Clinton and the Id Peter Gabe! ne of the most interesting aSpects of the recent presidential campaign was the failure of any of the conventional right-wing assaults on Bill Clinton to affect his ratings in the polls or, ultimately, the election. The Republicans repeatedly invoked many of the same images that had worked for the last twelve years?m such as patriotism, family values, and God?and sought to pOrtray Clinton as someone who would undermine the sense of community conveyed in these images. This draft dodger, this ?demonstrator on foreign soil, this woman- izer, this husband of an ?unfeminine? woman, this slick friend of the cultural elites (who don?t care about our country or our families)?whatever they tried had no ef~ feet and even backfired, as if peOple were reSponding with, ?come on, we don?t care about this Stuff. Since the creation of these conservative images of com~ munity had played a major role in the rise and success of the New Right, it?s fair to ask why they failed to move people this time. The conventional answer is that ?all peOple cared about was the economy. But this answer can?t be right. First, economic realities never Speak for themselves?their political importance is always deter- mined by the set of meanings peeple give to them. When Reaganomics led to a first big surge in unemployment and increased poverty in late 1981 and early 1982, economistic Democrats thought that the normal losses the presidential party faces in off-year elections would be greatly intensified in 1982. What they missed was that the energy and excitement generated by Reagan's ?revo- lution? had sufficiently gripped the minds of the public that they wouldn?t allow ?economic facts? to turn them against the Republicans. It is the social meaning that peo- ple give to the economic facts that determine elections? and this has more to do with the flow of energy than with the lifeless statistics that were available to Democratic candidates before Clinton. Secondaand more important?it is never true that all people care about is the economy. People care about connecting with others and come to life through this Peter Gabe! is Associate Editor ofTiltltun, president of ew allege of California, and a rarember oftbe Democratic Central Comrm'tz'ce ofSan Francisco. 10 kind of connection, and politics always is significantly about this aSpect of human desire, about its potential realization and repression. It is this erotic aspect of pol- itics that accounts for Clinton?s victory, not because Clin- ton is ?attractive? in some superficial sense, but because he was able to be the carrier of a hopeful ?opening up to each other? that peOple were ready to affirm again. Peeple were not ready to affirm this impulse in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was first elected because they were traumatized by the combination of the erotic energy re- leased by the sixties and the violent, dislocating craziness that had accompanied it. The sudden feeling of being alive that swept the planet during those amazing years overwhelmed the capacity of dominant institutions to perform their major function?to cool out the movement of desire in the service of ?alienation-management. We may not remember so well what it felt like to be alive in that way now that we?ve endured twenty years of con- centrated cultural assault aimed at convincing us that we weren?t really there, that all that happened was the bad parts, the excesses, the ways in which we were immature, the ways in which our ideals exceeded our level of indi- vidual and collective develOpment. But for a while we did experience a rupture of the world?s normal, numbed-out surface and had a radically different glimpse of what so- cial connection might be like beyond the paranoia and alienation that has held humanity in its grip for much of human history. Unfortunately, as the id broke through the ego?s retaining walls, giving us a taste of pleasure, ecstasy, and excitement about the possibilities of new forms of human relationships and new depths of human experi- ence, many people reacted with a combination of exhil~ aration and fear?fear that they could not trust and contain the new possibilities, fear that they were not enough to be what they would have to be to live with a new set of truths. As a result of that fear, people attacked, mistreated, and hurt each other?