sex, gender, sexuality, race and class. Without acknowledging these contexts and complexities, their characterizations of precursors and opponents as extremes on either side imply that they defend the capaciously common-sense positions of an inclusively moderate majority, as opposed to the views of unidentified critics and theorists engaged with politics, whom their vocabulary implicitly depicts as totalizing or unreasonable.
This kind of rhetorical positioning is often used to defend an exclusionary and exploitative status quo against those it excludes and exploits, and has long been employed against socialists, feminists, abolitionists and other malcontents—as Foucault, among others, has noted in tracing the historical discourses that have defined incarcerated people, the mentally and otherwise physically ill, or those who diverge from gender or sexual norms. In short, appeals to the authority of a presumed moderate majority—like those of the “silent majority” or “moral majority” to which Reagan, Nixon or Bush appealed—often succeed at the expense of the most vulnerable. Like all arguments from authority, they do not require reason or principle, because they rest on the implicit threat of exclusion. The definition of others as negative images of oneself is also consonant with a reluctance to engage with the ways in which a text is at odds with itself, as both rely on objectifications that deny internal contradiction. In this way, both are also consistent with the reluctance we noted in Best and Marcus to engage with the internal political differences of Bush’s America. This avoidance of internal difference and political history would at least partly account for a professed inability to “explain our oppression or provide the keys to our liberation.”
It is certainly strange to encounter an argument that during the Bush administration, the veils were lifted from the authoritarian aspirations of the US right, given that Bush’s candidacy began with his claim to represent a new, “compassionate conservatism,” supported by the widespread belief that both major political parties were substantively the same, as well as by distortions in campaign coverage.30 But that same candidacy was decided by the Supreme Court’s partisan verdict in Bush v. Gore, producing charges by legal scholars of outright “illegality.”31 That era also demonstrated the powerful influence operations of Republican strategist Roger Ailes, whose full editorial control over Fox News conditioned views of the PATRIOT Act, the “Defense of Marriage” and the War on Terror, even as he branded their approach as “fair and balanced.” In the Bush years, just as in previous decades, racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia were obvious to many, and at the same time they were persistently disavowed or obfuscated.
Of course, it will always be enticing to think of a day when we will be able to forgo interpretive engagement with the kind of bad faith represented by George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” Reagan’s putative love of liberty or Richard Nixon’s professed devotion to law and order. It is possible that the election of Barack Obama led Best and Marcus, like many others, to believe that the United States had turned a corner, and would go on to conclusively renounce its history of hate and fear. But a decade later, there is no question that those lessons are not yet learned. What they call the “nascent fascism” of Bush is now growing up fast, maturing into something much closer to the Europe-bestriding stature proper to Orwell’s forties, complete with far-right nationalist parties rising to power in Austria and Poland, and torch-wielding mobs in US streets chanting “blood and soil.” After a decade of gains, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court places civil rights in immediate peril, including voting, labor and reproductive rights. Transparent disregard for the rule of law and for equitable treatment of people of color, which Best and Marcus rightly abhor in the Bush administration, has long been featured in descriptions of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and is now a prominent feature of Trump’s presidency. One need only read the lines. But such reading has never been a given of political discourse, as comprehension and recognition have never been the default in human communication. It is only on the basis of misreading, incomprehension and misrecognition that we learn, by reflecting on what has not worked and what we must change.
The bad faith characteristic of authoritarianism, imperialism and all the various forms of scapegoating or victim-blaming has rarely been more potent in US politics than it is now. But the incentive structures that support bad faith have long been discernible, for example, in the systemic oppressions that comprise white supremacy in the United States. Now after decades of denials and disavowals, Reagan’s supporters have been confronted with new, apparently undeniable evidence of his racist views and attitudes. The recording of a private call to Nixon was recently released, made while Reagan was governor of California, in which he casually refers to UN delegates from Africa as “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes.”32 Both men blamed African countries for defeating a US-led effort to block the UN from seating the People’s Republic of China. There is no apparent reason why the African nations would be singled out, given that Nixon’s own State Department identified the responsible parties as Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland and Mexico, along with “Arab defections” from the US position.33 That is, there is no apparent reason other than the racist contempt and hatred that is apparent in Reagan’s comments. Nixon’s hearty laugh, and his subsequent repetition of the story to others, indicates that he and Reagan were of one mind about the inferiority of Africans, and did not bother to disguise their contempt in private. Of course, Reagan’s attitude toward people of color was already apparent to anyone willing to acknowledge the patterns in his rhetoric and policies as president, including his support for South African apartheid and his regular recourse to “coded” characterizations of African-Americans as lazy or criminal.
And yet when the tape was released, Melissa Giller of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute responded with denials and obfuscations: “If he said that 50 years ago, he shouldn’t have. And he would be the first person to apologize.”34 Note that her conditional “if” allows for the expression of doubt about something already clearly demonstrated. This conditional allows her to continue in the vein of a hypothetical characterization based on known evidence, as if we must apply what we know of Reagan to judge an uncertainty: “If he ever mistakenly said something offensive, he would be the first to apologize,” Giller seems to say. But this speculation is clearly contradicted by the actual evidence of the call, in which he deliberately says something so casually and cavalierly dehumanizing that it can only be interpreted as evidence of his belief in his own superiority over Africans, who he describes in literally dehumanizing terms, referencing racist and imperialist stereotypes, apparently irritated that people he considers uncivilized have a say in world affairs. To posit Reagan’s hypothetical eagerness to apologize for this is just as bizarre a gesture as Giller’s attempt to distance him from his comments by specifying that he said them “50 years ago.” This almost requires us to belabor the obvious point that, because Reagan was dead at the time of Giller’s response, his current beliefs could not be distanced from what they were decades ago. And dating the comments to 50 years previous to their release does nothing to distance them from his public record, because he was a governor at the time of the recording and began to campaign for the presidency only four years after it. In short, she can say nothing to refute the relevance of this revelation to Reagan’s public record, in elected offices that required him to represent the interests of African-Americans.
In writing as though it is a living Reagan she defends, as if what he said fifty years ago should not be held against him now, as if he were now capable of apologizing or changing his views, Giller inadvertently indicates that her rhetorical purpose is to defend the persisting and still efficacious mythologization of Reagan. Supremacist politics relies on the kind of narcissistic investment at work in this mythologization and devotion to the cult value of a personality. No matter how apparent the facts under discussion may be, this is a politics of interpretation that is founded on disavowal, as well as on the refusal to credit opponents’ equal worth, which results in refusal to credit their concerns or acknowledge harms. As indicated by Giller’s defensive response, Reagan is not remembered consistently and accurately for his policies or positions, but has instead been depicted as an aspirational figure of identification for a social fantasy of America. That fantasy universalizes a particular subject position, a straight white impenetrable Hollywood image of masculinity, a man devoted to Western civilization but anti-intellectual,
