J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization Like all variants of democratic politics, populism is constitutively aesthetic. But populism is aesthetic in a particular sense. As I argued in the first installment of this suite of essays (“Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance,” REAL 34, 2018), populism is driven by the fantasy of a type of representation that paradoxically represents itself as non-representation, i.e., as an unmediated presence and fulfillment of the popular will in the representative. Liberal democracy normally insists on the ineluctable difference between representative and represented, though on the campaign trail that difference tends to get elided for purposes of mobilization. Populist democracy, on the other hand, consistently denies that difference. It installs the logic of campaigning as the foundation of democratic politics, and it does so through recourse to a particular set of aesthetic strategies. These strategies are designed to equip the idea of the representative (the elected leader) embodying the represented (the voters, and by extension “the people”) with a palpable sense of reality. Crucial for the populist aesthetic is the creation of a particular kind of “space of appearance” (Arendt)—exemplified, in my analysis, by the political rally—in which the unity of representative and represented can be experienced by performative means. As I emphasized in part I, these performative stagings of unity are extraordinarily unstable and run the risk of losing intensity to a point where the performance becomes experienced as the failure of the populist community to pick up momentum and take shape. This is because the experience of unmediated unity hinges on a call-and-response structure between representative and represented that cannot fully be programmed beforehand but rather relies on improvisational techniques. Hence, rallies by Donald Trump are characterized by a dynamic that differs quite drastically from the soundbites and snippets usually seen in the coverage of those rallies on the news: they are characterized by a series of cycles of (sometimes dramatically) rising and falling intensity. This dynamic is so central to these events that Trump often self-reflexively thematizes it, for instance by commenting on the aesthetic qualities of his slogans and the responses they elicit. I concluded the first part of “Toward an Aesthetic of Populism” with a reflection on the normative import of describing the rally as a “space of appearance.” Insofar as the rally is designed to produce moments of felt unity, it contradicts the Arendtian notion of a democratic space of appearance as marked by a plurality of perspectives necessary for the co-creation of a shared world of interest. But during the actual political performance of the rally, these moments of unity cannot be taken for granted, and the rally 262 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger may in fact be most precisely characterized by the incongruity of the parties involved. From that point of view, the populist rally can indeed be said to resemble a democratic space of appearance—but only so long as it fails to achieve its goal of creating the experience of an undifferentiated unity of representative and represented. Extending the argument proffered in part I, I add that in contrast to the democratic space of appearance theorized by Hannah Arendt, the rally does not lend itself to any kind of reasoned argument on the basis of (aesthetic) judgment—even if one focuses on its phases of incongruity and plurality. Rather, populist non-identity is expressed affectively. In the affective language of populist performance, dissent and rejection are not expressed by saying “No! ” or by any form of reasoned disagreement. They are expressed by silence and, ultimately, by absenting oneself from the public space. The Rally as Emblem of the Politico-Aesthetic Order In creating a space for affect-driven non-identity that strives for affective unity, the rally is not so much a special sphere that lies outside of, or adjacent to, the public sphere. Rather, I contend that the rally encapsulates a politicoaesthetic order in which attendees actively, vocally, and improvisationally participate, but in which there is no room for the articulation of dissenting positions, nor for any form of compromise. In other words, I claim that the performative aesthetics of the rally figures what the political sphere as such is in the process of becoming today. To say that we live in a populist moment does not just mean that our moment is characterized by populist politicians like Trump, or that a sizeable portion of the population is open to populist messages, but that no matter which political positions we may hold, we are more and more doing politics in the manner of the rally. To make sense of this argument, it is crucial to understand the rally as a polarizing public form that is embedded in a polarized culture. This allows us to see the rally both as a condensed microcosm of tendencies that increasingly structure the political sphere and as an engine of the cultural logic of polarization. This second installment of “Toward an Aesthetics of Populism” will therefore shift from an analysis of the rally to the larger problem of the aesthetics of polarization. I will effect that transition by way of a brief analysis of the polarizing function of the rally itself. When the interaction between representative and represented in the populist rally is aiming for the momentary creation of a sense of unity, that interaction does not simply constitute a dialogue between the politician and his base. It is a dialogue between these two parties in reference to a third party, whose identity fluctuates between various kinds of internal enemies (including the political opponent, minorities, etc.). Adapting a distinction Ernesto Laclau makes between different kinds of demands made by populist movements, we can say that the populist community comes into being by way of performative acts that are alternately “particularistic” and “totalizing” (see Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 263 Laclau 39). In both “particularistic” and “totalizing” performative acts, “the people” are defined against the elites. This identity construction vis-à-vis the elites proceeds by the drawing of what Laclau calls an “internal frontier” without which “there is no emergence of a popular subjectivity” (38). But within this overall mechanism of performative identity construction with the help of an internal frontier, we can distinguish between those performative acts in which the unity aspired to between leader and followers is figured as the unity of “the people” (these are the acts I call “totalizing” or “universalistic”) and those acts in which the collective comes into being in contradistinction to a part of the people who are treated, not unlike the elites, as the populist community’s opponent (these acts I call “particularistic”). In the latter case, the shared opponent logically does not coincide with the elites needed to construct the internal frontier. Whereas the elites are constructed as external to the people, the opponent in the second case is uneasily recognized as belonging to the people, if only illegitimately so. Nadia Urbinati ingeniously captures this particularistic logic by calling it “pars pro parte: ” In extreme cases, populism in power attempts to constitutionalize “its majority” by dissociating “the people” from any pretense to impartiality and staging the identification of a part (the “good” part) with the ruler representing it (pars pro parte) instead. (Urbinati, Me the People 94) Whereas for Urbinati the particularistic identification stands at the center of populism (at least of populism in power), I suggest that it is overlaid with the universalist (or totalizing) logic of pars pro toto. In one moment, the populist community is a part of the people, in the next it is its entirety. Or, even more concretely, in one instance, the attendees of the rally stand only for the better part of America, and in the next instance, they stand for America itself. In the former case, the opponent is acknowledged, in the latter it is denied. The constitution of the populist community in reference to an other is facilitated by the presence of that other in the space of appearance. Hence Trump’s references to the journalists of the mainstream media positioned in the back of the venue, or the calculated appearance of protestors and hecklers from the opposite political camp (a tactic that had already been used by George Wallace). But as the Trump phenomenon demonstrates, evoking an other does not just construct and consolidate the populist community; it also constructs and consolidates that other from the perspective of the other itself. Trump is polarizing not only in the sense that he manages to rally a base that defines itself against the (allegedly illegitimate) rest of the country; in doing so, he also rallies the rest of the country against him and his base. This is what makes the populist a polarizing figure. It is not only Trump supporters who are enthralled by him. Those who loathe him cannot take their eyes and ears off him either. They, too, love the dynamics of the populist performative aesthetic, the booing and cheering, and booing and cheering for their booing and cheering. It is in that wider sense that the rally is in the process of becoming our political sphere. 