understanding theo-populism
Music: Catherine Wheel: Wishville (2000)
Despite looking like she would drop-to-sleep at any moment, my mother insisted on preparing me dinner last night. She is a payroll administrator---the only one at the company where she currently works---and they're cramming in twelve hour days so that they don't have to work the whole day on Christmas Eve (Mondays are usually the day payroll gets processed). While she was mustering what little energy she had left to be the embodiment of Southern Maternal, we were listening to the network news on a new television my father had installed in the kitchen. "Polls show Mike Huckabee is in the lead," reported Charles Gibson.
"Huckabee and Romney are terrifying to me," I said, not thinking before I opened my mouth, as I'm wont to do.
"We'll, you know who I hate? Hillary. Don't get me started."
"I'm pulling for Obama," I said, "although I saw this good documentary on Ralph Nad---"
"I'm voting this year," interrupted my mother, "and it's just so that Hillary doesn't win. I just can't stand her." I was astonished by this statement, because my parents have never voted in an election since I've been conscious of what voting is. To my knowledge, only my cousin Kelly and I vote in the whole, extended family.
[Break: Mother on the phone with my aunt just now: "Oh, he's got his nose up that dang computer. He's addicted."]
"Who are you gonna vote for, then?" I said. "Please, don't go for these guys running on a religious ticket. Don't vote on faith. This ain't time for a hail Mary."
"I don't know, but not Hillary! Our country was founded on religion, how soon you forget."
My impulse at the moment was to suggest that my mother read-up on the various candidates' positions, to pick up a few of their campaign books (I didn't want to go into the whole discussion about deism, the early fights between Madison and Jefferson on deity, and so on). Although these campaign books are often coached (if not ghost written), I don't think folks give them as much attention as they deserve. They often evince styles of thinking, tones of thought. Remember G-Dubya's A Charge to Keep? In retrospect it is akin to Mein Kampf in a way, although that was 1999 and the racist projections didn't come until October, 2001. Even so, the Hebraic tone of thought is there.
But then I reasoned reading books (or even the newspaper) was not what this election is about for my parents, and millions of people like them. The only depth on the issues that they will get is from CNN, Fox, and the network news (so what ends up there is all that gets downloaded). This means that the next election is about affective response: my mother returns home from work after having been abused all day, then tiredly makes dinner, a network new broadcast glosses on faith in the Huckabee campaign (the word "faith" is first under his name on the side of his touring bus), and my mother responds favorably, both at the level of significance but also at a deeper, emotional level---at the level of an affective disposition. She responds at the level that reminds her (me) of the pastor comforting us in that pinewood-paneled church on highway 124, just after I played a Magus in the nativity pageant. In the past I've asked my mother why she disliked Hillary so, and she could not say: "I just don't like her." "Just" bespeaks the limit of the signifier, the edge of something else.
I suspect many if not most people will vote their affective convictions in this election, short-circuiting in that final moment any knowledge that has been incorporated (think here Hume on action and judgment in politics). If Nine-eleven taught us anything about electoral politics, it should be that "good reasons" are important yet impotent when it comes to the force of feeling---the force of fantasy properly conceived. Certainly the rhetoric of neoliberalism, the economization of everything social and cultural, appeals to a certain affective disposition, but it is one that is largely seated in an elite class. The political machine serves their interests (although I would also suggest a political uncanny is also at work; they think it serves their interests, but Adorno would teach us something else). Regardless, that ideology has only been sustained by means of a rhetorical bridge to the dominant discourse of affective response in the United States today: religion, the discourse of finding God.