psychoanalyzing the tea party

Music: Marvin Gaye: What's Goin' On? (1972)

Yesterday afternoon a colleague leaned into my office doorway and asked: "So, Josh. Put the Tea Party on the couch. What's your diagnosis?" My reaction was similar to that of many folks I've talked to: "Well, it's a little bit too easy, isn't it? It's an organization of affect around one simple, adolescent or infantile experience: someone took my hap-penis away! (Or as we might say in reference to the tattoo here, "who's my daddy?") The problem, of course, was that there was nothing to be taken away to begin with, a classic object-cause of desiring if there ever was. In other words, whatever is or is in danger of being taken away is interchangeable with another thing; when a kid throws tantrum for candy it's not about the candy.

My colleague (who studies political communication, and whom I dare not mention by name or I will invite the wrath of colleague's wedded partner, who lectured me about not blogging about him or his spouse last night) . . . where was I? Oh yes, my colleague and I discussed our mutual befuddlement about the what the Tea Party wants. From just about any psychoanalytic perspective---Freudian, Lacanian, Kleinian, Jungian---the motive of the Tea Partying is very clear: infantile feelings of deprivation or lack. As I said to my colleague yesterday, there are two competing affective appeals organizing U.S. politics today: (a) love your neighbor; and (b) you took my happiness away. Of course this is grossly simplistic---but so are the stories in the mainstream media on politics. History has shown, time and time again, that one appeal works much better than the other, and in a way cannot be said any better than Francis Bacon: (a) is to "will" as (b) is to "appetites." Children have no will power, only appetites. It takes an adult to cultivate strong will. Loving your neighbor is a long-term endeavor that requires steady commitment to overcome the immediate appetites of the present. Human beings are often described as more "evolved" because of psychology: we are better able to plan long-term than other animals. Of course, such an observation is questionable (if not downright wrong, given what we know about a number of species), but it is nevertheless a common one. My point is simply that "the left" and "the right" today appeal to different motives. It's Jesus versus Ayn Rand, the classic struggle between will and immediate satisfaction. A savings account versus a credit card.

Politics cannot simply be about motive. As J.M. Berstein observed this June, organized affect without a goal is simple nihilism (a point that led me to a comparison between Mel Gibson's rants and Tea Party rallies). Politics must also be about a plan, and what's so baffling about the Tea Party is that they have no plan. "Taking back the country," is not a plan. Fighting for same sex marriage is a plan. "Taking a stand against Obama's socialism" is not a plan. Demanding the feds go after Arizona's racist immigration profiling law is a plan. This lack of planning makes the Tea Party movement doubly adolescent: not only does the Tea Party betray all the affectations of a teenage clique---the best comparison I can think of is the underground punk movement of the late 70s---but they also are not yet "adult" enough to know what to do with all this discontent. Unlike the street-marching grown-ups of the left-leaning "progressives," the Tea Parties don't know what they're protesting or how to change it.

Of course, we all have those feelings of deprivation from time to time. You might say the feeling is among the most primal. As a babe we feel joy with our parent's presence, and we feel tragic anger or fear with their absence. Or, as Klein might put it: nothing pisses of an infant more than a breast that won't miraculously appear when it cries out in hunger. Bad breast! Anyway, we all have these primitive feelings of deprivation and lack (and in some sense, one might say these are "wired" into the simple will to live or survive). When we're given over to them in moments that are not framed in terms of life and death (e.g., zombie apocalypse), we tend toward feelings of injury and entitlement. As a teacher, I see injury and entitlement every semester when grades are delivered (as if getting a "B" is akin to a unyielding boob). You can also clearly see these feelings in play with following footage of a Tea Party rally:

The cause of injury: abortion; taxes; spending; heath care; Pelosi; Obama. The various (sad) interviews make it easy to see the object-cause is interchangeable---it's everything and no-thing. And the catchphrase of entitlement? "We're here to take our country back."

But from whom? I asked this same question to a member of my immediate family recently. "Them!" she said. "Who are 'them' for you?" I responded. "You know, Obama, and his people. Those people." If someone has taken your happiness away, you need to identify a someone. Socialists. Communists. The Gays. Illegal Aliens. THEM!

So, putting the Tea Party on the couch is not terribly difficult, and diagnosing the failings of this organized affect is easy as well. I think what has both my colleague and me confused is how the Tea Party has managed to keep their affect organized while neither having a plan nor a leader. Perhaps thinking through our so-called "network" society can help us to explain what we might term here the Politics of Empty Demand (with nods to Laclau), a plan-less politics of affect that the Tea Party seems to exemplify so well (and in this respect, I strongly disagree with Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who suggests its no different from anti-New Dealists in the 30s or John Birch Society in the 60s).

For me, what is most astonishing is that no clear leader has emerged to help organize the affect of deprivation. In one of his most overlooked yet powerful studies, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud argues that mass movements, particularly religious and political ones, cannot be sustained over the long term without a leader. This is because the violence necessary to sustain a movement (whether it's screaming by speech, sit-ins and reactions to them, or physical aggression) cannot happen without a relaxing of social norms. Leaders of movements become the embodiment of new norms of permissibility, standing in for the internalized inhibitions of the average follower. Leaders need not be permanent, but Freud's argument, in general, is that there is one. Lacan's term for such a person, of course, is "the Master."

So, my final observation is this: the time is very ripe for a leader of the Tea Party to emerge. Such a person could readily cure the problem of lacking a plan too, thereby staving off out-right nihilism (which can be very dangerous). I predict that if a leader of some kind does not emerge within the year, this movement is going to peter out or become absorbed by the Republican party. The latter does not seem likely.

In short, I think the Tea Partiers have some Bonnie Tyler issues: