Theory & Event

Last September, prior to the 2004 US Presidential election, some of us at Theory & Event began tentative planning for a symposium on elections. We were interested in trying to frame the peculiar event of a US presidential election. We thought of the American election as peculiar because the institutions of American national politics — always eccentric, always latently holding the possibility of failure given the wheeziness of the US Constitution, which suffered a severe breakdown in 2000 – have been in recent years tottering on the brink of all sorts of black holes of sovereignty and power, representative aphasia, and apocalyptic spectacle. We believed that this election would probably be explicable, if at all, only through multiple exposures and perspectives. So we planned to place a call for after the election.

Our initial call invited reflection on the legitimacy of elections, on processes of choosing when there seems to be no choice, and on national elections of leaders in a context when their policies upon election will have a global reach. At issue for us as well was whether a focus on elections indicated a diminishment in aspirations for change or an accommodation with practices of power forever barred to social justice. Was preoccupation with the election a sort of political resignation, a sort of ironic voiding of politics from the political, or was engagement in the electoral processes, despite its extraordinary limiting of the range of possibilities, nonetheless appropriate to a situation of such immediately deadly seriousness, a situation with a real potential to foreclose any possible better futures?

In some ways, our initial reactions to the election itself, once it occurred — or at least those we voiced on the editorial board’s listserv — reiterated these concerns. Long lines and malfunctioning voting machines in Ohio and racially discriminatory practices of disenfranchisement in Florida suggested a broken, illegitimate electoral system. For some, this sense of brokenness was enhanced by the fact of increased voter turnout: the election results could not be explained away as the result of an apathetic demos.

People, quickly and sloppily categorized as citizens of Red States voting on the basis of their values, actually chose Bush. Why? Were they duped and misguided? Had ‘we,’ those who opposed Bush and were figured as the latte liberals of the Blue States, made crucial political errors that cost ‘us’ the election? Once we recognize the falseness of this opposition, which we must, the way it occludes more complex arrangements of values, interests, affects, and desires, what, then, is to be done?

Robert Meister’s contribution takes up this question.Taking up and redirecting concern with political values, Meister pays particular attention to a Left hope that voters would believe Kerry, even when we didn’t believe him, didn’t buy him, ourselves. William Chaloupka attends to Right ressentiment. He builds from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? to provide a compelling account not simply of Republican tactics but of the meaning of Republican politics. Lauren Berlant’s “Unfeeling Kerry” attends to the affective dimensions of political attachment. When political identification is mimetic, when campaigns aim to induce voters to identify with a candidate, what sort of candidates radiate authenticity and in this way stand in for a fantasy that the good and the normal will continue?

Whereas the first three contributions reflect specifically on the 2004 American Presidential election, the latter four place the election in a larger institutional, global, and technological context. Saskia Sassen addresses changes in the institutional structure of the presidency. Juan Cole reports briefly on the Iraqi elections. Ivan Ascher considers the intersection of election and protest in Ukraine. And, Richard Rogers, breaking with the punditry’s celebration of the year of the blog, provides a more complex account of the political role of new communications media.