By now it should not be surprising that truth and facticity have little to no bearing on American electoral politics at the national level (it must be my residual habermasianism that is repeatedly shocked by the Republicans' capacity to repeat lies; I really need to work on this). As I was thinking about this today, this condition (decline of symbolic efficiency) might also indicate why the Democrats were not completely wrong not to pursue impeachment. We are not living in conditions wherein Senate hearings are possible. More specifically, there is not enough of a common vocabulary, a shared conception of reality, that could enable anything like a sensical consideration of evidence.
There are multiple examples of the absence of such conditions: the moronic former Senator from Alaska's description of the internet as a series of tubes and pipes; Cheney's continued insistence of a link between 9/11 and Iraq; the Right's denial of climate change; Phil Graham's reduction of the economic collapse of the country to whining. The entire McCain campaign basks in lies, from those about Obama's tax plan to those about Palin's leadership and McCain's maverick status (did anyone else notice the misspelled maverick signs at the GOP convention?).
As we were talking about this, Paul rightly pointed out that impeachment proceedings could have been something like a new beginning, a rupture with and within the present such that a common vocabulary, a connection with Constitutional law and ideals would be (would have been) brought into being. One could imagine the very ability of the House to vote for impeachment proceedings as an Act and the hearings themselves as the retroactive determination of the conditions for that Act. From this perspective, my sense of the absence of conditions of possibility for impeachment misses the point: these conditions can only be created retroactively.
"Can only," though, is surely wrong (or is it? Paul mentioned something about polls after Nixon resigned; these polls said that the majority of US voters claimed not to have voted for Nixon; he won in 1972 by a landslide). Nixon would have surely been impeached had he not resigned--or is this sense the result of his resignation, one that made impeachment seem inevitable?
I don't have a snappy ending for these depressing ruminations. They remind me, though, that Zizek's accounts of socialism collapsing "all of a sudden" when people just stop going through the motions as understating the practices and habits and materializations of ideology in what we do though we know better. For a while this spring, it seemed as if the Right was starting to wither away. Palin changed the equation or the momentum. But this could only be possible if many of us, most of us, continued to believe in the power of the Right and in the fundamental inefficacy of the Democrats. It makes me wonder about the work necessary to disabuse ourselves of this belief and thereby change the conditions that make Palin, rather than impeachment, possible.
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