The Echo of the Culture Wars in the Obama-Clinton Fight

I’ve been trying to figure out the philosophical predicates of the opposition to Obama’s candidacy—as attentive readers of HNN will know—and I’ve noted that the opposition coming from the Left is deeply rooted in Enlightenment values or discoveries, particularly in the correspondence theory of truth (which tells us that ideas are the copies and words are the transcriptions of an external reality).

So I think it might be worth going further down this genealogical road, as a way of emphasizing just how hegemonic the Left has become, of mapping its present political contours, and of predicting its political future.

I don’t want to corroborate the paranoia of right-wing talk radio by implying that the American Left is a monolithic movement for socialism. It’s not—it’s no less divided against itself than the Republican coalition that elected (sort of) the malingerer-in-chief, George W. Bush. Like the New Right, its intellectual reach exceeds any political party, program, or voting bloc; there are self-appointed libertarians, for example, who vote for left-wing Democrats, and there are avowed socialists who vote for the reactionary Ralph Nader. Unlike the New Right, however, the Left has a solid purchase on the future of American politics—maybe a franchise.

Even so, a large part of the American Left opposes Obama, just as a large part of the Right opposes McCain. Why? I sense that the opposition to (the enthusiasm of) Obama’s supporters derives from the Enlightenment notion that rhetoric as such is the enemy of truth-telling, particularly in politics but also in other areas of discourse. I sense that the opposition wants more attention paid to “material realities,” as they are called, and less attention paid to linguistic ornamentation.

According to the Enlightenment logic of this opposition to Obama, if we looked through the candidates, rather than at them—rather than at their surfaces—we would be better able to have an informed opinion, and would know that Clinton was the better candidate. We would know that she has real experience and solid programs, while he has only empty rhetoric, just words.

According to the same Enlightenment logic, grace, rhythm, timbre, timing, style, gesture, expression, etc., all the qualities we look and listen for in, say, a singer, should be overlooked or forgotten when we evaluate a politician. By this rigorous accounting, we’re supposed to be looking through the person as if he—or she—is not there. We’re supposed to be reading the lyrics, not listening to the song and meanwhile watching the singer.

Aside from the mere impossibility of such extreme abstraction from the living, breathing human being who is right there in front of you—or, to put it another way, aside from the mere imbecility of looking past the person who’s talking (or singing) to you—there is another difficulty, and it goes like this. The man or woman who is the candidate or the senator or the president is the interpreter and the voice of the policies written out by clerks like us. He can’t phone it in, and she has to sell it. As president, he or she will also be the embodiment of America abroad.

Why, then, would we want to repress his or her bodily presence in the name of something deeper, something more programmatic, more truthful, more substantial? To get down to dangerous cases, why would we want to insist that Obama’s race—or Clinton’s gender—has nothing to do with our choices? Don’t we want to make history with our choices?

***

Well of course we do, unless we pretend to be color-blind, or pretend to be immune to centuries of misogyny We always pay close attention to the performer and the performance, because we don’t read lyrics, we hear music. In fact, we respond to the music even when we don’t get the lyrics, whether they’re complicated (“Like a Rolling Stone”) or unintelligible (“Louie, Louie”) or meaningless (“Tutti-Frutti”), or, lest this litany place me beyond the pale of the present, all three: try on Amy Winehouse.

In hearing the music—in your hearing, except it’s not—a world elsewhere suddenly appears. It’s a strange place removed from where you are right now, with all its quotidian idiocies and attendant atrocities, and it feels both familiar and bizarre: it makes you feel both home and alone, all at once. You can probably dance to it. You might even be able to play along. Either way, you’re identifying with something you’re not.

That’s why rhetoric is never empty, and why music has no limit. Both make us listen in a very particular way. In your listening, your expectations are aroused specifically, by gestures, intonations, and generic codes, like when you hear, say, country music, and you know that tragedy is impending, you know that hope is improbable but necessary, you know that resignation is your role in this desperate life. Or when you hear the blues, and you know that the impending tragedy will be turned to comedy—not humor, comedy—with that last lyrical riff, that last satisfying chord in the familiar progression.

