[Felix Hoenikker]

What's The Matter With Us? The Meaning of Post-11/2 Politics
8:2 | © 2005 William Chaloupka

· As apocalyptic as the 2004 election was, and it was certainly that, the results -- beyond the simplest fact of the Bush re-election, no doubt apocalyptic in itself -- seem, on early reflection, less striking than the election required. Yes, the strong citizen involvement and voting turnout were remarkable. The striking character of the Republican approach was confirmed beyond doubt, even if it seems to have eluded much of the mainstream commentary. Any national election that delivers control of both the executive and legislative branches to a self-styled radical party is a dramatic result, but in itself this fact does not capture the meaning of the election event. The Democratic Party is already debating how it must change, but any move it might make will be hotly contested, so the party likely will only change incrementally and in ways not at all yet clear.
· Even the dramaturgy of the election was disappointing. After the 2000 election's stunning last act, in which lawyers and villains of melodramatic scope fought it out in the courts, this election just ended. Hoping for a second chance, the left buzzed about Ohio's vote. But while Ohio surely has a problem, it did not undermine the national election result. Bush won a narrow, if clear margin. Period. In short, this was a stunning election season followed by, well, not much. Bush's celebratory posture was just as false after his win as before, and the dominant mood among Democrats and the left seemed more one of deep depression than anything sharper. After that remarkable election season, one might reasonably have hoped for something more.
· The enduring aftermath of the election will be told in the mundane language of policy, rather than at the terms of "meaning" both the right and left aspire to reach. To be sure, some of that mundane policy language will evoke consequences that are far from mundane, if Social Security is seriously undermined and if enough federal judges (and Supreme Court justices) are appointed to transform the judiciary for a generation, as seems possible. U.S. foreign policy will proceed in the active pursuit of the most dismal outcomes, but Bush's miserable post-election approval ratings are an emphatic reminder that the election did not endorse his foreign policy approach. Still, none of this gives the election "meaning." It was a relatively close, hotly contested election, the results of which do not yet form into anything like a mandate or a watershed, even if they might yet be understood to have set the stage for some watershed. Rather than try to conjure up meaning where there actually is depression and foreboding, I want to assess some of the effects, strategies, and tactics that were more clearly revealed in this election than they previously had been.
What's the Matter with Kansas?

· It's not as though many authors had not tried to set up an explanation, before the fact. In a remarkable year for political books,1 one was by far the most useful. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? wove a straightforward argument that emphasized two elements seldom found in crossover nonfiction politics books, namely, class interest and resentment politics. At the very beginning of the book, Frank puts the question bluntly.
People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents, senators, governors; it shifts Democrats to the right and then impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun. If you earn over $300,000 a year, you owe a great deal to this derangement.2
· Frank opens his book with a series of "conversion stories" about Kansans who converted to conservatism, often with the same plot. As times got worse in Kansas in recent decades, "with every bit of economic bad news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still" (5). Frank's book was aimed at the crossover, "serious nonfiction" niche and was written in a decidedly popular tone. It works so well, in part, because Frank's wide ranging and interpretive approach fits the topic. While others, including Morris Fiorina3, tried to parse our current political situation from the aggregate polling data, Frank goes for the puzzle. How could so many people be so susceptible to arguments that so profoundly contradict their self-interest and traditional affiliations?
· The brief answer, introduced early in Frank's book, is the Great Backlash (capitalized in the book). The backlash disappears in aggregate polling data about values; it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to ask a revealing question about backlash in a poll, and even if a question can be framed, the responses lose their analytical value when aggregated. The backlash question requires an interpretive analysis, contextualizing current politics with historical, social, psychological, and strategic analyses. Frank also has it right when he plots his analysis in a popular nonfiction form; while many cultural studies and identity politics theorists have studied ressentiment, few public intellectuals had adequately addressed the blunt, sometimes even brutal, identity politics of resentful populism that has emerged in recent years.
