I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States

By Paul Elliott Johnson

A rhetorical examination of the rise of populist conservatism

I The People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States examines a variety of texts—ranging from speeches and campaign advertisements to news reports and political pamphlets—to outline the populist character of conservatism in the United States. Paul Elliott Johnson focuses on key inflection points in the development of populist conservatism, including its manifestation in the racially charged presidential election of 1964, its consolidation at the height of Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, and its character in successive moments that saw its fortunes wax and wane, including 1994, the Obama era, and the rise of Donald J. Trump. theorizing conservative populism as a rhetorical form, Johnson advances scholarship about populism away from a binary ideological framework while offering a useful lens for contextualizing scholarship on American conservatism. I The People emphasizes that the populist roots of conservative hegemony exercise a powerful constraining force on conservative intellectuals, whose power to shape and control the movement to which they belong is circumscribed by the form of its public-facing appeals.

The study also reframes scholarly understandings of the conservative tradition’s seeming multiplicity, especially the tendency to suggest an abiding conservative unease regarding capitalism, showing how racist hostility underwrote a compromise with an increasingly economized understanding of humanity. Johnson also contests the narrative that conservatives learned to practice identity politics from social progressives. From the beginning, conservatism’s public vernacular was a white and masculine identity politics reliant on a rhetoric of victimhood, whether critiquing the liberal Cold War consensus or President Barack Obama.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817393809

Book preview

I THE PEOPLE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

I THE PEOPLE

The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States

PAUL ELLIOTT JOHNSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Garamond

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2109-3

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9380-9

For Alan Coverstone and Amber Kelsie, who, together, redeem my world daily even when it doesn’t deserve it.

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Conservative Populism and the Possibilities of the People

1. The Great Communicator against the Great Society: Ronald Reagan’s A Time for Choosing

2. It’s Morning in America: Populism in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Campaign

3. Nothing to See Here: The Year of the Angry White Man

4. The Real Silent Majority: Rick Santelli and the Populist Paradox That Birthed the Tea Party

5. Freedom at the Edge of Annihilation: Racial Fungibility in Tea Party Vernaculars

6. Donald Trump, White Masculinity, and the Challenge to Populism

Conclusion: The Doomsday Machine Is Terrifying. It’s Simple to Understand

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Figures

1. Institutions and subjects reliant on the pathological theory of Blackness, a.k.a. Blackness = death.

2. A depiction of what functional selfhood lived with and among uncertainty, rather than against it, should look like.

3. Conservatism’s fortunes rise along with the sophistication of its rhetorical capacity to sublimate its toxic investments.

4. Increasing conservative hegemony and contextual factors result in more need for naked rebellion and violence to cover up the emptiness of conservative ideology.

5. Producerist model lets white men imagine that they, not capital, mind the gates.

6. White victimhood, hungry for freedom, beyond satiation.

7. Selfhood as a process that secures relations to alterity and the world on a basis other than racialized fear of death.

8. Debates over what life is—rather than necropolitical fiat—emerge out of social and political interplay.

Acknowledgments

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I HAVE to acknowledge all those family who passed away in the six years that I worked on this project. Cathy Bruce, Eric Johnson, Esther Oriol, Scott Nelms, and Pat Elliott were all very dear to me, and I miss them all. To various degrees, some of them would have pretended not to understand exactly what I was doing while giving their unconditional love.

Second, I have to acknowledge the talented surgical team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Oakland. One spring morning in 2016, after working on the book at my local coffeeshop, I set off on my way to get some lunch. One speedily and illegally taken left turn later, I had been flipped over a sedan and landed on the hard pavement, my right arm smashed by the car. Luckily, a random guy walking down the street was an EMT, and he stayed with me while we waited for an ambulance. The incredible capable and professional trauma surgery team that helped me that day—along with the amazing rehabilitation staff at the UPMC rehab center in Oakland that helped me exercise twice a day for almost a whole year—helped make this project possible in a most basic sense.

Third, my family members are incredible people. My dad, Kirk, and my mom, Libby, have both been so supportive of me and my career. My sisters, Laura and Stephanie, have been similarly supportive and encouraging, and I love them all so much, along with my grandmas, Arlene and Mimi.

I owe an incredible amount of thanks to Kimberly Singletary at Humanities First! Her work as a developmental copyeditor helped turn this project from a set of stark ravings into a more coherent and legible enterprise. Kim’s expertise in rhetoric, theories of Blackness, and American identity helped shape this project into something more textured, transforming it into a manuscript that does a better job of putting credit—and blame—where they are due in assessing the state of play in the politics of the United States and its social order.