Or when you listen to a sermon or a symphony in silence because you know that’s the proper response to the performance of the preacher or the maestro. You know what to do before you get to the church or the auditorium. The sounds you hear first elicit and then confirm your expectations—sometimes with delightful surprises attached, usually not.

But here’s the thing. Which space, what sounds, do the candidates create? What are you going to do with Hillary Clinton? Her experience and competence and grim resolve and hard work and late hours—also her finger-pointing, and I don’t mean this metaphorically, I mean her signature gesture on stage—tell me that she’s going to do something for you. She can deliver the goods because she’s been through and been toughened by the culture wars. She has solid programs, not empty rhetoric and flowery speeches, and that, for you, is at it should be. She’s not cool, but she understands the material realities of our time.

Now when I ask, “What are you going to do with Hillary Clinton?” I don’t mean to return us to the question of who’d you rather have a beer with. Neither Democratic candidate strikes me as the kind of person you’d want to meet at the local bar—she’s too busy, he’s too edgy. They’d both be looking over your shoulder for more important patrons. In electing a president, we’re not looking for a friend, we’re looking for a leader.

By asking the question, I mean to suggest instead that listening in silence is the proper response to Clinton’s utterance because we know she doesn’t need our help. We know that her experience and competence and grim resolve and hard work and late hours will grind the Republican bastards down.

Obama does need our help. He needed our enthusiasm to lift him in the polls and to alert the press to the weird possibilities of his candidacy. He needed our money in those small but numerous doses that eventually exceeded the resources of the big donors Clinton still depends on.

But the truth contained in all the accusations of “empty rhetoric” is that Obama needs our response to make political sense of his unfinished journey—as an individual and a leader—and we need him to make cultural and psychological sense of our unfinished journey—as a people and a nation.

We don’t mind that he’s relatively inexperienced because we are, too, especially when it comes to imagining an America that is neither color-blind nor color-coded, but is just colored. He’s the Rorschach test onto which we have projected our best hopes and worst fears, and that, for us, is as it should be. We’re moved by the music he makes. Listening in silence is not an option when he speaks. We’re not reading the lyrics until the next day, so when you tell us that they make no sense—you say they’re unintelligible or meaningless—we say, “Yeah, but you can dance to it.”

I’m trying to say that the Obama campaign is a new instance of the call and response refrain that periodically convulses and renovates American culture, from the Great Awakening to punk rock and hip-hop by way of the ring shout, the “sorrow songs” and the blues. Obama’s political performance is, in fact, reminiscent of a rock star, as many mystified commentators have noted, from George Packer to David Brooks to Gideon Rachman, usually on their way to complaining that the content of the speeches they heard is somehow platitudinous, and eerily forgettable. No point in denying it. Do you remember the lyrics when you leave the concert?

But the truth contained in their mystification is that we are thinking with our bodies as well as our minds when we listen and respond to both Clinton and Obama, and that, for all of us, is at it should be. We can’t abstract from our embodied selves any more than we can abstract from the candidates as living, breathing human beings—not any more than we can treat each other as disembodied minds with no markers of our origins, our histories, the markers that, like it or not, are always already available for scrutiny and categorization by another person.

We can’t look through each other. Or rather, we need also to look at each other, to remind ourselves of the disconcerting, unmistakable particularity of every unruly individual we meet. The reciprocity born in this field of vision—it is not the fabled “logic of the gaze”—produces the risk of equality and the possibility of social movements that make a difference.

That possibility now resides in Obama’s campaign precisely because his rhetoric requires his audience and constituency to complete his phrases, to respond to his call. We’re supposed to be dancing, not just listening—we’re supposed to be performing as well as hearing the words or reading the lyrics. We’re supposed to be a concert in the old-fashioned meaning of the word.

***

Now thinking with our bodies would seem to be a way of acknowledging the most basic of material realities. But the wonderful irony of the current, and clearly urgent, opposition to Obama is that it recapitulates the Left’s fierce opposition to its own liberal kind in the 1990s—it recapitulates the fierce opposition to the “linguistic turn” that led us down the path of post-structuralism, away from the “material realities” that disfigure our lives.