· The Great Backlash inverts values, mobilizes anger, maintains its constituent relations, and forms stable coalitions. Now it has become inescapable: among the great identity politics accomplishments of our time, the Great Backlash now organizes political life in much of rural America, in the urban south, and in larger or smaller pockets everywhere. Rather than study aggregates, it makes sense to look at a site where it emerged. Frank is from Kansas, so he goes there. Although there are some problems with generalizing from Kansas, it is a good place to start, providing a stage where each of the themes of this new political world can be studied. The Great Backlash talks values, while maintaining the corporate support that finances elections (6). It succeeds by nimbly and persistently pushing the "spectrum of the acceptable" ever rightward, making what was unacceptable a few years seem reasonable now (8). Reminiscent of Murray Edelman's4 argument about the usefulness of unsolved problems, Frank notes that several permanent problems are crucial to the backlash; "Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act" (6). Instead, the actual policy goals of the conservatives elected by backlash votes have advanced corporate hegemony, with lower taxes, less regulation, and liberated trade.5
· Easily enough, Frank bypasses the "red state vs. blue state" categorization that has passed for serious analysis of the election just passed. As he neatly explains, that discussion misses the backlash's mechanisms and dynamics by aggregating it into a grand statement of cultural difference that, not insignificantly, plays directly into the backlashers' hands (16-20). This is an important, if subtle point: although the red/blue analysis seems to proceed on a cultural level, the entire red/blue discussion has become an implement of the Backlash, in the guise of an analytical framework that could assess it. As Frank shows to hilarious effect, even supposedly sophisticated conservatives make some truly astonishing claims on behalf of red state culture, furthering their goal of keeping this "two America" analysis going (22-24). Although states do build a sense of citizen identity, as college football programs attest, the examples of "purple" enclaves (in post-election analyses, Colorado, with its odd, crossover election results, is sometimes called a purple state, combining red and blue) suggest that more precision may well be due. The "red vs. blue" homily has helped the backlashers make their point about their uniqueness and estrangement: "What divides Americans is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics" (27), nor something as accidental as state lines.
· Frank is just as critical of what he takes to be the common left analyses that the backlash is simply another iteration of American nativism, easily explained away as racist or deranged. If either is true, the backlash might be less interesting as a political phenomenon, and Frank is right to suggest that the analytical frame by which we have been considering backlash often is structured in such a way that it cannot fully understand the vitality, strategic vision, and actual, tactical mechanisms deployed by backlash leaders. Although Frank never acknowledges theory in this book, the implied approach is clear enough. Political analysis appropriate to understanding the Great Backlash will have to be sufficiently situated to allow the tactics to become visible, but also general enough to evoke the strategic themes within which the tactical appears merely fortuitous. The mix is inevitably interpretive or, if you will, dialogical.
· Political life mixes particular and general, strategic and tactical, sociological and imaginary, economics and culture. The title of Frank's book is a reminder; "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was the title of a colorful anti-Populist essay by a small town newspaper editor, later used by McKinley against William Jennings Bryan (who hailed from neighboring Nebraska). The political claim inevitably aspires to the general level in its goal of reaching a mass audience. But it always returns to the local, where small town editors, campaign workers, and neighborhood opinion leaders translate the general into the specific. Given that mix of local and general, errors of aggregation abound, while particularism always carries risks of its own. For example, to cite one of the serious weaknesses of Frank's argument, it could both be true that dismissive analyses of racism or fundamentalist excess are insufficient to understand the backlash and that newly coded racial and/or fundamentalist politics still drive the backlash. Perhaps in his own effort to write a book that would reach a broad audience, Frank underestimates the backlash's potential for racism, especially in an odd chapter in which he makes extraordinary claims about Kansans' love for John Brown. Perhaps Frank is right, but the fear of the Other is not hard to find in white America. Frank's book is useful precisely because it is both firmly situated and generalizable, and the "John Brown" explanation for Kansan's lack of racism fails to address the possibility that codes for racism, in Kansas and elsewhere, have taken newly subtle and, because they are subtle, broadly viable forms.6
· In just such an interpretive context, Frank's argument does not translate simply or transparently to the results of the election that happened several months after his book was published. That requires an extension of his argument.
The election, take one

· In a now-familiar pattern, the 2004 election results were immediately followed by a haphazard rush of pundits and partisans who hoped to capture an explanation that could edge out their competitors by defining the election, giving it an identity that would help their cause. The instant analysis of exit polls suggested that Republican moralism might have carried the day for Bush, but those polls were quickly discredited.7 Similarly, the power of the anti-gay marriage ballot measures was touted, but was also discredited, once the votes in states with that ballot measure were analyzed against the 2000 results.8 Various Democrats urged the party to moderate its stance on abortion, guns, and other issues. Perhaps most dramatically, The New Republic, continuing its lurch to some unique political stance unrelated to actual American politics, urged that the Democrats purge their successful activist allies, MoveOn, an outcome that seems both silly and unlikely. At this writing, no simple analysis of the election persists. Bush says he won a mandate, but he enters his second term with historically low approval ratings. This raises a question; if journalists, activists, and social scientists have had so much difficulty teasing an explanation from the mountains of data any election provides, perhaps there is some essential confusion in the results, some factor that inevitably confounds polls and produces a voter motivation model (or several such models) that the journalists somehow can't quite find.