Dan Waterman at the University of Alabama Press has been great to work with. From talking through the finer points of preparing a manuscript, to giving feedback on the project at various stages, to finding reviewers well-positioned to comment upon and improve the book, I have nothing but excellent things to say about my experience with the University of Alabama Press. On the production side, Joanna Jacobs kept things moving, while the copyediting of Irina du Quenoy has been a gift, one desperately needed.

We have an amazing group of scholars from different departments who are part of a writing group here at Pitt, and I would never have finished the book without them. Twice a week we—all as junior faculty—would gather together and write. Jules Gill-Peterson, Peter Odell Campbell, Imani Owens, Elizabeth Rodriguez-Fielder, and Patrick McKelvey: every day some of us would be writing. They are all lovely, amazing friends. I have to reserve a couple special words for Peter, who has listened to just about every rant about this book I could imagine, whether at the coffeeshop at a reasonable hour or at the bar across the street from the coffeeshop at a . . . less reasonable hour. Further shout outs to others who show up sometimes and brighten the day, including Shaun Myers, Dave Molina, and Khirsten Scott.

The proprietors of Constellation Coffee in Pittsburgh, Amy and Cliff, deserve a thanks. It’s possible I wrote the bulk of this project in their space. And they let me hang out there whenever I lost my keys, like a stereotype of a professor. The coffee is great!

The graduate students at Pitt have helped me think through many key questions about rhetoric, violence, sovereignty, and US identity. Between the opportunities to teach seminars on rhetorical theory, populism, and sovereignty, I was able to work through a lot of these ideas in conversation with a wildly talented group of emerging scholars, both in class and at department events. Charles Athanasopoulos, Corinne Sugino, Robin Zwier, Kory Riemensperger, Elise Homan, Deborah Danuser, Andrew Allsup, Kelly O’Donnell, Al Primack, Sierra Abram, Kam Dadah, Rachel Clancy, Alex Holguin, Reed Van Schenk, Kaitlyn Haynal, Sam Allen, Daniel Beresheim, Sarah Constant, Jess Benham, Logan Blizzard, Ambrose Curtis, and Andrea Hannah all shared trenchant insights, pushed our thinking, and in general provided a model learning experience. An informal reading group on sovereignty with Niq. D. Johnson was also invaluable for shaping my thinking on many questions about authority and power.

I especially want to thank E. Chebrolu and Sydney Pasquinelli. Having worked with E. first in my capacity as a collegiate debate coach and then later together in the context of the Department of Communication at Pitt, I have learned so much by conversing with him about our shared research interests, even if some days the topics of our discussions really do read like the shipping manifest of the Voyage of the Damned studying some of the worst parts of our hellscape. He has really pressed me to be a great scholar and a better person, and I’m proud of how much work he does to insist that the world be a better place. Sydney, you are an incredible friend and working closely with you for several years coaching was great. Thanks for giving me room to grow.

Talking shop is one of the most important parts of a project like this. I’m blessed with an amazing group of friends and scholars. Jason Regnier, Sean Kennedy, Joel Lemuel, Joe Packer, Jessica Kurr, Taylor Hahn are only a few of many people who tolerated rants and raves and lengthy exegeses that appeared to have no end. A note also to Maddie Denison, whose keen observations as a debater and student have helped inform a lot of what I hope this book is able to illuminate. Finally, to Ron von Burg and Alessandra Beasley von Burg, who have tolerated me since way back when: your friendship and intellectual grace mean the world to me.

I have so many warm thoughts for people who were willing to read parts of this manuscript. Michael Mario Albrecht and Atilla Hallsby probably read almost the whole thing in various parts, and their comments and insights were keen and helpful. Olga Kuchinskaya and David Marshall, my colleagues at Pitt, gave incredibly helpful comments on the introduction, and both offered helpful advice for seeing the project to completion. Michael Goodhart, Tamar Malloy, Rafael Khachaturian, Rachel McKinney, Andrew Lotz, and other members of the Pittsburgh political theory reading group provided many useful comments and conversations. Other folks around campus, including Kris Kanthak and Dan Kubis, provided useful feedback on the project. Thanks to the Women’s Studies in Communication journal, including then-editor Kristen Hoerl, the production team, and their anonymous reviewers. They helped shape much of the material in chapter 6 of this book, which first appeared (in somewhat different form) in that journal as The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery.

