February
2001
Guest
Editorial: Fugitive Truth: the Selection Election Reconstructed
By Mia MacDonald
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Politics,
the adage goes, makes strange bedfellows. The recent selection election,
better known as Bush vs. Gore, was no exception. But one of the pairings
was truly beyond belief. Yes, this went well beyond the rumored coupling
of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris
(who, ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” reports, named her “household
pet” Chad); or the courtroom dynamics between sneaker-wearing Microsoft-slayer
(but IBM defender) David Boies and cranky, crotchety Judge N. Sanders
Sauls; or impassioned, fact-finding Jesse Jackson, chief supporter and
emissary of robotic, staccato Al Gore, who did, finally, find a coherent,
digestible message, albeit too late: “Count every vote.” Despite
its simplicity, its apparent pragmatism and base in the oft-invoked
“rule of law,” this sentiment inflamed the Republicans and
stirred their passions in ways nothing else had (not even Katherine
Harris herself), driving them to new lengths.
One particularly bizarre result followed: the New Right ideology of
“truth,” as defined by, among others, anti-political correctness
crusader Lynne Cheney, wife of Veep Dick, who got fully engaged (swept
away, really) with the truth-challenging world view of French deconstructionist
philosopher Michel Foucault. Really: the dead, gay, iconoclastic Foucault,
who said truth is created by those with power, and the very alive, straight
to excess, iconoclastic Lynne Cheney, who said there is objective, moral
truth and anyone who says otherwise is pulling at the moorings of democratic
society. Cheney and Foucault got it on in ways neither of them could
ever have imagined (and which Cheney may still not own up to). The results
of this unholy entanglement had a significant impact on the outcome
of this most post-modern of elections, the impacts of which are still
being felt even in the cold air of February.
In 1996, Lynne Cheney, a former head of the National Endowment for the
Humanities where she sought to root out any evidence of political correctness
in the national discourse or school curricula, wrote a book called Telling
the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense—And
What We Can Do About It. It was basically an impassioned critique of
Foucault and the idea that truth is a relative concept that can be,
is, and has been constructed by specific ideologies for particular purposes;
as such, it is largely determined by those who have more power. To Cheney,
other crusading conservatives—in and out of the academy—and
commentators (think the late Allan Bloom and the very alive John Ashcroft),
this idea of “relative” truth is an affront to American democracy
and democratic principles. Among the villains in Cheney’s book:
multiculturalism in schools, “radical” feminist legal scholarship
(think Catherine McKinnon) and “political correctness” in
American universities (think class and race analyses of historical events,
the study of colonialism and its impacts, and theses that focus on how
subalterns—people at the low end of the socio-economic and power
spectrum—experience economic, social and political “truth”).
To Cheney, et al (and there are a lot of these Republican self-styled
“conservative intellectuals”), truth is not contested; it
just is. Power has nothing to do with it. Telling the Truth made the
case that rational, clear-eyed presentations of facts are truth and
that without Truth, society shudders and societies quake.
Conservatives Pull All-nighter to Study Truth
Fast forward to November-December 2000. Focus in on the Florida
vote. Can you see, perhaps just out of camera range, the figures of
Lynne Cheney and Dick, Jim Baker, Katherine Harris, Ted Olsen and Tom
Delay (W’s on the ranch playing with his imaginatively named dog,
Spot) all avidly reading from Foucault’s work? “Repeat after
me,” Lynne may be saying as the tutorial ends and Katherine keeps
an eye on the chad counting via CNN, “truth is constructed by those
in power. Hey, folks, that’s us. Does that Florida Supreme Court
think they can get away with calling for all the votes to be counted?
Who do those county canvassing boards think they are? And Al Gore, don’t
even get me started. They’ve got some other truth coming: W’s
it. Damn that book I wrote. I see the way out now. Get with it. Up and
at ‘em.”
Perhaps Lynne used different words; perhaps the scene was quite different.
Maybe it was even Jim “velvet hammer” Baker himself who did
a midnight Internet search for a primer on Foucault’s work. But
Lynne’s book surely tipped the Bushies off, got them thinking in
a new way—out of the box—got a little bit of that vision thing
going (that Poppy Bush always struggled with). The truth, they realized,
far from being an objective, static, irreducible entity, was in fact
malleable, breachable, imprecise, open to interpretation. In short,
up for grabs.
How else but by a metaphorical coupling of Lynne Cheney and Michel Foucault
to explain what befell the “truth” about the vote counting
process in Florida? How else but deconstruction and then reconstruction
to explain the amazing “truths” the Republicans came up with?
Making legitimate voters into “felons” whose names were left
off voting rolls. Making hand counts of votes, deemed by experts and
even Texas law as the most precise way to determine the outcome of a
close election into “mischief” and likely malfeasance. Framing
attempts to determine voter intent as vote “fraud.” Making
decisions by the Florida Supreme Court, a court of law, into “legalistic”
rulings that “would not stand.” Making thousands of Black
voters into invisible men and women. Making an election night speed
check outside a Black polling station into a “routine” police
action with no larger agenda. Making a bunch of thugs who invaded the
Miami-Dade canvassing board and harassed officials and vote counters—a
mob funded by Rep. Tom Delay—into “concerned citizens”
out to protect the democratic process. (Wall Street Journal columnist
Paul Gigot opined on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” that this
mob really couldn’t be called a “mob” since all the participants
were “middle class” and wearing button-down shirts; Paul may
be reading Foucault, too. W. even called to offer the non-mob encouragement.)
Accusing Gore of “stealing” an election that he most likely
won.
And finally, in the coup de grace coup d’etat, making Bush the
aggrieved party before the U.S. Supreme Court, to whom “irreparable
harm” might be done if all the votes were counted! Making sure
that the Court, too, was well-briefed in Foucault (no wonder Clarence
Thomas had to pull an all-nighter) so that their selection of Bush as
the next president would be cloaked in “rule of law” and “democratic
principles” when it was nothing more than an overt, shameless power
play. The decision was so unmoored from legal precedent and the Constitution
that even conservative legal scholars had to admit that the Justices’
reasoning seemed to proceed from this principle alone, their desire
for the truth to be (based on their construction) that Bush won.
Poor Al Gore with his simple mantra of “count every vote”—he
was no match for the conservatives on Foucault. Yes, every campaign
and candidate works to break down its opposition and in this the Republicans
in the post election period were not unique. But the zeal and efficiency
and ruthlessness with which they tried—and to a large measure succeeded—in
redefining long-standing “truths” was at another order of
magnitude entirely. Freely casting and counting votes, a “bedrock”
principle of our democratic system (or so we have been taught since
grade school), was challenged and ultimately delegitimized in the service
of getting W. into the White House. The scope of this challenge to “truth”
is breathtaking; its longer-term impacts uncertain. As Jonathan Freedland
wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian, “…the final act
of the Supreme Court, which installed George W. Bush in a fix [that
was] so transparent, so intellectually indefensible, [that] it would
shame a constitutional court in Harare or Belgrade.”
One outcome is certain: thanks to the machinations of Lynne Cheney and
her peers—the GOP grandees—Truth is now very much up for grabs.
Michel Foucault has been reconstructed, reconstituted as an intellectual
force in service of the Republican ideology. Could stranger bedfellows
than that even be imagined? It’s a good thing Foucault, a confirmed
leftist, has no idea. The scales are off our eyes: let us open them,
wide, and join the fray. Deconstruct, reconstruct away.
Mia MacDonald
