“It Doesn’t Get Any More Real Than Perry”?:
“People of all persuasions are sick, sick, SICK of mollycoddling, pandering and Edwardian (as in John Edwards) phoniness . . . . It doesn’t get any more real than Perry. The elite may call it ‘swagger’; I call it a real man with real convictions and the courage to stand up for them, which happen to comport with the majority of Americans. Or as they say in Texas, he is had and cattle. And the coupe de gras, he is a spiritually anchored and philosophically happy warrior.”
Since when did the Right (and more specifically white Republican men from Texas) become the arbiters of what it means to be a “real American man”?
As a Canadian transplant, I’ve always found the theatrics of the U.S. political scene fascinating, where big money campaigns seem interminable and public spectacle usually trumps any in-depth discussion of policy. American politics is a virtual blood-sport with all its sound bite and bombastic fury. Texas Governor Rick Perry is just the latest Republican to enter the pissing contest that is the 2012 presidential campaign, ready to show the “real America” that he has the balls to lead the nation.
Of course, Perry is simply following in the well-worn footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush, with his self-righteous swagger, Texas drawl, and rugged, frontier persona. He prefers cowboy boots to dress shoes and proudly recounts shooting a coyote with his .380 Ruger (it had a laser sight). He wears his Christianity on his sleeve, most recently playing the patriarchal prophet at his Houston prayer rally. Even though Bush’s people reportedly disdain Perry, he seems to have taken many of his moves right out of their campaign playbook.
While Bush had to manufacture a frontier persona to cover up his elite, northeastern roots (much like President Theodore Roosevelt back in the early 1900s), Perry actually has a real connection to rural Texas. As his campaign website triumphantly claims, “A fifth generation Texan, Governor Rick Perry has taken an extraordinary Texas journey, from a tenant farm in the rolling West Texas plains to the governor's office of our nation's second largest state.” Perry and his people would clearly like us to think that he made it to his current political station by pure, hard-scrabble individualism (with a little help from the Man upstairs), but even a cursory look at his record suggests otherwise.
As his website extols, “Rick Perry has led a life of public service, starting in the United States Air Force and continuing over two decades in elected office.” Thanks to a clever, rhetorical twist, his work for one of the largest wings of the federal government – the military – can be touted as admirable public service, in contrast to the other government services he so desperately wants to cut. As the wife of a former Marine, I also know that serving in the military makes one eligible for government-backed housing loans and educational funding, but Perry would argue that unlike other handouts these are appropriate entitlements for deserving people. Perhaps most ironic of all, he boasts two decades as an elected official, even as he calls for the shrinking of government. (I’m pretty sure that he won’t be handing back his tax-payer-provided pension or healthcare.)
Perry claims credit for “creating a Texas of unlimited opportunity and prosperity by improving education, securing the border and increasing economic development through classic conservative values.” However, his real record and the real-life conditions in his state tell a different story. Despite his vociferous condemnation of the federal stimulus bill, Perry has a long history of fighting for federal money to help fund state projects. Even members of his own party have decried his blatant “corporate cronyism.” He has used handouts from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) to pad the pockets of his friends in big business, who in turn have helped to fill his campaign coffers. The free market’s hand is not so invisible in the Lone Star state.
Misery and misfortune have also accompanied Perry’s “Texas Miracle.” While the state boasts a low unemployment rate, it is tied with Mississippi for having the highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the nation and bears the unique distinction of having the highest percentage of residents without medical insurance (many of whom are children). Evidently, the governor’s narrative of the white Christian patriarch who pulls himself (and his frontier state) up by his own bootstraps is just that – a narrative.
Still, I don’t want to use Perry as a simple straw man, since many Republicans share both his basic campaign tactics and political worldview – the most extreme example being the so-called Tea Party (which is incidentally bank-rolled by the uber-rich Koch brothers and conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch). Indeed, the most notorious peddlers of this racially-inflected, Alpha-male individualism are not what they seem; many of them have effectively consolidated their power and wealth on the backs of “real Americans.”
So, after the disastrous Bush years and subsequent economic crash, how is it that this narrative remains so seductive to voters, particularly (white) working people? Arguably, this fake populist narrative has become all the more seductive for many struggling to make it through the Great Recession, even as the chasm between blue-collar (especially male) laborers and the super-rich continues to widen. So again, why in the heck are people continuing to support the Right’s line about the need to scale back/privatize public services, bust any remaining unions, and keep all industry free of regulation – things that have not proven to be in their (or their families’) interest over the past thirty years?
One thing is certain: the Republicans are great communicators steeped in the art of storytelling. Over the decades, the party has masterfully manipulated a reactionary tale of race, gender, and class, which it consistently invokes to fire up the anger, fear, and prejudice of its base, pushing them to the polls. Underlying its message of constitutional purity, individual rights, lower taxes, and small government is the specter of nefarious collusion between the corrupt and wasteful plutocrats in Washington, DC and the masses of undeserving (read: black and brown) poor.
