Cultural Politics:

Political Theory and the Foundations of

Democratic Order

Forthcoming in Jodi Dean, ed., Cultural Studies and Political Theory (Cornell University Press, 2000).

University of Massachusetts

Department of Political Science

Thompson Hall

Amherst, MA 01003

e-mail: cruiksha@polsci.umass.edu

Alexis de Tocqueville is famed for his argument that the solid foundation of protestant political culture in America made it possible to have democratic politics, a politics that was unpredictable and full of contention yet did not fall into chaos. "What keeps a great number of citizens under the same government is much less a reasoned desire to remain united than the instinctive and, in a sense, involuntary accord which springs from like feelings and similar opinions." A people who see the same things from different cultural perspectives cannot live in harmony under the same government. One of the things that made America exceptional according to Tocqueville was the absence of class conflict. He did predict that America would be divided by racial conflict, but in the 1830s, that conflict had not yet taken place to the extent that the political culture was destabilized. Presumably, then, Americn political culture united people across class, providing the foundation of democratic political order.

In Tocqueville's view, the grounding of American political culture in a shared religion and feeling provided for unity even in the context of political turmoil. Consider his account of the relation between American politics and culture:

American morality and culture were fixed but in politics anything was possible. Today, one could argue that the relationship of American culture and politics is reversed. Government seems fixed, particularly elections, yet in culture anything is possible. For example, whereas the canon of political theory is concerned with "political culture," today we speak in reverse of "cultural politics." In the political world, everything is decided in advance, foreseen, and stable. Polls can accurately predict elections in advance; mass opinion determines election campaigns and even foreign policy. In the political world, obedience is passive, yet voluntary; low voter turnouts are routine and the highest political virtue belongs to the candidate who stands forthright in the middle of the road. However, in the cultural/moral world, everything is contested. From language to religion, education, to American history and identity, in each there is independence, contempt of experience, and jealousy of all authority.

While Americans at present are said to be generally uninterested in Washington politics or representative government, cultural politics touches everyone. In addition to the culture war, think of "identity politics," "family values," La Raza, Operation Rescue, English-only movements, "sex wars," V-chips, and the New York City mayor's highly contested attempt to "civilize" the city. In America today it is culture, not government, that is in turmoil and where all is uncertain. According to traditional political wisdom, such as Tocqueville's above, we should be experiencing a breakdown of political order. Yet, the American culture war is, so far, largely a war of contending discourses. As murderous as discourse can be, the provocation for this essay is the relative stability of the American state despite the rages of war over the terrain of culture. Governmental stability does not typically incite political theory, yet I will point out why the stability of American government in the midst of cultural warfare calls for revisiting some of the traditional problematics in political theory regarding the relationship of culture and politics.

My purpose is to challenge the traditional political wisdom on "political culture" only insofar as culture is held to be both mutually constitutive and the limit of government. The point is not to debunk canonical political theory, but to illustrate the danger of repeating traditional political wisdom in the context of the American culture war. Rather than a source of political stability, I will argue that the case for American exceptionalism is a source of disorder.

Neoconservative cultural warriors, I will argue, are cornered by traditional political wisdom. Without a thorough re-thinking of the political itself and the role of political theory, I suggest that the war may yet amount to more than a discursive tirade. To defend the natural and the traditional, as we shall see, neoconservative discourse must continually circle back upon the repetition that such and so is best because it is natural and traditional. Backed into a tautological corner, the only way for neoconservatives to win the culture war is by violence. I fear the escalation of violence in the battle to reterritorialize the borders of nature, culture, and politics. By reading the canon (Tocqueville and Machiavelli, in particular) against neoconservative warriors such as Robert Bork, Newt Gingrich, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Samuel Huntington, I suggest that cultural politics and culture war require a reconceptualization of the political made possible, in part, by neoconservative discourse. I also suggest the possibility that the traditional problematics of political theory could be settled by cultural politics rather than by reterritorialization.

I. Political Culture and Cultural Politics

My argument turns on three postulates of traditional political wisdom regarding the relationship of culture and politics. The first comes as a pairing: a common culture provides the foundation for stable (and in some cases, free) government; culture and politics are mutually dependent for the maintenance of political order. Second, culture is impervious to the law; culture is the limit of governmental and legislative reach. That is, a corrupt or divisive political culture cannot be restored or stabilized by governmental and legislative action. The third postulate concerns the exceptionalist wisdom that American democracy necessarily operates without a political theory; theory cannot help to restore or stabilize American political culture and government.