~in politics, sexual rela- tionships, and families?undermining their emerging belief in the possibility of a different world. Through the Spread of a ?rotating doubt" subtly passed from per- son to person, most of us came to feel that what we were experiencing really wasn?t possible, that it was false, and that fear led to an ebbing of energy, and a decrease in "1 the connections that had previously sustained us. The sixties didn?t end?they ebbed away in the seventies as each of us confirmed the doubt in the other and then found ourselves alone, doubting ourselves, losing our confidence that anything had really happened. We be- came susceptible to a societal assault that would reduce the sixties to self-serving draft dodging and mindless drug and music infatuation. Enter Ronald Reagan. Freud said, ?The superego knows more of the wishes of the id than does the ego, by which he meant that conservative, repressive authority?a legacy of our personal and cultural past that we each carry around inside ourselves?is keenly aware of our desire to break on through to the other side and is inge- niously capable of prevent- ing us from doing so. As the sixties began to fade because of the doubt that we ourselves felt about its promise, those grown-ups whose sense of cultural identity and traditional community were most threatened by the sixties formed an alliance with younger people who felt hurt and betrayed by the sixties and harnessed the still-loosed power of desire in the service of a new repression?the New Right. Led by Reagan, the New Right capitalized on our doubt, got control of ?The Force? released by the sixties and turned it against the sixties itself. Freud also made this point?that the superego, which has no energy itself, uses the energy of the id against the id to protect what he called civilization from all hell breaking loose (the standard paranoid fantasy of community). The eighties succeeded in binding the energy of the six- ties within a series of Split repressive images?on the one hand, idealized images of community exemplified by the traditional family, church and nation (?morning in Amer- ica?); on the other, the image of the ?evil empire? against whom our collective rage was to be directed (along with other ?others? like gays, liberals, and the like who?in the realm of the imaginary?were deemed to pose a threat to our idealized community). The disturbing, liberatory en- ergy of the sixties, in other words, was literally converted into its Opposite through the collecrive invention of Ronald Reagan as an idealized and also vengeful father-figure pro- jecting images of an authoritarian, false, and ?safe? com- munity. To give one reminder of the energetic power of this image of authoritarian community, recall the frenzied search for the Original Intent of the Founding Fathers led by Attorney General Ed Meese in the mid-eighties. As I showed in my article ?Founding Father Knows Best? writ- ten at that time, this attribution of hallucinatory power to the ?original? intent of the Fathers above all fathers was part of a symbolic effort to ?cleanse? the Law of the per- missive liberal impulses released by the sixties. Understood in this way, the Reagan revolution should be seen as what Freud called a ?reaction for- mation,? a defense against, and a ruthless denial of, the erotic longings of human de- sire. Unlike the blandness of what we might call bureau- cratic historical periods, the Reagan era was hot and powerful precisely because it converted the social-con- nection energy of the sixties into an anti-sixties wrath and a passionate commit- ment to the purity of the Na- tion, the Family and other alienated images of con? nection, emerging from the McCarthyism and the kitchen?culture of the ?fties, that the sixties sought to challenge. In this sense, Reagan was an erotic figure who bound pe0ple together through the invocation of an authoritarian, imaginary world fueled by the id-energy that the sixties had unleashed. Yet precisely because the binding energy of the New Right was ?false? in the sense that it was based on the re- pression of desire rather than the realization of desire, it was doomed to expire or dissipate. Offering nothing it- self to the real human need for love, confirmation, and community, its energy was parasitic on the energy it sought to crush. And I think when Reagan left office in 1988, we all began to feel the erotic bind of the New Right weaken, even though Bush was able to win by adapting Reagan?s imagery (the Flag vs. Willie Horton) to his kinder and gentler perSOna. Beginning in 1988, we began to float as a country, unmoored from both the liberatory energy of the sixties and the antilibidinal power of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Oliver North, and those Founding Fathers who slipped back into their actual place in the past. As the cultural id let go of the convulsive struggle between the sixties and the eighties, people began to lose CLINTON AND ma In 11 . interest in the supposed original intent of long-dead men or the kind of patriotic bond offered by Oliver North. It was in this ?floating Space? that the recent presi- dential campaign began, and it is quite possible that George Bush might have ridden the inert images of the New Right to power; the election might have been a bland extension of the status quo while the id within us?by which I mean the powerful desire for social con nection and confirmation?simply waited for its next historical opportunity, like waiting to find a lover dur- ing a period of drift and solitude. But, Bill ClintOn emerged from whoever he had been (recall the unbe- lievably boring speech at the 1988 Democratic conven- tion) to seize the