Austere Subjectivity and Tea Parties: Between Individual Freedom and the Individualization of Risk

The 2007-2008 global economic crisis puts in stark relief the corporate-state alliance within our contemporary neoliberalist common sense. Citizens of nation-states in times of economic crisis assume responsibility for private companies’ failure, while corporate profits remain privatized in times of plenty. According to Nomi Prins, by summer 2009, “the [US] federal government’s bailout of the banks (including all federal loans, capital injections, and government loan guarantees) stood at approximately $13.3 trillion, roughly divided into $7.6 trillion from the Fed, $2.5 trillion from the Treasury (not including additional interest payments) $1.5 trillion from the FDIC (including a $1.4 trillion Temporary Liquidity Guarantee program [TLGP] initiated in October 2008 to help banks continue to provide lending to consumers), a $1.4 trillion joint effort and a $300 billion housing bill” (Prins 2010, 13-14). In saving the banks at all costs, the US Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve governed through Keynesian policies of governmental investment. They became the buyers of last resort to mitigate mass unemployment and prices because private enterprise lacked the capital to back all of its toxic assets. With the exception of the debilitated 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Federal Reserve and Treasury did not, however, implement new financial and banking regulations, or force the banks to renegotiate mortgage terms in light of skyrocketing unemployment. These processes indicate the functional priorities of the Fed for the banking and finance industries over any constellation of the “public,” as well as the increased power of financial services in everyday life.¹ The Federal Reserve continues to this day an expansionist stimulus program of buying bonds to keep interest rates low, thereby facilitating economic growth by assuming banks and financial corporations’ risk, even for those corporations who initially contributed to the crisis. However, for the US public there has been no extended stimulus, instead as I will discuss below a near universal push for austerity.

Austerity offers a flexible discourse to blame governments for problems to which they only marginally contributed, while simultaneously rewriting history on the cause of economic crises. As the US economy stabilized from 2010-2014, previously precarious financial organizations turned profits, the stock market went above 16,0000 and the federal government sold its stakes in General Motors and Frannie and Freddie Mac, corporations that it had bailed out just a few years earlier. A corporatist dream was fulfilled: government intervention had restored confidence in the market; now, as the story went, banks would resume lending to continue the free movement of capital fostering economic growth while government competition in the market receded.² To avoid the perception of governmental competence in bringing failed corporations to profitability, the financial investment and private equity firms mobilized lobbyists and think tanks to demand, at the same time, that the federal government sell the companies it had pulled from the brink in the open market. Notwithstanding the fact that the Treasury and Fed could have generated a substantial profit from the stakes they had taken in these companies, these same monies could have been used to pay down some of the US’s budget deficits created by waging two wars and the corporate bailouts. Nevertheless, despite robust profits, a bullish stock market, and lucrative executive bonuses returning, the banks still restrained their lending and investment due to the risk and uncertainty of the global market (Joshi 2011). Although government intervention was stimulating the economy, managing risk, and investing in deflationary measures to enable easy corporate profits, many banks and financial services had lost their market mojo, and no longer had confidence in the ontological primacy of markets for expansion, growth, and opportunity. As a result, speculative capital sought less risky market avenues where governments had already intervened and done most of the heavy work such as education. (The intensification of the financialization of charter schools and push for online education in our present [Gabriel and Medina 2010], as well as the persistent push to results-oriented learning through tests and efficiency reports may have, I think, correlations with speculative capital’s interests in education as a market possibility.) The budget and debt crisis in part created by “saving” the economic system also provided new free market opportunities. Through a media blitz building on decades of free market consensus, irresponsible government handling of the economy became the cause and effect of the economic bailouts, rather than the Banks’ massive failures in economic and risk management. As a result, governments must be punished for their profligate and irresponsible behavior by selling off their state assets in education, healthcare, criminal justice, the military and so forth to willing corporate clients at a fraction of their long-term value and worth. The economic crisis provided an opportunity to eviscerate further the moribund welfare state, facilitate financial services and equity funds, while also normalizing further that individuals should assume ever greater risk and responsibility. Individual citizens should assume risk as markers of their freedom and collective liberty, a paradoxical psychological empowerment through measures of austerity that may make more citizens’ lives precarious.

In the midst of uncertainty, I will trace in this paper how austerity became a new type of social contract, a means to unite disparate peoples in the face of economic uncertainty, while also restructuring the organization of the state. Austerity requirements demand that governments cut budgets, reduce debt to facilitate growth, and thus restore marketplace confidence in the face of unmitigated risk. The discourse of austerity employs an affective and moral dictum: Due to “irresponsible” behavior, the government needs to reorganize the state to avoid future mistakes—even if the government never made them in the first place—because they cannot manage risk as effectively as free enterprise, even with the counterfactual evidence of the economic crisis. My argument shows the mechanism for enfiguring life within normalized schema of attention, whereby processes of subjectification conduct life into complex material figurations that, though ideological, rely on affective relations for their success. In this regard, I am tracing how austerity, a latent idea, becomes a fixed ontology through inchoate structures that enigmatically require individualism as a unifying element to stand in for the state’s reorganization of public welfare concerns. I am diagnosing what I call the figuration of the “subject of austerity” that emerges as a way of uniting people paradoxically to assume risk individually that previously was managed by some social community, grouping, or configuration of the welfare state.