1. Political Culture

First, political theorists as diverse as Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville, each held that a common political culture (language, religion, history) was the foundation of stable governments and that culture and political order existed in a mutually dependent relationship. To put it a bit too straightforwardly, the traditional wisdom is that a stable and homogeneous political culture provides the foundation, as well as for the maintenance, of stable government. In large part, culture provides for the regular reproduction of citizens who are unified, coherent, predictable and obedient. Political culture reproduces a governable population, a job that government cannot do itself unless it is willing to impose a unified culture upon a people by force, as both Plato and Hobbes were willing to concede in The Republic and in Leviathan.

Machiavelli, for example, held that it was religion that gave the Roman republic its good laws and good fortune. He understood culture and government to be mutually dependent upon one another for sustaining the liberty of a republic: "For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people." One cannot flourish without the other. Once the people and their culture in a republic became corrupt, Machiavelli warned, the hope that good government or new laws could redeem them was in vain. (It is according to the same reasoning, as we shall see, that contemporary neoconservatives fear the worst for America.)

It is tempting to read the present condition of culture war and cultural politics as a reversal of traditional political wisdom regarding the relationship of politics and culture: perhaps now it is the stability and homogeneity of the liberal state that makes it possible to have a culture war going on with no drift into general violence. What keeps the American people united under the same government is their general indifference to the government, not "like feeling" and "similar opinions." Indeed, that is the argument made by pluralists such as Robert Dahl. On that reading, the relationship of culture and politics are still mutually dependent, but now it is politics that provides a stable foundation for cultural turmoil.

Or, it is equally possible to read the present quite differently yet still remain consistent with the terms of conventional wisdom. A Tocquevillian observer might say, for example, that the "involuntary accord" that made it possible to remain united under one government has eroded in America. The inculcation of instinct, like feelings and similar opinions is no longer compulsory. Because Americans no longer see the same things from the same cultural perspective, multicultural perspectives pose a threat to political order. On that reading, the relationship of culture and politics have not been reversed; rather, the "decline" and "corruption" of American culture into cultural politics is tearing the (necessary) foundation out from under democratic institutions. That is, in fact, the way that neoconservatives read the present and why they have declared a culture war, as we shall see.

Another possible reading of the present as neither a reversal of tradition wisdom, nor as a corruption of the past, but as a new beginning. Those who declare that the "postmodern" age is upon us, for example, might reject the "grand narrative" of conventional political wisdom altogether, and give up on reading canonical political theory altogether as something relevant to the present. Also, fundamentalist and apocalyptic readings of the present as 'the beginning of the end,' for example, Frances Fukuyama's declaration of the present as "the end of history," are strangely consistent with prefixing "post-" onto modernism. I do not mean to say that postmodernists and fundamentalists are alike, only that their readings of the present are given in relationship to the past, be it revivalist or rejectionist.

Finally, and now obviously, the present might be read as a time in which all these possible readings are contested. A time, that is, in which the borders and proper relationships between culture and politics are contested and confused. I explore this last reading of the present more below. For the moment, I leave aside the question of how to characterize the present, whether the traditional wisdom on the relationship between culture and politics is infallible, reversed, or irrelevant in terms of the present culture war. So far, I have concentrated on the conventional wisdom that culture and politics are mutually dependent, with one providing the necessary foundation for the other. I now turn to the ways they are held to be distinct.

2. Culture and the Law

A second bit of traditional political wisdom is that the law is powerless to change culture. While culture and politics are mutually dependent, culture operates as the limit of politics. For example, Machiavelli believed that once a people became corrupt, short of instituting a whole new constitution, it was impossible for the law to "check a general corruption." "Besides, the constitution and laws established in a republic at its very origin, when men were still pure, no longer suit when men have become corrupt and bad...new laws do not suffice, for they are not in harmony with the constitution, that has remained intact." So long as the old constitution survives, the law is powerless to redeem a corrupt people.