· A politics of resentment resists easy entry into the sort of post-election commentary discussed above. Incorporating resentment into this sort of discussion risks skirting too close to blunt discussion of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Resentment's force overwhelms other factors (including the class interest Frank explains has been plowed under in Kansas). Its psychology is at odds with the requirements of interest, opinion, and autonomy required by liberals and conservatives of any mainstream stripe. Resentment is ambiguously linked to policy issues, in that many of its most often deployed issue positions function as codes, even more often than is the usual case in the highly coded world of politics -- helping to explain why the inability to legislate on such issues as abortion and school prayer has seldom damaged Republican prospects. Journalists lack the analytical tools to cover resentment, although Frank's book could teach them a few things. Instead, the pundits code resentment as "anger," which misses several of its most interesting elements. Resentment has become an unmistakable feature of our politics, mobilizing fundraising, organizing, and voting. It adds confusion and resistance to some parts of the electorate, feeding on and then exacerbating the well-known oddities introduced by weak levels of information or even a basic understanding of political processes among large parts of our supposedly well-educated electorate.
· Nietzsche's ressentiment is famously more specific than the more general "resentment" sometimes mentioned in political conversation. His summary, in the Genealogy, provides a reminder. The "revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. . .. From the outset it says No to what is 'outside,' what is 'different,' what is 'not itself'; and this No is its creative deed."9 As Frank elaborates, this No has now become extraordinarily vigorous and flexible. For some backlashers, even science (on global warming, even for many mainstream Republicans, but even the elementary science of evolution, for many backlashers) is a suspect sign of the supposed arrogance of the "insiders" who deploy science to support their policy positions. In Frank's terms, this shift is done in the name of authenticity; the backlashers are authentic, while their adversaries are frivolous or worse.
· As Frank reviews, often hilariously, it is not at all clear why watching Fox News and listening to Rush makes one more authentic than the neighbors who watch ABC and listen to music. But the extreme loading on what is "not itself" is the point, and as Nietzsche explained, values are created. And more: "This . . . need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, this morality always first needs a hostile external world."10 And so, even in its utter triumph, reelecting an unpopular and, by the gentlest assessment, not particularly competent or even attractive President, maintaining control of both houses of Congress and a large majority of statehouses, in full collaboration with a powerful corporate state, the backlashers are still, to themselves, woeful underdogs, set upon by a world in which they are powerless but righteous.
· This political dynamic of resentment persists in (and now easily sustains) both triumph and its own subjection. In States of Injury, Wendy Brown summarizes the paradox: "Identity structured by ressentiment . . . becomes invested in its own subjection. . .. Politicized identity that presents itself as a self-affirmation now appears as the opposite, as predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a 'hostile external world.'"11 An identity politics so thoroughly based on resentment leaves itself open for a particular kind of exploitation. Staking all on the prospect for revenge, this political approach ensures that its revenge will come at the terrible price of its continued powerlessness. An "ally" that can take advantage of this impulse to revenge would be a very fortunate and powerful ally. Brown argues that class, a disappearing aspect of American politics, performs any number of distortions on our public arena through its disappearance. The capitalist allies of the vengeful moralists benefit from the moralistic backlashers' vehemence and political efficacy. But the backlashers themselves don't much benefit; their political psychology stymies them, and that suits the interests of powerful allies sufficiently, as it turns out, to be a sustainable political condition. It is also an enduring trap -- for the backlashers and their victims and adversaries.
· This arrangement makes for powerful politics, as Nietzsche explained: "The man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself."12 Immunized from self-examination or external criticism, as well as many awkward "facts," the backlash (with the backing of powerful allies) attacks journalists and turns weak adversaries into seemingly awesome challengers. This is, on one hand, a variation on the familiar American nativism, well-enough described forty years ago by Richard Hofstadter.13 But the solid cooperation of corporate America is new, as is the demise of the center. In one of his most compelling sections, Frank shows how the conservatives took the moderate Republicans on in Kansas, and successfully drove the "mods" (for "moderates") out of power. This should not be unfamiliar, either: the dynamic of ideologues driving unimaginative and lazy centrists into the shadows has happened on the left, too. But the backlash has been more successful than the left ever was. As the New Yorker immediately editorialized after 11/2, there just isn't much of a center anymore, either in Congress or in the electorate. A significant element of the Democratic Party, habitually centrist, has waited for decades for politics to come back to the carefully nurtured center they've defined, and keeps getting beat.
· Still, as striking as resentment is in its political context, some of its key instances emerged during this election season in rather mundane ways, or more specifically in ways that tested the limits of mundane American politics. Every election features several common rhetorical and tactical ploys. Some of these ploys are routinely criticized, but they recur just as routinely since they seem to work. For example, the complaint that Kerry was a flip-flopper was unique only in that it emerged so early, during the spring (after the outcome of the Democratic primaries was determined). A humorous television commercial seemed to work, the Kerry campaign failed to effectively counteract the charge, and "flip-flop" went on to become a major theme in the campaign. That is actually a good example of "business as usual," rather than a demonstration of the election's uniqueness. And that fact must be understood before one can see precisely how flip-flop mattered.