To do this work, I will focus on the guise of the Tea Party, a corporate figurative franchise based on individualism and the idea if not the reality of individual freedom. The Tea Party is a dispersed organization that initially exists through a media swarm and becomes politically material by glomming onto the US Republican Party to express a general will based on austerity. While the political power of the Tea Party is admittedly in flux, they have captured attention and discourse, and created a new consensus on collective freedom through rugged individualism and risk management that warrants further interrogation. They have provided one of the most effective blocs to promote processes of austerity and what I call the individualization of risk. Perpetual threats to stability give the representational possibility of inclusion within ready-made subjectifications like the Tea Party a psychic and affective power that often defies any analogical relationship to material realities. In sum, I am charting the generalization of risk management from corporate and market realities into the formation of human subjectivities through austerity, something that I believe represents an inchoate social formation.

Farcical Eternal Returns of History

The US is a sovereign nation-state guided by the common good of its citizens within a demarcated territory to secure and protect them from economic and military harm due in no small part to its ability to monopolize force. When corporate elements have become too powerful or too corrupt and thus threaten economy vitality, the Treasury has historically intervened to break up large corporate monopolies, or the Federal Reserve, following Congressional Acts, establishes or enforces regulations. For example, the economic depression of 1929 led to the creation of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, as part of New Deal legislation. It was designed to keep commercial banks that offer consumer services (like personal banking and mortgages) from getting involved in the high risk and reward of investment banks. Congress repealed Glass-Steagall in 1999 after extensive lobbying from banks and financial companies, as well as free market advocates within government, including Secretary of the Treasuries Larry Summers (1999-2001) and Robert Rubin (1995-1999). Without the Glass-Steagall Act, consumer subprime mortgages could be leveraged and packaged with commercial debts and investments into securities and derivatives for higher risk and reward investments like credit default swaps and collateral debt obligations.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall represents neoliberalism’s normalized consensus since the 1980s: Governments ironically rule by limiting the capacity to govern and outsource their historical monopoly of force to several corporatist structures. The reorganization of governmentality represents a biopolitical calculation in the production of what Michel Foucault called homo oeconomicus in the wake of the Austrian school of neoliberal economists embodied by Friedrich Hayek and their American disseminators at the University of Chicago with Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and Theodore Schlutz. Homo oeconomicus is, for Foucault, “a grid of intelligibility,” “someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such it converges spontaneously with the interest of others. From the point of view of a theory of government, homo oeconomicus is the person who must be left alone” (2008, 270). The economic human is ontologically the process of laissez-faire. Nevertheless, homo oeconomicus is paradoxically manageable and responds “systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment” because s/he “…is someone who is eminently governable” (2008, 270). The “economic human” views freedom primarily as a market concern and embodies emergent synergies between differing political constituencies of the left and right who are united by their hatred of state’s rules and regulations, and their desires for security. In the process, economic humanity merges libertarians, anarchists, and the free market wings of political parties as strange bedfellows in their mutual promotions of freedom from states. With Foucault’s “economic humanity,” power shifts the governmental-economic relationship and creates new subject formations. In other words, it represents a type of humanity and agency organized by and for the economy. At the same time, Foucault’s analyses of the processes of subjectification and power’s deployment of individualization as a mechanism of control may help us to understand the generalized economy of austerity.

The Kenyesian interventionist welfare state of the 1930’s-1970s in the US, represented by the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, has been shifted to an individualization of risk and profit. According to Robert Reich, the tax rates for high earners dropped from an average of 70% in the 1950s to below 25% in the present with the intensification of immaterial financial industries (2011, 10). The lowering of tax rates is a governmental calculation, one that alters the sovereign power of governance. This drop led to a mixture of dismantling or underfunding of public welfare agencies—including the much discussed deferral of maintenance for the nation’s infrastructure, resulting in bridge collapses and crumbling public school buildings—in order to direct revenue streams to vast military and security apparatuses. The lowered tax burdens on the wealthiest sectors have come by scaling back programs aimed at securing the most precarious sectors of the population, and eviscerated regulatory organizations like the Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services from having the structure in place to intervene. In sum, governmental institutions have actively starved themselves or shifted burdens from the federal government to states and municipalities in the name of greater individual freedom, marking a transformation of sovereignty, but one still orchestrated by governmental decisions.

Due to the loss of revenue, governments privatize their historical institutions and outsource their sovereign functions for reproducing themselves. For example, prison systems in the US were sold to private enterprises or closed. The costs for warehousing large sectors of the population were no longer viewed as expedient methods of social control or financialization. Similarly, educational systems including universities, rather than following historical missions of producing citizen-subjects, monetized excellence and success through results-oriented skills (Readings 1994). Reduced tax rates in US states meant less money to subsidize state and community colleges, shifting the burden of education costs to individuals with rising tuitions. Michel Foucault’s described how in modernity techniques of disciplining the body created the modern individual as the mechanism for states to reproduce themselves. As a result, the prison, school, hospital, and military barracks provided privileged sites where states could produce the modern soul at minimal costs to themselves. Yet, in the biopolitical shift to manage life itself through techniques of normalization, these institutional sites have been outsourced to corporate forces who individualize risk. As corporations have outsourced their production and manufacturing to other nations with lax labor laws, so too now have federal and state governments outsourced their risk and legal liability. Outsourcing also sheds employees and their pensions from increasingly austere local, state, and federal budgets. In the process, governments shift their sovereign decisions from service provider to client, and citizens become unwitting shareholders in corporate governance.

