Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America

William Chaloupka
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999
240 pp., $25.95 hc

Tim Lehman
History
Rocky Mountain College

That cynicism is the dominant feature of contemporary American politics is a truism of the conventional wisdom of our age. Yet there is little agreement about the causes of or solutions to this rampant cynicism. William Chaloupka's Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America is an insightful, but uneven contribution to explaining why we are in this mess and what, if anything, is to be done. Although Chaloupka touches on the classical origins of cynicism in Diogenes and finds in James Madison's "Federalist Paper Number Ten" a cynical foundation for American politics, most of the book focuses on cynicism in recent decades.

Chaloupka's best chapters describe the pervasiveness of cynicism in recent electoral politics, the growth of a popular politics of resentment (by which he means a knee-jerk hostility towards government), and the prevalence of cynicism in the popular culture of politics. He contends that during the late twentieth century "belief depleted suddenly," and therefore that traditional political faith in community and nation is no longer perceived as a credible way to organize political life (18).

According to Chaloupka, President Richard Nixon played a crucial role in the development of this politics of resentment by moving policy to the left even as he pushed politics to the right. This strategy of enlarging the powers of government while simultaneously manipulating antigovernment rhetoric created an atmosphere that fostered the "jumbled, postrationalist, unreal aesthetic of weird causation and bent social dynamics" that Chaloupka calls "wig" cynicism (46). This cynicism is like the Star Trek's Borg, absorbing all that it comes in contact with and constantly enlarging its empire, as the "cynics-in-power" (27) manipulate the public who in turn come to expect this and interpret politics with increasing cynicism. This is the natural home of talk radio, conspiracy theories run amok, militia movements, and finally the Oklahoma City bombings. Thus Rush Limbaugh represents "the Republican wager, riding since Nixon, that resentment and cynicism can be harnessed to defeat Democrats and move politics to the right. In the rubble of Oklahoma City, we saw clearly the downside of that wager" (52).

Chaloupka's line from Nixon to Timothy McVeigh may seem too direct, but this is typical of Chaloupka's tendency to work by flashes of insight more than sustained argument. At its best, Chaloupka's analysis forces one to reconsider an accepted version of events and perhaps even have that flash of understanding that comes from the sudden juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated ideas. His most frequent rhetorical strategy is to explain what "everybody knows," only to unmask what he perceives as the inadequacies of the popular view.

But throughout the book the evidence is sketchy, the analysis tends to be one-sided, and the interpretation sometimes wears a little thin once the initial insight wears off. In this sense the book is partial and evocative rather than complete and authoritative. Like the media it describes, the book values the sentence over the paragraph, the sound-bite over the exhaustive argument. The book is more like a series of provocative essays, connected by theme, than a sustained scholarly interpretation of recent American political culture.

For instance, Chaloupka is no doubt correct that contemporary cynicism owes something to this "Republican wager," and a strength of his approach is to see cynicism as the connecting fiber between manipulative elites and disillusioned citizens. However, the serious work that would link the ideology or strategy of McVeigh to Limbaugh to Nixon is not present in this work. (Curiously understated in this analysis is attention to the role of President Reagan in perpetuating this Republican strategy.) Neither is there as much attention to the excesses of the left as to the excesses of the right. Chaloupka does discuss Clinton as a master practitioner of the cynical, and mentions "the serious feminist claim that the personal is political" as one source of our current fixation on the private lives of public figures, but he does not develop this angle of criticism. In some instances, Chaloupka's juxtapositions, upon reflection, appear more as unsubstantiated leaps of logic than genuine insight. When Michigan Militia spokesman Norman Olsen accused Senator Arlen Specter of being a "clever attorney," was this really a "familiar anti-Semitic code" (152)? Is it reasonable to conclude a discussion of militia movements with the claim that they represent "the energetic pursuit of resentment politics, set off by a generation of conservative cynics who learned their craft from Richard Nixon" (154)?

In Chaloupka's treatment, cynicism is a slippery concept, difficult to pin down precisely. He defines cynicism as "condition of lost belief" which is "rooted in a rejection of shared moral commitment" (6). Yet cynicism is larger than attitude or belief; Chaloupka also describes cynicism as a "world view" (10) and a "permanent condition of culture" (212). It absorbs criticism and cannot be easily rebuked. Chaloupka skillfully describes the cynicism of the Clinton Administration, the campaigns of George Bush (1988 and 1992), and the editorializing of George Will. Chaloupka casts such a wide analytical net that it is hard to know from reading this book what, if anything, is not cynicism. I found unpersuasive his portrayal of Colin Powell as a cynic because "he went along" (37) with military orders in the Persian Gulf, carrying out a military campaign of which he did not approve. Was Powell a cynic or merely a good soldier? Another example of his exaggerated claims is his contention that "journalists are our archetypal cynics" because they "doubt the word of nearly everyone they contact" (101). This confuses a healthy professional skepticism, a fact-checking impulse that not all journalists share, with the genuine cynicism of much campaign reporting which treats every idea as merely another tactic in the election game. In other words Chaloupka defines cynicism so broadly that his argument loses its analytical precision and becomes frustratingly vague.