· In this instance, the Kerry campaign's characteristic approach (and its most singular error) was to steadfastly assume that the election was essentially conventional -- that there were a few undecided voters, and that most of the campaign should be run with them in mind. Even this crucial error was mundane; for many years, all closely contested election campaigns have been run on this assumption. The object of the enterprise is to discourage a few potential adversary voters from going to the polls, while still energizing the few "undecided" voters who would vote for Kerry. The campaign left it to others to mobilize the base and ignored the early "flip-flop" charge as insider baseball, utterly unimportant for those few undecided voters they wanted to target. Of course, the right's resentment machine picked up the flip-flop accusation, turning it into their drumbeat for the year. When it became fairly clear that the turnout in this election would utterly nullify Kerry's conventional strategy (since most of the undecided, leaning voters would vote, especially in targeted states), it was too late, since the crucial decisions had been made months before. This entire pattern was repeated during the Swift Boat episode in August.
· The Kerry politics-as-usual found itself confronted by a Bush campaign that had decided to push backlash buttons, no matter what. Several Bush campaign laments struck me as remarkable, and some of them seemed simply bizarre. At one point, Kerry told an interviewer that his goal was to diminish the threat of terrorism so that it would be a nuisance rather than an obsession. The statement seemed innocuous enough. It acknowledged that the category of acts now called "terrorism" was unlikely to go away, but that the sort of conflict represented through those actions could be managed. Surely, that sensible goal would be shared by a very broad segment of American popular and elite opinion. And it seemed unlikely that the Bush campaign would pick up on the statement. After all, Bush himself, always prone to mistakes when speaking off the cuff, had earlier told interviewer Matt Lauer (on NBC's widely watched morning television show, "Today") that the war on terror couldn't be won. That his entire campaign had been based on "winning the war on terror" evidently eluded his grasp, momentarily. This gaff, like so many others, failed to make much of an impact, the mainstream press having decided that Bush's inarticulate, smirking persona was not an appropriate election issue. But, surely, Bush's gaff meant that he wouldn't criticize Kerry's statement on terrorism.
· Weirdly, the opposite happened, and loudly. For several crucial days during the campaign's late stages (in early and mid-October), Bush and other Republicans highlighted Kerry's statement as somehow indicating weakness on the terrorism question. How dare the Democrats suggest that this problem could be reduced! For several days, the President of the United States put himself in the decidedly odd position of insisting on permanent war mobilization, without an end in sight. "Total war, forever!" became, effectively, the Bush campaign slogan, logic, and only hope. Of course, Bush sought no sacrifices from the citizenry, unless one counts the willingness to tolerate giveaways to corporations and the continuing erosion of individual and group rights. And he continued to promise that he could win the war on terror, a promise that he simultaneously insisted was naïve. The complaint against Kerry was so unusual as to command attention. The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman (a supporter of the Iraq war before it started) sounded baffled: "Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives."14 He went on to criticize the Bush campaign for exploiting the fear of terrorism for political purposes, a criticism that seemed fully applicable in the current instance (and, to many on the American left, had seemed just as obvious during the run-up to the Iraq invasion that Friedman and his newspaper had so forcefully supported).
· The Bush complaint was even stranger than Friedman's comments suggested. Portraying himself as the savior from terror (indeed, basing his entire campaign on this thin reed, since he has so little support on anything else, including the Iraq invasion), Bush now went out of his way to loudly, persistently denounce the idea that salvation was possible. Having previously erred in forgetting to promise victory -- the central trope of any candidate, for anything -- Bush now reminded everyone of his error, and did so at a very high volume. Having stated that liberties (if not tax dollars or SUVs) must be sacrificed to win the war on terror, he now belligerently insisted that the sacrifices would be permanent in the face of endless war. It is one thing to insist on abortion or school prayer as permanent, base-mobilizing resentment cues. Those "perpetual problems" are more or less simple reminders of resentment's grudges, accrued more or less incrementally. But to insist on a perpetual, Spartan war mobilization, with any objector to that stance subject to withering denunciation -- that's something else altogether.
· Even if that were honestly Bush's position, why would he have used it so insistently in a political campaign? Although Americans have considerable ambivalence about our political rituals, those habits and patterns serve a number of functions. They seek to reassure and to justify at least a minimal coalescence around a process that really is as goofy as it appears to be. They simplify political action -- no small feat for a culture so insistence on the efficacy of the autonomous, individual citizen. It is even a positive function, in a particular way, that these rituals alienate Americans from political action; after all, the political, economic, and social arrangements central to the culture presume that citizens will not much care about politics, nor place too much hope in its outcomes. Now, a none-too-imaginative son of America's social and economic elite was framing the political ritual in such an absurd and paradoxical way that he drew attention to the weird manipulation.15
· One explanation is that Bush's political handlers, always characterized by the chief, Karl Rove, were desperate at that point, despite polls that looked favorable for Bush. They, too, were captive of the convention, unable to know whether turnout would increase and would thereby hurt them, because of the well-known (conventional) tendency of late-deciders to vote for the challenger. But there is another, intriguing explanation for this odd behavior. By the fall of 2004, the Republicans had honed their politics of resentment to a fine edge. For nearly a quarter of a century, they had assembled a coalition based on resentment or its opportunistic deployment. Now, with an election on the line, the Rove team could push their strategy to its illogical extreme. In Orwell's 1984, what is so shocking about the slogan "one is zero, zero one" is not its denial of truth per se, but how blatant that denial has become, how routine and unremarkable. Plenty of political figures manipulate appearances, as the entire canon of western political thought documents. But to celebrate the manipulation, that's a special accomplishment.