We see this concretely on the governmental libertarian front, where state governments have decertified unions, and shed historical pensions by forcing municipalities like Detroit and Stockton, CA, to declare bankruptcy so that they will rewrite their social contracts. Municipal governments like Sandy Springs have ceded from county organizations to cut spending. The citizens of Sandy Springs, a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, employ the discourse of local ownership to justify lowering tax rates, and implement fee for service to outsource key governmental functions and infrastructure, including the judicial courts, to private enterprise with a skeleton crew of city/county employees. In the process, corporations take on the historical functions of the sovereign state such as creating, adjudicating, and administering the law: “the city’s court, which is in session on this May afternoon, next to the revenue division, is handled by a private company, the Jacobs Engineering Group of Pasadena, Calif. The company’s staff is in charge of all administrative work, though the judge, Lawrence Young, is essentially a legal temp, paid a flat rate of $100 an hour” (Segal 2012). This example of the privatization of public functions makes Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010), which anthropomorphized corporations as legal individuals endowed with individual liberty and freedom, seem quaint by comparison. The quick privatization of public services in health, education, and the armed forces and subsequent unloading of workers and pensions by governments reconfigures the social contract. Ironically, this reconfiguration of the social contract renders more lives at immediate risk in the name of managing long term financial risks.

The habit of demanding austerity and reshuffling wealth from publics to private entities is nothing new, as economic crises and state intervention in the economy are as old as mercantilism (Arrighi 2008). Throughout the post-WWII, the so-called developing world has been subjected to the World Bank’s and International Monetary Fund’s austerity prescriptions from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000’s, requiring them to sell state assets to service loan debts (Caulfield 1998, Chussodovsky 1994). Due to their power in the global economic order, the Bretton Woods institutions facilitated primarily European and American banks to force indebted governments to unload their governmental institutions as requirements for loan obligations. Now however, the chickens have come home to roost in the wealthy countries of Europe and the Americas. We can draw from Naomi Klein’s thesis of the “shock doctrine” how crises become opportunities for neoliberal reshuffling of assets from state ownership of lucrative transportation businesses, or national industries of oil, gas, and water, to free market sources. Non-revenue producing (a.k.a. Cost +) industries such as social welfare or government pensions must merely be cut to fill budget deficits, while keeping tax rates low and enticing for global capital investment. In the name of efficiency and lowering costs, or as simple requirements of bank debt obligations, resources are shifted from states who nominally must be accountable to their citizenry to market forces that can evoke their right to privacy to frustrate calls for accountability.

Banks, financial, and transnational corporations are then able to affect the daily operations of governmental operations under the sovereign goal of flexibility. Debt obligations trump any social contract that the state may have with its citizens. Indeed, as international economist Mark Blyth describes, mass austerity promotes deflationary measures, reducing or stagnating wages, and cutting budgets in the interests of growth. Blyth argues that in the interest of the idea of growth, economies shrink for two reasons. If all nations and corporations in recession are cutting wages to promote growth through a race to the bottom, it could debilitate the number of available global consumers ready to purchase goods to foster economic growth. Secondly, with nations following the same prescription for austerity in light of a mass economic catastrophe, they will be in competition, leading to overproduction of goods and services, decreased wages and purchasing power, and the need to go into more debt to fill the gap of lost revenue. This creates what I call a cycle of austerity, a paradoxical growth industry. Austerity policies generate more budget deficits, thereby creating the need for new austerity measures to starve the beast into selling off more state institutions.

In wealthy countries, governmental demands for austerity historically emerged in exceptional circumstances in times of war or major economic crises to unite disparate peoples for a nationalist cause. The national subject proved an effective way to unite people against a common enemy, marking what Carl Schmitt called the essence of sovereignty in the friend-enemy distinction. With the 2007-2008, economic crisis, the Banks were demonized partially as enemies for their irresponsibility, yet the consensus was put forward that as President Obama described: “In order to save Main Street, we must save Wall Street.” Bailing out the banks instantly became patriotic—individuals assumed the plight of the banks to maintain the sovereignty of the market. As Gilles Deleuze argued in his musings on Spinoza, thinking stops when morality reigns and judgment is reduced to a choice between transcendent Evil/Good. The moral and ethical discourses of responsibility connected to an established common sense on governmental ineptitude, creating the consensus on governmental austerity to promote financial growth. While I have no interest in portraying the state as transcendent good, I do want to understand how the consensus on free markets and anti-statism, and what Blythe calls the “dangerous idea” of austerity, no longer operate as an exception in a moment of crisis, but becomes a philosophical and moral universal to restructure governmental forces and promote flexible subjects for the global market. I also will try to think through the reaction and resentment to this established discourse through the Tea Party, a group I find bewilderingly incoherent but fascinating for its figurative and institutional power and success, despite how numerically small it is. I analyze below how individuals in the US who, according to the Declaration of Independence, are purportedly endowed by “the creator” with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are encouraged to see risk as part of their individual responsibility and a beacon of their freedom. Why is the paternal hand of the New Deal seen as a sign of individual failure in light of the promise of the fleeting and evanescent invisible hand of the market? Before further exploring this idea, let us consider the material deployment of figurations that creates forms of life as the sovereignty of nation-states transform. This theoretical aside will set the stage for our analysis of the Tea Party and the subject of austerity.

