Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
predation only reinforces a neoliberal “starve the beast” strategy. As a budgetary strategy, this starvation means first cutting taxes, so that spending restrictions can later be introduced as necessary to avoid deficit and debt—a strategy illustrated by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan musing, just after the 2017 tax cuts, about the need to cut Medicare and other social programs to address the budget deficit they had just enlarged.47 If we apply the same pattern to an electoral strategy, “starve the beast” would mean sowing mistrust of government, voter disengagement and disillusionment with the efficacy of electoral mechanisms of power. By undermining the legitimacy of democratic governance, one muffles the outcry that might otherwise follow restrictions on voting and other civil rights. In both its budgetary and its electoral forms, the monstrous state must be depicted as only capable of benefiting the bestial other, so that attacks on the state are attacks on the other. It would appear that this is the strategy pursued by the same partisan forces that support the tax cuts, and it is well supported by the strategy of division and voter suppression that US intelligence services and the Mueller Report have attributed to Putin’s efforts in the 2016 election.48
Putin’s reorientation of Russia’s burgeoning democracy into an oligarchic mafia state illustrates the benefits of undermining democratic legitimacy for those with corrupt agendas. As Russian information operations have illustrated, those who seek to undermine democratic governance encourage a definition of politics as pure antagonism, rather than as collective action in pursuit of a common good. Logically, the politics of antagonism is the politics of supremacy, because it rejects the necessary democratic principle of consent, which requires the state to serve all its citizens, not solely those who supported a given politician or party. This indifference to consent is common to patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism. It is also evident in both the old left paternalism of government as caretaker and the New Right notions of government as predator, because both definitions ignore or dismiss a key consequence of governance by consent: that such a principle makes the state, in principle, an instrument of the people’s self-governance, self-determination and self-care. Of course, this is not the government we have always had, and we have never had such a government entirely. But we have had such governance to some extent, in some times and places. That distance between democratic principles and historical democratic governance is what informs Masha Gessen’s description of democracy as “an aspirational ideal,” toward which a society progresses or does not.
By bringing together D. A. Miller’s anachronistic notion of the state with a discussion of conspiracy and systemic oppressions, Sedgwick’s essay dramatizes the consequences for interpretation of indifference to historical change and subject position. She describes Miller’s writing as a brilliant performance in emulation of Foucault’s characteristic concerns, but by relocating those themes in the United States of the eighties Miller produces an anachronistic exposure of the violence of paternalistic care in an era of neoliberal neglect, placing the state in the role of universal agent, rather than situated instrument. Disciplinary specialization, which presumes the development of a discourse that is either relatively or absolutely autonomous, here overlaps with the entailments of self-universalizing privilege to condition anachronisms and misrecognitions of the problems posed by one’s historical and political situation. And when literary studies neither produces profit nor contributes to solving social problems, what will be its constituency? And who will object to its demise?
Sedgwick illustrates the difference between the violence of state intervention and state neglect by describing Reagan’s attitude toward the AIDS epidemic. This difference is relevant even when they achieve the same ends: If Reagan had executed fifty thousand people whom his constituents’ Christian morality condemned as sinful, the action would have been condemned in the same terms as the state crimes that Orwell describes. But in allowing approximately that number to die of AIDS while he refused to even acknowledge the existence of the epidemic.49 Reagan could find cover in distraction, public inattention, or his own ideology of liberty as absence of state intervention.50 Reagan did not actively murder fifty thousand citizens, most of whom were gay men, and were therefore condemned by the particular strain of religious dogma he courted and encouraged. The evidence suggests that he merely allowed those fifty thousand humans to die, while taking no action at all.
Sedgwick’s account of the time shows that this distinction was not always clear, and that many who opposed Reagan were predisposed to understand his actions in the mold of state attack, rather than state neglect. In the eighties, Sedgwick recalls asking a friend about the idea that HIV was “deliberately engineered or spread” by the US government. Cindy Patton, a sociologist and a historian of AIDS, replied “I just have trouble getting interested in that.” In a nuanced and considered reply, Patton questions the utility of such suspicions to projects for change, ultimately rejecting the notion that conspiracy theories are helpful in pragmatically progressive efforts to solve the problem of the epidemic—efforts that Reagan’s administration should have been undertaking. Sedgwick acquits herself well in taking time to reflect on this response, which seems to pose a challenge to her worldview, rather than dismissing or attacking Patton’s response as insufficiently radical or oppositional. She reports that, having “brooded a lot over this response” in the years since, she has come to find it “enabling” and empowering.
When Sedgwick broached the possibility of a government conspiracy to spread HIV, “sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic,” Patton replied with a clear sense of the equivalent violence of state neglect and state attack. Conspiratorial speculation was uninteresting, Patton explained, because even if proven, it would add nothing to what she already knew:
that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?51
At this time, when Reagan could be seen to be entrenching Nixon’s cultural agendas—the war on drugs, glorification of a masculinist militarism and misogynistic heteronormativity, white supremacy at home and abroad—Patton had no need to unearth the secrets of a new conspiracy to establish that there was support inside and outside government for actions that harmed the preponderance of the victims of AIDS. She did not need to read between the lines. Reading the lines of American history, and the overt public rhetoric and policies of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, was more than enough to prove it.
Patton’s reasoning illuminates a definitive aspect of conspiracy theories, one that challenges neat equations of reason or logic with power and privilege: Conspiracy theories are unnecessary explanations. They do not begin from an unsolved problem, a difficulty or a gap in knowledge, then seek evidence and arrive at conclusions through inquiry and sound reasoning. Instead, they begin from the assumed, from that which is experienced as known, applying what one already believes to explain what one does not understand. In doing so, conspiracy theories tend to reinforce initiating assumptions, and strain the credulity of those who do not share these assumptions. Their complexity arises not as a consequence of encounters with the overdetermined richness of an interdependent field of causes and conditions, but as a corollary of the need to explain how the presumed and easily comprehensible agenda of the conspirators is hidden from the uninitiated. Of course, sometimes this complexity of concealment is also borne out by reasoned inquiry into conspiracies, as in the reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, or the investigations into Russian influence operations. The demonstrable existence of conspiracies, Patton’s answer implies, means that it is not incredible to accuse the US government of deliberately spreading disease: There are historical precedents for this, from the spread of small pox among Native Americans52 to the deliberate infection of African Americans with syphilis.53 However, these plots do not provide sufficient reason to default to government conspiracy as explanation for any epidemic among members of an oppressed population, especially given that what Sedgwick calls “systemic oppressions” are usually sufficient