My department at Pitt has been very supportive and generative. Not only was my department chair Lester Olson helpful as an advocate when I required time off in 2016, his support for securing financial backing was vital. Brent Malin has been an exemplary mentor and colleague, meeting regularly to talk about the project, offer professional advice, and offering feedback about my work. Conversations with Calum Matheson further shaped the project, although perhaps with not nearly enough Lacan. Lynn Clarke has been a great source of cheer and scholarly acumen on the (too rare!) occasions when we get to talk shop. Ron Zboray and Gordon Mitchell have been strong supporters of my work as well.

Guy McHendry put together the images you find in the manuscript based on rather rough sketches. I recommend his scholarly work, not only for the images sometimes contained therein but also for the high quality of his rhetorical scholarship. Colleagues at other institutions have been generous in offering insights and feedback. Matthew DeTar provided invaluable feedback on the introduction, as did Chelsea Graham and Michael Lechuga on ch. 1. Jamie Merchant and Randall Bush both helped me think through a number of the most pressing questions in this manuscript. Michael Lee provided useful comments regarding my understanding of American conservatism, and his book, Creating Conservatism, is vital reading. Casey Ryan Kelly, Jennie Keohane, Jarrod Atchison, and Kelly Jakes joined Mike in providing intellectual and bourbon-soaked support.

Three Rhetoric Society of America summer institutes were very important in shaping this project. Between the seminar on presidential rhetoric at the 2013 RSA led by Vanessa Beasley and Shawn Parry-Giles, the 2013 seminar on political theory (which included Jeremy Engels and Pat Gehrke), and the 2019 seminar on neoliberalism helmed by Rebecca Dingo and Robert Asen, I connected with communities of scholars interested in similar research questions. Two special thanks: first, Vanessa Beasley was incredibly encouraging, supportive, and so danged smart. Being able to spend four days getting up to speed about presidential rhetoric with her was a true joy. Second, I owe additional thanks to Rob for his helpful insights and comments on the book project.

In conducting this research, I was fortunate to be able to take archival trips to the presidential libraries and research rooms of both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. The archivists provided me with a wealth of information. Thanks especially to Jennifer Mandel at the Reagan site and to Allen Fisher at the LBJ archives. Also, during my tour of the Reagan Library, a particularly helpful docent reminded me of how much Ronald Reagan admired Andrew Jackson by pointing to the latter’s portrait displayed in a replica of Reagan’s Oval Office.

I spent a considerable amount of time in academic policy debate, and while I am not in that world anymore, my experiences in that arena informed this project. Specifically, I was fortunate to be in debate at a time when competitors were pushing argumentative boundaries by relying on critical theories that pointed out the structural conditions informing the reality of the United States. In particular, I thank competitors and coaches who pushed the community to think affirmatively about questions of structural inequality—especially, but not only, racism. The most incredible thing about an intensely competitive activity is its capacity to humble you by introducing you to theories, perspectives, and ways of thinking that you had scarcely considered before. While an exhaustive list is impossible, I would like to mention here Elizabeth Jones and Tonia Green from the University of Louisville, Ignacio Evans, Ben Morgan, Ben Crossan, and Ameena Ruffin from Towson University, Jyleesa Hampton and Quaram Robinson from the University of Kansas, Ben Hagwood, Eddie Fitzgerald, and Vida Chiri from Liberty University, and Marquis Ard from Oklahoma. I’d like to give a special shout out to Scott Harris for being a principled coach and inspiring role model. A special mention goes to Shanara Reid-Brinkley, whom I was lucky to call a colleague for several years. I’m even luckier that she chose to support me and give me the opportunity to learn from her. In some ways, intercollegiate debate’s enmeshment in structures of violence and privilege made the discomfort in the community in the last decade-plus one of clearest previews of coming attractions that were in store for the US polity, and I know that Dr. Reid-Brinkley’s book on the subject is going to be vital reading.

I have to reserve a special place of thanks for Amber Kelsie. I count it among one of my greatest blessings in life that I got to first coach with Amber at the University of Pittsburgh, to count her among my best friends, and then to be a member of her dissertation committee. Amber is a charitable arguer and a capacious thinker, and if there are useful insights in this book quite a lot of that is owed to her influence. More important than either of those things is that Amber is a human being who knows that friendship involves real love, and I have that love for her too.

David Hingstman was very supportive and full of keen insight at the point of this project’s inception, and I very much hope he is enjoying his well-earned retirement. Others at the University of Iowa who were important to this project’s development include John Durham Peters Mark Andrejevic, Jiyeon Kang, Leslie Baxter, Barbara Biesecker, and David Wittenberg. Finally, to David Depew: you were amazing to think with, even if, in the end, we did not take the same view about modernity.

