Constitutional Sentimentality

Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Mirror of Presidential Politics

In most respects, Bill Clinton’s domestic policy has been to the right of Richard Nixon’s. His main substantive accomplishment has been to fortify the boundaries of political possibility established by Ronald Reagan. Were it not for the affair that brought us, “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” and, “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” the defining line of his presidency would be, “The era of big government is over.” In attacking welfare, for instance, Clinton proved far more ambitious than Reagan ever dared to be. His administration has done little of consequence for organized labor. Nor has the Clinton presidency brought significant benefits to African-Americans, an outcome prefigured at least as early as 1992, when, to show white suburbanites that he was no Michael Dukakis, he left the campaign trail and flew home to Arkansas in order to preside over the state’s execution of a brain-damaged black man. Yet he has proved consistently popular with black people and has been an exceptionally powerful magnet for conservative rage. For many on the American right, President Clinton has stood as not merely an exemplar of political liberalism but a key symbol of “the Sixties.” In the course of the Lewinsky scandal, some intellectuals on what’s left of the American left found themselves defending a Clinton they understood in those symbolic terms. Accepting the conservative description while inverting the conservative evaluation, they fundamentally misunderstood, or at least misdescribed, the past decade of political history. If George Shulman’s account is right, Toni Morrison’s designation of Bill Clinton as the first black President is among the most striking instances of this defense through misrecognition.

What I value most in Shulman’s provocative and edifying essay is the way it makes sense of this odd turn of events, not merely of Morrison’s particular position but, more important, of the broader political context and contours of the scandal. Shulman illuminates not only the interests but the intimately entwined longings and aversions that have driven American politics over the past few decades. His loosely psychoanalytic account of the cultural logic of recent Republicanism reveals the strong internal connections between the party’s libertarian-sounding advocacy of “the free market” and its deployment and defense of religious reaction, homophobia, sexual puritanism, and white supremacy. His discussions of the intercoding of race and sex — of the ways in which they function as reversible metaphors for each other — and of the continuing power of competing political allegories of the sixties show how Clinton’s body could become the object of both reactionary loathing and, in a moment of crisis, African-American and progressive white identification. Shulman subjects that identification to well-deserved critical scrutiny while recognizing that, despite the appalling shortcomings of Clinton’s tenure, the struggle to defend him from impeachment and define the meaning of the scandal was necessary and important to the future of American politics.

What form should that defense have taken? Was Morrison’s fundamentally mistaken, a missed opportunity? Shulman faults her for a failure of political imagination: in seeking to fend off Clinton’s foes with the materials she found readymade, she accepted too much of what’s wrong with American political culture. Yet because Shulman’s previous investigations of that culture have drawn inspiration from her work, for him Morrison’s contribution to the fight against impeachment stages anew some of the most vexing questions about the rhetoric of criticism and the possibilities for political belonging in this country: Can dissidents and radical movements effectively challenge existing conditions without invoking the prophetic story of a chosen people, a special nation, the betrayal of a founding covenant, and the promise of redemption? Can contemporary tellings of that story avoid the exclusion, subordination, and violence that have so often accompanied prophetic stories about America from the Puritans onward?

Shulman’s ongoing work on prophecy has taught me the importance of these questions, and his reading of Beloved in relation to them offers the best analysis of the novel that I have encountered.[1] I do not consider...