· There are other possible readings of this decidedly odd episode in the Bush campaign. War has long been conducted (and suffered) by inarticulate men who carefully maintain their discursive limitations, as Michael Shapiro recently argued.16 Whether intended or not, the Bush complaint reminds some of the antiwar left's complaint about Bush foreign policy, namely, that it implies a continuous, broad brush military activism. The left's fear coincides with a literal reading of his complaint, which to them meant precisely what it said, that war was indeed permanent, that acquiescence to this perpetual war was a condition of citizenship (at least if one wished to avoid the kind of intrusive surveillance and worse that the Bush administration hinted might be aimed at domestic adversaries), and that hopes to move beyond war were naïve and dangerous. From this critical position, the final capitulation to this permanent war was reenacted in the election of an inarticulate President whose complaints made no sense. The heroic version of history always worries about the silver tongued devil, not the one who cannot speak a straight sentence and whose complaints, even when carefully scripted, simply make no sense, either as a statement about on the world, or as interpretive text for anything like a conventional political campaign.
· Bush's complaint about Kerry's goal of normalcy has the whiff of "one is zero. . ." about it. It says, in effect, "we can say anything and still count on at least 48% of the vote. Our irresoluteness bespeaks strength, since only a wise and strong leader could be so wantonly careless during a campaign." Richard Nixon experimented with this approach, once famously telling his advisors that he intended to appear unbalanced to instill an extra element of fear among foreign leaders. But, as in so many other ways, Nixon's idea was immature and naïve. Now, Rove and the rest have established a far more routine, subtle, and widely distributed version of Nixon's approach. Above all, their position exclaims, "don't fuck with us. We are capable of anything." And if Rove decides to send a message directly to his backlash constituency -- saying "one is zero. . ." -- anyone who might point that out, war ally Friedman included, would be dismissed as "one of them," one of the elites who run the world and live in New York City. And if you read the Times, we'll come after you, too. Even undecided voters (whose disconnection was awesome in a year when sides were so clearly drawn) could sense the message of power.
· The Bush campaign and the right in general decided that it could say anything. Nobody is qualified to check the arguments. This is now a permanent strategy. Despite a very high level of institutional and cultural control -- including domination of both Congress and the White House, most state governments, and much of the national media -- Rush Limbaugh and the various Fox commentators are as angry as ever, permanently announcing what victims they are and how strong their adversaries are. It is specifically conspiratorial, saying in effect, "our power is reflected in our ability to announce our righteousness and our victimization regardless of the facts."
Strategies and Tactics

· The combativeness of the Republican response is a key, and it was precisely this aspect of Frank's argument that Slavoj Zizek emphasized in his glowing, pre-election review.17 It is not only that the right is combative that makes its pugnacity effective; it is that the culture war is cross-coded, as it were, with the left having ceded the struggle aspect of the conflict to the right. It is not that the right populists are inattentive, Zizek emphasizes, although some on the left have fallen into such explanations: "'Stupidity' and 'ideological manipulation' are not an answer; that is to say, it is clearly not enough to say that the primitive lower classes are brainwashed by the ideological apparatuses so that they are not able to identify their true interests."18 Far from stupid, the right found an opening. The left's version of the culture war, as Zizek explains, is built on the avoidance of struggle, even if it carries the ghost of Marxist class struggle: "it takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the dominant ideological topic of the 'enlightened' liberals whose politics is focused on the fight against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural tolerance."19 Too often, the left has recoded politics as ethics, replacing struggle with the introverted project of "getting one's own life together," assuming that this somehow generates a crucial (or the crucial) political project, perhaps by modeling a better society. The discomfort with struggle inherent in this strategy leaves the possibility open for populism to jump sides, and the right took the opportunity.
