Seeking Symptoms in Contemporary American Politics

“Unlike a sign…a symptom can only be interpreted in the signifying order.  A signifier has meaning only through its relation to another signifier.  The truth of symptoms resides in this articulation.  Symptoms…are truth, being made of the same wood from which truth is made…

“…the subject’s radical dodge by which the symptom comes into being.”

                                                            - Lacan, “On the Subject Who is Finally in Question”

I wonder if the conception of a symptom as a “radical dodge” from some unassimilable reality can be applied to an analysis of contemporary US politics.  Perhaps one could begin by looking at the collective dodge manifest in broad movements toward “third party” politics.  While these campaigns are by definition a fragmentation of the national ego, they are nevertheless marked by a fervent rhetoric of solidarity and the reunification of alienated patriots.  Certainly it is the case that political parties undergo a constant process of (re)definition, but I propose that consideration of the rhetoric of specific movements outside of the dominant binary may, like the analysis of a symptom, reveal the obstacle away from which the party platform turns.

Especially in my (young) political memory prior to 9/11, the primary opposition to the Republican/Democrat binary has at all levels of government been independent candidates.  This I believe to be true despite a long list of officially registered parties with subdued voter support.  Post 9/11, however, several third-party movements have briefly blossomed, nurtured by populist “grassroots” movements, which, unlike the subtle redefinition of the term in its application to President Obama, actually served the purpose of raising to national consciousness those platforms and candidates significantly divergent from the traditional binary which have been nurtured through popular local or regional support.

Of such post 9/11 grassroots parties and candidates, one might mention The Green Party, whose platform and name foreground that party's focus on ecology.  Although the The Green Party has supported former only lists “Ecological Stability” as the third of its four-tiered platform behind “Democracy” and “Social Justice” (as if its ecological concerns were merely an addition to other presupposed but variably defined national values), analysis of these tiers suggests that the Green Party’s primary form of divergence is to emphasize the ecological as a key to the humane.  Within this third tier of their platform the party makes the following claims:

• The human community is an element of the Earth community, not the other way around.  All human endeavors are situated within the dynamics of the biosphere.

• The health of the life-support systems - the ecosystems on our continent - is of paramount importance. Inherent in the efficient dynamics of those ecosystems is a vital profusion of biodiversity.

If we were to make political use of Lacan’s formulation of the symptom, might we discern in a platform so constituted and so named a turn away from the specifically human concerns of a post 9/11 nation; a turn away from trauma and loss, experienced at the level of both national and personal identity, and towards another register of concern, that of the ecological?  Though the above identifying characteristics of the party inform their emphasis on equality and sacredness of life in their foreign and domestic policy, the dominant philosophy and unifying premise of the party remains locked in a turn away from the specifically human toward the broader category of “biologic.”

Other grassroots movements have recently proliferated and may therefore be of interest to explore, including the New York City The Rent Is Too Damn High Party and the Ron Paul Libertarian campaign in 2008 whose loud minority used graffiti in lieu of billboard advertisements and for whom the majority of my freshman writing classes at the time swore their support.

Of course, eclipsing each of these at present is the Tea Party Movement.  Not properly a political party, members of the Tea Party Movement primarily identify themselves as Libertarian or Republican, but the movement's emphasis on “constitutional conservatism,” primarily expressed through an emphasis on reduced government spending, has greatly influenced candidates and elections at the regional and national level. 

Here again we find, in the unifying principle of the movement, a turn away from the specific human concerns which we might assume are the motivation for political action.  It isn’t that Tea Party Patriots intend to inflict harm on the poor, seniors, or minorities; nor is it the case, to borrow an epithet from the baser and more vitriolic attacks on the movement’s platforms, that they are “stupid.”   Rather, when faced with problems that resist assimilation into their perception of the national ego (eg. insufficient medical care, hunger, and poverty) Tea Party Patriots turn away from the human manifestation of these problems and towards the constitution as an idealist abstraction of functioning democracy.  For members of the movement the constitution-as-political-document is abstracted into a holy presence, the care and conservation of which salves the unapproachable moral dilemma of obligation to the other as subject.   

The best way to analyze a symptom is to attend carefully to the discourse of the analysand, but unlike the Green Party, the Tea Party Movement website does not include any documents of purpose*, platform, or policy.  Consider, then, the following video clip as an example of their discourse.  Certainly one must begin by recognizing both that the nature of a "video clip" implies that the conversation has been lifted from its context and that the contents of the clip have been selected by one of the Democrats featured in the video debating with a Tea Party Republican.  These facts constitute an undeniable bias.  My suspicions of a symptom are nevertheless present:  in a conversation that begins with Bernie Sanders discussing human concerns of sustenance, health, and end of life living, Rand Paul turns towards economic abstraction.  Unable to confront the apparition of a suffering and needy other, he retreats to the manageability of a fiscal argument:

It is important to note that I am not advocating a policy or a political viewpoint.  I mean instead to suggest that perhaps by following the above method, derived from my reading of Lacan, identification and analysis of symptoms in American politics might uncover the difficult realities which motivate and give shape to the "dodge away." 

Thinking in terms of a cinematic metaphor, the Lacanian symptom seems to play the role of the sheets Adam and Barbara don in Beetlejuice.  The couple are in the curious position of being dead and wanting to scare the new owners away from their home.  Their attempts at creating horror through gore and grotesque distensions of their dead bodies had been futile, however, because the new owners refused to see the truth of the haunting.  Only once the couple donned sheets and made the quintessential “oooohs” of animated ghosts were the new owners able to see them, but in this manageable form their uncanny presence had been deprived of its ability to shock and create fear.  The unassimilable fact of angry, dead former homeowners gives form to the sheets, but the current owners can only see what they can accept – a manageable prank of their daughter’s, some ruined sheets – and it is only what they can see that they seek to address.


*since writing this I have realized that the Tea Party website does indeed include a Mission Statement, one which I believe only further supports my understanding of the platform as symptomatic turn away.