FDR, JFK, and the Oedipal Triangle overlaid on one another.

Paying attention to American electoral politics is a disorienting experience. There’s a definite sense that you’re watching a very large group of children pick their new step-parent. This dynamic repeats and reproduces itself almost everywhere you look. During the horse-race of the Democratic Primary, I heard a number of people compare the various candidates to stock-character parents, and there was the well-publicized freak-out by the sitting president who admonished a reporter for speaking to him in a tone he didn’t like by saying, “don’t ever talk to the president that way.”

Likewise, I remember having conversations back into the nascence of my political awareness, where I was told that I always had to respect the president – in those days, noted war criminal George W. Bush – based on some poorly-articulated standard. There was clearly the expectation that the office of President imposed on the men who occupied it some kind of paternal respectability that nothing could ever be said to annihilate.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that we parasocially relate to the politicians that we elect as if they’re our parents. This is a decidedly unidirectional relationship, and a relic of earlier ages, that is supported by the myths and legends that we repeat to ourselves.

Let’s back up. Even before getting into discourse about the Founding Fathers, there is a whole complex of beliefs about honored men being cast as the father of the nation. It happened several times in Roman history, for example: first Marcus Furius Camillus, then Cicero, and then Caesar were all considered Patres Patriae. During the Empire it was awarded to Emperors who served with distinction or for a great deal of time – a way for the senate to put their stamp of approval on their leader.

Of course, Kings were also god’s lieutenant on Earth in some constructions: regicide was somewhere between patricide and deicide, as a result.

The attitude towards Kings in medieval Europe also tended to err on this side: the king was the father and protector of the people. Sometimes, especially with very young kings, this was no doubt the cause of a great deal of cognitive dissonance. In the excellent Revolutions podcast, historian Mike Duncan equates Louis XVI in the early revolutionary period to a sort of “father of the nation” being characterized by the popular press of the day as protecting the Third Estate (the commoners) against the overweening hungers of the nobility.

Then, we get to the American Founding Fathers – quite an ostentatious title for a group of men who started a country as a tax dodge – and their reverence for their elected demigod, George Washington (artwork depicting the “apotheosis of Washington” was featured in my previous piece on American Cringe). I really have nothing to say about the men here, but a large number of them went on to serve as Presidents, and I would not be surprised if every signatory of the Declaration of Independence or Constitution served in government at some point or another. I don’t know, I didn’t really care enough to check.

What this suggests to me is that there’s this tendency in our culture – at least among those of certain political persuasions – to desire a paternalistic relationship between the government and the citizens. It’s simply a debate about the flavor. The argument between Democrats and Republicans is whether it should be a paternalism that says the right things but does nothing (the Democrats) or a cruel one (the Republicans). They dismiss the generous paternalism of the social-democratic regime as setting up a “nanny state,” which is of course too expensive (much as effective childcare is too expensive for many). But a nanny state would be preferable to the Republican party-designed “drunken stepfather state” that we seem to be stuck with.

I’ve heard the stock market referred to as a “graph of rich people feelings” and nothing has ever felt more true in my life. (image source: know your meme.)

You see this in the discourse around social programs, which opponents often describe derisively as a desire for “free stuff” by the advocates. It’s never acknowledged that the actual material base for these programs are not provided by the financial services sector that are supposedly creating so many jobs that never seem to actually appear but are provided by the manufacturing and service workers that are often dismissed as a drag on the “real economy” (read: the line).

Neither side of the superficial American political spectrum wants the citizens to be treated like free adults that have the right to form relationships, associations, and agreements between themselves. The rhetoric – as many rhetorical tricks have been – has been largely co-opted by the right wing, but you see it everywhere: google the name of either mainstream political party and the phrase “spoiled children” or “spoiled brat” or similar. When you look at it long enough, the narrative begins to emerge: the average person (even, in many cases, the elite lawmakers that are sent to Washington) are viewed as utterly abject, as children unable to make responsible decisions for themselves. It is up to the person elected to interpret the will of the people, the only individual possessed of a lordly – dare I say a paternal? – bearing, to fix it.

As an aside, the whole “interpret the will of the people” thing is an intentional reference to Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism”, where he identifies the interpretation of the theatrical fiction of a popular will as a trait of Ur-Fascism(1), which is the ideological precondition for fascism.

The series His Dark Materials, now being adapted by HBO and BBC falls into the same trap of reducing the scope of the plot to family drama. Here, we see the protagonist, her mother, her father, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. — The series *His Dark Materials*, now being adapted by HBO and BBC falls into the same trap of reducing the scope of the plot to family drama. Here, we see the protagonist, her mother, her father, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Like most of our most pernicious social traits, I trace this Oedi-political line of thinking to our popular media. Take, for example, the Star Wars movies. Now, look, I unironically love Star Wars, despite my thoughts on the sequel trilogy, but the reduction of every conflict in the universe to not just a family conflict but a family conflict that hinges on the relationship between a father and a son was a weakness.

Consider just how much of a cliché this is in all strands of fiction, where it seems that all stories shrink back to the choked horizons of the oedipal triangle of father-mother-child. If the only models we have in our culture are for such stories, which never reach beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois nuclear family, is it any shock that all the participants in a conflict are tempted to adopt one of the three melodramatic roles and play it out?