Similarly, Tocqueville predicted in the 1830s that the American political culture of racism might stabilize only by a cultural adaptation: sexual/racial miscegenation or apartheid. The latter was more likely, he believed, but a race apart could spell nothing but violent conflict in the long run. Tocqueville held that in the ancient world, the difficult thing was to change the law. In a modern democracy, however, the legal emancipation of slaves was a relatively simple matter. But the culture of racism would not end along with legal prejudice. "When they have abolished slavery, the moderns still have to eradicate three much more intangible and tenacious prejudices: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of the white." Tocqueville's line of argument appears to be consistent with the fact that civil rights gains and the formal political equality of blacks in American ended neither racial segregation nor racial conflict. If the law cannot change culture, then culture operates as a defining limit of governmental power. Perhaps traditional wisdom rings true; while political culture and political order are mutually dependent, culture is impervious to the law.

The recent "Republican revolution" may well illustrate the wisdom of the traditional view. Neoconservative Newt Gingrich led the "Republican revolution" with an understanding of revolution in the antiquated sense (Machiavelli's sense) of a turning back or revolving rather than as an abrupt break and a new beginning. His goal was to "renew American civilization" by returning to the principles of the founding fathers. However, while drafting the "new" Contract with America, Gingrich ignored Machiavelli's warning that the law is powerless to redeem a corrupt people. The American people are, according to Gingrich, thoroughly corrupt. The people are characterized in the Republican Party's Contract with America as dependent on drugs and welfare, fearful and powerless in the face of the violence taking over their streets, a people who disrespect the law and escape justice by hiring fancy lawyers, people who sue each other in court rather than handle their own problems, people who are quick to divorce an unhappy marriage rather than honor their vows, or avoid the obligations of marriage altogether, irresponsibly begetting illegitimate children. How can a people so thoroughly corrupt be brought back from the abyss?

With his characteristic apocalyptic twist, Gingrich writes, "I'm a history teacher by background and I would assert and defend on any campus in this country that it is impossible to maintain civilization with twelve-year-olds having babies...What is at issue is literally not Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative, but the question of whether or not our civilization will survive." The self-reproduction of American civilization ground to a halt, according to Gingrich, because the countercultural movements of the sixties successfully overthrew the American value system of hard work. Great Society social welfare programs produced "dependence" instead of an independent and responsible citizenry. How is it now possible to turn back the decline of American civilization?

The Contract sets out to renew the faith of the American people in their government by reviving "traditional American values" of family, hard work, and personal responsibility through legislation. By "say[ing] to the counterculture: Nice try, you failed, you're wrong. And we have to simply, calmly, methodically reassert American civilization and reestablish the conditions, which I believe starts with the work ethic." The question of whether the work ethic or "traditional American values" are winning rally cries now that capitalism is global is not important here. What matters is that the failure of the "Republican revolution" appears to serve as a perfect illustration of the traditional wisdom that culture is impervious to the law. Republican legislation failed on both counts to "renew American civilization" and to restore "the deeper underlying cultural meanings of being American."

Despite the very real consequences of the 1994 "Republican revolution" in Congress (the further erosion of civil liberties, the "devolution" of welfare provision, and a yet more draconian and privatized criminal justice system, the Defense of Marriage Act, among others), there is yet no revolution of any kind; no fundamental transformation of American government and no restoration of "traditional American values." Remaining bound to a liberal Constitution that does not suit their illiberal and "revolutionary" aims, Republicans failed even to convince the majority that America is going to hell in a handbasket. Rhetorically, Gingrich actually mobilized the same political strategy used to forge the Great Society programs he blames for the current crisis. Gingrich, echoing community action rhetoric, proposes a "government that works with the poor rather than for and against the poor." The dismantling of the welfare state, Gingrich wrote, "should be done in cooperation with the poor. The people who have the most to gain from eliminating the culture of poverty are people currently trapped in a nightmare..." The five principles laid out in the Contract are familiar liberal principles: individual liberty, economic opportunity, limited government, personal responsibility, security at home and abroad. The Republican Contract is a traditionally liberal technique for uniting the American people with their government. It was bound to fail, according to traditional political wisdom, because American political culture and the people are no longer, so to speak, traditional. Gingrich says this himself, that the countercultural movements and governmental reforms of the 1960s undermined the "traditional American values" of family, hard work, Jim Crow, and political quietude. The people, in other words, no longer conform to the liberal political culture of individualism and so liberal remedies will be unable, as Machiavelli said, to "check a general corruption."

More in tune than Gingrich with traditional political wisdom, most neoconservatives are ready for a modern revolution that would overthrow rather than attempt to mobilize liberal institutions to save American civilization. Neoconservatives fear the worst: it is too late to reform the liberal government because American culture is no longer capable of reproducing a uniform, quiescent and governable population.