264 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger These Polarized States of America When we say that populism flourishes, we thus mean more than that the ideology or preferred style of one particular segment of political society turns populist. We rather point to a logic and aesthetic that takes hold of society at large. Put differently, the constitution of the populist community happens by way of performative acts that create a relational structure between two halves of society. Populism takes hold when the relational antagonism of the two halves becomes recognized by both camps, so that each half recognizes the other as opponent or enemy and, as a corollary, is reluctant to accord the other half legitimacy. In tying populism to polarization this closely, the question emerges how current populism relates to the history of polarization in the United States—and, more fundamentally, in what sense the United States can be accurately described as polarized at all. While it has become commonplace to describe the United States as polarized, political science research is less than unanimous about the extent and time frame of polarization. Yet, major recent studies, published since 2016, have produced accounts that tend to agree on the major outline of the story of polarization in the United States. That story will serve as background to the analysis of the contemporary aesthetics of polarization. Very little controversy has ensued over findings that postulate political polarization among political elites, meaning elected officials, candidates, and activists. Major studies conducted in recent decades have shown that Congress has become increasingly structured by partisanship since the party realignment of the late 1960s (Andris et al.; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal; Campbell; Abramowitz). Political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who later also collaborated with Nolan McCarty, have developed the so-called DW- Nominate to track the voting behavior of members of Congress and quantitatively chart their position on the political spectrum. They do so by tracking how often individual members of Congress have voted with members of the other party, thus arriving at a measure that moves from centrist to partisan. This measure does not proceed by designating particular ideological issues as either centrist or partisan; it is rather a strictly relational measure of voting behavior. Moreover, by considering all roll call votes in U.S. Congress between 1879 and 2015, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal have recorded changes in partisanship throughout the long twentieth century. The most essential take-away of their research is that between roughly 1900 and 1967, representatives of both parties increasingly voted with members of the other party. In other words, this was a phase in which overall polarization decreased. Since 1967, the trend has reversed among members of both parties, though asymmetrically so. According to DW-Nominate, while the Republican Party is now more polarized than ever before, the Democrats are roughly where they started out in the late nineteenth century. The biggest movement within the Democratic Party has been by its Southern wing. While between 1927 and roughly 1990, Southern Democrats were the least polarized (sub-)party ever—meaning that they voted more often with the members of Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 265 the other party than any either Northern Democrats or Republicans, which is not surprising, given that they fit uneasily into the New Deal coalition—they are now just as polarized as Northern Democrats (though not as polarized as Republicans). But while most scholars agree on the view that the political class has become increasingly polarized, the question to what degree this polarization extends to ordinary Americans is more controversial. Yochai Benkler and his co-authors summarize the debate: “There is less consensus about what has happened to the majority of Americans who are not highly engaged partisans of either party and are not as polarized as the most engaged citizens. Morris Fiorina and his coauthors have been the leading academic voices expressing skepticism over ideological polarization of the broader public” (302). Indeed, Fiorina et al. declare the idea of widespread polarization and the idea of a culture war to be a “myth.” As they write, The myth of a culture war rests on misinterpretation of election returns, a lack of comprehensive examination of public opinion data, systematic and self-serving misrepresentation by issue activists, and selective coverage by an uncritical media more concerned with news value than with getting the story right. There is little evidence that Americans’ ideological or policy positions are more polarized today than they were two or three decades ago, although their choices often seem to be. The explanation is that the political figures Americans evaluate are more polarized. A polarized political class makes the citizenry appear polarized, but it is largely that—an appearance. (Fiorina et al. 9) Fig. 1 Polarization in the U.S. Congress by Party, 1879-2015. Source: https: / / voteviewblog.com/ 2015/ 06/ 10/ more-on-assymmetric-polarization-yes-the-republicans-did-it/ . 266 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger The idea that polarization is a myth, that in everyday life the center does hold, is certainly a charming fantasy, but its implausibility begins with the idea that the political class is delinked from the population, as if politics were not experienced through the media and as such incorporated into the political culture of everyday life. Fiorina and his co-authors neglect to account for processes of collective group-formation and identification via politics (perhaps these processes lie outside the scope of their methods). Moreover, the historical trajectory of polarization—with its moment of reversal located in the South of the late 1960s, when there was a strong reaction to the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Movement—further undermines the idea that it is the political apparatus and a sensationalist press alone that create the false impression of a polarized society. Rather, the results of the DW-Nominate suggest that the predictions made by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, have proved accurate. Phillips, whose assessment was taken to heart by Richard Nixon in devising the Southern Strategy, interpreted the 1968 presidential election as the beginning of a “conservative cycle” that was the result of the backlash to the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Movement. As Phillips put it: “The Negrophobe Deep South and modern Outer South simultaneously abandoned the Democratic Party. And before long, the conservative cycle thus begun ought to witness movement of congressional, state and local Southern Democrats into the ascending Republican Party” (36). In fact, Phillips did not innocently foretell the future of anti-black and anti-progressive backlash, but rather operated in a political context that actively courted political polarization in terms of racial or ethnic polarization. He did so on the basis of the conviction that “ethnic polarization is a longstanding hallmark of American politics, not an unprecedented and menacing development of 1968” (470). “Phillips,” concludes historian Dan Carter, “urged his party to work vigorously to maintain and expand black voting rights in the South, not as a moral issue, but because it would hasten the transfer of whites—north and south—to the Republican Party” (Carter 379). John Mitchell, Phillip’s mentor and boss, even propagated the “positive polarization” of American politics, i.e., a type of polarization that would give Republicans “more than fifty percent of the voters once the electorate was divided into warring camps” (379). The basis of Phillips’s analysis was not that the electorate would follow political elites, but vice versa: the political process would come to reflect the widely held resentment among whites of the civil rights struggle and its embrace by the Democratic Party. This chain of causality has been supported by political scientist James Campbell in his recent study Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, first published in 2016. Campbell claims that “the electorate is and has been highly polarized since the late 1960s” (41), but it took the political parties time to catch up. “Polarization of the parties, in the electorate and among elites, seems to have developed [not until] the late 1970s and into the 1980s” (48). Campbell, in fact, is so keen on severing the two processes of polarization—one among the electorate, the other among Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 267 political elites—that he tends to fall prey to the same conceptual mistakes made by Fiorina, only from the opposite direction. Like Fiorina, he indirectly suggests that polarization in the wider population and polarization among political elites can be logically and practically distinguished from each other. More convincing in this regard is the work of political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who rejects the idea that the polarization of political elites and that of the larger public can be kept apart. He arrives at this position by rejecting another opposition, namely the distinction between sorting and polarization (held, among others, by Fiorina). By “sorting,” political scientists refer to the coalescence of ideological positions of voters and their party choice. In a well-sorted system, voters identify their own political convictions correctly with the party representing that position; they moreover adopt a whole set of positions in line with the issue packages represented by each party, so that “liberal” becomes synonymous with “Democrat” and “conservative” with “Republican.” “Polarization,” by contrast, refers to the extremity of the positions held by the electorate and of the views represented by the parties on a scale from centrist to extreme. In theory, it is possible to imagine a perfectly sorted political landscape (in which the views of each voter neatly correspond to the package of positions offered by one of the parties) in such a way that the positions shared by voter and party platform are predominantly centrist. Abramowitz contends, however, that in practice “sorting and polarization are almost always indistinguishable” (Abramowitz 101). His analysis of American political history since the party realignment of the late 1960s confirms this: Since the early 1970s, Democrats have shifted to the left, Republicans have shifted even further to the right, and the overall distribution has shifted away from the center and toward the two ends. These shifts are very similar to those seen among members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during the same period, although the shifts in Congress have been somewhat larger. Nevertheless, the evidence shows very clearly that for both groups, sorting and polarization are very closely connected. As Democrats and Republicans in the electorate and in Congress have sorted themselves across the ideological divide, they have simultaneously moved away from the center. (104) One of the reasons for the confluence of sorting and polarization—which takes place on the sides of both the electorate and the political elites—is the principal change in the mode in which polarization (and sorting) takes place. While political scientists for a long time approached polarization primarily with reference to political issues and more abstract convictions dubbed “ideology” by political scientists, Abramowitz argues that polarization over the last decades has increasingly become a matter of voters’ affective identification with their party and candidate of choice. And not only does political identification work through increasingly strong affective attachments to party or candidate; even more important has become the strong dislike of the other side—what Abramowitz calls “negative partisanship” (109): “Large proportions of Democrats and Republicans,” he explains, “now dislike the opposing party more than they like their own” (164). In this combination of 268 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger strong affective identification with the candidate of choice and even more strongly felt negative partisanship, the polarization of candidates gets shortcircuited with the polarization of voters: “The polarized evaluations of candidates seen in 2012 require both polarized candidate choices and polarized voter positions on issues and ideology” (112). While political science scholarship based on polling, roll-call tracking and similar quantitative techniques is useful in giving us an idea of the extent to which voters have indeed become polarized, there are shortcomings to this kind of positivistic research: it cannot arrive at a theoretical explanation of the dynamics of polarization but ultimately stays limited to evidence-based statements about whether and how polarization has taken place. Only on the basis of a theoretical approach, however, does it become possible to explain why polarization can be regarded a phenomenon characteristic of democracy, how it relates to populism, and why polarization takes particular forms of cultural expression. For this reason, we will treat the findings of the political science scholarship on processes of affective polarization and negative partisanship as the occasion to think through the relation between democracy and polarization. Envy in America, or Tocqueville’s Democratic Passions When Alexis de Tocqueville, at the outset of Democracy in America (1835/ 1840), points to the “equality of conditions” as the defining characteristic of (American) democratic society, he does not have in mind actually existing equality among members of society, but rather a post-rank legal constellation in which citizens are nominally equal (4). Throughout both volumes of Democracy, Tocqueville traces various tendencies that grow out of the equality of conditions, including the character of everyday social behavior, forms and traits of cultural expression, and a particular set of feelings. Because he consistently—at times even single-mindedly—ties back his observations to the post-feudal conditions exemplified by the United States, his work continues to have heuristic potential for conceptualizing the cultural and political dynamics of (U.S.) democratic society. This, we shall argue, is true also for populism, which can be reconstructed, with Tocqueville, as a ramification of the affective consequences of democratic nominal equality. Tocqueville is writing about the United States as a French aristocrat who sees democracy as the future fate of his own nation. He does so with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he shares classical misgiving about democracy (inherited from political theory reaching back to antiquity) and particularly worries that it will turn into a “tyranny of the majority”—an idea that resonates with classical fears of “mob rule” and that was commonly discussed in debates about the U.S. Constitution. On the other hand, he admires how Americans have kept their democracy from reverting into tyranny and therefore presents the United States as a best practice model for dealing with the democratic future his home country will (to his mind) inevitably face. Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 269 Ultimately, it is his fear of democratic tyranny, however, that is crucial for understanding Tocqueville. For it is this fear that shows Tocqueville to be deeply indebted to the Republican tradition of political philosophy, and, as we shall argue, it is by putting Tocqueville into dialogue with classical debates about democracy that his explanatory potential for contemporary dynamics of populism becomes particularly striking. According to Tocqueville, the equality of conditions “creates opinions, gives birth to sentiments, suggests customs and modifies all that it does not produce” (4). Opinions and sentiments, he suggests, are shaped by the equality of conditions in three related ways. First, they bring forth a love of equality; second, individuals are driven to stand out from the crowd of equals in a quest for the gratification of recognition, which paradoxically becomes fueled, in Winfried Fluck’s insightful take on Tocqueville, by the very conditions and love of equality (Fluck); yet third, individuals have to cope with the experience that it is not them who stand out from the crowd but somebody else. Naturally, for most people, it is this third type of experience that predominates in everyday life. So, in a sense democratic life is characterized by witnessing how other people excel, which is an experience doubly irritating. First, because the democratic individual aspires to the very distinction achieved by the other and thus compares herself unfavorably to that other; second, because the observance of the other’s advancement contradicts the democratic individual’s love of equality, according to which no one should stand out in the first place. Both of these irritations come together in the affect of envy, which Tocqueville discusses throughout both volumes of Democracy in America and which he ultimately singles out as the primary democratic emotion. In the chapter “Of the Government of Democracy,” Tocqueville writes: The fact must not be concealed that democratic institutions develop the sentiment of envy in the human heart to a very high degree, not so much because they offer each person the means to become equal to others, but because these means constantly fail those who use them. Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it entirely. (316) As Jon Elster once put it, envy, for Tocqueville, is “a comparison-based emotion” (71). The aim of envy is to counter the emergence of inequality by producing a leveling effect. In contrast to hatred, envy does not aim at the destruction of the other, but at leveling out the difference between self and other regarding some attribute. Envy presents one of two options to work towards leveling out that difference. One option is upward leveling—this, for Tocqueville, is the expression of a legitimate passion for equality; we may associate it with an American trajectory that leads from Transcendentalist notions of self-growth all the way to the human potential movement; the second option, associated with envy, is downward leveling, which Tocqueville describes as a “depraved taste for equality … that leads the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in liberty” (89). 270 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger For Tocqueville, the downward leveling of envy is doubly pernicious. It drives citizens of democratic societies towards accepting equality in servitude—a politically disastrous state of despotic conformity. On the level of the individual’s emotional life, it moreover leads to systemic unhappiness and even depression. The more successful the leveling efforts, the smaller the differences become; yet as equality increases, so does the sensitivity to remaining (or newly emerging) inequalities, however minute they may be. From this sharpened perception—which is echoed in the Latin word for envy, invidia, literally: to look upon—follows a continuous experience of disappointment: “Every day,” Tocqueville writes, “at the moment when people believe they have grasped complete equality, it escapes from their hands and flees, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight” (316). The costs are not merely political unfreedom, but a collective malaise of the soul. “It is to these causes that you must attribute the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic countries often reveal amid their abundance, and this disgust for life that sometimes comes to seize them in the middle of a comfortable and tranquil existence” (946). Affects of Athens: The Passions of Ancient Democracy In recognizing envy as a problem peculiar to democracy, Tocqueville links up with an age-old discourse about envy and resentment that goes all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Envy and resentment are not quite identical, but it is remarkable that the Greek term phthonos gets translated as resentment, envy, and even jealousy. Whether in Athens, Rome or modern America, envy permeated the emotional life of democracy because democracy established a norm of equality—or, as Tocqueville called it, “a passion for equality”—which was contradicted by the really existing inequalities characterizing democratic society. In Athens and Rome, that disparity lay between political equality on the one hand and stark economic inequality on the other. “Class tension,” writes historian Josiah Ober in his classic study Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, “was endemic in Greece and often contributed to the violent and disruptive political conflicts (staseis) that were common in the poleis of the archaic and classical periods” (18). As a consequence, keeping mass unrest in check became one of the chief challenges of ancient democracy. Aristotle, in his Politics, devotes much space to recommendations of how class tensions can be alleviated, both ideologically and materially. It is in this context that “the philosophers of the classical period,” as Jeremy David Engels puts it, “conceptualized resentment as a bitter, eruptive, undignified force that had to be contained” (4). Interestingly, Aristotle, writing from an elite position, put so much emphasis on class inequality that his definition of the demos, and thus of democracy, tended to veer from the institutionalized understanding of these foundational concepts. While officially the democratic people of Athens were defined as the collectivity of native-born, free men, independent of wealth—which is to say that there were stark economic disparities among Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 271 those constituting the polis—Aristotle defined democracy as the “rule of the poor” and contrasted it with oligarchy as the “rule of the rich.” He went so far as to suggest that even if the poor were a minority, and not the overwhelming majority that they really were, their rule would still have to be called democracy. Likewise, even if the rich were not a minority but a majority, their rule would still have to be called oligarchy. In that sense, democracy was an ambiguous creature: officially, and by mass consent, it was the rule of all politically equal citizens, but from the view of elite writers, it was the unjust uprising of the poor (cf. Ober 192-93). We will see why this is important when we come back to Tocqueville. In Aristotle’s analysis, extreme social inequality is a fertile ground for the emergence of demagogues—those literal “leaders of the people” whose power rests on their rhetorical prowess. According to Aristotle, not all demagogues were dangerous to democracy, but under conditions of extreme economic inequality, demagogues had the capacity to turn into tyrants. Nadia Urbinati explains Aristotle’s reasoning as follows: Social distress unleashes the immoderate desire for power among the few, who realize that the breakdown of social and political balance [between the rich and the poor] can be turned into a strategy of regime change, through which they can make decisions without consulting the opinion of the people. (Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured 142) Demagogues utilized envy and resentment emerging from inequality to their own benefit. They were able to fortify their powerful position—and the position of elites more generally—by stoking and then deflecting popular unrest. Jeremy David Engels calls this mechanism, which he traces from classical Greece to present-day America, “the politics of resentment: ” What I call the politics of resentment involves channeling civic resentment—engendered by economic exploitation, political alienation, and a legitimate sense of victimhood—into a hatred of our neighbors and fellow citizens. Rather than allowing resentment to build up as the unifying emotion through which a demos becomes itself in opposition to an elite, the politics of resentment redirects resentment within the people, thereby taming the force of democracy to act as a path to justice. (12-13) By way of this mechanism of redirection, skillful demagogues use the resentment caused by economic inequality to entrench inequality even more firmly. In the case of classical Greece, resentment more specifically opened up the possibility of spreading inequality from the economic to the political domain. Ancient demagoguery is not the same as