Our Monica, Ourselves

The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Lauren Berlant, Lisa A. Duggan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814789667
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alongside the O.J. Simpson trial, the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90s. Alternatively transfixed and repelled by this sexual scandal, confusion still reigns over its meanings and implications. How are we to make sense of a tale that is often wild and bizarre, yet replete with serious political and cultural implications?

Our Monica, Ourselves provides a forum for thinking through the cultural, political, and public policy issues raised by the investigation, publicity, and Congressional impeachment proceedings surrounding the affair. It pulls this spectacle out of the framework provided by the conventions of the corporate news media, with its particular notions of what constitutes a newsworthy event. Drawing from a broad range of scholars, Our Monica, Ourselves considers Monica Lewinsky's Jewishness, Linda Tripp's face, the President's penis, the role of shame in public discourse, and what it's like to have sex as the president, as well as specific legal and historical issues at stake in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Thoughtful but accessible, immediate yet far reaching, Our Monica, Ourselves will change the way we think about the Clinton affair, while helping us reimagine culture and politics writ large.

Contributors include: Lauren Berlant, Eric O. Clarke, Ann Cvetkovich, Simone Weil Davis, Lisa Duggan, Jane Gallop, Marjorie Garber, Janet R. Jakobsen, James R. Kincaid, Laura Kipnis, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, Joe Lockard, Catharine Lumby, Toby Miller, Dana D. Nelson, Anna Marie Smith, Ellen Willis, and Eli Zaretsky.

Part 1

DEMOCRACY AND PRESIDENTIALISM

1 The Culture Wars of the 1960s and the Assault on the Presidency

The Meaning of the Clinton Impeachment

Eli Zaretsky

The impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton was one of those extraordinary historical events whose nature historians will debate for centuries.¹ Among the problems they will have to address are the Republicans’ motivations, the chasm between the electorate and the normally dominant media elites, and the Republicans’ remarkable achievement—if we can call it that—in turning Clinton’s Paula Jones deposition into a protracted national emergency. The problem of the Republicans’ motivations is particularly vexed since, while it was unfolding, impeachment blatantly contradicted political calculations and, afterward, resulted in the collapse of the conservative movement’s pretense to hegemony. Of course, any explanation will be preliminary. But in my view, it will be easier to solve these problems if we situate the impeachment in at least two overlapping historical contexts: the long-term reaction to the cultural revolutions launched in the sixties (feminism, gay liberation, multiculturalism, etc.), and a discrete series of attacks, dating from the thirties, on the presidency as the democratic moment in modern politics.

Stephen Greenblatt, Anthony Lewis, John Judis, Michael Ignatieff, and many other commentators have noted the similarities between the impeachment and the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century.² The appeal of this analogy lies in its attempt to explain the irrationality of the Republican actions. As Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum demonstrated in their 1974 Salem Possessed, those who supported the persecution of witches lived in the poorer and more remote precincts of Salem Village. While their initial targets were social outcasts they later turned to their more prosperous fellow villagers who had ties to commerce and the sea. Witches were scapegoats; the trials were an irrational, persecutory response to anxieties unleashed by late seventeenth century commercialization and individuation.³

Similarly, it is plausible to argue, the Republicans spoke for white, male, rural, suburban, and southern constituencies threatened by the social and cultural changes unleashed since the 1960s. Their real targets, never far from their words, but also never directly acknowledged, were women’s emancipation, sexual emancipation, cultural “relativism,” secularization, and pluralism. Clinton, the out-of-control dope-and-sex fiend, was their scapegoat. If they could have gotten rid of him, a whole reign of persecutions in such areas as abortion, education, and government would have followed.

While this explanation certainly has merit, there was a second current to the impeachment drive that received less attention. This lies in the specific history of the United States right wing, whose origins date to the late 1930s opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. To understand this opposition requires a perspective on the history of the presidency. It is one of the most powerful institutions ever created—and not only because the United States is powerful. Those who wrote the Constitution put the president in place of the king, as a symbol of national unity and moral identity. Whereas in parliamentary systems such as England the monarch or president divides authority with a prime minister, in the United States the president is simultaneously the chief executive officer and the symbol of the nation. Over time, due to the uniquely pluralist—multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural—character of American society, the president emerged, along with the Constitution and the Supreme Court, as one of the few loci of centripetal authority.⁴

The intentions of those who wrote the Constitution were conservative. Contrary to those intentions, however, the presidency became the center of democratic aspirations. This shift began during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1828–1836), but its true origins lie in the Civil War. Then, as Abraham Lincoln argued against Stephen Douglas, the nation had to take a stand on a fundamental moral issue, namely slavery. The end of the war saw the creation of national citizenship, by virtue of which the executive branch of government can and must intervene to guarantee due process against local or state practices. In the late nineteenth century, the mass politics that developed with industrialization increasingly focused on the presidency. The political scientist Gwendolyn Mink tells of an Italian stowaway captured while trying to enter the United States in the 1890s, who knew only one word of English: “McKinley.”⁵ But the most fundamental transformation of the American presidency into the vehicle of democratic strivings occurred during the New Deal.