This fear has driven neoconservatives to declare a culture war. In response to the successes of the counter-culture and social movements, neoconservative Samuel Huntington argued in 1975 that there are "potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. Democracy will have a longer life if it has a more balanced existence." Without limits on where it is appropriate to apply the standards of democratic accountability, the population becomes ungovernable. Huntington declared a "crisis of governability" in the face of the politicization of the family, military, universities, and race relations. The political activism of women, blacks and students was dangerous not because those groups overran the political realm, but because they took politics out of the governmental realm into previously settled cultural terrain. Huntington argued that the "arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited." Indeed, the counter-cultural challenge to traditional cultural authorities threatened to bring democracy to the street, into the family, university, military and the shop floor. "Too much democracy," Huntington argued, was not a good thing. Only a reterritorialization of culture and politics, a return to a bounded democratic system conducted by political elites, would safeguard democracy against the crisis of cultural authority.

More recently, neoconservatives meet "the crisis of democracy" with talk of violence and authoritarian rule. There is little faith among neoconservatives that the cultural "crisis" has a political or legal solution. Under the tutelage of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank, Robert Bork summarized the failings of the "Republican revolution":

The culture war is a war of last resort to mobilize, in Gertrude Himmelfarb's phrase, a "counter-counter-revolution." For example, Himmelfarb (a more formidable historian than Gingrich) believes that the sexual revolution was truly revolutionary: "What is striking about the 1960s 'sexual revolution,' as it has properly been called, is how revolutionary it was, in sensibility as well as reality." Moreover, the sexual revolution is symptomatic of the more general "de-moralization" of America. A "de-moralized" culture is one in which culture replaces the social and economic causes of crime: "Today in inner cities there is a correlation between unemployment and crime, but it is not a causal one. Or if it is causal, it is not unemployment that causes crime so much as a culture that denigrates or discourages employment, making crime seem more normal, natural, and desirable than employment." If culture is a causal factor, then culture itself, not the law, must be the terrain of a counter-offensive.

To restore the moral foundation of liberal and democratic institutions, many neoconservatives hold that strong governmental action is required to enforce personal responsibility, marriage, legitimacy and sexual abstinence, prohibit abortion, and to condemn homosexuality, child pornography, and dead beat dads. Himmelfarb argues that it is not enough to remove the obstacles of governmental intrusion to free the individual to act on his or her own moral sense of personal responsibility. The individual is already corrupt so to enlarge their freedom is to enlarge the scope of corruption. The liberal state relied upon cultural conditions of reproduction that no longer exist. Contra Gingrich, less governmental intervention will not remedy the fact that the social and moral conditions for the exercise of individual responsibility and freedom can no longer be assumed.

Himmelfarb cites two kinds of revolution in the 1960s. "The first was a social revolution [Great Society programs] intended to liberate the poor from the political, economic, and racial oppression that kept them in bondage. The second was a cultural revolution liberating them...from the moral restraints of bourgeois values." (224). If there was a moment for turning back the social revolution by scaling down the size of government and allowing the market to discipline the poor, as Gingrich proposed, that moment is now past according to Himmelfarb. The impact of the cultural revolution was to undermine the culture and values upon which democratic government rested. Those values will not be restored by a new liberal contract, but only, Himmelfarb suggests, if strict moral (bourgeois) judgement guides policy-making. A corrupt people cannot be expected to know what is best for them. Himmelfarb proposes a return to the (in her reading) stern and strict morality of the Victorians who were willing and able to impose their own bourgeois morality upon the demoralized. However, quite unlike the Victorians, Himmelfarb believes that it is necessary to resort to using state power to inculcate Victorian values. In other words, neoconservatives find themselves in the awkward position of calling for a strong state and authoritarian measures in order to reproduce a citizenry capable of existing under a liberal and limited state. "Those who want to resist the [counterculture] cannot merely opt out of it...They may be obliged, however, reluctantly, to invoke the power of the law and the state, if only to protect those private institutions and associations that are the best repositories of traditional values." Rather than try to elicit the consent of a corrupt people to liberal and voluntary forms of government, Himmelfarb is ready to impose a moral order on an unwilling people by means of an authoritarian state. (Below, I explain why neoconservatives are pushed into going to war by the logic of their own discourse rather than the strength of the counter-culture.)

