Tea Party Individualism

I was so enamored by Kateb's treatment of Whitman that I completely forgot last post why I picked up his book in the first place. Whitman does that to me.

I initially started exploring this question of the individual about a year ago because the term is incredibely imortant to Tea Partiers and the play of this term if fascinating for three reasons:

• It's a very liberal term. I mean liberal here in the strictest tradition of theoretical texts from Locke moving forward that position government as arranged to protect individual freedoms by establishing a social contract. The United States, let us not forget, is a nation heavily influenced by these liberal principals. The Declaration itself borrows heavily from Locke. The Constiution itself, as Kateb rightly assumes, is a social contract. 
• The Tea Party is conservative. Political theorists, myself included, have never really been good at working out where conservatives fit in the liberal tradition that backs this country's politics. Usually, the definition replaces Burke and de Maistre's aristocracy with property owners, something more fitting for a liberal society. But what doesn't change is that conservatives are suspicious of people and don't think that everyone's ideas are the best, something contrary to the strictest liberal tradition. Of course the other question we might consider is that liberalism is more conservative than we like to think (but that's a post for another day.) 
• Despite this, the Tea Party grounds its vocabulary in the liberal tradition making the words they use operate in interesting ways.

Which is what makes this Tea Party individual very interesting. I read something fascinating when the whole La Raza studies thing in AZ blew up. One of the primary backers of the ban made the following statement several times: I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups.

This statement is funny because conservatives as a general rule do not enjoy levelling people into a mass of indivdiuals with equal opportunity. That is a distincly liberal sensibility. But the term as it is used by the Tea Party reconciles itself with the group's conservative world-view because the individual they imagine is very, very specific.

Here I'm thinking of the poll covered in the NYTimes last year that shows Tea Party backers are more like to be male, wealthy, and white, a cohort that is decidedly within the American conception of conservatism and conservatism as a whole.

I don't think a Tea Partier would deny their conservatism (Glenn Beck's recent comments on Egypt sounded a bit like Edmund Burke-light, except Burke might have had more sympathy for Egypt than does Beck.) What I am suggesting is that Tea Partiers toss about the word individual because they can't quite figure out how to seperate the vocabulary they were born with from the vocabulary they really want to use. This, to me, is fascinating because they claim for themselves a conservation of this country's founding liberal ideals when what they suggest is quite the shift away from the true meaning of the vocabulary on which our social contract is founded.

Like I said, fascinating.

Things I Read While Writing This:
The Inner Ocean by George Kateb
Polling the Tea Party in the NYTimes 
Press Release from the State of Arizona Department of Education [note: The phrase I'm talking about here was stated many times in articles about this subject, but the links I bookmarked a few months ago stopped working save this one]
And if you're interested in conservatism in general, Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke is a classic as is Joseph de Maistre's Considerations on France. For a more modern take, Oakshott  will tell you a lot about British conservatism. On the American side, let's not forget Ralph Reed and Robert Bork. I suggest you only read these if you think you are a conservative and want to know more. If you are generally a progressive liberal (and here use the word like how people use it in the media), these will make you want to gouge your eyes out with forks, so just read the Wikipedia entries.

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate:

This is my anthem when the news depresses me. This is a cold war - you better know what you're fighting for.

Some Initial, Disorganized Thoughts on Kateb

I've been reading George Kateb's  The Inner Ocean. It was something I read in undergrad but didn't really understand mostly because I cared too much about understanding it correctly. I picked it up because I was thinking a bit about the role of the American individual nowadays and the sub-title of the book is Individualism and Democratic Culture, so I thought there might be some insight.

A bit on why I am interested in this whole individual business: the Tea Party. They are obsessed with the individual. Individual freedom. Individual tax-burdens. Saving the individual from the monster of socialism. The individual they talk about is distinctly American, too. When they talk about immigration they like to say that we are all just individuals. American individuals. Which is funny because it absorbs unique individuals into a mass of white Americanness, but I digress. The Tea Party just fascinates me and I'm trying to understand a bit where their vocabulary comes from. It doesn't come from Kateb (they've probably never heard of him), but Kateb writes a lot about the vocabulary we use in American politics. So, there's that.

Back to Kateb. Kateb thinks the individual is pretty stinking important. In particular, he thinks individual rights are important and that socioeconomic equality is a threat to those rights (sound familiar?) A democratic culture supports the individual. And here we come to the title of the book and one of the more pretentious sentences I have ever read, "I find the theory of democratic individuality, like some other individualisms, cultivates a sense of individual infinitude; that is, a sense of one's inner ocean, of everybody's inexhaustible internal turbulent richness and unused powers (Kateb 34)."

I can get behind this to a point. I'm American and, technically, a liberal theorist, so I do get a little uncomfortable when you start to push the individual into a mass. But I also think the individual can find more room to move when they feel safe, and much of how our government and socioeconomic structure doesn't offer safety to the individual, which I think means we don't get much space to recognize our inner ocean.

Something that worries me more, however is how Kateb's idea of the individual is really masculine. I'm not sure if this is a valid critique, but the dudes (and they are dudes) he talks about are really, really male. In particular, he likes Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson. I love all of these guys. I'm even considering a tattoo of a line from Song of Myself. That said, these dudes have always been for me dripping with the ideal of the lone American male, self-sufficient and able to shape themselves into anything. They'd be Marlboro-men if the Marlboro man was a philosopher. There's also this line from Emerson that Kateb makes use of, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members (Emerson quoted by Kateb on page 86)."

It's not that Kateb or Emerson is against women. Hardly. They just have an image of the individual that is male. A female individual simply doesn't enter the equation.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that idea. This is a blog, so it'll progress and maybe not as rigorously as I'd like, but this concerns me because if our American liberal philosophies are grounded in this idea of the (male) individual, then I'm a little worried about what we really mean when we defend the American individual in philosophy and other popular texts.

Stuff I Read While Writing This
The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture by George Kateb

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate

Make your own hipster Ariel