You remember those culture wars on the Left, don’t you? They started in the 1980s and early 1990s with the furious response from avowed feminists to the semiotic definitions of gender developed by Joan Scott and Judith Butler. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, two political theorists who trained in the Frankfurt School of “critical theory,” claimed, for example, that Butler’s account of gender formation robbed women of their political capacities.

Let’s look at some other examples of left-wing frustration with the “linguistic turn” of post-structuralist, post-modernist thinking in the late-20th century. Having done so, we will be in a position to understand that the so-called culture wars were mostly domestic squabbles—they were largely in-house arguments about the future of liberalism—until the very end of the century, when they spilled out into party politics. As Roger Kimball put it in the second edition of Tenured Radicals (1998), “the real battle that is now shaping up is not between radicals and conservatives but between radicals and old-style liberals.”

Our first example is from 1995, when Alan Sokal, a physicist from NYU, embarrassed the editors of Social Text by writing a hilarious parody of post-structuralist prose for a special issue on the “social construction of nature.” The day the issue came out, Sokal revealed his hoax in a magazine devoted to the cultural politics of academe. Like Lynne Cheney, Sokal believed in a fixed “external reality” governed by scientifically proven laws of motion—and like the editors of In These Times, a socialist newspaper published in Chicago, he believed the academic Left had lost its way when it made the “linguistic turn.”

As a dedicated activist who lent his time and money to many progressive causes, Sokal wanted to show that the Left was wasting its time on esoteric, trivial pursuits insofar as it was not concentrating on the “material realities” of poverty at home and abroad, but was instead just doing things with words, offering up empty rhetoric.

Our next example is from 1997, when Richard Rorty, a red-diaper baby and a bona fide liberal, followed the lead of Roger Kimball and, at Harvard’s invitation, delivered a withering critique of the Left that had taken over the universities. Like many right-wing critics of the same political tendency, Rorty called it the Cultural Left, but the story he told was a tale of decline and fall from the glory days of the New Deal, when the Old Left—a coalition of labor unions and intellectuals—invented the welfare state. First the New Left repudiated these predecessors; then its constituents went to graduate school, became professors, and taught their students how to hate their country. This Cultural Left spent “all its time talking about matters of group identity, rather than about wages and hours”—talking, that is, about something other than “material realities.”

Yet another example of left-wing culture wars is from 1999, when the eminent philosopher and ardent feminist Martha Nussbaum went after Judith Butler in the New Republic, courtesy of Leon Weiselthier (another old-school materialist who now worries that Obama’s happy talk of “change” distracts us from the obvious constraints of the real world). Here again the issue was the evasion of “material realities” and the erasure of individual agency supposedly navigated by the “linguistic turn.” Nussbaum’s blistering attack on Butler recalled the remarks made a decade earlier by Benhabib and Fraser, but its angry emphasis on those “material realities”—the phrase is used eight times in a seven-page piece—finally makes it sound like a parody of the vulgar Marxism once peddled by Communist Party hacks.

The critique of “tenured radicals” was, then, an intramural sport on the Left in the late-20th century. It was most definitely not a vast right-wing conspiracy—but it was in many ways conservative, because it sought to rehabilitate Enlightenment notions of individualism, agency, transparency, and objectivity.

So maybe Antonio Gramsci was right, after all, in saying that the “relation between commons sense and the upper level of philosophy is assured by ‘politics.’ ” Certainly there is an echo of the left-wing culture wars of the 1990s in the great divide over the merits of the Democratic candidates. Certainly the common sense of their different campaigns and different constituents can be mapped onto philosophical differences, and vice versa.

On the one hand, we witness a strenuously Enlightenment model—a campaign— demanding that we focus on “material realities” by looking through the candidates, by abstracting from their language, their rhetoric, and their embodied presence. On the other hand, we have a model—a campaign—assuming we have already taken the “linguistic turn,” and asking us to look at the candidates as well the substance of their programs.

Either way, liberalism wins. Either way, so does the Left.