I have been the beneficiary of the fact that I hail from the great city of Nashville, Tennessee, as a result of which there are a number of talented scholars and friends whom I can see whenever I visit my ancestral home. Terrell Taylor, Isaac West, Jeff Bennett, and Claire Sisco King have all listened to me go on endlessly about this book. And, in the case of Claire, she has read and commented on so much of this work that the debt I owe to her is really above and beyond. She has been a generous colleague in terms of commenting on work, pushing thinking, encouraging the project, and being forthcoming with time and mental energy. Jeff and Isaac have each looked at and commented upon huge chunks of this project at times, first when it was in a very earlier stage, and then later as I developed it. Isaac, you’ve been an immensely helpful mentor to me, and I’m really in your debt.

Several generous gifts made archival research possible. I’d like to thank the Kenneth Dietrich School of the Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Between a Type II summer research grant, the Office of Research’s Central Research Development Fund, and the Edwards Fund, Pitt has shown a level of real enthusiasm for this project at every level. Several talks I attended at the university really strengthened the project as well, especially those given by Armond Towns, Lou Maraj, Annie McClanahan, and Philip Mirowski. Various other scholars have also impacted this project, though perhaps they do not know it, but their work and occasional suggestions about the need to expand one’s list of readings and perspective are appreciated. I am thinking in particular of chats with Bryan McCann, Anjali Vats, Lisa Corrigan, Mary Stuckey, Karma Chavez, Kendall Phillips, Michele Kennerly, Carly Woods, and Damien Pfister.

Finally, I am grateful for my blessings in life. There is a wizened bunny of twelve, Pax, and a more recent addition in the form of a modestly sized dog named Patches. But most important is the brilliant C. B., who has listened to every insufferable rant about this project, tolerated my uneven affect as I have worked through it, and read and commented on much of it. Most importantly, she’s been with me through many difficult, challenging times. We have dealt with so much, but we have also created an awful lot of good together. That’s all worth far more than any document. Thank you.

Introduction

Conservative Populism and the Possibilities of the People

ON APRIL 12, 2010, A little more than two weeks after the federal government made the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, the law of the land, conservative activists posted the Contract from America (henceforth Contract From) online. The document followed up on the 1994 Contract with America (henceforth Contract With), a covenant drafted by the GOP during that year’s midterm. Where the Contract With committed to a flurry of procedural reforms in the House of Representatives, the Contract From departed from its antecedent in tenor and content by making demands on the political system rather than negotiating with it. Both documents, in speaking about America, implicitly invoked its people. I place quotation marks around the people throughout the manuscript, to acknowledge that the term itself is contested. The Contract From figured the relation between the freedom of the population and the authority of government as one of inverse proportionality: the less the people are governed, the freer they are. Thematically the document’s goals—calls to reject the [Environmental Protection Agency’s] overreach, adopt a simpler, flatter, and fairer tax system, and defund, repeal, and replace government-run health care—link back to a larger political agenda, the expansion of the authority of the real population of the United States, figured as a set of radically autonomous individuals united in their possession of liberty.¹ The Contract From conflates popular freedom with market freedom, conjuring a people tethered to economic liberty by proclaiming, any other economic system, regardless of its intended pragmatic benefits, undermines our fundamental rights as free people.² Terms like any and fundamental indicate certainty about the people’s identity as well as a constitutive claim operating without any qualifiers or reservation.³ The 2010 Contract is more brazenly evangelical about the benefits of the free market than the 1994 Contract, highlighting the rhetorical function of the Contract From, whose confident proclamations about the interchangeability of economic liberty and popular freedom attempt to push away the prospect of popular dissent from capitalism.

The broader rhetorical figure the people contains more possibilities than those entertained by either Contract, since democracy might spring out of tensions not imagined by their authors. For example, Pew polling in 2010 suggested only a thin majority of Americans supported capitalism, contravening the Contract From’s people who loved free markets.⁴ How could both people be? This disconnect underscores that naming the people stakes a claim and simultaneously opens the term up to contestation.⁵ I do not aim to refer to the people as an entity with a factual existence. The people names an unending process rather than a stable entity.⁶ Acts invoking the people tacitly admit they require naming, pointing to the fact that the people is a social construct rather than some Platonic essence. That one has to name a people at all forswears the possibility that they exist as a metaphysically grounded entity. The gap between the Contract From’s attempt to enunciate an American identity grounded in faith in free markets and popular suspicion of capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis illustrates this tense relationship, in particular showing the contestability of claims about the people’s identity.