In short, more taxes paid to the federal government somehow translates into more handouts for the supposedly lazy/criminal/promiscuous/spend-thrift/illegal-immigrant poor and therefore less money in the pockets of hard-working/family-oriented/God-fearing, real (read: white) Americans. The election of the United States’ first black president, Barack Obama, has only made this convoluted logic more convincing. And, the recent debt downgrade certainly didn’t help matters. Republican pundits could barely contain their glee that a black president presided over the nation’s first slide into “bad credit.”
The resounding calls to “take our country back” are just the latest iteration of the Right’s recycled story of virtuous white victims bravely battling to reinstate patriarchal law and order – a frontier tale for the twenty-first century. Of course, the real question is “back from whom and back to when”? One only needs to look at the Tea Party’s deification of the founding fathers, its revisionist history of the revolutionary war and constitution, its sanitizing of American slavery, its elision of Native American genocide and dispossession, and its refusal to acknowledge the nation’s imperial past (and present) to get an idea of the answer.
They are effectively channeling the rage of their target audience – disgruntled white working- and middle-class people who feel increasingly wedged between America’s soulless elite and the pathological poor. Two of the main pillars of the “Taking Our Country Back Tour,” the call to lower taxes (read: tax breaks for the super-rich and corporate giants) and shrink government (read: further cutbacks to social programs and entitlements), can only appeal to this target audience if cloaked in a siege mentality.
On the one hand, the tour’s website links to a Fox News feature on country singer John Rich’s anthem decrying government bailouts and Wall Street bonuses. Yet lurking beneath the surface of this populist rhetoric is an even more pernicious disdain for the black and brown people who have supposedly plunged this great democracy into moral depravity and economic decline, from “affirmative action” elites, to illegal aliens, to violent gangbangers, to drug addicts, and welfare moms. To make matters worse, the 2010 census confirmed that America’s nonwhite population is booming. Even though white wealth still dwarfs that of nonwhites and the logic of white supremacy still permeates U.S. institutions, Tea Partiers somehow feel they’re being pushed aside.
In some respects, white working- and middle-class Americans are right to feel their privilege and stability melting away, but not because of any great government gift to the undeserving poor. Instead, thanks to the Republicans, Warren Buffet and other billionaires are now taxed at a lower rate than the average American. Still, to sell its fiscal agenda, the conservative elite urges its rank-and-file to cling to the romantic frontier images of the family farmer and the independent shopkeeper desperately in need of relief from taxes and regulation – images of declining significance in an age of corporate consolidation, globalization, and financialization. In reality, their economic fates are more closely tied to those of the very people Republican leaders encourage them to despise. This is truly “class warfare” at its best – except, the “haves” have unleashed the “have-nots” to fight amongst themselves.
The recent “Marriage Vow” is yet another example of how conservative class warfare relies on well-honed stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality. In July there was a smattering of reactions to Tea Party candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) signing of this so-called “declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY.” In particular, commentators criticized two of the vow’s most egregious points: 1) it suggests black marriages and black children were better off under slavery than they are today; and 2) it endorses the idea that homosexuality is simply a deviant lifestyle choice. While both these points are undoubtedly inaccurate and inflammatory, I want to dig deeper into the underlying logic of this conservative pledge.
In a nutshell, it attributes most of the nation’s problems (whether social, moral, or economic) to the supposed breakdown of the heterosexual, patriarchal family. According to its line of reasoning, single (read: black) mothers are the causal link to “poverty, pathology and prison.” Moreover, the vow blames “family fragmentation” and its “costs to the justice system” for the expansion of government services and higher taxes, and for the resulting rise of the federal deficit and public debt burden. All of this has put undue pressure on American (read: white, nuclear) families.
The declaration even suggests that the status of U.S. women and children is declining because of the nation’s collective “debasement” of marriage through quickie divorce, premarital sex and cohabitation, and its growing acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, it couches these evils as the root cause of “human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, [and] abortion.” According to the vow, restoring Christian, heterosexual patriarchy (while also reducing taxes and shrinking government) is the only out of our current moral and economic dilemmas.
Poor black people are the obvious bogeymen haunting the text of this treatise on societal decay, with its invocation of slavery and the Moynihan Report of 1965 (which blamed the black out-of-wedlock birthrate for black poverty). Gays are also used for rhetorical flourish, as deviant foils to “real American men” (and their real families). These are the racial and sexual demons that foreclose any real discussion of how the U.S. neo-imperial wars, in tandem with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have contributed to the deficit. They turn the public’s attention away from how financial deregulation fostered the mortgage crisis, which led to the economic crash, and then to the government’s bailout of Wall Street and to the passage of the federal stimulus bill to help get Main Street back to work.
