as presidential produced a weird split. Insofar as news media in the .first months following the September 11 attacks emphasized how presidential Bush was, they inadvertently voiced an anxiety that he was not quite presidential or that there was at least a risk of him not being presidential enough. Shouldn't resolve be demonstrated by more than going back to our everyday activities? Shouldn't someone be made to sufer? To die ? Diferently put, attention to the appropriateness of his resolve or demeanor underscores the gap between the man and his ofice. \_As the war on terror continued, this gap was covered over by the fantasy of a second, evil, more powerful leader, one less constrained by goodness or compassion, one wilg to exact the necessary, awful revenge-Vice President Dick Cheney at work in his secret underground bunker, heading the shadow government.

Slavoj ^Zizek's account of two figures of the master helps to explain the importance - of this doubling of authority. The invisible master, ^Zizek writes, "is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act in shadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantomlike, spectral omnipotence:'62 If Bush was the visible voice of justice, resolute but vague nevertheless, then fantasies of Cheney provided the obscene supplement underping this resolve. After 9 I n, Bush relied on "evil" as a nodal point holding together the discourse that would establish the meaning o f the war on terror. Bush and Cheney were two sides of an image of the master momentarily securing this meaning. Bush could give people what they wanted, and the very vagueness of what he was giving could be masked by the fantasy of the repulsive Cheney at work behind the scenes, a fantasy of people really getting what they wanted. Cheney provided the fantasy of secret power, of actions so unbecoming to the president, to America, that they best not see the light of day.

RES OLVE

117

The war on terror is the appropriate background for Bush's axis-of-evil speech not because Saddam Hussein had any connection with September n but because Bush's ontological evil fuses al violence, crimes, threats, and the potential or possibility of any violence, crime, or threat into the theater of absolute struggle. AB he said in his address on September 20, 2001, anyone not on the side of America was on the side of the terrorists, that is, on the side of evil. This ontological evil makes clear why the facts and details and justifications for war against Iraq had so little to do with the actual invasion. Bush knows-he doesn't need to be bogged down by policies and inspections. Bush is certain-he doesn't need the support or consent of other nations. His certainty comes from God. Precisely because Bush doesn't think so much as .feel and pray and rely on his gut, he can know and be certain. Naming evil enacts this certainty. The war against Iraq made sense because it was part of the struggle against evil.

The imaginary axis of evil says nothing about Iraq, North IZorea, and Iran. It says something about Bush. Secretary of State Colin Powel admitted as much as he defended the speech by emphasizing "the president's very powerful and clear and honest statement."63 The statement is powerful, clear, and honest-the president spoke from his heart. The actual facts are not the issue. Bush's conviction empowers him to see among the excesses of evil flowing throughout the world that evil that must be di:. rectly confronted and named. He can do more than fight a vague war on terrorism. He can locate in the present those evils that might threaten us in the future. "Evil" thus designates that "special something" (objet petit a), that extra beyond brutal, repressive, very bad, that Bush takes as his call to eliminate. (And, convenientlYi considering evil as objet petit a highlights the impossibility of its eradication. Evil is an aspect of the drive to eradicate as such. Bush's notorious landing of a small Viking jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in May 2003 to announce the victory of

118

FOUR

U.S. forces in Iraq is a good example here. Criticism of this publicity stunt misses the way the warrior image enacted not Bush's fantasy of U.S. militarism but the reality of U.S. militarism-the staged fantasy didn't cover up the truth of ongoing military conflict. On the contraf}lj it performed it and in so doing expressed the truth of Bush's intentions to continue in·his fight to eliminate evil from the world.)

One last aspect of the way "evil" inhabits Bush's language is crucial to understanding how Bush could invoke an axis of evil. This last aspect, moreover, points less toward Bush's serving as some kind of a master who knows than it does to Bush's functioning perversely as a kind of object or instrument of knowledge. Bush sees himself as chosen by God. He sees America as duty bound to ensure the establishment of God-given rights all over the world. To this extent, fighting evil is a false choi�e: we have no choice; or th.e orly response to this choice is to accept it, bring it on!­ anything else is damned from the outset. The falseness of this choice is clear when we try to introduce it into the field of politics and debate it: Oka)IJ we can end world povert)'J find a cure for cancerj or eradicate evil in the world-whoever "votes" against eradicating evil must secretly support it! Perhaps the proper response to Bush's ontological evil is to take the choice of :fighting evil seriously-yes, there is evil in the world, but there are other chalenges as well.

Once the United States is God's chosen instrument for removing evil from the world, we confront the truth of democracy in comunicative capitalism: it's a perverse form of governance protecting raw power while immunizing it from substantive change since all change has already been �oded in terms of democracy. Any mistake, problem, or excess is always already captured as demanding democracy as its solution. The invocation of evil as Real, however, belies the fetishistic denial driving such appeals to democracy. Ontological evil subverts and exceeds the symbolic order of language, rules, and norms on which democracy has been premised. Bush can barely speak. His administration uses language as a mantra, meme, or slogan to afect people directly and viscerally. His invasion of Iraq broke explicitly with previous U.S. foreign policy and the norms of the international community. How far this has gone might be seen in th.e attacks on Howard Dean during the 2004 presidential campaign. Dean was widely mocked for suggesting that Osama bin Laden should receive a fair trial. The rule of law, it seems, is now a joke, a joke preventing the United States from eradicating evil from the world, its God-given mission as a democracy.

RES OLVE

119