Complicating matters further, the process of popular enunciation occurs not only between competing accounts of the population’s collective identity but also in the differences between the individuals who comprise it. Both the people and a person can change. For example, one’s views regarding a robust welfare state and limited government are contingent and subject to revision. Ideally, the people and those who compose the body politic are caught in a constant process of informing, displacing, and reconfiguring each other. The Contract From represents a paradigmatic attempt to state a claim about the identity of the people while keeping other potential accounts of the demos at a distance, making this 2010 document a fair representative of conservative populism in the United States. Conservative populism excels at coding the various forms of identarian uncertainty subtending liberal democracy—like differences among accounts of the people or between people and self—not as signs of democratic possibility but as threats.

The modern American Right’s rhetorical form posits a uniform national population, repudiating the contingency that gives substance to democratic life. Thanks to this rhetorical form, conservatives have engineered an end-run around the tensions constitutive of liberal democratic life and whatever progressive potentials inhere therein. Theoretically, the tensions between the individual and the collective—such as the self and the people—and between the people and both competing accounts of the popular will and the system work as mutually enriching forces that critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct self, people," and system in a dynamic process constitutive of liberal democracy.⁷ This interactivity underscores the dependency each has on the other while suggesting why the people constitute an attractive vehicle for making moral demands, as noted by political theorist Nadia Urbinati.⁸ However, Urbinati also suggests that the flexibility of the people comes with downsides. Because self-interested, long-sedimented, and tautologically self-authorizing sociopolitical power structures are best positioned to enforce their judgments about which account of the people is true and which is false, populists can take advantage of the theoretical indeterminacy of popular identity to cloak fascist, morally objectionable reactionary politics in democratic trappings.

Urbinati’s keen insight demands a sui generis supplement accounting for the United States’ individualistic culture. The liberal political tradition posits that there is an essential and desirable structure of the world. This latter is secured along at least two lines, one between individuals who contract with one another and a second in which they agree to cede some authority over themselves to shared institutions. These compacts help make manifest the democratic side of living, one that involves sharing and negotiating with other people. In contrast, conservative populism’s fuel is a white and male individualist ideology that positions the democratic side of the liberal democratic equation as a threat to the people defined in narrow, individualistic terms. Rather than opening up an individual’s representativeness as a point of contestation and political struggle, conservatism locates that figure as anterior to politics, securing it against dissent and placing its freedom beyond deliberation. Where, ideally, politics names how one idea of the people constantly defines itself interactionally through the government, persons, and competing ideas of the people, the conservative people’s freedom is beyond negotiation and therefore disavows liberal democracy’s paradoxes by locating alternative accounts of the collective will exterior to the national spirit. Conventional accounts of liberal democracy admit that the constant churn and failure of the people to fully integrate within the political system generates a remainder, with this disjunction between population and system the source of liberal democracy’s potential for transformation. However, rather than letting this political residue containing hints of democracy’s promise represent the uncertainty and contingency inherent to politics, conservative populism figures it as a failure, one that is threatening the conservative subject with marginality and lack of agency and a particular American people with loss of nation.

I the People: The Rhetoric of Modern Conservative Populism argues that what unifies American conservatism is a commitment to a freedom-soaked, populist rhetorical form. Where earlier iterations of the people in American political discourse—particularly those of the Progressive and New Deal eras—imperfectly marshaled the idea of inequality to legitimate state expansion and a partially egalitarian redistribution of resources, postwar conservatism invokes the people to frame progressive politics as a threat to freedom.⁹ This people does not negotiate and refine an idea of the common good. Instead, conservative populism positions various external figures—ranging from politicians, virtue signalers, crony capitalists, bureaucrats, feminists, politicians, abjected Black people, effete intellectuals, and/or civil rights activists—as the opposite of the people, scapegoats to assure conservatives that their differences from the aforementioned actors are more significant than differences between themselves. Populist rhetoric thus links conservatives to one another in a resentment-laden affinity structure, while persuading them that they inhabit an authentic and altogether different world than the messy and threatening one of democracy. Even the nominally collective concepts invoked by conservatives, ranging from people, community, and nation to organized religion, are walled off from the broader political world. For example, conservative thinkers Paul Weyrich and William Lind think there is only one world: The first Christian principle, and the first principle of Western culture, is that there is and can only be one reality.¹⁰ Whether focusing on the individual difference of persons from one another, or the difference of Christianity from the secular world, conservatism separates its central life space. For conservatives, the people who control and benefit from the liberal political system exist as a qualitatively different form of life from those who inhabit real America, the sometimes explicit but often implicit center of conservative populism.

