Bad Person Spotlight: The Conventions of the American Right

We begin with an observation: the Left expects more of the wealthy; the Right expects more of the poor.

This statement contains the core truths about the ideological conditions in which the American polity finds itself today. In order to arrive at their conclusions concerning what the poor should do, one would expect the Right to have spent a great deal of time observing the poor, learning who they are and in what conditions they exist. Even more, one would expect the Right to know the poor, to have read narratives of their experiences and taken that great leap of faith we today call empathy. Indeed, if they are going to speak on the poor’s behalf, one would expect the Right to have spent any time on the poor at all. But even those on the Right who have experienced poverty and could have once called themselves poor have spent their time only in the pursuit of escaping the condition on which they speak. Let me qualify: the leadership of the Right (I, of course, include the Democratic Party to fall within this category) is composed disproportionately of the non-poor—perhaps this explains why they avoid talking about the poor in any substantive sense. The discourse about ‘the economy’ and ‘jobs’ today is always within the context of the ‘middle class’—a group that, by definition, does not have to worry about going hungry or being without shelter. Those members of the middle class that DO have to worry about meeting their material needs could be described as a contingent middle class, those whose membership is in a probationary phase, purchased on credit and requires constant vigilance to maintain—mortgage owners come readily to mind. What this contingent middle class fears is to lose their membership, to be relegated to the ‘lower’ class of individuals we call the poor, those without property whose entire socio-political existences themselves are contingent, whose access to power requires that they cease being who they are. Here is the paradox of the American Right: the meritocratic foundation of their ideological world requires that the poor have no voice, because the poor are wrong. If the world is perfect (which is the synonym for ‘meritocracy’ in the political context, i.e. 'everything that is right appears, and that which appears is right') then it follows that the poor are wrong—they are the living evidence of the imperfection of man. The poor have failed—they need only supplicate themselves before the wealthy and search their souls such that they find the seed of their imperfection and deliver themselves into the Hands of the Invisible. For the poor to complain is for the thief to decry his imprisonment—it is a condition that is earned, a situation that either remedies though discipline and punishment or ensures exile so that the clean do not risk association. ‘If you’re so unhappy, go get a job’—so many subtleties. If the poor are unhappy, they should first find employment and cease to be poor before they speak. The contradiction widens: in order for the poor to find a voice in politics they need first to surrender their poverty and become powerful so that they can exercise power. Indeed, poverty is not the problem—it is the poor that are the problem.

Here lies the secret obsession of American society. The race to the middle class is a flight away from the poor—it is a race to the chance at power. There is no place for the poor other than at the margin of society: the margin is where they belong.

These observations should be uncontroversial—they are the logical conclusions of the discourse employed by both Democrats and Republicans. No one dares speak about the poor—it is necessary only to speak on their behalf. To give them a voice (imagine the day when a poor man or woman wins a seat in Congress) would be disastrous. It would reveal a subject position that has long since been buried in the name of the market whose perfection is rivaled only by Jesus Christ himself.

The conventions of the American Right are everywhere the same; they demand the general acquiescence to ‘the way things are': they demand supplication before a force they call the Market. Yet even as they speak on the behalf of this force they reveal its cruel appetites: structural unemployment, outsourcing, and debt. The conventions of the Rights dare not challenge the force itself—there is only time to search about it its wake for explanations and hope that its next passage will be more merciful.