· A contemporary, contrary political example illustrates this. In 2002, after 9/11, Democratic prospects in the off-year election were perilous (indeed, the Republicans won back the Senate in that election). One incumbent Senate Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, seemed particularly vulnerable. Bush had won Montana in 2000 by a landslide, and Baucus was the only important Democrat elected statewide. National Democrats expected a very difficult election. Instead, Baucus won easily, and how that happened illustrates Zizek's point. The Baucus campaign took off against his Republican opponent with a ferocity that plainly embarrassed much of the left. In the campaign's critical television advertisement, the Baucus campaign found quarter-century old footage of the Republican, who had been a Denver entrepreneur with a barber/beauty college and a local TV show. In the footage, a seventies throwback (shirt unbuttoned half way down, medallion, white boy afro) demonstrated the benefits of a facial, for male clients. The voiceover of the Baucus ad told the undisputed truth: the Republican's business venture had been investigated for the misuse of veterans' benefits assigned to its students.
· Of course, the coding of the ad had less to do with veterans' benefits than it had to do with the embarrassments of the seventies in general, and the hint of homosexuality in particular. While gay rights groups generally supported Baucus (the Republican candidate was an anti-gay backlasher in the legislature) and did not criticize the advertisement, the discomfort on the left was impossible to miss. For a left self-identified with the culture of tolerance, this level of ferocity was plainly uncomfortable. Surely, there must be a more kindly way to win these elections! Whether that is possible is beside the point; the Baucus campaign had demonstrated what a pugnacious anti-backlash initiative might look like. It had, at least for the moment, switched the coding back, regaining the initiative in the culture war by acknowledging that the "war" was in fact part of a conflict. This is not to say that Democrats must lie or cheat; the Baucus ad was precisely accurate. The point is that it emerged from a sense of struggle, of combativeness the left otherwise found distasteful. The ad crossed boundaries.
· This is hardly the only way to respond to backlash, which as a highly coded and often suppressed element calls for flexible and multiple responses. In 2004, Democrats in Colorado (to which I will return in the conclusion) adopted a somewhat different set of tactics against the right, compared with the earlier Baucus campaign. The similarity is that Colorado Democrats also managed to at least neutralize the right's wedge issues, targeting districts where they could hammer the Republican legislature's fascination with culture war issues, rather than the state's funding mess, itself plainly caused by a backlash-inspired Constitutional initiative passed in the early 1990s.20 Simultaneously, the left neutralized the third party, Nader challenge in Colorado, substituting for it ferocious organizing efforts by third force entities such as MoveOn and Acorn.21 Indeed, one of the unacknowledged successes of the left in 2004 was how it managed the Nader threat, essentially by mounting a third force effort adjacent to rather than opposed to the Democratic Party.
· The cross-coding and ambiguity of backlash and responses to it are precisely so powerful because they are the consequence of a peculiar inevitability -- at least, the inevitability of fragmentation. As Zizek explains, "the wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism ('class struggle') which overdetermines all others."22 Zizek goes on to usefully complicate that overdetermined antagonism, in the process making visible an aspect of residual Marxism that has debilitated the left -- perhaps all the moreso since the left's multiculturalist toleration made a straightforward discussion of its reluctance toward struggle all the more difficult. The particular difficulty in this case, Zizek explains, is that only some of the ongoing issues the left believes it should claim as its own are based in conflict:
What the series race-gender-class obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case of class: while the anti-racist and anti-sexist struggle are guided by the striving for the full recognition of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing, annihilating even, the other -- even if not a direct physical annihilation, class struggle aims at the annihilation of the other's socio-political role and function.23
· Still, the radical pluralism championed by Foucault and others is not nearly as simple to implement as it is to announce. There are counter-examples to Zizek's analysis of the left's difficulty with struggle, and their exceptionalism helps demonstrate Zizek's point. The human rights movement, at least the part styled after the Southern Poverty Law Center started by Morris Dees, has taken a combative, annihilating approach to hate groups, suing them into oblivion when possible, finding ways to aid police efforts to crack down on them, and so on. If this approach has not made the SPLC and other similar groups offensive to the left (after all, they are in the mold of traditionally aggressive anti-Nazi efforts), it has at least made them notably different than the other variants of anti-racist and anti-sexist activists. The difference makes them notable. A similar analysis could be posed for the gay rights group, ACT UP.24 Of course, there is a parallel oddity; the Christian and populist fundamentalists in this culture war "retain this logic of antagonism," in Zizek's words, despite the fact that they are the supposed evangelicals and universalists. The left, with the tradition of struggle, somehow got boxed out of that legacy.