Conservative populists define the population by constructing as its essential element the individual separation of each person within the people from one another, encouraging them to find their individuality in their difference from the system. While populism often involves a group identifying themselves against a system, it is not always the case that these differences from the system register as signs of one’s individuality. That fragile personhood comprises the conservative people, which I label an individualistic collective, a popular totality binding people together not on the basis of a shared common good but via the individual singularity of each atom thought to comprise the broader civic molecule.¹¹ People do not necessarily have to think of themselves as individuals, but within the structures of liberal capitalism, individualism appears to exhaust the available set of possibilities for what it means to be human. According to political theorist Jodi Dean, in such contexts the generative practices people undertake in common are denuded of their shared sensibilities, designating the collective as not secondary or tertiary in relation to the individual but qualitatively different and functionally irrelevant owing to the collective dimension of life’s imagined origins outside of the self.¹²

Selves are not inherently individual, placing intense burdens on social and political discourses that attempt to disavow this reality by defining the subject as an entity existing prior to sociality and politics. To produce its people, conservatism relies on a vocabulary of negative definition. Conservative populists accuse a slippery, malleable set of establishment actors of the high crimes of bureaucratic managerialism, threatening freedom via making claims of morality, and condescending to the American people via the faculties of public reason. Conservatism defines its people in these gaps, between the people and public reason, and between the free individual and progressive morality. Conservative populism’s sustaining fantasy suggests that both the individual and the authentic American people possess their freedom because of their constitutive opposition to sharing space with other people and other worldviews. Sometimes (un)wittingly, conservatism tracks shifts in the ontic character of capitalism from the postwar period onward, registering the increased individualization of personhood in the United States less as a symptom of capitalist rot than as a sign of progressive capture of political and social institutions. The consequence is the occlusion of conservatism’s continued investment in hostility to social difference.

Modern conservative populism saps legitimacy from certain institutional and governmental authorities, clearing a path for the market to order society while the political system struggles to legitimate itself against the sovereign but indeterminate will of the vox populi. Conservatism’s fear of accountability partially explains pressing problems of epistemic closure, polarization, partisan gridlock, division, and radical individuation. Perhaps rooted in the context of its Cold War emergence wherein a suspicion of collectivity was considered a virtue, conservatism’s suspicion of collective will—whether in the guise of state governance, public reason, or some versions of expertise—conceives of democratic collectivity as a threat to personhood.¹³ Consequently, the ideal subject of conservative populism demands an absolute freedom from social reason and responsibility, one that neither society nor fictions of the omnicompetent, heroic individual can deliver.¹⁴

Conservative populism remains indebted to such iconoclastic acts of imagination because the history of American conservatism is a history of cultivated felt marginality in relation to the American mass public. National Review founder William F. Buckley’s essay announcing the launch of the magazine is instructive. His declaration that conservatives stand "athwart history, yelling Stop positions conservatives as observers of a process driven by other actors. Buckley repeatedly describes conservatism as out of place," blaming forces like the United Nations and the New York Times for marginalizing conservatives from the political center. Buckley attacks liberal ideologues who, "having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one."¹⁵ In turn, conservatives’ displacement gives them a unique parallax view alien to that of mainstream liberals. They can see the unspoken ideological assumptions of the center and perceive how they are rotting American values. Buckley’s conservatives are philosophically central to the life of the nation but feel marginal to the social and political order.

FREEDOM IMPERILED: TRAUMA EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

Victimhood Out of Paradox

The titular phrase I the People emphasizes how modern conservatism uses a shared, thin sense of selfhood to build a coalition that bulldozes its way through parallel paradoxes at the micro and macro levels of liberal democracy. Put simply, at the heart of liberal democratic politics and this book project is what Chantal Mouffe calls the democratic paradox, the notion that neither self nor collective can ever emerge fully triumphant in their tensional struggle with one another.¹⁶ Modern conservative populism reconfigures this liberal democratic friction in a way that evades democratic accountability, offering its audience a heuristic for interpreting the discomfort inherent to heterogeneous social life as a threat, one that in the United States takes a particularly racial form. Rather than producing subjects who might be, in Lars Tønder’s words, motived by the desire to experiment and to become otherwise, they cling to their sense of self.¹⁷ By marrying that fear to a set of seemingly disparate signifiers—states’ rights, family, liberty, religious freedom, culture—conservatives posit the struggle between self and society as existential rather than constitutive and productive, weaving victimhood into the structure of American conservatism’s ideal person.