modern populism, not least because they have different impacts. In ancient direct democracies, a demagogue used the power of words to persuade the assembly to put his stirring speech into law directly. A modern populist, by contrast, may stay confined to the realm of ideological opinion-making and never get to the point where he or she can translate that ideology into law. But ancient demagoguery and modern populism both rely on exploiting the violation of the norm of equality, which is to say that both rely on the exploitation of envy and resentment. Moreover, both have in common that the politicization of resentment allows 272 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger them to reduce the plurality of positions circulating in the democratic public into exactly two poles, only one of which is given legitimacy. E pluribus duo, so to speak. This is why polarization is a built-in feature of the populist cultivation and appropriation of envy and resentment stemming from a violation of the democratic norm of equality. As mentioned before, Aristotle and other elite writers of his time wavered between defining the demos as the collective of all free men and defining them as the poor. The latter definition may not have been shared by the majority of poor yet politically enfranchised citizens, but the strong association of the people with poverty did carry over into the content of popular resentment. As Josiah Ober clarifies: When an average Athenian citizen observed a rich man, his emotions were complicated, but prominent among them was a straightforward sense of envy (phthonos). The poor man would like to have possessed the rich man’s wealth and the fine things wealth could provide. (205) The envy described here is a protracted, entrenched, and structural experience that, in modern usage, is captured by resentment rather than envy. Whereas envy tends to describe the feelings on an individual, resentment emphasizes that this feeling emerges from a stratified position. As the anthropologist Didier Fassin puts it, resentment points to “the misery emanating from the social location occupied and the frustrations it elicits” (258). Aristotle (much like Tocqueville in modern times) understands envy to be a comparison-based feeling based on equality. As he writes in Rhetoric, envy “is excited … by [the prosperity] of people who are like us or equal with us” (1386b 18-20). But despite being equal politically, the poor, in Athens, could not hope to acquire the attributes of the rich. We might say that here, political equality was coupled with a social caste structure. Hence the deep frustration typical of resentment. This, it would seem, is where the modern dynamics of democratic envy and resentment, as described by Tocqueville, differ from the classical model. What Tocqueville sees in the post-feudal equality of conditions of the United States is the transformation of a fixed caste structure into structures of inequality that are rapidly changing. He characterizes democratic society as marked by extreme economic volatility that can potentially affect any of its members in unforeseen ways. This, Tocqueville finds, affects the minds of Democrats by stirring the hopes of even the poorest person and creating anxiety among the very rich: I did not meet, in America, a citizen so poor who did not cast a look of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, and whose imagination did not grasp in advance the good things that fate stubbornly refused him. On the other hand, I never saw among the rich of the United States this superb disdain for material well-being that is sometimes shown even within the heart of the most opulent and most dissolute aristocracies. Most of these rich have been poor; they have felt the sting of need; they have long fought against a hostile fortune, and now that victory is won, the passions that accompanied the struggle survive it; they remain as if intoxicated amid these small enjoyments that they have pursued for forty years. (934) Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 273 In other words, in Tocqueville’s conceptualization, the demos does not consist of the poor but of politically equal citizens who are collectively subject to the vagaries of continuously emerging structures of inequality. Here, envy and resentment still emerge from inequality, but the kinds of inequality that provoke envy and resentment proliferate. Certainly, economic inequality remains a crucial engine of envy, but economic equality is not pressing only because life is miserable when you do not know how to put food on the table. Poverty becomes the ground of the comparison-based feeling of envy because in poverty, a difference of status and standing becomes manifest that contradicts the norm underwritten by the equality of conditions. But differences in status and standing become manifest in other ways as well, including education, culture, and regional affiliation, etc. The difference between ancient and modern democracy, then, is not that the first produces resentment (because of its quasi-caste structure that contradicts political equality) whereas the second produces envy only (because in a situation of general volatility inequality appears as less structural and therefore frustration is less deeply entrenched). Rather, modern democracy tends to transform economic inequality into a question of status, which is another way of saying that it culturalizes inequality, without thereby diminishing economic inequality (for a Marxist genealogy and critique of this assessment regarding populism, see Jäger). This does not make the discrepancy of the norm of equality and de-facto inequality less of a question of social position but merely redefines social position, from a location in the economic hierarchy to a location in a symbolic hierarchy. So, to repeat, two processes go together in a Tocquevillian analysis of envy/ resentment and inequality in modern democracies: the first is the dynamization of inequality (which is not to say that there are not entrenched quasi-oligarchical structures in the United States). The second element is the transformation of inequality from poverty and riches to a question of status. To be precise on this point, material inequality retains a privileged role in the production of resentment even after this transformation. In most of his examples, Tocqueville grounds emerging inequalities of status in material poverty and wealth, and social scientists of our own age studying populism and polarization have also been acute to the correlation between rising economic inequality and political polarization (see in particular McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, who argue, in their co-authored Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, from 2006, that polarization and economic inequality have been on the rise in interlinked fashion since the 1970s). But the overlayering of economic and symbolic inequality has a crucial impact on how resentment can be redirected. In classical Greece, redirection stayed largely within the economic realm. Here, structural inequality was typically redefined as the scandalous, arrogant swagger of morally deficient rich individuals—black sheep, so to speak. As Ober puts it, “The ostentatious lifestyles of the rich provided the forensic orator with an obvious body of material which could be used in exploiting his audience’s envy of the wealthy” (207). By contrast, under the equality of conditions it becomes possible to 274 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger redirect economic resentment to all kinds of culprits. Not only can the elite be redefined as college professors, journalists, and latte drinkers; the elite can even be defined in such a way that the superrich do not belong to it. And, as influential theorists of populism point out, it also becomes possible for populism to become “triadic” (Judis), i.e., to usher in what we call a “resentment sandwich,” in which the resentful are defined as the middle, and the resented become those on top and the internally excluded at the bottom. In other words, it is the more flexible redirection of resentment under the equality of conditions that lends itself to turning economic resentment into racial resentment. As a side note, the image of the resentment sandwich—which imagines those feeling resentful to make up its middle—aptly captures the fact that in the United States of the late 1960s, the language of the politics of resentment, which stoked and exploited racial resentment