Seven Red

In that last post, I freely copped to being totally wrong about US electoral politics most of the time. In other words, I can’t make heads or tails of how people vote in this country. It simply makes no sense to me, likely because of my snooty Eastern elitist upbringing and continued devotion to an urban elitist arugula-laden lifestyle. Case in point, of course, would be Governor Palin, who strikes me as a finger-wagging knucklehead at best. she and I were laughing this morning at her scoldiferous outtakes on NPR; I didn’t watch her speech, but the whole thing seems just preposterous. Needless to say, she greatly impressed everyone, including the pundit braintrust in the supposedly “liberal media” who fell all over themselves to mention how fantastical she was after the McCain campaign spent the better part of two days kicking them in  their collective balls. Maybe it’s my Eastern elitist roots cultivated in the snooty confines of outer borough New York City public schools, but where I come from, if somebody calls you a worthless asshole, the appropriate response is generally not made up of compliment and praise. Like I said, I don’t understand how the thing works.

So the unemployment numbers come out today, and it’s pretty brutal: 6.1% unemployment, and eight straight months of job losses, now over 600,000. In another stunning stat, 9.2% of all homeowners are either behind or in foreclosure on their mortgages. The overall numbers are just as bloody: 3.7 million manufacturing jobs up and vanished under the Republican presidency; real wages, as Obama likes to remind listeners, are down $2200 since Bush took office. All of this has much less direct effect on places where the effete urban elite live, of course. The effete urban elite are generally trained in precisely the sort of symbolic analytic work that prepares them well for a variety of positions in the global economy: lawyers, doctors, marketers, teachers, software project managers, derivative traders, and so on (to name the positions of just a few of my friends from college, some of whom are even rabid Bushites). Of these friends, nearly all live either in New York City itself, or in the immediate suburbs, or in major metropolitan areas in New York state . What’s more, none of these people would last two weeks in Wasilla, Alaska – and especially not the Bush fans. I am the only one of them with even an inkling of having lived in something less than a city/suburb for more than a weeklong summer vacation, and that was in Giant State University College Town, not exactly Wasilla, culturally speaking.

But no worries, Ohio! That Sarah Palin’s spunky, and she’s gonna show those city folk how to field dress a ten point buck! Hooo-aahh! I don’t usually go in for the Thomas Frank argument, that these “merely” cultural issues cause people to vote against their economic self-interest. First, I think people usually vote a certain way for good reasons: good reasons for them. Unlike my cohort in the Eastern elitist squad, I don’t buy that people are duped or even stupid. Everyone locks into some affective attachments; it just happens that the liberal affective attachments come with this scientistic mythology about “economic self-interest” being somehow different and superior to all the other  “interests” in life. This is a strange sort of prediliction indeed, since the same people will usually argue against mere social or economic efficiency criteria for, say, the arts. Aren’t the arts “wasteful” in the same way voting merely on abortion issues is “wasteful” for the poor family in Kansas? One would do well to read Bataille on restricted and general economy, and the various functions of wasteful expenditure. Instead, the solution has been to reduce everything to restricted economies, and to thereby import social and economic efficiency into the analysis. The arts are – so this story goes – really efficient after all, first, because they are crucial industries themselves (the culture industry), and second, because they produce positive externalities, etc.

All true, I guess, but ultimately lame. The struggling musician who could do much better writing stupid little commercial jingles “votes” against her economic self-interest everytime she refuses to “sell out,” just as surely as does the struggling mechanic obsessed with semi-automatic rifles. But you don’t see a lot of people writing books about how these people are “duped,” or, if you do (No Logo), it is only because their very “resistance” to efficiency has itself been cycled into production. To take it from a completely opposite direction, nearly everyone who votes at all really votes against economic self-interest if you posit the exploitation of labor as a given. As my three readers know, I do. This leads to the ironic condition whereby voting for your “self-interest” continually ratifies the exploitation of your labor. Of course, self-interest must be laid out on a continuum of possibility. It would always seem better to vote for the pro-union candidate than it is to vote for the anti-union candidate, the pro-choice candidate rather than the anti-choice candidate. But let’s not pretend that economic self-interest is a transparent category. So these arguments don’t really work for me, either way you slice it.

The question would not be “Is this congruent with self-interest?” Rather, we’d have to ask what affective attachments operate in either case. It also doesn’t seem as simple as prattling about “resentment,” as Krugman does in the NY Times today, unless you want to take a stronger Nietzschean version of ressentiment right to the heart of the Subject. Why the left isn’t better at asking these questions remains a mystery to me, since it is much better at managing collective affects in nearly every domain outside of electoral politics. They seem to think that if only people could see through the “cultural” screen to the real effects of economy, the scales would drop, and ta da! That the right has gotten so good at parsing out these attachments is similarly mysterious, since their devotion to the most stupid and reductionary neo-liberal economism generally dominates their analysis of all social life, full stop. But that might be how it works. Once you give up on the silly base-superstructure version of economism, you start to get a better sense of how these affects circulate. The right has completely given up on the distinction: everything is economics for them; it’s the night in which all self-interest is gray, so to speak. Hockey-mommery is as important as job creation: this is what you get when base-superstructure falls by the wayside. Obama, on the other hand, keeps up with this “They’re not talking about economy. They’re not talking about issues” stuff. Will it work with 6.1 % unemployment and a collapsing economic “base.” Maybe, maybe not. What irritates me about Palin, in any case, is not the premise, but the specific affects she promotes and hooks into. Again, I’m usually wrong.

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