James Kurth upped the anti with a call to arms published in the neoconservative journal, The National Interest. Kurth does not harken back to the constitutional founding, but to the "second founding" or the "Golden Age" of the American nation-state (1890s-1960s). The Golden Age came with "the arrival of wide-spread, multi-class literacy in a common language, especially in a common literature" that united Americans. The decline of the Golden Age began in the 1960s with the celebration of multiculturalism, the rise of the mass media, the post-conscription army, and most importantly, when the ruling elite became conscious of themselves as "the Establishment." Once, the "American political class was confident and cohesive enough to impose not only literacy but Americanization by means of mass education," military conscription, and wage production. To re-charge contemporary elites who are unwilling to do what is necessary, Kurth attempts to rally their willingness to use force to impose a common culture upon the American people. Kurth calls for a civil war to restore America's once-dominant position on the world stage. "The central actors of history have been great Leviathans who have been rich, civilized, brutal, and big." Kurth places no confidence in liberal institutions to stem the decline. His faith rests on a powerful ruling elite, physical strength, violence, money, and cultural unity.

Is America headed for a civil war if the culture war escalates? If it is to be, is it merely ironic that the instigators of radical measures are those who hold tight to tradition? Next, I will argue that it is not ironic but inevitable that neoconservative discourse, by mobilizing the tenets of traditional political wisdom, corners its own advocates. Boxed in by their own logic, the only way out is to fight. Cultural warriors are prepared to impose an "involuntary accord" and cultural unity upon the people, if necessary by force. That is, perhaps, unless a third and final postulate of traditional political wisdom is reconsidered.

3. American Exceptionalism

The third postulate of traditional political wisdom is that America is an exception to the rules of European political thought. Taking their lead from Tocqueville, exceptionalists believe that American history and political development proceeded according to a general consensus and continuity rather than ongoing class and racial conflict. Although I cannot give a full account of exceptionalism here, suffice it to say that even the American Civil War was, in the words of one exceptionalist, an occasion "to reinforce our sense of the continuity of our history."

Here, I want to concentrate on the American exceptionalist conviction that political theory is un-American. For example, Daniel Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress and historian, wrote in 1953 that ideology, propaganda, and political theory are foreign to America. Boorstin is a "consensus historian," meaning he holds that American history is guided by the consensus of the American poeple. Consensus history was opposed to "conflict history," and "social history," or the view that American history is not built upon a consensus, but upon the repression of class conflict, slavery, the colonization of American Indians, and the subjugation of women. Boorstin, we would say today, is on the side of monoculturalism as opposed to multiculturalism. He beleived, like Tocqueville, that America was truly exceptional among western democracies because it was not guided by a theory of government or divided by ideological and class differences.

Boorstin wrote with the goal of curing the "cultural hypochondria" of Cold Warriors and McCarthyism. To quell the fear that something was amiss in America, that there were communists in our midst or that socialism presented a genuine alternative to liberal capitalism, Boorstin argued that American values were implicit in the landscape, history, and values of Americans. "Some Americans, however - and they are probably increasing in number - make the un-American demand for a philosophy of democracy. They believe that this philosophy will be a weapon against Russia and a prop for our own institutions. They are afraid that, without some such salable commodity, they may not be able to compete with Russia in the world market." Disappointed and embarrassed by the fact that they had no theoretical defense of capitalism and democracy in their arsenal, Cold Warriors called upon intellectuals to lay down a philosophy of democracy. To defend those values, however, to make them explicit, to provide a theory of American values was, Boorstin believed, downright un-American and a threat to the stability of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, the ultimate failure of intellectuals to draft such a theory, Boorstin insisted, was itself an expression of "the genius of American politics." The incapacity for articulating "American values" clearly in defense of democracy, said Boorstin, was evidence that those values were "given," expressions of the natural landscape of America.

In a chapter entitled, "How Belief in the Existence of an American Theory has Made a Theory Superfluous," Boorstin argues that it is enough for Americans to believe that they have a theory, despite the fact that they do not. That is "because we already somehow possess a satisfactory equivalent, I propose the name 'givenness.'" "'Givenness' is the belief that values in America are in some way or other automatically defined: given by certain facts of geography or history peculiar to us." Boorstin's origin myth, as he understands it, is no myth: Americans agree on their values not because they discuss them and are able to articulate those values, but because their agreement is implicit in the fact that those values are shared.

