Kidult Politics and the American Right. posted by Richard Seymour

A loving smack on the bum for the Bush team.


Some childish abuse.
Let’s face it, they’re all winners. They struggle against great personal disadvantage, a heritage of bad genes, lousy luck and sub-standard copulation. Imagine managing in the face of such odds. The undeveloped intellects, the twisted, cruelly distorted bodies. The inane gurning and dribbling. And the childish fantasies, earnestly expressed. If they weren’t also complete and utter shits, I might feel enormous sympathy for the Republican Party.
Over the years, they have done their best to absorb the brightest minds in America, using their enormous financial leverage to pay for party apparatchiks, marketing men, intelligentsia, pollsters, think tanks etc. The net result is that they still control one half of American power. On the other hand, their President and CEO is George W. Bush, a man who will get past the first sentence in good time so don’t mock.
It is a capacious institution, embracing East Coast liberal conservatives, small-town farmers, Christian fundamentalists, gun enthusiasts, libertarians, far right fanatics and isolationists. It is also home to the neoconservative, a modestly variegated species, having its origins in two distinct generations: respectively, Trotskyists turned to Cold War liberalism; and most recently the followers of Leo Strauss. The latter are often hardcore Zionists and Likudniks, which may for the first time make the Republican Party more pro-Israel than the Democrats.
In that spectrum of opinion, George W. Bush seemed initially to tend toward a paleoconservative isolationism, but subsequently surrounded himself with hard right neoconservatives and only a couple of ‘doves’. While his father abstemiously restrained the Republican programme to a modest Eisenhowerianism, Bush junior has taken the USS Enterprise to new zones, pursuing the more extreme edges of Reaganite outer space. Now, clearly, there is no connection between this political alignment and George W’s putative idiocy. No. One need only be a hypocrite, a liar or an extremist zealot to wholeheartedly swallow the Bush programme. One may be all of these things and also be an urbane intellectual shrouded in darkness and glowers (as opposed to Bush jnr’s idiotically sunny smiles). But one does have to be very stupid indeed to accept both the rhetoric and substance of the present administration without any sense of the incongruence of the two. It is therefore no coincidence that both Reagan and Bush affected a sweet, warm-hearted but tough, folksy demeanour, doing only the hard talking while allowing others to do the hard thinking.


The cunning of unreason.
We generally think it’s a hopeful sign for us if our enemies are abnormally stupid, but Bush’s stupidity is depressingly normal. Nor is it the case that a lack of intelligence is cosubstantial with a lack of guile. One of the most alarming things about kidult politics as practised by this administration – and expertly by Bush in particular – is its sophistication, its ability to press all the right emotive buttons. I recall a pro-Republican acquaintance boasting to me that Bush had “all Clinton’s moves”, and it was a perceptive remark: Clinton did not begin the trend of speaking to voters “like Little Orphan Annie”, as Gore Vidal once put it, but he was an expert at it. He could emote better than Bush, but he wasn’t as good at the tough guy act. And while he clearly had more right to common folk pretensions than the upper class white-bread Bush, he often sounded like a dreadful yuppie and was not averse to evincing a subtle good-old-boy racism. Both Bush and Clinton can do a convincing line in self-mockery and irony, while being able to shrug off criticism with a knowing smirk. Both can lie fantastically well, and these aren’t just the ideological lies that usually sustain a Presidency. But this matchless capacity for purposeless lies has proven a drain on the charm resources of both. As a friend once remarked to me, Clinton would have been even more popular in the polls if he had said:
“Mah fellow Americans. Not only did I fuck that woman, but I also made her come. Top that, Ken Starr!”
But that would break the rules of kidult politics – a world in which noone ever has illicit sex, takes corrupt funds, scapegoats the poor or uses the nearest available country as a convenient glop mop to erase the evidence of one’s latest misdeed. In fact, kidulthood’s apparent innocence is entirely sustained by a deep core of cynicism. One cannot stop the lies, so why not believe them?
The Simpsons gives this logic its most advanced articulation. It portrays a corrupt America, full of police brutality, homelessness, bribe-taking politicians, a media more interested in lewd perversion than the news, public education falling apart at the seams, and a class of scavenging capitalists cutting corners while treating workers as over-priced commodities. Yet, it stops short of drawing the logical conclusion that the whole society must begin from scratch – this is FOX, after all – and instead allows an eery innocence to have the last say. Witness Lisa Simpson, the eight-year old prodigy who knows about the police acting as vanguards of corporate America, but still rallies round the flag when called to do so. One knows that everything is awful, but this is AMERICA after all. The ironic in this form is wilful innocence, just as the innocent sentimentality of the confessionary talk show is brute, cynical narcissism.


Innocence and cynicism – seperated at birth?
The American Right is a past master at trading on the collusion between innocence and corruption in this way. Iran-Contra was revealing for, among other things, the tenacity with which a hard core of the American public insisted on believing in the protestations of innocence from Oliver North and his accomplices. I posit that those people, or the bulk of them, were fully aware that the Reagan administration was a corrupt clique in league with mercenaries, but were able to subsume any sense of repellence in the notion that these men were essentially innocent. This or that disgusting act was necessary in the fight against evil and so was, in a more fundamental way, good. The stars and stripes is for this reason the complete Republican emblem, the gestalt image portraying both the face of modern freedom and that of corrupt tyranny. It is no coincidence that the party of Law and Order, in whichever country, is also the party of police brutality and extra-legal force as the inherent transgression needed to sustain the Law. The resort to war, too, may in fact violate the very ethical or legal exhortations which the warriors say they are out to defend. This dialectic is carefully defended by Robert Kagan in Paradise and Power, a more than usually eloquent neoconservative tract on the necessary reliance of the Kantian paradise of modern Europe on the Hobbesian power politics of modern America. If anything, it is America which has been enjoying the Kantian transcendental paradise, while Europe has suffered the irruptions of real political violence in the form of the IRA bombers in London and the GIA bombers in Paris. But it is an ideological necessity for rightwingers that they are the tough bastards living in the real world, weathering the storms of geopolitics so as to protect – who else? – the innocent.


The Matrix vs “the Desert of the Real”.
It is easy to be innocent, of course, if such innocence entails preserving one’s privileges in the world without suffering any discomfort about it. Indeed, how else does Agent Smith tempt his informant if not by contrasting the nightmare world of the real with the mouth-watering fiction of the Matrix? September 11th, far from militating against such these traditional ideological coordinates, has only compounded them and given them reason. One can even pretend to have abandoned innocence while diving beneath Blanket Security. If anyone hoped that the experience of a successful attack on America would arouse an awareness of the suffering of the rest of the world, they might have looked more closely at the reaction to the trial run in 1993. Al Qaeda made an abortive airplane crash into the WTC, (abortive in the sense of failing to generate the mass hysteria that 9/11 provoked), and there followed seven years of American growth, anti-terrorist rhetoric, a few demonstrative assaults on foreign lands and at least the façade of self-assurance. But not, even in the initial shock, a sense of global hostility to American hegemony, or an awareness that these kinds of atrocities were daily inflicted on the rest of the world, often as a result of American actions.
Kidult politics is about contrived lack of awareness, (a barely conscious contrivance on the part of the ignoramuses to be sure), and the ideological appeal of naïveté, sutured by cynicism. It is the American Right’s triumphant reprisal of postmodernism. For that reason, it is our global enemy.