Enfiguring the Real

Language creates material instantiations, including the essence of things, concepts, and techniques, such as government as transcendent evil and market as paradoxically transcendent and ontological freedom. Terry Cochran describes the process of modernity’s creation of consciousness with language, which often denies its all too real materialities: “…[A] s a product of ongoing institutionalization, language enforces, cajoles, and convinces, but its more insidious power lurks in its concepts, in the very matter of thought. Conceptually, this power is an antecedent to judgment, which acts in the name of power even as judges can do little more than assert their impartiality” (2001, 245). As Cochran shows, the figure and concept, the material formations of thought, are inextricably connected with power and institutionalization, what Michel Foucault called the discursive formation, Antonio Gramsci common sense, Gilles Deleuze (1994) the “dogmatic image of thought,” Bernard Stiegler grammatization, Jacques Ranciere the “distribution of the sensible,” and Friedrich Nietzsche the production of truth in a non-moral sense. They all indicate the materiality of language as a multiplicity of forces, affects, and material energy flowing and connecting the sensations and sounds in linguistic communication before meaning production. The blockage of these affective and power relations fixes the habits of thought by rendering the world in its complexity into a comprehensible object of knowledge through institutionalization.

Gilles Deleuze (1989), Foucault’s most important reader specifically for energizing the latter’s often overlooked ontological thinking, analyzes how Foucault thinks the “being of language.” Foucault calls statements in language a network of relations of power and knowledge, what Deleuze calls a dispositive (apparatus) or assemblage: “statements are multiplicities…a statement is itself a repetition, even if what it repeats is ‘something else’ that none the less ‘is strangely similar and almost identical to it.’ So the greatest problem for Foucault would be to uncover the nature of these peculiar features presupposed by the statement” (1989; 13, 12). Statements do not represent experience or capture reality through language for Foucault, but serve as relations of force that often defy the observable world, showing the limits of epistemology. Statements mark material processes that shuffle between the articulable, visible and invisible eruptions into expression, while marking the relays between these worlds. What Foucault describes as a discursive practice—a body of knowledge and behaviors that mark truth, normality, deviance affected by power relations—is in flux, not just due to the institutions or variables affecting them, but the perceptions and limits of knowledge and concepts of truth in specific moments of time. Consequently, his work on homo oeconomicus diagnoses how neoliberalist thinking could organize and dominate knowledge, establishing what he calls the “games of truth” of new market and governmental realities.

Foucault determines how knowledge is the sedimentation of relations of power and statements that construct the known world, while concealing the passions and affects that can disrupt normalized schema of attention and create new possibilities of thought. These new possibilities of thought are not due to some latent reality that resides behind things in the observable world as they appear to be or some essentiality that we need to access by removing false consciousness. Rather, they may already exist and defy human conceptualization or are neglected due to the habits of thought. Foucault, rather than just revealing the truth or showing the ideological bend of the agent making the utterance, attempts to map an “ontology of the present” (2010).

Political philosopher Jacques Ranciere recognizes Foucault’s philosophical coimplication of political and aesthetic realms and extends this idea through his concept of the “distribution of the sensible”:

the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.”

(2004, 12)

Ranciere’s “distribution of the sensible” names a process of sensing, perceiving, judging, and acting in the world that marks the limit and establishes the hierarchy of the possible, including subject and group formation, and foregrounds affective relations. This comprises processes that are sensed, perceived, felt, and affected, as well as subjects who are rendered mute because their language defies comprehension within the distribution of the sensible, such as the critics of the neoliberal consensus. For Ranciere, the social reality that we are obliged to consent to is an effect of political motivations of normalized consensus, so that the social order is delimited within a small range of ways of being, living, sensing, perceiving, and speaking. For Ranciere, sense-perception and the ways in which a human might recognize its surroundings become the real itself, whereby figures become the very realm of sense, knowledge, and truth. Indeed, Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible resonates with Foucault’s “games or arrangements of truth” to mark the procedures of subjectification and individual incorporation with a more focused engagement on affective relations. These affective connections, I think, are crucial for understanding how austerity can be embraced as a sign of individuality, even when it defies rationality. Critiquing austerity can neither rely, therefore, solely on truth claims to show the fallacy or errors of free market thinking, nor unmask the ideological weapons at work like Fox News, the Republican Party, or neoliberal elites at Stanford, Harvard, or University of Chicago, in the production of a neoliberal consensus. Belief in austerity should not be seen, therefore, as a marker of stupidity and irrationality as Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s crucial critiques of austerity suggests. Instead, Ranciere and Foucault provide exceptional tools for thinking ontologically processes of subjectification for non-human agency, including enfigurements of dynamic processes created, formalized, and dispersed in real time like the global market, austerity, and the Tea Party. Foucault describes the “aesthetics of existence,” the immanent production of beings and their relations to other objects, beings, knowledges as producing realities and the ontologies of the present, including unpleasant ones like the Tea Party. As a result for Foucault, what he calls the “games of truth” connect, disturb, or are incorporated with sedimented discourses that mark a moment of institutionalization. Previously unrecognizable historical formations become concretized as truths, including the truth of austerity, even if it may have little to do with historical events, as I have indicated above.