The Cold Warriors were actually putting American values at risk by making them explicit, Boorstin warned. To extract a theory from the given is, he feared, to call the given into question. "When people already agree, the effort to define what they agree on is more likely to produce conflict than accord. Precise definitions are more often the end than the beginning of agreement." A political theory of American democracy would be dangerous to the American consensus. Better to supply a fact than a theory, the principle of "givenness," that in itself implicitly presupposes agreement.

Nevertheless, although he claims there is no and should be no theory of American democracy, Boorstin cannot defend what is "given," or even articulate that it is given without recourse to theory, or, at the very least, an interpretive "principle." Why is a principle any less dangerous than a theory? With "givenness," Boorstin proposes a principle that needs no theoretical justification, no argument. It just is. As his own argument goes, the lack of an explicit theory of American democracy is due to the fact that American institutions grew up without one. There is a circularity to Boorstin's argument, to be sure, making it seem, at least to him, unnecessary to draft a theory. Echoing Tocqueville, Boorstin wrote that "what has held us together as a nation has been no explicit political theory held in common but rather a fact of life (what Whitman properly called 'adhesiveness')..." Is Boorstin, like an uneasy parent, avoiding the revelation of some unspeakable or awful truth? Is "givenness" an ironic political myth, an expression of the inexpressible? American exceptionalism is "a fact of life?" Like death and taxes? Could this Librarian of Congress and keeper of the faith be cynically espousing a noble lie like Plato's philosopher-kings? I don't know.

However, I will suggest that whereas Boorstin called for leaving well enough alone and hoped to suppress the urge to theorize, he did something far more dangerous than theorizing.

Boorstin hoped to defer theory and political conflict, but to do so he illustrated the fact that American exceptionalism works to exclude political contestation of the "given." "We Americans are reared with a feeling for the unity of our history and an unprecedented belief in the normality of our kind of life to our place on earth." The "American consensus," then, is somehow compulsory, perhaps akin to the "involuntary accord" that Tocqueville described. It is not normal, according to Boorstin, for an American to see things otherwise, to theorize, challenge, or to resist living "our kind of life." "Givenness," as it turns out, is a principle of rule and "normality" its regulative method, the point at which a governable population is reproduced. Boorstin hoped to re-assert the discourse of the given in order to make it, again, a given. But his own discourse leaves him chasing his own tail, insisting that our kind of life is normal because we believe that how we live is normal. American exceptionalism, in effect, begs the question. To reconstitute the "fact" that American culture is based upon a consensus, even when in the 1950s new facts were flying in the face of it, Boorstin let slip that the "facts" and the "given" were, all along, constituted as such. The "facts of life" in America were undergoing an intense challenge within from socialists and the civil rights movement, and from without from the alternative of socialism.

Boorstin was not entirely unaware of the risks he was taking. As the quote above indicates, he was aware that calling for agreement on the principle of "givenness" might produce disagreement. However, he believed the greater risk was that a theory would be drafted and the "American consensus" would end in the rise of an empty nationalism and ideological conflict. He failed to anticipate (or perhaps he inadvertently helped to instigate) that counter-cultural movements of the 1950s and '60s would call the constraints of the given and the normal - heterosexuality and marriage, work, American supremacy, patriotism, racial segregation, and the gendered division of labor - into question. When the counter-culture held these cultural "givens" up to a standard of democratic accountability, the American landscape was fundamentally altered. While seeking to foreclose the possibility that American democracy could be theorized, Boorstin made that foreclosure over into the foundational premise of American democracy and political thought. But he risked making the very cultural foundation of the "given" vulnerable by making it explicit.

To theorize American democracy he believed, is to automatically undermine it. It is theory, not culture, which operates here as the limit of American government. It is true that theory can change our world and our vision of it, and so it is dangerous. But political theory only calls that which can be changed into question. If something cannot be changed by human action, then it is a thing of nature or an act of god, and not political. Boorstin brought something formerly fixed and unalterable, that which is "given," "normal," and "natural" into the domain of politics and contestation. In short, he inadvertently politicized that which he held to be a "given": the idea that American history is founded upon consensus.

Boorstin hoped to avoid conflict by avoiding theory; but he did something much more dangerous than theorize. He brought the very constitution of cultural "givens" into question, making them appear changeable and so making them political. Even "the facts of life," even what is "given" by nature and by God, might be otherwise.