· Zizek, in this pre-election piece, did not take this much further, beyond refusing "the easy liberal contempt for the populist fundamentalists" and suggesting that "we should reject the very terms of the culture war." Presumably, that means recoding the struggle part of this puzzle, as the Baucus example suggests. And, in that respect, the election of 2004 may well have augured future left successes, in that coalition and mobilization were far more complete, less equivocating, and generally more energetic than they have recently been. The left's disgust with Bush produced an urgency that not only helped instill a sense of struggle, but also fostered coalition and a populist base for fundraising (which did not, it is important to note, exclude very large contributions as well). Indeed, among the puzzles of this election, one crucial puzzle is this; despite the backlash's remarkable success and brazen initiative, it barely managed to win this election. By any standard, the left Democrats accomplished remarkable gains, very nearly defeating an extraordinary backlash campaign. Left groups practiced effective coalition-building, with independent groups mobilizing voters who might resist joining a Democratic campaign. Howard Dean showed how Democrats could indeed raise enormous sums of money from small and medium-sized donations, something the Democrats previously had never accomplished. This is part of the awful and wonderful ambivalence of the post 11-2 era; it is the worst of times, with Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz, et al, in charge of the entire Federal apparatus. But it is also promising; any response to the Republican revolution has to find a way to admit that positive steps have been taken, so that these steps can be identified and built upon. This is the undecidability of the political world, reenacted at a very high level.
· Nietzsche wanted to leap beyond this mire, and beyond the resentment, too, with broad, heroic leaps of intellect. A century of his intellectual successors have now modulated that conclusion, arguing for the radical pluralism of Foucault, identity politics, and a thoroughly post-Marxist leftism of coalition and strategy. Frank's solution seems to call for a return to a politics of class interest, though he finds few clues to how that might work, perhaps because his horizon is, necessarily in terms of this book, limited by Kansas. But, although Kansas behaved utterly predictably in the 2004 election, there were other examples, suggesting that while Kansas displays the problem clearly enough, we might need to look elsewhere for solutions.
Conclusion: What's the Matter With Colorado?

· Colorado sits next door to Kansas, though in truth the two states are separated by a huge, depopulated stretch of what Montanans call Big Open -- the prairie of western Kansas and eastern Colorado, stretching from Manhattan, Kansas to the Denver International Airport, where ever fewer people live and little industry survives, save the occasional penitentiary, meat packing outpost, or Interstate highway gas station, restaurant, and motel oasis. While Kansas is clearly a Great Plains state, Colorado's identity looks westward, to its mountains. In terms of the U.S. Senate (and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College), the Republican success in the last quarter century, is founded on a coalition of southern, Great Plains, and rural western states.25 And unless Frank's book is most applicable only in the rural Great Plains, Colorado (which is interesting post-11/2 for several reasons) provides a good pallette with which to write some conclusions.
· In many ways, the progressive tradition Frank cites for Kansas never really stuck in Colorado. Kansas has John Brown; Colorado has the Ludlow Massacre, emblematic of an often brutal right wing history (which plays a role in Anthony Lukas's book about the violence of labor struggles in also-neighboring Idaho, Big Trouble26). Despite a brief window in the 1970s, when the state declined to host the Winter Olympics and Gary Hart became a political celebrity, Colorado doesn't really have a progressive tradition. As in other rural west states, conservatives have had great success ridiculing the urbanites (in this case, Denver) and the liberal college town (a role Boulder has given in to with alarming ease). The religious right has prospered in Colorado, more successfully than it has in much of the rural west, at least the non-Mormon parts. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, one of the wealthiest and most politicized Christian right organizations, is headquartered in Colorado Springs, where it sports its own freeway exit sign. And defense spending is a central part of Colorado's economy, as Michael Moore suggested in "Bowling for Columbine"; NORAD, the Air Force Academy, and several large defense industry factories help tilt the southern Denver suburbs (where Columbine High School sits) and Colorado Springs, to the south.
· As it happens, Colorado's 2004 election results organize a test of Frank's Kansas and Zizek's extension of Frank. Despite strong early Kerry efforts to make Colorado a battleground state, Bush won with nearly the same percentage advantage as he enjoyed four years ago, but the Democrats picked up a U.S. Senate seat, a U.S. House seat, and, in the biggest shock for Coloradoans, won back control of both houses of the state legislature. In the context of this ambiguous national election portrait, what happened in Colorado? Democrats in Colorado -- or, more precisely, the array of forces allied to help the Democrats whether they liked it or not -- ran hard and smart. The Bush war advantage is clear in Colorado; down ticket, it didn't work. At the top of the ticket, Colorado confirms my earlier discussion about turnout. It is not inaccurate to say that virtually every eligible Coloradoan must have voted; the over-80% reported turnout, discounted for registrations that were no longer active (because those registrants had moved) is astonishing in a state as mobile as Colorado. It provides evidence of why Kerry's campaign, in the end, never had a chance: everybody voted.