In the class I teach, one of the texts I use is “Toys” by Roland Barthes. When I reread it this prior semester, I underlined a particular set of sentences near the middle of the piece:

[lifelike dolls are] meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to 'condition' her to her future role as mother. However, faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish.

The stories that we are given as children are toys just like action-figures and race cars, simply made out of language instead of plastic. We are given these potted lessons and we never move past them, stuck in a head-space that depends on the causality of childhood, where the bounds of our world are the bounds of the nuclear family. But, as with childhood, the object of the story and the ground against which it occurs become confused, and they are entangled.

Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons, here in a still image that many of us can hear. — Ralph Wiggum from *The Simpsons*, here in a still image that many of us can hear.

The parent is both the primordial antagonist and the unquestionable authority. The child is both the hero and the abject subject. When the child is removed from the home and taken instead to school, this model holds true for a time, acting as a fetter on their behavior: the adult is the implicit parent, the child is the implicit offspring. This is shamed and disavowed – consider the embarrassment of the child that slips up and refers to their teacher as “mom.” The slip happens for a reason. The child has spoken something that feels intuitively correct but is obviously wrong.

This parent-child model of relationship continues outside of the classroom. I remember heading my boss at the now-sadly-defunct job that I mentioned several times in the earlier portions of this blog declare to no one, unprompted, that he was not his employees’ father and had no interest in being so.

So if everything is read in terms of a parent-child relationship, should we be surprised if people act like the sitting president is some kind of super-parent, a father of the nation?

No. We shouldn’t be surprised. But neither should we be happy about it.

I found this image after I wrote about American Cringe, and had to include it somewhere. I think, perhaps, the election of Barack Obama might have broken the perception of the president as national step-father, but we’re really scrambling to find t… — I found this image after I wrote about American Cringe, and had to include it somewhere. I think, perhaps, the election of Barack Obama might have broken the perception of the president as national step-father, but we’re really scrambling to find things to fit in there, and it’s leading to some deranged cultural artifacts.

For one thing, I think that this partially explains the identity-categories that the president falls into (after all, race isn’t a limiting factor on fatherhood, but sex is generally considered to be so). I think that this will most likely be present until we manage to end or radically rework the Oedi-political dynamics of American culture (which, of course, can’t be changed, unless it’s changing overnight. It’s hard to keep track of what we consider possible these days).

For another, and much more importantly, bringing the tools of family drama to questions of policy is useless. There are many lessons to take away from the middle ages – far more than most people realize – but one of the key realizations that we should have had is that the micropolitics of the family are unsuited to guiding the fate of large populations. One thing that we should treat these last four years as being is a reminder of this, because what is a reality show but a tawdry imitation of private family drama? And what has this been if not a reality-show presidency?

So it’s here that I finally get to the point where I’ve worked through enough of this idea that I feel that I can offer something like a definition of the unwieldy neologism that I’ve written this to work through – and what is theory without unwieldy neologisms? – so, let’s think. What is Oedi-Politics? Especially given that I’m very far from being a Freudian or a Lacanian?

Oedi-Politics is the intrusion of patterns of behavior and thought characteristic of family dramas – specifically those characteristic of the bourgeois nuclear family – into the realm of the political. It is the adoption of maternal, paternal, and filial roles by political actors and the determination of future courses of action by the relationship between these roles. In short, when people should be coming to agreements, making compromises, working through problems, they are instead defaulting to playing house. Everything else becomes secondary, and poisoned by this.

It was literally impossible for me not to rope Trow in for this discussion.

George W.S. Trow wrote in Within the Context of No-Context that “The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.” Likewise, Trow identified that the rules of childhood had spread through the whole of the adult world, and thus adulthood became, “a position of control in the world of childhood.” This is the mirror image of Barthes, where the child is made into an uncanny homunculus of the adult, the “little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality” – and is it any wonder that such a world, where every child is conditioned into an adultlet and every adult into a titanic child, would encourage people to desire that a real adult show up and do the adulting(2)? So people swoop in and tell us to step aside, that they’ll really do it.

And then it becomes clear that they’re just doing that because an adult (or, if they’re a republican, a man) is someone who takes charge and takes responsibility. But none of them are interested in doing that, they’re interested in playing the role of father in this little game we’ve been stuck playing.

I’m going to guess that the vast majority of people don’t want a reproduction of these family dramas outside of the family. It’s simply due to a lack of other models that we fall into this pattern. What we need are other models for interaction that don’t hinge upon reproducing the relationships of the nuclear family.

Absent that, what we might need is some new idea of what adulthood is actually supposed to be. The old models, constantly reasserted by socially conservative forces, are clearly failures. What comes out of this as the new model for adulthood, I’m going to guess, will only be recognized as such after it has emerged: it will not come out of asserting what an adult is or does ex nihilo, but out of holding up some behavior or phenomenon witnessed in the world as praiseworthy and valuable to imitate. It will come from some keen-eyed observer pointing at some behavior or practice and saying, “That. We should be doing that.”

Chances are it will happen many times, and many of the examples will turn out to be stupid and bad. But some of them will be worth following.

We just have to learn to judge which is which.

1. It reads:

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples” – “maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

2. A term that I know many of you hate. But one of the things that the cultural bloc commonly called the millennial generation broadly realized before others did is that – especially now – no one is truly an adult. We’re all neotenous messes that can’t agree on what it means to be an adult, but we can at least identify, occasionally, what an adult does.

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