Consequently, the US government can become the primary agent of failure rather than the Banks though both are mutually coimplicated in the dynamic financial processes that create the crisis, setting the stage for the consensus of austerity. Rather than dismiss these processes as ideological weaponry, though no doubt they are, they indicate, I think, how strategically effective figurations are for affective fixing of ontology. In my next section, I theorize how measures for austerity simultaneously produce their own subjects that cannot be explained by historical formations of disciplining and the individualizing aspects of power. Instead, the subject of austerity is a flexible type of agency, shifting focus from the Hegelian subject of consciousness to processes of subjectivation as Foucault diagnosed it. Austere subjects replicate the shift in the organization of work from the industrial production of Fordism to what Jeffrey Liker calls the “Toyota Way” of Just in Time (JIT) production. I turn next to how austerity became a dominating affective figuration for individual freedom through the Tea Party. I am analyzing the paradox of “subjectivity as austerity” and the techniques for generating individuals who relish austerity as a form of their individual agency, while accepting the dictum to be flexible as a moment of their consciousness. They become actualized as subjects through their acceptance of individual risk.

Tea Partying as Risk Management

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have been the most powerful organizations to emerge in the aftermath of the economic crisis, united by a common rage against an iniquitous economic system, albeit from vastly different positions. While Occupy was eventually dispersed from its seizure of Zuccotti Park to protest social inequity and the a government more interested in protecting companies over people, it has remade itself into a network of community, regional, and non-governmental organizations based on bringing people together to provide humane services in the wake of the diminishment of the welfare state.³ The Tea Party, on the other hand, creates a signifier and subjectivity for a dispersed mass of people founded on individual liberty and belief in the myth of rugged individualism as part of a uniquely American project currently under siege from enormous government and corporate forces, and racial minorities and immigrants who are stealing their jobs. The Tea Party is, I think, a grouping that emerges due to economic restructuring yet only thinks of itself as a cultural grouping. Its Ranciereian distribution of the sensible is around an authentic nationalism driven by a sense that the nation itself needs to return to a heroic past represented by the intentional wills of the Founding Fathers who understood freedom and liberty as ontological. The paradox of the Tea Party—individual liberty defended by collective organization—is the paradox of the US’s form of governmentality from its inception that gives form and expression to an anti-statist affect that senses but does not theorize a generalized absence of individuality when governing. In this section, I will discuss how the Tea Party enfigures an affective counter reality of individualism through collective organization that is an effect of austerity, offering a representational plenitude in light of their eviscerated material realities, as we discussed in the last sections.

The Tea Party lineage begins with the event of CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in response to the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan of 2009. The troubled economy, according to Santelli, was held hostage by the “losers” who had gotten loans that they could not repay (Bedard 2010). The Plan, established by the Department of Treasury, was designed to help avoid mortgage foreclosures and allow restructuring of loans to lower mortgage holders monthly payments. Santelli called on corporations to punish the Treasury and thus the US government by unloading US bonds, which the Treasury was floating to help pay for the $75 billion program. Although a mere drop in the bucket to the total amount spent saving the Banks, Santelli’s utterances—his affective rant—soon became a rallying cry to coalesce an anti-statist will for the Tea Party’s outrage, ushering in a new historical narrative of blaming the government and their problems for the economic crises caused by the Banks. This was surprisingly easy to market as the Federal Housing Ace of 1934, a New Deal piece of legislation, created the Federal Housing Administration, consolidating home ownership as a so-called US “soft right,” and foregrounded the role government has played in fostering housing as part of national identity including the premise of the “American Dream.” Furthermore, it shows how ubiquitous government already is in people’s lives, despite the US’s foundation as an “empire of liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson once put it. Paradoxically, the concept of home ownership is one of the most mythic exemplars of “rugged US individualism” and marks individual economic and cultural success, despite the material reality that most homes are owned by the Banks who allow the residents to live there as long as they pay their mortgage. To maintain the transcendental illusion of housing as a US soft right and marker of cultural identity, the Tea Party seized on the failed debtors as causing the crisis and thus attacking the nationalist ethos. The complexity of banks’ overleveraging with speculative instruments, including the mortgages’ algorithmically bundled into derivatives and securities, was reduced to the more manageable unit of morally-suspect individuals who had taken out loans they “irresponsibly” and willfully could not pay. The failed individual who could not honor his/her mortgage contracts became a contagion on the body politic that must be extirpated for failing to individualize the risk that now threatens the system itself. By siding with the banks, Tea Party followers take a moral position on individualizing risk as a good unto itself, while maintaining the emptied concept of home ownership as a form of national identity. Yet to discuss a singular Tea Party with Santelli as its unofficial historian may be premature.

The Tea Party lacks a center, and coheres only through its negative formations of anti-government, anti-elitism, anti-Wall Street—(large banks are part of the problem and the governmentally enabled consolidation of large banks stupefying)—and sense that individual liberty is under siege. For the Tea Party, the Federal government is equated with a colonial occupier, the British crown of 1774-75, and therefore must be purged for its attempts to extract taxation without representation. The Tea Party embodies libertarian principles and a general disillusionment with government to honor its social contract to its citizens. Yet, they nostalgically lament the diminishment of specific ways of life (religious, white majorities) that is putting more and more individuals at risk. Zygmunt Bauman has diagnosed the existential crises for the human subject of what he calls “liquid modernity,” whereby institutions and social forms do not have enough time to retain their individual sensorium or frame of reference, frustrating the creation of communities, social justice, educational institutions, cities, or even the prospect of a career or long-term future. The loss of solidity creates greater insecurity and fear for all sectors of the population, whose lives they recognize as precarious. Law and order increasingly function therefore as marketing slogans due to the production of perpetual fear, and rights become less indicators of “political actions than of social esteem and personal dignity”(1997, 15). The Tea Party fits in nicely to this formulation, providing esteem for the marginal and dispossessed by focusing on individual empowerment and affective strength.