Both critics and conservatives have identified a rhetoric of victimhood as present, if not central, to conservatism. Literary critic Lionel Trilling, a prominent consensus-era literary critic, identified that victimhood as a set of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.¹⁸ More contemporarily, Judge Roy Moore’s run for Senate in Alabama exemplifies how conservatism’s persecution complex has eviscerated what little capacity for gatekeeping existed in conservative culture. In 2017 Moore, a cult hero among some conservatives for his willingness to violate the Constitution to display a Ten Commandments monument in the state supreme court and to discriminate against same-sex couples, announced a Senate run to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who had agreed to head the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump. During the campaign, reports surfaced that Moore habitually molested young girls.¹⁹ He refused to withdraw from the race and lost to Democrat Doug Jones by less than two percentage points. Clay Routledge addressed Moore’s campaign in the National Review, arguing that the chief threat to principled conservatism was captured both in Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP and Moore’s candidacy, both of which were characterized by a right-wing version of emotional safety and victimhood culture.²⁰ Similarly, Commentary’s Noah Rothman discussed how Trump’s run for president made it harder to deny the force of a white, grievance politics animating the Right.²¹ While Rothman and Routledge both reference identity politics to imply that the Right is borrowing tactics from the Left, a closer look suggests these grievance politics have an organic history on the Right itself.

Conservatism’s struggle to escape its minoritarian roots underscores the continuity within the movement between the 1950s and the first quarter of the twenty-first century.²² While there were conservative forces opposed to the New Deal, it took the postwar period for a cadre of writers, emigres, exiles, and philosophers to gather as a community around the term conservative.²³ Conceptually, conservatism convened a public around two elements. First, the tension between its own seeming intellectual heterogeneity—traditionalist investments in older sources of authority and libertarian fetishism of individual freedom—was a source of dissent and vital energy. The second element involved shared anxieties about marginality. As Michael Lee argues, the conservative culture of argumentation was no Platonic struggle with a determined end. Rather, arguing about conservatism constituted a mechanism through which its ideologues both made their identities and asserted conservative hegemony in the face of daunting ideological differences between their factions, producing conservatives as subjects spoiling for a fight because of their shared felt marginalization within the political system.²⁴

The cauldron of the early Cold War period and the 1960s provided fertile conditions for a populist turn vocalized as a hybrid of rebellion and metaphysics. Though conservatives held a deeply felt sense of themselves as outsiders on the defensive, they were never the excluded figures they believed themselves to be.²⁵ Conservatives were not reacting to the fact that they, as people, were excluded from the political world. They were instead externalizing their disagreement with the views of the political mainstream. Indeed, what scholars call the liberal consensus had a decisive effect on the conservative movement in the United States. Lizabeth Cohen describes this consensus as robust, bipartisan political support for military spending, high taxes, federal infrastructure programs, and some welfare programs.²⁶ Whether one was a traditionalist, a libertarian, or a rabid anti-communist, one found cause for worry in the seemingly hegemonic power of the consensus.

By the late nineteen sixties the Republican Party was poised to reap a political windfall from the well-off, white suburban voters who felt excluded from the liberal agenda represented by social activists, civil rights legislation, and the suite of Great Society social programs associated with the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Nascent conservatives could interpret nightly news reports of riots, protests, military defeats, and economic setbacks as symptoms with a shared cause: the imagined constitutive exclusion of both white personhood and conservative views from the political center. The imagined marginality of the people and conservatism blended into a politically useful theory of the subject. In appealing to a mostly white audience and coaching them to imagine that they had been excluded from politics, the GOP made a Faustian pact whose debt came due in the form of white identity politics. Conservatives stoked racial resentment, trafficking in the fact that in the United States racism often appears as a neutral expression of the popular will.²⁷

Carol Anderson describes white rage as a political agenda, composed of subtle bureaucratic and governmental actions that tamp down racial progress and gut existing institutions and procedures meant to pursue egalitarian ends: White rage doesn’t have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the street. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively.²⁸ Conservative populism’s generic thesis, that an alliance of minorities, arrogant bureaucrats, and elite politicians have colluded to kick the people off center stage, underscores Andersen’s point: there are lots of ways to make problematic claims about who the real population of the nation is, suggesting that conservatism’s emergence in lockstep with significant progress on Black rights is no odd coincidence. While white voters in the South were leaving the Democrats even before Barry Goldwater flipped some southern states in the 1964 presidential election, conservative election analyst Sean Trende admits the GOP purposefully used racist appeals to reach southern voters who felt alienated.²⁹ The GOP’s active reliance on a base of white voters is well known. Less widely acknowledged and yet no less important is modern conservatism’s reliance on a racist theory of personhood, one that equates autonomous selfhood, power, and property ownership with whiteness while associating vulnerability, immiseration, and abjection with Blackness.