opening created by the dissipation of the energy of the New Right. While the Right proceeded to exaggerate its increasingly lifeless images of its ver- sion of our social bond, Clinton stepped up to the plate to reclaim American society in the name of the long?dor- mant generation of the sixties. To accomplish this, he had to both manifest a mature version of the erotic power of the sixties and dissolve the energy blockage that had been the political legacy of the failure of the sixties?the blockage created by the politics of ?coercive deference? to special interest groups that had come to dominate the Democratic Party and the Left. As 1 showed in the last issue, the originally liberatory and po- tentially universal appeal of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the other transformative elements of the thirties and sixties had settled?mainly as a result of the self-doubt I referred to earlier?into a collection of bitter and angry demands for more rights and benefits against an ?outside authority? that was refusing to suffi- ciently recognize the victim-Status of these groups. This process, which had originally been reflected direcrly in countless organizations and meetings in the seventies, in which white ?middle-class? idealists had been neutered and driven away by their politically correct, interest-group counterparts, had come to characterize the public politics of the Democratic Party and the Left in the eighties. We had these white grown-ops from our parents? gener- ation?Carter, Mondale, Dukakis?trying to ?lead? a col- lection of groups to whom they were forced to defer and who therefore, quite understandably, held them in con- tempt. The crazy, denunciatory aspect of the sixties pro- duced this form of impotent civility in the mass politics of the late seventies and eighties, a hOpeless politics of blocked energy, resentment, and inauthenticity that could not possibly unite peOple with constructive passion. Clinton had the courage and smarts to cut this Gor- dian knot by publicly and politely repudiating Sister Souljah and in other ways indicating that he would not ritually defer to the victimized anger of interest groups in order to get votes. In so doing, he became what none 12 TIKKUN VOL. No. 6 of his recent, neutered, predecessors could become?a source of power and energy that could enable whites, Blacks, union members, and yuppies to get turned on to- gether about reclaiming the world from the pathological eros of the Right. By cutting through the politics of guilt- based, self-denying deference?and by combining this with the expressiveness, youth, and saxophone power of the now grown-up sixties generation??he enabled us to reenter public space and rediscover each other. Against this reemergent but less crazy force of the sixties, the old right-wing appeals to the id seemed like the phobic Sput- terings of a dying generation. At the Republican con- vention, Marilyn Quayle made an admirable attempt to win the battle for the sixties by asserting that ?not all of us participated in the sexual revolution ?-?-meaning: not all of us gave in to that exhilarating sense of connection that produced, and can only produce, betrayal, pain, and loss. But Clinton had already defeated this_attempt to in- validate the sixties precisely by repudiating the destruc- tive dynamics that had emerged from the contradictions of the sixties and providing a safe way back into politics for peOple who remembered what was good about that time and the ways in which we were right. ow we will see if in our adult years we can be- gin to build the confidence in our transforma- tive aspirations that we could not do twenty years ago. One of the most important symbolic aspects of Clinton?s insistent focus on the economy during the campaign was that it demonstrated an attentiveness to improving people?s real lives that contrasted with the Rights increasingly hollow fantasies of community. In this sense, focusing on the economy meant caring about people and creating real community, while ?family val- ues? meant denying the pain in people?s real lives and exhorting peOple to keep believing in the expired im- ages of the Reagan years. But for our generation?s com- ing to power to be a true extension of the Spirit of the sixties, Clinton and all of us supporting him must not let his economic rhetoric lose its communitarian quality and become a set of technocratic formulas and slogans. If that happens, we will lose the Spiritual Opportunity that this victory represents and set the stage for new id- based forces of reaction led, perhaps, by the passionate and compelling Jack Kemp. So let's have four years guided by saxophone power and the passion of a politics of meaning rather than the professional, moderately progressive reformism that can?t engage pe0ple?s life force and will set us up for fail- ure. We need to join Clint0n, embrace our generation?s second chance, and pull him with us toward what still remains true and deep about the liberatory visions we once dared to hold.