Dean Mathiowetz - Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and the Shaping of Political Agency

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Mathiowetz, Dean, 1972

Appeals to interest : language, contestation, and the shaping of political agency /

Dean Mathiowetz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: Explores the theoretical and political implications of self-interest within the context of neoliberal political, theoretical, and methodological imperativesProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-271-04850-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Self-interestPolitical aspects.

2. Political psychology.

I. Title.

JA74.5.M38 2011

320.01'9dc22

2010039084

Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of
the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.481992.

This book is printed on Natures Natural, which contains 50% post-consumer waste.

Thomas Franks 2004 best seller, Whats the Matter with Kansas? spoke to the puzzlement of many Democratic voters regarding the ability of the Republicans to win the votes of people who were harmed financially by GOP policies.1 Frank claims that white and rural working- and middle-class Kansansand their counterparts in states whose electoral votes are up for grabsact against their interests when they support Republican candidates at the polls. The power of Republicans to induce these folks to vote against their interests seemed, to many observers, a formidable barrier to the pursuit of better economic and social policies for all Americans.2 Frank points to the culture war that began with Nixon, and then to the galvanization of abortion opponents in Wichita in the early 1990s, to explain this subversion of interest. This political development was fatefully turned to the advantage of the Right when the Democratic Leadership Council began to drop planks of economic benefit to the middle class from the party platform. All of these developments, he says, turned the politics of this country upside down.3 Turning politics right side up again, as Frank sees it, means restoring rationality by convincing voters to attend to their bottom line when calculating how to spend their votesgetting them to act, once again, in their interests.

While the cultural turn played out in American politics and academic disciplines over several decades, the financial crisis of fall 2008 also brought the centrality of interest to economy and government into sharp relief, and again interest became a puzzle. In the wake of cascading bank failures, the demise of Wall Street giant Bear Stearns, and an unprecedented government bailout of financial institutions like the American Insurance Group, Alan Greenspan testified before the House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform on October 23, 2008. Greenspans thousand-word statement addressed several areas of concern, but just twenty-five of those words became the sound bite that was played and replayed across the news media. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equitymyself especially, he said, are in a state of shocked disbelief. With these words, Greenspan registered the degree to which the primacy of self-interest had been an article of faith among policymakers, as well as a linchpin of finance capitalism, while at the same time attesting to its fallibilityan admission all the more notable coming from a self-professed disciple of Ayn Rand. This potent morsel was mostly ignored by the Right, but was greeted by a chorus of self-satisfaction by a few left commentators in the media and academia. To these latter critics, Greenspans confession exposed the fundamental bankruptcy at the heart of neoclassical economics and the neoliberal free-market policy prescriptions that had defined American policymaking since Ronald Reagan.