in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, came to make excessive use of the idea of “middle,” as in Richard Nixon’s phrase “Middle American,” which, along with phrases such as “’Forgotten American’ became commonplace at the White House” (Lowndes 312). The mechanism of redirected resentment gives us a clue as to why the debates about whether Trump was elected because of economic inequality or because of widespread racism are wrongheaded (see for instance discussions by Schaffner et al. and Abramowitz). The politicization of resentment always needs some form of redirection, and so the current politics of resentment draws on racism for its translation of a resentment that is at least in part grounded in material inequality. Therefore, polling data that suggests that white Trump voters were motivated by race and not class does not give us conclusive evidence about the role that economic inequality really played because such polling cannot account for the process of redirection but only for its results. What it does suggest, however, is that polarization proceeds not along the vertical axis of poor and rich, but along horizontal axes that pit groups of citizens against each other. Once the people are no longer defined as “the poor” but as nominally equal citizens, even economic inequality is articulated as a grievance along horizontal lines. This is why Trump’s wealth does not contradict his claim to represent the rust belt. Indignation and Resentment as Mirror Affects The link between resentment and polarization does not stop at the idea that the redirection of resentment depends on the creation of a split in the population in order to deflect popular discontentment from its true target, the elites. Going back once more to Aristotle and elite writers of his time, polarization was regarded as an affective process that involved not only the masses but the elites themselves, with the two sides standing in a mirror relation to one another. Jeremy David Engels points out that in classical Greek, phthonos meant “envy,” “resentment,” and “indignation,” and was thus a synonym for nemesis. However, writes Engels, “class modulated these words: phthonos was Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 275 generally associated with ‘upward’ resentment of the masses toward the elite, and nemesis with downward resentment of the elite toward the masses” (33). In his Rhetoric, Aristotle is even more direct than Engels suggests (though, as David Konstan observes, in Aristotle’s time, to nemesan—the verb form of nemesis [indignation] Aristotle uses—was old-fashioned and no longer representative of common usage; see 115). Drawing on the old-fashioned word nemesis/ nemesan allows Aristotle to explicitly differentiate between indignation and envy, finding different (class-inflected) logics at work in each. While for Aristotle, envy (as we have seen) is excited by the prosperity “of people who are like us or equal with us,” indignation is excited “by the prosperity of the undeserving” (1386b 18-20). Indignation works as the mirroring complement of envy: whereas envy presupposes equality and generates a sense of frustration from de-facto inequality, indignation presupposes one’s superiority and generates a sense of anger from de-facto equality (or, more accurately, from a social reality that denies the superiority one believes to embody). Indignation, by this logic, is an affect experienced by elites who feel threatened in their privileged status by those who challenge the existing hierarchy through their success, prosperity, ambition, or direct challenge to authority. To Aristotle, indignation is a natural response by those in power to any change in the social structure: [W]hat is long established seems akin to what exists by nature; and therefore we feel more indignation at those possessing a given good if they have as a matter of fact only just got it and the prosperity it brings with it. The newly rich give more offence than those whose wealth is of long standing and inherited. (1387a 16-22) What appears to have been always what it is is regarded as real, and so the possessions of the newly rich do not seem to be really their own. (1387a 26-27) Indignation may therefore properly be felt when anyone gets what is not appropriate for him, though he may be a good man enough. It may also be felt when anyone sets himself up against his superior, especially against his superior in some particular respect (1387a 32-35) As David Konstan concludes from this extended passage on indignation, “Aristotle himself acknowledges that to nemesan … is not simply indignation at the illegitimate acquisitions of another, but is also modulated by what we may call class entitlement” (122). The very differentiation between indignation and envy/ resentment on which Aristotle insists (against common usage of his time) will re-appear in Roman writings. As Engels points out, “Cicero [similarly] distinguished indignatio from invidia, explaining that ‘indignation is not the same as resentment’” (37), because indignatio comes from above, invidia from below. Though as we have argued, today polarization no longer maps onto a simple class divide between rich and poor, we suggest that the affective economy of polarization has retained this mirror structure. Indeed, on the part of liberal America, indignation seems a much better term than resentment for describing the affective involvement in the polarized nation, whereas resentment is useful to describe the predominant affect on the right. We 276 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger might speak here of different righteousness claims, one of which—indignation—emphasizes the need to uphold norms and standards against the forces of disruption, whereas the other—resentment—adopts the stance of insurgency in wanting to demolish the system, the “deep state,” etc. Both appeal to equality, but from different angles. Indignation appeals to the application of standards—of respect, rights, etc.—to everyone (think here only of the slogan “Black Lives Matter”), whereas resentment demands the tearing down of privileges, the leveling downward of the playing field. Here, equality is to be found in the shattered ruins of existing structures. Superiority and the Middle Finger: The Aesthetics of Polarized Laughter This affective mirroring structure has its correlative in expressive repertoires of polarized democracy. This is where our analysis returns to the aesthetics of populism, which can now be understood more fully as an aesthetics of polarization. The aesthetics of polarization does not simply generate “affective polarization” and “negative partisanship.” Our detour through the theory of democratic passions from Aristotle to Tocqueville rather allows us to comprehend the aesthetics of polarization as the interplay between an aesthetics linked to the affect of indignation and an aesthetics linked to the affect of envy/ resentment. This mirroring structure of two interlinked forms of affective aesthetics we call “expressive polarization.” Staying true to our heuristic schema, the aesthetics of the affect of indignation ought to reflect and reconfirm a stance of superiority, whereas the aesthetics of the affect of envy/ resentment is expected to reflect and reconfirm a demand for disruption that stands in the service of leveling the playing field. The analysis of the populist rallies of Donald Trump in the first installment of this two-part essay brought to light some of the features of the aesthetics of resentment. In particular, it showed that the most successful way for generating an intense experience of unity from the perspective of resentment is by the combined attack of the political opponent and racially marginalized others (in accordance with the image of the “resentment sandwich”). During the mid-term elections of 2018, this was exemplified by Trump’s strategy of creating the specter of the “caravan” of immigrants allegedly about to invade the U.S. with the support of Democrats. Aesthetically, this sinister message was translated into the register of euphoric excitement. In opposing the dual enemy, the populist assembly collectively created the exhilarating sense of interactive, improvisational unity. When the collective attention was set on differentiating the assembly from the opponent, the attendees rejoiced in the collective creation of a pars pro parte community. As the self-enjoyment of the emerging collective began to heat up towards collective ecstasy, the world around it ceased to matter and the populist community moved towards a Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 277 pars pro toto experience. In the move from the collective pars pro parte experience to that of pars pro toto, the existing order was affectively and imaginarily shattered and displaced. In what follows, we will focus predominantly on the other side of the divide, i.e., on the aesthetics of the affect of indignation. For this purpose, we turn to political late-night television in order to show that this self-consciously politicized genre of television has assumed a structure that, in some respects, mirrors that of the populist rally. Indeed, late-night television, like the rally, can be described as a “space of appearance” in which there is no longer any room for plurality. This is a rather new development that can be observed by looking at the recent career of Stephen Colbert, whose CBS show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has become the leading late-night show of the nation. Before taking over The Late Show in 2015, Colbert delivered in-character satirical political statements on The Colbert Report. In that earlier show, which ran on Comedy Central from 2005 to 2014, Colbert addressed a liberal audience by playing the character of “Stephen Colbert,” a sharp-minded, strident, arch-ideological conservative whose extremism was meant to out-radicalize his real-life models of Fox News. The joy of the performance resulted directly from its satirical set-up, whose target was not merely the political opponent, but the very structure of partisan media. Colbert’s iteration of The Late Show is affectively more direct or sincere than The Colbert Report, and it lacks the satirical conceit of the earlier show. That satirical conceit allowed the audience of The Colbert Report to laugh at partisanship itself, while affectively siding with, and cheering for, the faux-conservative host. The disappearance of the satirical conceit in the new show has excised the earlier show’s invitation to the audience to split its allegiance—to root for Colbert, the performer, but against “Stephen Colbert,” the conservative caricature. Indeed, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has increasingly turned into a manifestation of the affective dynamics of polarization within the political left. As might be expected from a topical show making light of the day’s news, Colbert’s jokes on The Late Show during the 2015-16 primary and presidential elections were directed at a wide range of the candidates. However, as was the case for his peers on late-night television, by far the most frequent target was eventual Republican candidate Donald Trump, a remarkable front runner among joke targets in that he easily outdid recent Republican candidates, who had been more frequently joked about on late-night television than their Democratic opponents during each of the last seven presidential elections (Farnsworth, Lichter, and Canieso 338-40). As Trumpism manifested in U.S. politics, the humor of The Late Show shifted, and Colbert made the increasing polarization regularly explicit. He did so perhaps most strikingly during election night in 2016, when The Late Show aired live, as it had been during the weeks leading up to election day. By the end of the show, not having prepared material for the eventuality of a Trump victory, Colbert improvised. Speaking in a searching and spontaneous manner about political divisiveness, it became clear that Colbert decided to react to the election result in a sincere tone. 278 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger And I think the people who designed our democracy didn’t want us in it all the time. Informed, yes. Politicking all the time, I don’t think so. Not divided that way. … But now politics is everywhere and that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common, so whether your side won or lost [points finger towards camera], we don’t have to do this shit for a while. (“Stephen Colbert Signs Off on the 2016 Presidential Election,” 4: 20-5: 10) After this improvised section, he dutifully delivered a prepared segment of jokes about “things we actually have in common.” Reaching for an aura of patriotism, Colbert implicitly implored the nation to come together. Colbert ended the show on a call to action—“Kiss a Democrat! Go hug a Republican! ”—as if his audience was of a piece with the national community and comprised both sides. The premise of not doing “this shit for a while” signified the intent to return to non-polarized normality. But just as the winners of presidential elections have routinely come to pay lip service to national unity upon declaring victory, only to then proceed along the lines of polarized politics (one of the few rituals adhered to even by Trump), Colbert’s patriotically charged appeals to national unity and political normality had spent themselves at once. In the days and weeks after the election, Colbert’s show-opening monologues showed him struggling to find ways of joking about the election of Trump. The monologues were mainly preoccupied with the public expression of grief—a sure sign that he was no longer the voice of a unified America. Soon, Colbert returned to humor, but it was a type of humor that, while not new to the show, took on unprecedented prominence. It was a humor that bespoke an intensified and heightened affect of indignation. The political humor of the show in this new mode (re-)instituted a sense of superiority in the audience. By implication, this entailed claims to superiority of one side of the polarized divide. Theorists of humor and comedy have largely dismissed the notion that superiority is a driving force of laughter, but it might be worth revisiting the superiority theory of humor for the purpose of analyzing the aesthetics of polarized political humor. Laughter, as Thomas Hobbes (one of the key proponents of the superiority theory of humor) saw it, is the realization and affirmation of someone else’s weaknesses. It is a mechanism of competitiveness: we laugh when we feel that we are winning. The superiority theory of humor was christened by its critics, who sought to dismiss it as too harsh a view on laughter and humor (Billig 39). Admittedly, the feeling of superiority is a dubious explanation of laughter when it is treated as a general theory. One might point to many occasions of laughter when no competition or comparison is involved. We suggest, however, that as an aesthetic strategy of political humor, superiority humor—laughter that feels like winning—is a useful concept. Superiority alone might not make anyone laugh; it might not ever have accounted fully for the appeal of any but the vilest humor. But superiority humor does not exclude other mechanisms. The incongruity and relief theories of humor, respectively describing humor as the “substitution of an unexpected event or remark in place of what is anticipated” (Holm 10) or a psychological pressure-relief valve (Morreall 16), are later contributions Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 279 to a philosophy of humor which quickly superseded superiority theory. Especially incongruity humor—laughing at the surprise, the sharp contrast, or even the absurd—is a handy (and thus consistently popular) concept in analyzing the comedic triad of setup, punchline, and laughter. We argue that on The Late Show, patriotic middle-of-the-road humor seeking broad appeal made way for political superiority humor mixed with incongruity humor. As a paradigmatic example, consider the following extract of Stephen Colbert’s monologue from an episode of The Late Show in October 2019 in reaction to one of Donald Trump’s tweets on the impeachment process: Up ‘til now, the GOP has focused their defense on how the hearings are secret. Pelosi’s announcement of the vote tomorrow making it public changes that, but the president is not concerned, tweeting: [Colbert reads in Trump’s voice] “Republicans are very unified and energized in our fight on the Impeachment Hoax with the Do Nothing Democrats, and now are starting to go after the Substance even more than the very infair Process” [audience laughs]. The “infair process? ” [pause]. What are you…unsane? [laughter and long applause, then cheering]. (“Trump Pleads,” 0: 00-0: 40) Reading the president’s tweets had by then become a regular feature of The Late Show. Here, the joke itself is derived from a typographical error, an incongruity in language. And yet, it is not innocuous incongruity humor: the audience is affectively on board with Colbert’s indignation. His impression of Donald Trump and the