· In one sense, Colorado was a test of how the left can suppress the sometimes-smug middle class liberal culture that Zizek derides, while also avoiding the pull to the right. In response to the election, moderate Democrats insisted that the party's salvation could only be found in Southern values and centrism. The claim, a persistent one often associated with the right-tending Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is that Democrats have to move closer to the Republicans programmatically and stylistically in order to be competitive in the red states. But this argument fails to consider the distinction between substance and gesture. If substantive policies are necessary to the core Democrat political logic, as seems likely, the DLC's analysis has to be discarded. Colorado Democrats had previously tried the classic "Republican light" approach several years ago, when they ran a rural conservative, Ben Nighthorse Campbell for the U.S. Senate. While that seemed a savvy choice at the time -- Campbell became the first Native American elected to the U.S. Senate -- it didn't stick. Campbell switched parties when the Republicans won the Senate, and immediately became a reliable Republican vote.
· This time, Colorado Democrats nominated another rural minority member, Attorney General Ken Salazar. But, as opposed to Campbell, Salazar came from the party's progressive core when it came to policy and politics. The nod to rural culture was symbolic; the politics of Salazar's campaign were anything but. Hispanics are an important, growing force in Colorado politics and they'd been relatively invisible in the Democratic strategy. While Salazar took some moderate positions, there remains little chance that he would feel as alienated from the national party as Campbell obviously did. Ken Salazar yielded little, ideologically, to the conservatives, running instead on what was essentially the national, blue-state Democratic platform, although his personal style was decidedly rural and down-home. As Zizek's complaint about liberal culture implies, some of this is purely a matter of coding. Salazar's alterity was both rural and Hispanic, and it utterly confounded Pete Coors' attempt to brand him a "slick lawyer."
· Identity politics, cross-coded far more successfully than Zizek's schema suggests is possible, worked in Colorado. While the subtext of the DLC strategy has long been to ignore the identity politics of the party's progressive elements, Salazar inevitably ran against that grain. Salazar's success was underscored by the fact that his brother, a state legislator, captured a vacant U.S. House seat that had been held by a Republican (in the years since it was held, previously, by Campbell), one of the few such "captures" accomplished by the Democrats nationally. The pair led some Democrats, following the earlier lead of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, to propose a "southwest strategy," against the "southern strategy" favored by the DLC. An explicit appeal to Hispanics, coupled with a resolve to split off some of the rural west (much of which is not nearly as much influenced by the Christian right as is the south) marks a strategic choice for Democrats, given that the west is growing in population and, in some cases, in wealth.
· Nationally, women marginally moved back to the Republicans, probably on the war issue, and that was likely among the most decisive factors in the election.27 Again, this speaks to Zizek's argument. Although sexism is a toleration issue, in his terms, it has long been coded by the abortion rights issue, which Bill Clinton famously negotiated with his statement that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" (and which Hillary Clinton, post-election, has engaged as a family planning issue). The Clinton approach amounts to an attempt to maintain the issue's viability in the fact of withering Backlash opposition. But it also confuses and perhaps defuses the coding by which Democrats must remind women that they are part of the party's coalition. I suppose both Zizek and Frank might promote the WalMart issue as the replacement -- a class-based, classically feminized issue over low pay and benefits. But it is unclear whether the union movement has the ability or the nerve to really contest WalMart, a powerful adversary.28
· Elections continually promise clarity they cannot deliver, even if some elections quickly acquire a narrative that sticks to them. Despite the stark Backlash quality of this election, and the election-night assessment that it was a "values" outcome, that narrative seems easy to contest. The Colorado example I have been considering here, crossed with Frank's discussion of Kansas and Zizek's explanation of the left's structural problem, might imply a set of responses, but those lack the clarity that, somehow, really should attend an election season as dramatic as this one. And the "values election" the right champions is both unsupported by fact and confounded by the tricky logic of resentment, an analysis Frank has now carried to the mainstream.
· Derrida and others repeat that it's language all the way down. The political variant of that might well adapt Foucault's (and Deleuze's Foucault's) multiples: it's multiples, all the way down. Although it is seriously unsatisfying, it may be appropriate to deny that the election of 2004 had any meaning at all. At the very least, reading Zizek and Frank, it is important to remember that neither actually calls us back to a politics dominated by class, an analysis that has often become too monolithic a dream, one that has mislead the American left repeatedly. The election had too many meanings, and the actual strategies for response will yet be developed, from the election's developing history of itself, but also from its aftermath, from what happens next. For now, the story of this election is best left more open than not. If there has to be one narrative linking the events of the election, here's my suggestion:
· There is a small group of infrequent voters (whose power was most important in states such as Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, and who are somewhat more often women than men) for whom disentangling the difficult knot of "war and democracy" proved too daunting to do on their own. They voted the war on terror. Those forces pursuing a Kerry vote did not reach this group, whether from fear of losing other voters, or because of a wretched, if perhaps understandable, miscalculation.

William Chaloupka is Professor and Chair of the department of political science at Colorado State University. He teaches political theory, environmental thought and politics, and American politics. His most recent book was Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America. From 1999 through 2004 he served as Co-editor of Theory & Event. He can be reached at williamc@colostate.edu.