For my tastes, I would like to see cynicism defined with more attention to both time and place. Chaloupka rightly describes cynicism as a recent phenomenon, but he could be more specific about the reasons for this historical trend. Where is the Vietnam War, for instance, with its "credibility gap" and widespread loss of confidence in American institutions both left and right? Chaloupka mentions that "since the end of the Cold War, Americans have become acutely aware" of cynicism (xii), but he does not follow up on this connection between the demise of the perception of imminent foreign danger and the unleashing of domestic discontent. Nor does he explain sufficiently how the politics of resentment, which from at least the French Revolution through Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was a left-wing phenomenon, was captured by the right, how the politics of resentment came to defend privilege while attacking the left as privileged. Also useful in this context would be international comparison, placing recent American cynicism in global context of the rise of conservative governments in the late twentieth century. How did cynicism play in Thatcher's England? Are Americans more or less cynical, more or less disaffected from government, than post-Soviet Russians? If cynicism in America generates conditions that lead to terrorism, was cynicism part of the brew which concocted the recent embassy bombings in African nations? Or is American cynicism genuinely "singular" as Chaloupka claims and is this then a circuitous argument for American exceptionalism?

If Chaloupka's political analysis sometimes lacks depth, his insights on the politics of popular culture are sometimes enlightening, even brilliant. One of the best chapters in the book is his treatment of television's influence on the growth of cynical politics. He explains how the medium by its very nature claims to be the ultimate in empiricism, how the instantaneous delivery of actual pictures of distant events "amount to a claim that TV represents reality" in a purer form than any other media (104). Walter Cronkite, the quintessential news anchor, could end each broadcast with the tag line, "And that's the way it is" (104). Even criticisms of television, Chaloupka maintains, usually get "stuck in a rut of moral judgment" and ask mainly that television do a better job of presenting reality, without realizing that "television is constructing realities, and a struggle is on over those constructions" (107).

Chaloupka saves some of his harshest criticism not for cynics, but for the communitarian "values talk" which presents itself as an antidote to cynicism. Every chapter criticizes the inadequacies of a return to civic belief, and every argument can't resist taking some digs at communitarians. The problem with the "civility solution," Chaloupka argues, is that it asks citizens in neighborhoods and churches to solve a problem which elites in politics and government created (218). The civility solution, Chaloupka argues, "describes an insider rhetoric but does little to destabilize the advantage of those who rule, who can cynically use the rhetoric of civility or community" (182). At community meetings, he wittingly remarks, "lunch is usually good; but privilege is what is actually served" (23).

Still one wonders why Chaloupka does not analyze left-wing communitarian thinking, why he claims Martin Luther King, Jr., as "last great civic preacher" but denies the chance that civic preaching might have a role in contemporary politics. Chaloupka's solution instead is honest, contentious, democratic political argument, but he doesn't explore how this might be consistent with some understandings of civil discourse.

Not all cynicism is misplaced, and Chaloupka invents a questionable category for the good cynic, the "profound jokers" who destabilize power, prick the pompous, and form a tradition since Diogenes of "satirical resistance." Chaloupka calls this, from the classical Greek, a Kynic, and the list of examples includes Randy Newman, Robin Williams, Oliver Stone, Abbie Hoffman, and Humphrey Bogart. Arlo Guthries's "Alice's Restaurant" is, for Chaloupka, a "kynic masterpiece" (194). Although Chaloupka admits that kynics can be conservative or liberal, nearly all his examples are from the left and so serve to confirm his own perspective. The kynic, he maintains, challenges the rational center by making the form of the protest as important as the content. The kynic, because he does not defend wealth, power, or privilege, "destabilizes power in a way that values talk cannot accomplish" (182). The kynicism of the powerless is very different than the cynicism of the powerful.

With this defense of a generation of countercultural heroes, its almost as if Chaloupka is trying to explain what was right about the '60s, and how the counterculture was blindsided by the politics of resentment from the cynical right. Indeed, Chaloupka says of the kynic, "boomer culture...deserves better" (225). Chaloupka invents a dispossessed kynic-hero to justify boomer culture, but at the same time overlooks the undeniable privilege inherent in the position of university professor, filmmaker, or movie star, countercultural or otherwise.


Contents | Home