Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
Say” announces “I know the government administered AIDS,” and “Crack Music” names the culprit behind West’s conspiratorial view of that epidemic: “How we stop the Black Panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.”57 As we have noted, investigations revealed that it was an institutionally white supremacist and stridently anti-communist system of law enforcement that “cooked up an answer.” And that answer was much less inventive, involving the harassment, murder and imprisonment of civil rights workers and leaders, including the Panthers’ Fred Hampton, throughout the sixties and seventies.
The mechanics of exposing this truth did not require sophisticated hermeneutics, in the sense adduced by Best and Marcus, but dogged research and pattern recognition, of the sort done by journalists and Congressional staff in the sixties and seventies to uncover COINTELPRO—or in a simpler form by Chris Wallace interviewing Mick Mulvaney. And for all their complexity, the systemic explanations for crack, AIDS or the Panthers’ decline are still the parsimonious option: Given the historical commitment, or at least indifference, of US authorities to the destruction of black lives, why would Reagan need to resort to inventing a new method of ingesting cocaine in order to undermine a community organizing movement? Would it not be infinitely simpler to continue along the course of neoliberalism and culture war, relying on those policies to accomplish the destruction of black community mobilization? Union-busting, deregulation and free trade policies would undermine employment opportunities, spending cuts would limit the social safety net, Nixon’s drug war would continue to demonize people of color and a history of racism would ensure their disproportionate incarceration. In theory, none of that would require of Reagan any special conspiratorial action, apart from his already well-publicized policy orientation. For all the ways Reagan did expand government’s power and increase spending, in this area he only needed to curtail the federal government’s activities, to govern less, in order to accomplish the aims of white supremacy—as was also the case during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. This, of course, is one obvious meaning of “states’ rights.” The consequence of this reasoning is that even if a conspiracy to invent crack cocaine was carried out by Reagan, this would still not necessarily be the most important target of activist resistance to Reaganism, because without neoliberal and neoconservative policies and rhetoric, finding operatives for such a conspiracy would not be possible, and with such policy and rhetoric, such a conspiracy is superfluous.
What does require interpretive sophistication and education is the ability to recognize the consequences of one’s own interpretive defaults, which one unwittingly universalizes like the proverbial fish in water. Public opinion in the eighties seems to have drifted toward the default assumption that crack and AIDS, not to mention the decline of the Black Panthers and other civil rights struggles, were “special interest” problems germane only to minority groups, even problems those groups brought upon themselves, not affecting “normal” or “mainstream” Americans. This is in some sense the implicit purpose of ad hominem disqualification, a dismissive or even demonizing definition of those who differ from one’s self-image in ways deemed salient: We disqualify others from our attention so that we can ignore or disavow the harms done to them. It is not obvious, without some interpretive effort, that this default to a self-centered or self-interested orientation entails a corollary orientation of default to conspiracy. And yet this is true whether the self-image on which I am centered is a valorized or disqualified image: To the extent that I accept the premise that the other is the standard, the norm or the mainstream of society, I am likely to implicitly define myself in relation to their agency, either as their object or else as an agent only insofar as I resemble them. This definition will condition all my explanations of my situation in society. If I am held personally responsible for positional consequences of my birth into poverty, patriarchy, white supremacy or heteronormativity, then I am likely to look for whom to hold personally responsible for the actions of power. When I am taught that systemic consequences are the effects of a personal, agential cause, I will oscillate between blaming or praising myself and blaming or praising another, like Reagan, for the situation that obtains.
It is perhaps the most sophisticated interpretive act, though it is in principle equally possible for each human to accomplish, to develop the capacity to define what immediately appears ubiquitous as a complexly constructed and particular theory. An old joke tells of a fish asked “How is the water today?” His reply: “What is water?” Asked earnestly, this is the definitive theoretical question. The quintessentially human interpretive act involves inferring the specificity of the ocean in which we swim, and the possible alternative oceans that implies, which may lead to inventing our way out of the ocean, onto dry land, launching ourselves out of our immersion in one kind of system into a previously unrecognizable alternative. After all, how else can one describe the immense interpretive transformation involved in the ongoing transition from the magical or divine blood right of aristocratic governance to the aspirational goal of equally distributed sovereignty that defines democratic governance? Such an all-encompassing transformation of social relations entails an equally holistic transformation of imagination and reasoning.
Nevertheless, along the way we will inevitably mistake water for land. West’s conspiratorial criticism of Reagan was greeted by at least one critic as an indicator of “Kanye’s black radical consciousness.”58 This makes sense if one reads “radical” merely as a synonym for “extreme” or “outside the mainstream of opinion.” But if one reads “radical” as Marx did, as indicating a concern with the “roots” of systemic oppressions, the principles that entail the range of particular practices, then this characterization of West is wildly mistaken. This brings us directly to a principle of difference between conspiracy theory and theory as reasoned inquiry: A conspiracy identifies the root with an overvalued ego as a fantasy of whole agency, while inquiry defines the root in terms of a principle by which one system can be reliably distinguished from others. In the latter definition, West’s account is not an indicator of radical consciousness, but of wish-fulfilling megalomania. West’s diagnosis turns systemic oppression into a battle between proper nouns, depicting the overdetermined consequences of a centuries-long white supremacist program, in the context of which the FBI carried on a decades-long program to target “subversives,” as the plot of a single all-powerful politician to destroy a single organization. In these ostensibly knowing pronouncements, West’s inversion of the problem also distorts its solutions, representing systemic class struggles in the manner of a “Great Man” historiography, as struggles to the death among powerful individuals. This model of politics, in which superhuman heroes and villains fight to decide the fate of faceless masses, reproduces the most conservative and dehumanizing pseudo-historical melodramas.
This personalization of systemic conditions and class struggles indicates the connection between West’s paranoid style of reading systemic oppressions and his narcissism, as it creates foes whose unrealistic omnipotence reinforces his own aggrandized heroic self-image. It therefore should not surprise anyone that West is so attracted to the narcissistic and racist melodrama of conspiracy theorist Donald Trump. Visiting Trump in the Oval Office, West described with characteristic artistry and ambiguous self-awareness the difference between an activist empowerment arising from systemic explanations of oppression, and the narcissistic self-aggrandizing potency entailed by identification with “Great Men.” Comparing Trump’s signature red hat to the Clinton campaign slogan, West explained that
this hat, it gives me—it gives me power, in a way […] The [Hilary Clinton] campaign “I’m with her” just didn’t make me feel, as a guy, that didn’t get to see my dad all the time—like a guy that could play catch with his son. It was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman. That was my—that’s my favorite superhero. And you made a Superman cape.59
There is unmistakable genius in this analogy and its convincing presentation as an improvisation, in which the simple and effective branding of the red hat is psychologically linked to the red cape. And there is unmistakable symptomatic significance in West’s dismissiveness toward the value of solidarity with a professional woman, like his own single mother, an English professor who divorced his former Black Panther father when West was 3 years old. But just as unmistakable is the significance of his “favorite superhero”: Superman is often called a boring character60 precisely because he is too close to the narcissist’s fantasy of perfection,