Borrowing from Robert Castel, Bauman diagnoses how the state no longer protects individual rights within predatory global capitalism, and contributes to the dissipation of the very ideas of solidarity and the social state offering some type of protection that I outlined above. While the rise of individualism is coterminous with the dissipation of the welfare state—what Bauman calls “deregulation-cum-individualization” (1997, 66)—the individual becomes the only social bond in a sweeping state of existential insecurity, leading to a generalized fear of risk. For Bauman, difference itself contributes to risk, leading to “mixophobia” (1997, 87). The “insurance policy of community,” whereby one encounters difference and learns to coexist with the variety of human differences, is replaced by the “militarization of space” (to borrow from Mike Davis) to keep the other/enemy distant from the individual. Or, more tragically as with the Tea Party, there is a retrenchment into a unitary sense of national identity that must eschew the multiplicity of existence, such as national, ethnic, or cultural identities.

The Tea Party uses selective national history and revolutionary rhetoric as an umbrella to allow disaffected individuals to see themselves represented by other like-minded and generally ethnically white figures as a way to combat the generalized state of uncertainty in their lives (Lepore 2010). Their nationalist populism thus mixes Reaganesque pride of “Morning in America,” a rebirth of America to its ontological state of freedom, with the racial and ethnic paranoia of the George W. Bush administration’s endless quest for security and war on omnipresent terror. As Donald Pease argues the Tea Party mixes populism with white racial fantasies, but speaks in code regarding mysterious forces (non-whites) that have taken the country “away from them,” represented by the democratic election of the first African-American president. Yet, the racism is mixed with economic restructuring as Obama’s election in 2008 put in stark relief how much had been lost by disaffected working class whites in the reorganization of capital (Blow 2011). Indeed, the Tea Party emerges due to a generalized insecurity, brought on ironically by the retreating welfare state and general sense of dispossession of many, primarily white, working and middle class Americans, struggling amidst deindustrialization, and the loss of Union-backed well-paying jobs. No longer able to count on governance through state institutions as they are corrupted by concentrations of power, they turn to markets and individualism to guarantee freedom and empower their subject formation through consumer opportunities. Their love of markets is especially paradoxical as agency is exercised mostly through consumerism, but they cathect their anger to the big corporations who frustrate their individual freedom by diminishing their purchasing power. Their hatred of Wall Street, a figuration for elites and monied classes, marks a recognition and critique of the consolidation of capital under neoliberalism—hence their outrage generated by saving banks that were “too big to fail.” The Tea Party does have a critique of neoliberalism because it holds an opposing concept of individualism to the neoliberal consensus. However, they look to government for security through law and order, and like consumers believe that they should have a democratic say in how their money is spent. Their muddied paradoxical philosophy seeks, therefore, a mythic figuration within the rugged individualism of the self-made human of social mobility, yet does not recognize how individualism has been made all the more tenuous by the economic policies they advocate (as I outlined above). Austerity becomes their reality to unite themselves as a group and maintain their individuality.

The Tea Party evokes thereby Walter Benjamin’s 1936 comment on the dangers of fascism for aestheticizing politics. Benjamin’s analysis was written in the context of a transformation of the human’s sensorium in relationship to media technologies that exceed what Henri Bergson called the sensory-motor schema, the causal connection between agents and actions:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they [the proletarianized masses] strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.

(1990, 120-121)

Referring to techniques of massification through visual branding of nationalism and political structures in new media, Benjamin diagnoses the representational empowerment of individuals who belong together through visual affective social relations as a mass. However, in the process, the incorporation into the nationalist mass for Benjamin actually atomizes and individualizes people from power and productive material capacities. The people can be united representationally in a figure of collective or community formation as homeowners or patriots, but not materially or legally, specifically if it affects the distribution of money, property, means of production, or in our instance the profit possibilities of speculative capital and the Banks. The Tea Party also employs a Benjaminian rhetorical revolutionary discourse that will not alter the relations of power—including property and home ownership—too radically. Consequently, Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” can still be relevant in light of neoliberalism’s extension of the economy and techniques of governmentality based on governing more with less through austerity. Although the Tea Party is guided by anti-statism, the desire for security leads to the need for communal structures or systems of organization to monopolize violence, like military and police, and law and order that will be magically shed of their governmental connection. Aestheticizing politics through unifying figurations—including the leader (Fuhrer, Il Duce), the nation, Aryanism—creates what Wendy Brown calls the staging or performance of sovereignty, even if governments outsource politics formations and power as I discussed above. The government must instead operate flexibly and fluidly like a corporation, including through processes of subjectivation, to create a group of individuals—the very definition of the corporation.