Curiously missing from the vow is any mention of the very real obstacles facing poor, especially black and brown families, over the past few decades. Deindustrialization has changed the face of the U.S. job market, leaving those without access to high-quality education with few opportunities to thrive in the mainstream economy. Yet, under No Child Left Behind, little other than high-stakes testing has been implemented to improve public schools and to help outfit inner-city youth for the rapidly shifting information economy.
Not coincidentally, this has taken place right alongside the breathtaking expansion of the prison industrial complex, which disproportionately incarcerates black and brown people (many of them fathers and mothers) for non-violent, drug-related offenses. The prison system happens to be one area of the government that both conservative and liberal leaders are not so eager to downsize, particularly because of the huge profits to be made from servicing this captive market.
What Michelle Alexander has called The New Jim Crow, and in the case of California what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has dubbed The Golden Gulag, has done nothing to alleviate the interconnected problems of poverty, instability, hopelessness, and addiction in the United States. Instead, this fiscally irresponsible and morally reprehensible system cages and dehumanizes disadvantaged black and brown people who have been essentially left behind by the new economy. (And, it doesn’t help that once you’re a felon, you face employment and housing discrimination, disfranchisement, and the denial of public benefits and services.)
It is a wonder that anyone can sustain a happy, healthy, and successful family under such conditions. Things have only worsened with the recession, which has slammed black and brown people with disproportionate ferocity. Regardless of these realities, the Republican myth-making machine has somehow managed to sell a political story of white victimhood. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad speculate, “When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.”
Predictably, (white) “frontier” men like Perry and “traditional” (white) women like Bachmann have emerged as the heroes of the conservative’s recycled tale of redemption. In one fell swoop, they will stamp out moral pathology and bring back economic prosperity in the name of “real America.” (While Bachmann might “submit” to her husband, this “hombre-ette” claims she has the balls to take on Washington.)
In contrast, the “sissies” of this story are labor organizers, community activists, professors, and basically anyone left of center (or arguably, centrist). Workers’ grievances, intellectual analysis, and anything smacking of “wealth redistribution” or “social justice” are marked as effeminate, effete, even queer. After all, real American men suck it up at all cost. Real men (and their faithful women) don’t protest about working conditions, or the poor state of public education, or the lack of affordable healthcare. Unfortunately, these calls for (white) men to stand up and be men, and for (white) women to stand by their men, come at the expense of building progressive coalitions for change across racial, gender, class, and other differences.
Middle-class liberals and leftists are by no means blameless for the current state of affairs. We have largely sat back and watched all of this happen, throwing up our hands in dismay while living smugly in our supposedly “post-racial” bourgeois enclaves. Some even naively hoped that voting Barack Obama (“the Magic Negro”) into the White House would suddenly change the political and economic trajectory of the United States. (But that’s just not how change happens.)
At the same time that liberals have allowed the Right to hijack popular definitions of masculinity, family, and the “real America,” they have also played into the general erasure of class from political discussions. The democrats’ (especially President Obama’s) hesitancy to call the debt-ceiling crisis for what it was – a means to preserve the privilege of the wealthy at the expense of the rest of America – is just another example of the reticence of many U.S. liberals to acknowledge and discuss the persistence of gaping wealth disparities.
In a recent episode of the Real Housewives of New York, Alex McCord declared that she would rather say “see you next Tuesday” (read: c-u-n-t) than ever utter the other c-word, “class.” The implication being that class is not something for polite conversation; it’s a dirty word. Before the recession, many middle-class liberals assumed that “class” didn’t apply to them, turning a blind eye to the nation’s increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Now that the same issues that first hit those at the bottom of the economic ladder are making their way upward, they suddenly want action.
The solution for liberals and leftists is not to become more ruggedly Alpha-male or to invest their energies in upholding patriarchy. This is no time to throw our collective “dicks” on the table – we will never win that pissing contest, nor should we want to. Instead, we need to be more forceful in calling the Right out on its clever, yet perverse manipulation of racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes. We need to call them out on their fake populism.
We also need to develop strong and inclusive coalitions, in ways that don’t involve the proverbial chest-thumping and demonization of those who aren’t like us or those who don’t fit prevailing definitions of “normal.” We need to foster movements for change that go beyond a narrow focus on individual rights and “family” in the most narrowly constructed ways.
The “real America” is already standing up, but not always in ways that are palatable to our bourgeois sensibilities. We need to take seriously the voices of prisoners on hunger strikes, of student and community activists working in the inner cities, and even of flash mobs expressing their frustration at the unequal state of the affairs. They have something to teach us, if we will just listen.
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Theresa Runstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University at Buffalo and, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Humanities Forum for the 2011-2012 academic year. Her book, tentatively titled, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press) drops in Spring 2012.