The New Deal launched a genuine and continuing social and cultural revolution, at first centered on the working class and the immigrants. While there were nineteenth-century predecessors for the American right wing, notably in “states’ rights,” secession, and the Confederacy, as well as in the legal profession, the American right active in the impeachment episode was born in opposition to the New Deal and, specifically, to the enhanced role of the president that it fostered. Thus, the Republican attempt to roll back the cultural changes initiated in the sixties was part of a longer history, one aimed at retarding democratic change in general.

Republican actions, situated within this context, have also been subjected to depth psychological analysis. Following Freud’s well-known argument in Totem and Taboo, Jonathan Lear argued that Clinton, as the first member of his generation to become president, needed to reassure his followers that he was leading from “within the group”—in other words, as one “brother” among many. Instead, many took Clinton to be foolishly flaunting his ability to transgress the rules—to avoid the draft, to smoke grass, and to possess every woman who caught his eye. Childishly brandishing “the presidential penis”—this is Lear’s characterization—Clinton awakened infantile, unconscious fears of a powerful father figure who lives outside norms. Even more disturbing, he awakened omnipresent and ubiquitous desires to be that figure. Writing amid the furor of the impeachment hearings, Lear pointed to the Christian iconography that haunted it—for example, the intense anger at Clinton for failing to apologize properly, an act that would turn his antisocial exhibitionism and public soiling into a reaffirmation of the group’s collective self-suppression. Only through proper contrition could Clinton bring about the ritual cleansing of what the New York Times obsessively called the “hallowed rooms” at the White House.⁶

In one sense, Lear’s stress on paternal authority deepened the meaning of the ritual sacrifice, cleansing, and rebirth that the impeachment enacted. The scapegoating of the witches, as described by Boyer and Nissenbaum, is actually a subcase of the scenario put forth in Totem and Taboo. Freud’s view in that work was that the murder of the primal father—the founding moment of human society and the one that institutes the incest taboo—initiated a series of ritual reenactments aimed at preserving the social contract. Accordingly, symbolic fathers or father substitutes—for example, sons such as Jesus—were sacrificed to affirm the rule of the church or monarch. The mass, or other rituals, reenacted the founding moment. Similarly, in Salem, the witches were scapegoated to affirm the authority of ministers. One particularity of the New England example, which explains its special resonance with the impeachment, lies in the weakness of the ministers and their cause. A fuller study would have had to explain why the vast majority of increasingly secular and commercial New Englanders allowed a handful of religious bigots to have their way, just as we will have to address a similar problem in the case of the impeachment. Totem and Taboo provides the necessary clue. The sacrifice is tolerated because it promises to expiate a collective guilt.

In another sense, however, Lear lost a critical subtext of the witchcraft analogy. Following Freud, who portrayed the origins of society as the banding of the brothers against the father, Lear described impeachment as an all-male event. In contrast, female scholars such as Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, and Carol Pateman have demonstrated the central role of gender difference in founding historical moments such as the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and French revolutions, and of the importance of misogyny in sparking the counterrevolution.⁷ In my view, the 1960s were a period of revolutionary social and cultural transgression, akin to that of the great democratic revolutions and undertaken by women along with men. The conservative counter reaction to the 1960s, such as the impeachment, was importantly aimed at women and at Clinton as a man who had aligned himself with women. As in the past, the ultimate if unconscious aim of the counterrevolution was to reestablish the father’s role as enforcer of the incest taboo, the task Clinton was perceived as abrogating in his affair with Lewinsky.