Santelli’s rant and the Tea Party figuration would have disappeared into the ether of daily media events of fringe groups such as the survival-ist Michigan Militias of the 1990s, but its connection to capital facilitated its coalescence into the structures of attention or consensus through digital and televisual media. They became a media vector in McKenzie Wark’s term that concretizes random events or bits of events into a structured, albeit nonlinear narrative. The Tea Parties share almost no concrete platforms except libertarian principles on the immorality of governmental intervention with several different organizations vying for recognition, each with varying claims of authenticity within the different Tea Party groups. They include non-profit organizations like The Tea Party Patriots (itself comprised of 1,000 affiliated groups); Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers organization; FreedomWorks, led by Dick Armey; the Tea Party Express, a movement formed by a political action committee (PAC) that itself was formed by a consulting firm; and Tea Party Nation, a for-profit group. While these organizations harness the anger or disaffection that the Tea Party cathects, they distribute the sensible against the government and promote austerity to enable their own free market possibilities. The NGOs and PACs provide the capital to keep the Tea Party going in the visual and discursive realm as a possible truth, indicating how it is a virtual production that then becomes material through the mediascape.

The Tea Party is then a set of individualities who connect to capital and modes of expression in the media as a political movement; they become through identification and incorporation. They could be described as a corporatist form of flexible inclusion that subjugates its members within its dispersed organization—all whose faces embody individuality like Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics. Their individualism emerges by requiring submission to the idea of limitless individuality, populism, austerity, and a mythical concept of the United States. With this flexible distribution of the sensible, each individual Tea Party member identifies with the corporations ironically that rule them, while trying to hold out for a concept of individualism that exists only in a mythical past of Founding Fathers. Instead, their sense of individuality is a corporate form that they perceive as being molested by incorporating forces of consolidation identified by them as states and large corporations. They become individuals through incorporation with others into the Party, an individualism that gains expression by being connected and submitting to one of the abovementioned groups’ revenue streams. Yet, this compulsory individualism emerges through choosing to actively take on risk and embrace austerity as a way of exercising power, the very same position advocated by the corporations.

Conclusion

Corporate franchises like the Tea Party operate increasingly in the visual realm with decentered systems of organization and revenue streams. These corporate identities are franchised as inchoate decentered political organizations that ironically bring their multitudes together. Given the connections between the Tea Party and Republican Party, it is easy to see the former as merely a tool of the latter. Yet, I think that this view is mistaken as each uses the other’s message in order to exercise power and monopolize discourse. The Tea Party becomes the screen to project coherence and to direct emotions, affects, actions into a sense of virtual agency. It becomes thereby a larger than life collective will within the representational field, even if it is quite small in the physical world.

The economic crisis of 2008 showed the generalized precariousness of the entire neoliberal free market system and the spuriousness of faith in the market as ontological freedom, a freedom shown to be unreliable. In the US, equality of opportunity is equated with the opportunity for individuals to procure work and gain wealth as a form of individual liberty and freedom. At the same time, paradoxically, work subjugates their individual consciousness to market forces, a point reminiscent of Max Weber’s protestant work ethic and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “Americanism.” Building on this, C.L.R. James remarked how extraordinary the US project was for controlling people through their own self-direction. The economic crisis afforded an opportunity to reorganize society, including the procedures of subjectification, as the promise of equality of opportunity diminished in light of economic mismanagement. When humans trained as workers (homo faber) and individuals no longer find limitless opportunities to carve out their liberty through work/employment, they need other figurations to fabricate their existence. This creates a crisis of subjectivity. As Hegel pointed out, a subject cannot be in itself and for itself to achieve self-consciousness until recognized by the other. The Tea Party is one such figure and regime of truth, an effect of neoliberalist policies to turn all limits—whether it is forms of regulation, obligation, or knowledge—into statism and assaults on the individual choice of freedom. Furthermore, the populist anti-intellectualism of the Tea Party suggests any subject of knowledge, any subject in the know, is part of a conspiracy of intellectual elites hocking inconvenient truths, paternalists impeding on their individual choice. Indeed, even the political liberalist policies of the Enlightenment (Locke, Paine, Henry) and revolutionary desire on which the Tea Party bases its foundational knowledge are recast as new set of strategic villains, the very state that created them. In a curious sleight of hand, each individual projects him or herself as a market that must be liberated from these oppressive forces, including disparate or critical knowledge itself.

To understand these epistemological concerns at the level of agency and ontology, Foucault emphasized that he could care less about a “theory of the subject,” but focused instead on the “constitution of the subject’s mode of being…analyz[ing] the different forms by which the individual is led to conduct him or herself as a subject” (2010, 5). Foucault diagnoses the becoming object of the subject and vice versa:

This objectivation and this subjectivation are not independent of each other. From their mutual development and their interconnection, what could be called the ‘games of truth’ come into being-that is, not the discovery of true things but the rules according to which what a subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and false. In sum, the critical history of thought is neither a history of acquisitions nor a history of concealments of truth; it is the history of ‘veridictions,’ understood as the forms according to which discourses capable of being declared true or false are articulated concerning a domain of things. What the conditions of this emergence were, the price that was paid for it, so to speak, its effect on reality and the way in which, linking a certain type of object to certain modalities of the subject, it constituted the historical a priori of a possible experience for a period of time, an area and for given individuals.

(“Foucault” n.d.)

In sum, Foucault does not argue for grasping reality through nominalism or the perpetual indeterminacy of the signifier, but tracing their movements and sensing the passage of a process in its becoming reality, including agency through forms of subjectivity or objects. (Indeed, Foucault was dealing with issues of objecthood and ontology well before the speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists looked behind the burning bush of post-structuralist thinking and continental philosophy to find ontology again!) These realities emerge due to connections to power in the establishment of truths. It is for this reason that Deleuze (1989) describes Foucault’s writing as a “cartography” of becomings, a mapping to trace forms of expression and the institutionalization of “veridictions” in the production of agents, including subjectivity, political formations, and knowledge.