Another way to put this is to say that Boorstin made it explicit that what held America together was the discourse of exceptionalism. As Samuel Delany put it, discourse tells us, out of all that we see, what is important and what is not. Discourse, writes Delany, is "material, educational, habitual." Discourse is the manner by which the facts of life are established and maintained, how we do things as a matter of course or habit, because it feels right or normal. In other words, discourse comprises what Boorstin calls "givenness."

Delany offers an ordinary example; girls pee sitting down, he explains, not because they are incapable of peeing standing up but because that is what girls do. Girls are taught to sit and boys are taught to stand. Indeed, that is one of the ways children learn the difference between a boy and a girl. Of course, girls can pee standing up (and with remarkable accuracy, he adds), the same way boys do, by manually pointing their genitals in the direction of the toilet. But men's restrooms are often equipped with urinals and toilets; women's rooms are not. Discourse is made material in the architecture of gender difference. Discourse is material also in the sense that girls might not only find it hard to believe that they can pee standing up, but they may not want to pee "like a boy." Discourse does not make it impossible for a girl or a woman to pee standing up, as Delany observes, but it does make it likely that she will voluntarily not do so. (Recall here Tocqueville's phrase, "involuntary accord.")

Discourse is not the same thing as ideology or political theory, although they are all related concepts. The discourse of American exceptionalism is more than an ideology or a myth. "Ideology" is most often used to explain that how one sees is determined by the world view of another. "Ideology" gets into your head. Discourse does too, it is learned, but discourse does not determine the possible. Discourse both enables and constrains what it is possible to do, think, say, be, or feel. That is how Tocqueville could make sense of American culture with an oxymoron, "involuntary accord." Discourse makes it a normal "fact of life" that girls sit and boys stand to pee. Girls can and do, of course, pee standing up and boys do pee sitting down. But witnessing such anomalies does not usually make us pause and wonder about the social construction of gender. The limits of the possible are routinely transgressed without erupting into conflict. Yet those limits are always matters of power relationships.

Discourse, like power, is everywhere. But that is not to say that politics is everywhere, only that we should not be surprised to find either power or politics in the toilet. Relations of power are not essentially contested; they are contingently contested. Many relations of power solidify in the discourses of our material lives, our habits and our traditions. Here, I cannot give a complete explanation of the conditions under which discourse, or the given, gets politicized. What I can say is that the discourse of American exceptionalism presumes that "givenness" is uncontestable. But what I have tried to show is that to avoid theorizing American democracy, Boorstin hoped to reconstitute its status as a discourse, the kind of material and conventional constraint on the possible that he calls the "given." But what he did was draw attention to the ways that what is "given" is in fact constituted by power. I do not want to say that Boorstin caused the decline of the "American consensus" or generated a reaction in the form of multiculturalism, but to explain that the discourse of American exceptionalism has itself become dangerous in the context of the culture war.

Discourse, unlike theory, is not something that more readily survives by its defense. If discourse, or the "natural," "traditional," and the "given" cannot be reconstituted by their defense, then they must be imposed by force. For neoconservatives, imposing a unified culture on Americans by authoritarian means is necessary because, according to traditional wisdom, for democracy to survive, it must rest upon a foundation of cultural certainty. Traditional political wisdom and the three postulates that continue to instruct neoconservative culture warriors are dangerously misleading in this transformed American landscape. In fact, there are two possible outcomes of the culture war. One is the escalation of violence due to the fact that neoconservative discourse cannot reconstitute culture back into the stable foundation for democracy. So long as neoconservatives cling to traditional wisdom regarding the relationship of culture and politics, I see no way out for them but violence. On the other hand, cultural politics itself might offer a solution to the traditional problematics of culture and politics.

II. Cultural Politics

Like Boorstin, neoconservatives are trapped by traditional political wisdom. For example, when neoconservatives call attention to and defend "traditional family values," they actually make discourses of "the family" plural; neoconservatives transgress the limits of the possible precisely by trying to galvanize those limits. In the neoconservative understanding, cultural politics, or the contestation of cultural givens, can only represent a sign of decline and an anathema to political order. However, the rhetoric of returning to "traditional" American values appeals to the naturalness of those values at the price of undermining their givenness. Again, one reason that the culture war may become more violent or lead to an actual revolution is that neoconservatives cannot win a battle of discourses.