Conservatism, Race, Blackness: Beyond Demographics

The role of race in the rise of modern conservatism is difficult to understate and owes much to an abiding negativity that characterizes an American identity tied to the status of the nation founded on settler colonialist and anti-Black violence. Eve Tuck and Rubén Gatzambide-Fernández define settler colonialism as a system of authority in which actors dispossess existing populations in the name of resource extraction and claim the land previously occupied for themselves. They then set themselves up as arbiters of citizenship, civility, and knowing.³⁰ Conservative claims to the people constitute one pathway for the production of this authority by positioning the United States as a mythical entity rather than one built on histories of violence.³¹

Many Americans’ investment in anti-Blackness speaks to a similar negativity connected to the role of chattel slavery and its afterlives in producing the United States. Discourses that tap into a libidinal economy of anti-Blackness keep the legacy of chattel slavery alive in the present. Building on the work of literary theorist Hortense Spillers, among others, Frank Wilderson III defines the libidinal economy of white supremacy as a structuring irrationality that organizes the grammar, or rules for what can and cannot be said, of the civil society of the United States.³² As the name suggests, libidinal economies run on enjoyment. The chief feature of the US libidinal economy, argues Wilderson, is its organization on the basis of a desire for the reproduction of American civil society in which the constant generation of the American social and political order is inseparable from processes that treat Blackness as pathological. As shorthand, I express this formula as Blackness = death, representing its effects on structuring US society in figure 1.

In this manuscript I follow a coterie of social and political theorists who define Blackness as an inventional resource through which rhetors and institutions might organize operative definitions of life, and therefore the world, otherwise than it has been. This requires operationalizing thought about Blackness as entangled with histories of slavery and colonialism so as to avoid depoliticizing and rendering toothless theories of Blackness. At the same time, I wish to avoid speaking of the coincidence between Blackness and pathology as a total and entirely determining relationship because the American Right relies on the Blackness = death formulation to make their racism appear as an affirmation of their commitment to defending human life. Media theorist Armond Towns observes that Blackness is not the opposite of political liberalism, and that to treat it as such would grant political liberalism an authority derived from some place other than its dialectical, even vampiric, relationship to Blackness. Political liberalism, hampered by its own nihilistic conception of personhood rooted in possessive vocabularies which conflate agency with property ownership, attempts to domesticate and tame Blackness by reducing it to death as a means of holding at a distance the threat posed by the nihilism of liberal personhood. To presuppose a philosophical opposition between humanity and Blackness risks internalizing the anti-Black formulations of humanity within liberalism.³³ Blackness is not liberalism’s opposite but its foil, a reservoir of rhetorical invention that points not to what liberal sovereignty can control but instead to what its aspirations for mastery reveal about its own fragility as a system of political sovereignty. Towns and like-minded critics reject the assumption that US sovereignty has successfully secured the enthymematic association between Blackness and death. Rather, political rhetors, cultural texts, media discourses, and other circulating elements that construct the sociopolitical world should be seen as having to perform anti-Black work because anti-Blackness cannot make good on its promise that Blackness = death. The libidinal economy offers critics a heuristic for understanding how America remains invested in anti-Blackness and how this investment emerges in relation to the histories of dispossession, chattel slavery, and structural violence that continue to impact the distribution of resources in the United States.

Image: FIGURE 1. Institutions and subjects reliant on the pathological theory of Blackness, a.k.a. Blackness = death.

FIGURE 1. Institutions and subjects reliant on the pathological theory of Blackness, a.k.a. Blackness = death.

In order to critique conservatism’s investment in Blackness = death, I follow scholarship like that of Towns and Tiffany Lethabo King, who theorize Blackness as a resource for expansion and possibility.³⁴ To understand why conservative and many liberal discourses react against Blackness with such intensity and why sovereigns both grand and petty fail to entirely domesticate Blackness requires understanding it as the potential that things could be otherwise. Blackness can be—and is—much more than the legacies of slavery and colonial dispossession. Moreover, the Right’s fear of Blackness stands in for the former’s fear of democracy. Abjecting, critiquing, and brutalizing people and arguments challenging the subject position of the real American, to borrow from former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s vernacular, is the core substance of conservative politics.

If one perceives a disconnect in how I operationalize Blackness, let me clarify that while I draw on theorists of Blackness who discuss dynamics of fungibility, violation, and objectification—often though not always associated with social theories that consider the abiding negativity of race as a central feature defining America, including but not limited to critical race theory,