I have been mapping in this paper how the veridiction of austerity emerges by linking ontological truth to global markets and freedom. The market is, however, a figuration for dynamic and complex processes and systems, many of which exceed human knowledge, even for the experts who make their living trying to tame and monetize it. The global market and freedom, I contend, are ontological examples of human construction, whereby epistemic systems connect to faith-based reasoning, to construct a material figure that stands in for the materialist world. Manuel De Landa identifies with Deleuze another set of processes that operate outside the observable world that he calls “realist ontology,” “grant [ing] reality full autonomy from the human mind, disregarding the difference between the observable and the unobservable, and the anthropocentrism this distinction implies” (2002, 4). In sum, De Landa, Deleuze, Foucault, and Ranciere indicate the dynamism of ontology due to the epistemic shuffle that takes place to enfigure dynamic realities through processes of subjectivation, while marking how little is actually known due to our anthropocentric limits. A market crisis shows the limits of human perception for thinking complex systems and challenges the usual anthropocentric common sense about freedom and markets. The market embodies a constellation or relay of forces that can only be mapped through economic algorithms that frequently operate beyond mind’s limits. Rather than confront this powerful nonhuman agency, the anthropocentric limits of mind read the market as freedom when the economy is doing well and chaos or unpredictability in downturns. As a result, the shuffling of effects and causes happens due to the limits of human thinking, thereby allowing, for example, the recreation of history on the contributing factors for the economic crisis. The Tea Party can emerge as a revolutionary force to take America back by diminishing the state and recreating Jefferson’s agrarian utopia of the yeoman farmer in a consumer society.

The subject of austerity can become, I contend, the beacon of freedom. The discourse of austerity keeps corporate relations of property intact, as the individual interiorizes and accepts responsibility for the conditions of austerity, regardless if the individual bears any direct liability for the conditions of austerity. Indeed, the individual instead assumes the Banks’ responsibilities to honor their debts through extended financial leveraging as if they are his/ her own. After outsourcing everything else, Banks and financial companies have now successfully outsourced responsibility even for their failures. At the same time, attention is geared to the production of subjects within a dehistoricized moral polarity of good and evil. The path to moral righteousness is paved by austerity. These arguments can simultaneously rehearse religious values based on self-sacrifice and the teachings of Christ on the need to live for others, while creating subjects that live for the betterment of corporations, a higher force whose success has become coterminous with national identity. This is how I believe the Tea Party formalized the subject of austerity, even as it political power and membership fluctuates.

Austerity becomes the distribution of the sensible, when it represents a very limited market rationality that justifies protecting banks at all costs for they underwrite the promise of human individuality. In the process, austerity becomes a generalized consensus, whereby we all take on the task of “doing more with less” as a way to reassert power over a precarious existence due to the individualization of risk. Austerity is a curious figuration for uniting a collectivity and generating a social figuration ironically constructed through individualization metaphors: A tightening of belts for all, one individual at a time with redistributed costs onto individuals who must each contribute their part to save the banks—the latter now miraculously anthropomorphized as individuals at risk. Ironically, the unloading of state and municipal assets includes dumping jobs and potential consumers, intensifying the unemployment rate and the general precariousness of all job forms, on the promise of a beautiful future when the Banks say economic confidence has been restored. However, individuals relish becoming in Zygmunt Bauman’s “collateral damage.” They become heroicized and empowered by participating in the assumption of risk as a new social contract (Bauman 2011). Austerity requirements and the retreat of social welfare programs become the new national common sense coupled with platitudes of shared sacrifice, regardless of the fact that the disintegration of welfare states entails a wholesale reallocation of funds from public to private hands. Subjects become agents by assuming their individualized risk, as subjects of austerity. In the process, the United States’, Britain’s and the European Union’s liberalist corporatism challenge the state’s monopoly to that of one and several corporatist forces with the production of particular forms of the human to perpetuate that idea. This reorganization and subjugation of the population through the paradoxical idea of community formation through austerity and shared sacrifice, ironically destroys the belief systems in institutions of civil society and community. Education, public libraries, municipal and state workers, pensions, social welfare, and services for the poor, are social debts that need not be honored. Instead, emergent subjectivities of austerity and moral worth are united amid a mythical image of rugged individualism, while systematically destroying their ecology.

The subject of austerity adopts the concept of perpetual self-making through sacrifice as an ethos. This morality is of course driven only by economic rationality—profit—of the specific forces who will benefit from flexible subjects who cannot imagine or expect a system of institutional reciprocity but view their individualization of risk as a noble duty. The subject of austerity perceives itself as individual and free through its practice of self-denial. Indeed the subject of austerity rehearses Christian penitentialism but is guided by market morality with the individual as the potential for wealth creation in times of plenty and austerity in hard times. The 2007-08 economic crisis became the means for pushing the subject of austerity as a non-political yet policed individual to a global figuration. Individualism, self-reliance, and anti-statism merged a sense of patriotism with austerity ushered in by libertarians and groups like the Tea Party. We all now pay the price for the advocacy of marginal groups selling the individualization of risk as transcendent good.