On my reading, however, neoconservative discourse actually aids in opening up the possibility that the culture itself might be democratically ordered, that we might democratically decide what kind of families are best and what sort of values should be instilled in children. To make what is given explicit is to create a new possibility: cultural politics.

Culture war is not cultural politics by other means. Whereas cultural politics are aimed at transforming the discursive conditions of possibility, the culture war is mobilized to re-territorialize the confused and contested borders between culture and politics. Culture warriors take the "givenness" of culture to be an absolutely necessary foundation for democratic politics. Cultural politics, on the other hand, is a practice that takes the contingency and alterability of the borders between the cultural and the political to be a measure of democracy.

The culture war could as easily go the way of a violent re-territorialization as it could go the way of cultural politics. However, the latter course will be adopted only if traditional political wisdom undergoes a thorough re-thinking. The three postulates of traditional political theory, that culture and politics are mutually dependent and mutually constitutive, that culture is the limit of governmnetal or legal intervention, and that America is founded upon a consensus, are all dangerous in the present context because they foreclose the possibility that cultural conflicts might be settled by cultural politics rather than by war.

Concerning the first postulate, while I suggested at the beginning of this essay that cultural politics might signal a reversal of traditional wisdom, that is not the case. Rather, cultural politics contests the discursive constitution of the boundaries between culture and politics. Cultural politics is about altering the boundaries that order American democracy. We might say today, for example, that the personal is political, we have sexual politics, health politics, family politics, racial politics, and so on. The iterability of these new forms of politics, I believe, signals a transformation of the political and the cultural altogether, not a simple re-ordering of two exclusive but mutually dependent domains.

The second postulate, that culture is the limit of the law is also eclipsed in the present. By holding onto traditional wisdom, neoconservatives can see the attempts to change culture through legal means - affirmative action, civil rights - only as sources of corruption. But the law no longer operates over and above culture. Cultural politics recognizes that the law is, like any discourse, potentially constitutive of the given. And that means, of course, that it will be contingently contested, and rightly so. The territory of the law cannot be analytically separated from culture without shutting down the possibility that the law might be made democratically accountable.

The third postulate of traditional political wisdom, that American democracy is exceptional in that it is governed by a consensus that is essential to its stability implies that democracy cannot withstand cultural politics. In effect, I argued above that Boorstin and neoconservatives laid the constraints of "givenness" and "normality" at the door of the counter-culture. However, if cultural politics is to be supressed at all costs, those costs will be very high indeed and will include missing the opportunity to settle cultural conflicts by political means.

A revolution that would overthrow American democracy and impose an authoritarian state is certainly possible. So far, the culture war hasn't come to that. My question remains, why hasn't the culture war spilled over into the domain of government? How it is possible that the liberal state remains relatively stable at a time when the extent to which discourses and culture have been politicized may be unprecedented? On the one hand, there may be no "crisis of governability" because Americans, in general, remain under one government without being united. Or, it is also possible that the practices, rhetorics, and changes in American government are so routine, so utterly irrelevant to politics, that they operate as givens. However, if the liberal state is a given, we cannot depend on the fact that it will remain so.

III. Political Theory

I have tried to show the ways in which the traditional political wisdom regarding the relationship of culture and politics makes it impossible to see that cultural politics is a novel political form that contests the boundaries between culture and politics, between the given and the governmental, the facts of life and the political. Social movements and counter-cultural politics, in particular, have confused the boundaries between culture and politics. Cultural politics cannot be mapped out by analytically distinguishing between what goes on in the House of Congress and in the domain of culture precisely because cultural politics reconfigure the relationship of public to private, the personal and the political, the cultural and the governmental. Rather than solidifying new boundaries, cultural politics recasts the boundaries themselves as terrains of contestation.

Settlement of the analytical confusion produced by cultural politics is unlikely to come from political theory unless, contra Boorstin, it is reconstituted along with politics itself. Political theory will be relevant to the resolution of the culture war only insofar as it transgresses the limits of the possible ways to theorize. The traditional focus in political theory on the foundations and maintenance of sovereign political orders is a discursive trap. The stability of American democracy can no longer be understood to rest on cultural foundations that theory should not and cannot touch without destroying. Our analytical confusion will be settled in the same way as the culture war, by either cultural politics or from a reterritorialization of academic disciplines.

The solution to the culture war I hope for is not the reconstitution of the given or the retorritorialization of culture and politics, but a voluntary accord that the facts of life in America will be democratically derived.