Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contemporary U.S. Public Life and the Conservative Right by Marlia Banning (review)

In Manufacturing Uncertainty: Contemporary U.S. Public Life and the Conservative Right, Marlia Banning examines how conservatives have used uncertainty as a form of social and political control. Banning, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado–Boulder, defines uncertainty as “times of unpredictable change, when the possible outcomes of the present or future action are unknown and incalculable” (2). Uncertainty can be productive and increase public deliberation. However, Banning’s timely book posits that the conservative right’s contemporary use of uncertainty has constricted deliberation and caused public complacency through “heightened affect, fear, and resentment” (135).

Employing a critical-rhetorical approach, Banning pieces together several fragments to argue how coordinated but dispersed efforts by conservatives have created an uncritical political environment where citizens disengage from politics. Although she uses the phrase “conservative right” to refer to a number of ideologically diverse political groups, Banning carefully explains that the conservative right is not “a fully rationalized or systematically organized group” (4). Instead, this group is a loose “conservative assemblage” organized by a commitment to neoliberal logic. Rather than placing their rhetoric and policies in the “language and reality of the public good” (3), conservatives have used neoliberal logic to favor private interests over public concerns.

Banning bases much of the theoretical ground for her study upon the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Giorgio Agamben, and other neo-Marxist theorists. Employing a method called “a rhetoric of the everyday,” Banning maps “the dialectics between material and economic conditions of uncertainty and the [conservative right’s] dispersed, yet strategically aligned, efforts to reconfigure public life” (10). In the introduction and chapter 1, Banning argues that America’s conservative right has created a “social apparatus” intended to “heighten uncertainty... thus diminishing people’s ability to name, define, and debate matters of public concern in the United States” (37). To uncover and show the effects of this social apparatus, Banning analyzes “discursive measures (such as books, opinion-articles, and talk radio) and non-discursive measures (such as funding, institutions, buildings, and people)” (33). Throughout the remaining four chapters, Banning builds her rhetoric of the everyday by examining public controversies like climate change and President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The result is several compelling case studies that showcase how conservatives have helped move “the nation to the right” (182) by causing publics to disengage from substantive public debates.

In chapter 2, Banning explores how rhetorics of political correctness are used to silence and end debate in twenty-first-century America. Basing her analysis in discursive works like New York Times and Newsweek articles, and nondiscursive measures like the growth of nonprofit foundations like the American Enterprise Institute, Banning highlights how political correctness has been used by the right as a powerful keyword that “veils, erases, and displaces discussions” (59). Banning explains that this kind of rhetoric perpetuates uncertainty by “deflect[ing] criticism of the status quo” (60) and preventing discussions about the causes and effects of issues like economic and social inequality.

In addition to uncertainty being supported through political correctness, in chapter 3, Banning provides a detailed analysis of how a cultural politic of resentment has pervaded contemporary American society. Dispersed through conservative political movements like the Tea Party and supported by the deregulation of electoral, financial, and media systems, a cultural politic of resentment redirects public attention in moments of crisis. This cultural politic “functions to demonize dissent and dismiss discussions of the material differences organized by the logic of late capitalism” (96). Resentment valorizes the free market system while fostering fear, hate, and uncertainty in government programs and regulation practices. Rather than bringing publics together through “issues that are likely to unite a majority of Americans” (97), Banning notes that conservatives’ use of rhetorics of resentment supports a political environment that further polarizes Americans along partisan lines.

Moving beyond debates about the role of government...