In general, then, it is worth situating the impeachment in the context of the changing meaning of presidential—and paternal—authority. In Roosevelt’s time, the president led the way against a set of sacred shibboleths: the “free” market, the Social Darwinian “laws of nature,” the right of the rich to their riches. Though a patrician, Roosevelt led from “within the group”—industrial workers, blacks, women, ethnics, southern whites, union members, Jews, enlightened businessmen, and the like. In doing so he helped his followers overcome feelings of deference, fears of authority, and systematically weakened self-esteem. The results were the almost revolutionary changes brought about by the New Deal. In the 1960s, the executive branch of government became the focal point for a new series of struggles—against racism, sexism, and homophobia—which both continued and diverged from the economic struggles of the previous epoch. A new leadership had to preserve the gains made in the New Deal era as well as repudiate additional shibboleths, for example the naturalness of a particular family norm. However, this task was complicated by a basic difference between the 1930s and the 1960s. Whereas the New Deal was the democratic response to a unifying national project, namely Fordist industrialization, democratic leaders since the 1960s have had to seek support among globalized social forces that often pushed against one another. Globalization actually intensified the focus on a symbolic private sphere in which the struggle between social forces seemed to be enacted. As a result, the attack against presidential authority—to which Clinton irresponsibly opened himself—and the scapegoating of Clinton as a symbol of sixties’ culture converged. Or so I shall argue in what follows.

Before Roosevelt’s inauguration as president in 1933, the national government, as V. O. Key later noted, “had been a remote authority with a limited range of activity. It operated the postal system, improved rivers and harbors, [and] maintained armed forces on a scale fearsome only to banana republics [sic].”⁸ The New Deal transformed it into an active and powerful collection of offices, comprising about one-third of the national economy, able to intervene in unparalleled ways in institutions that were defined as private, but which were actually organized through tradition, the market, and the corporations.⁹ The presidency was the pivot of this change. Three aspects of the transformed presidency were particularly important for understanding the Republican drive against Clinton.

First, the New Deal freed the presidency from party control, by basing the president’s new powers on direct (i.e., charismatic) communication with the masses, and on command of a vast bureaucracy. Early twentieth century presidents, notably Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, certainly enhanced presidential authority, especially in the sphere of foreign affairs. But only with the New Deal, did the president, the focus of mass aspirations, replace Congress, the seat of party organization, in initiating and framing legislation. The budget became the instrument of national planning, and the party system began to decline. Franklin Roosevelt actually ran against his own party members when they opposed his program, thus trying to turn the national Democratic party into an ideological party—the “party of liberalism,” as he called it.¹⁰ By the time he left office the presidency had been transformed into a unique synthesis of popular rule and administrative power.¹¹

Second, the president’s new authority helped legitimate an enormously expanded sense of entitlement. In 1935, a recent immigrant, Mrs. Olga Ferk, wrote to President Roosevelt complaining that she had been mistreated at her relief station, was only $19 behind in her government H.O.L.C. mortgage payments, not three months as accused, and that her son’s Civilian Conservation Corps check was always late in arriving. “How long is this rotten condition going to last?” Mrs. Ferk demanded. “I am at the end of the rope. The rich get richer and the poor can go to -H- that is what it looks like to me. … Let’s have some results.” Mrs. Ferk’s assumption that the national government owed her family relief, a mortgage, and employment was as unprecedented as her letter, which reflected a new, personal relation to the president.¹² In fact, before 1933, one person handled all the White House mail. By 1945 there were fifty. Of course, the presidency empowered groups as well as individuals. The great mass-production union organizing drives of the 1930s—steel, rubber, oil, electricity, autos—proceeded under the slogan “the President wants you to join a union.”

Finally, the New Deal tended to promote a pluralist and secular presidency. Before the New Deal, American politics, culture, and especially reform were deeply Protestant. Even the progressive reformers of the early twentieth century were preoccupied with individual virtue and vice. The New Deal, by contrast, substantially based on Catholic and Jewish ethnic voters, was essentially secular in its orientation.¹³ Often misdescribed as technocratic or “pragmatic,” it elevated universal, secular ideals, such as freedom from want or (later) international justice, over moralizing, quasi-Protestant slogans, such as the progressive era’s “beloved community.”¹⁴ Among Roosevelt’s first acts was the repeal of the quintessential progressive moral reform, namely prohibition. The Republican attack on the presidency and on the sense of popular entitlement was also an attack on freedom of religion, the original source of all liberalism.

In spite of the New...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: DEMOCRACY AND PRESIDENTIALISM
• Part 2: BODILY IMAGINARIES AND SEXUAL PRACTICES
• Part 3: FANTASIES OF RACE, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY
• Part 4: FEMINISM AND SEXUAL POLITICS
• Part 5: ETHICS AND MORALITY
• Contributors