shared experience of superiority in observing Trump’s incorrect language use are met with enthusiastic applause and cheering from the studio audience. The audience may be cued to laugh at the correct moments and yet the powerful end product is the jointly performed affect of indignation through superiority laughter. We have suggested that liberal late-night television should be conceptualized as the mirror image of the aesthetics of resentment performed in the populist rally. There is, however, also the possibility of putting the superiority humor of The Late Show in relation to right wing humor, though admittedly, right-wing comedians must be regarded a niche phenomenon. Stand-up comedians like Nick Di Paolo self-publish comedy sets on YouTube, thus sharing the publication strategy and media sphere of right-wing alternative media. To test our heuristic schema of expressive polarization, we briefly consider whether right wing comedy proceeds differently from liberal mainstream comedy. For an example, we turn to Nick Di Paolo’s comedy special “A Breath of Fresh Air.” Di Paolo begins with a claim familiar from right-wing pundits who stoke racial and gender resentment by claiming to have been marginalized, silenced, or discriminated against by the liberal mainstream: “‘Toxic white European? ’…There’s no respect for white European males anymore” (“A Breath of Fresh Air,” 1: 10). Such self-victimization is a core ingredient to the generation of resentment, understood, as defined earlier by Fassin, as “the misery emanating from the social location occupied and the frustrations it elicits.” As the next performative step, Di Paolo makes it explicit that in his (performatively constructed) audience of white males deserving more respect, 280 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger the other is nonetheless present as well. That other is easily recognizable: it is that part of the audience—sometimes an imaginary extension of it—that withholds laughter. To recognize this other, to give it presence in his pars pro parte performance, Di Paolo deliberately inserts pauses to allow for laughter and applause. While a comedian pausing for the audience to laugh is nothing out of the ordinary, it is remarkable that Di Paolo’s pauses—not necessarily following any discernible punch line—entail the provocation of “unlaughter,” as Michael Billig calls the rhetorical withholding of laughter (192). Di Paolo then turns the provocation of unlaughter into an explicit point: Some of youse are laughing. The rest of youse I can see you’re shitting in your little faggy fucking liberal pants. [Laughter. He pauses and smiles.] I’m woke, okay, and I’m on the right, motherfuckers! ” (“A Breath of Fresh Air”, 3: 50-4: 20) Throughout the hour-long performance, Di Paolo’s speech and body language are dominated by anger and frustration. He performs his own marginalization both in the field of stand-up comedy and in that of politics—never mind that he is doing so in front of a paying audience willing to agree with him. His humor principle might be called “middle finger humor,” to which his jokes on topics like cars and smoking adhere: if an action is perceived by the other to be harmful, it is worth pursuing (and humorous to display it) in an even more determined way than before. And if the other answers with unlaughter, then the humor principle of the middle finger finds its validation. Thus, in the realm of political comedy, polarized affects find their aesthetic expression in different modes of humor: indignation meets its correlative in superiority humor, resentment in middle finger humor. Circulation and Proximity: What Humor Has to Offer The in-group joking of The Late Show and “A Breath of Fresh Air” has the primary effect of making their constituencies impervious to penetration from the outside. Expressive polarization contributes to a process of self-perpetuating radicalization, by way of which both sides of the divide seal themselves off from each other. It is striking, however, that there is another form of political humor prominent in today’s media culture that seems to contradict this kind of self-immunization. We have in mind here the digital meme, whose defining operational characteristic is its viral dissemination. The specific aesthetic toolkit of the meme allows it to live not in a space of appearance on one side of polarization but in circulation across the divide. There is little doubt that online spaces have become a central location and infrastructure of political and cultural polarization. As is frequently argued, online networks (including social media networks, but also YouTube, where Stephen Colbert and the other late-night hosts have found a sizeable secondary audience) have the technologically designed proclivity to build “echo chambers.” Their algorithms aim to get their users hooked (and thus drive Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 281 up advertisement revenue) by showing them what they “want” to see, which essentially means: more of the same. This raises the question of how memes— designed for circulation—fit into the polarized structure laid out so far. Without having the space to engage in a deeper analysis, we suggest that the graphic form of jocular memetic content, which has been suggested to have the greatest chances to achieve viral online diffusion (Shifman 67, 161), succeeds by crossing the divide of the politically fractured discourse. It would be hasty to conclude, however, that memes are therefore a promising cultural strategy for overcoming polarization. Rather, to the degree that memes succeed in achieving virality, they tend to make use of forms of humor like irony and parody that provide their meaning with radical indeterminacy. They thus open themselves up for widely diverging interpretive possibilities. If it is their jocular character that allows them to go viral, this is because memes that are jokes never have to shed their multiple codifications. They thus allow for diverging acts of affective reception on either side of the divide. In a society already set on the process of polarization, memes can thus become short-circuited with that very process, helping each side to fortify itself. As a case study, let us consider one meme particularly popular in 2016. The meme originated from a video that showed a gorilla, named Harambe, at the Cincinnati Zoo being fatally shot to prevent a child from harm. Controversy ensued over the killing of the gorilla as well as over its justification. “Media outlets reported days of protests and candlelight vigils at the Cincinnati Zoo and other zoos around the country, while #Justice4Harambe trended online” (Romano n.p.). In the course of these controversies, Harambe became a household name, not to say an online celebrity. But the controversies quickly changed in tone. Harambe became a parody and stand-in for a wide variety of discourses, most of them political, ranging from celebrity deaths to police shootings. Different political groups and ideological camps politically and comedically charged the meme. Initially, “black social media communities embraced the Harambe meme to comment ironically on the ways in which society tends to minimize and overlook the deaths of ordinary people of color” (Romano n.p.). Quickly, racist online communities also picked up on the image, exploiting the racist tradition of equating people of color with apes. Harambe’s image and fate have spawned myriad spin-off versions, many of which form a choreography along the entrenched ideological and affective battle lines of the culture wars. In these acts of repurposing and remixing, logic often stretches thin. In one instance, a Trump supporter claimed Harambe in an interview with Breitbart as direct support for Trump’s border wall: “The one thing that would have prevented the tragic loss of Harambe is having a proper wall in place. There’s only one candidate who is supporting tighter border security and a beautiful wall and that’s Donald J. Trump” (quote in Romano n.p.). To make a more general point out of this, we observe that spin-off memes tend to be tailored to the interpretive demands of one side of the cultural divide. 282 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger Usually, memes proliferate through the act of varying the material. In the most basic and most common form of meme creation, an iconic image provides the unchanging foundation. That image gets combined with overlaid text that changes from one iteration to the next. Interestingly, in some cases it is the exact same meme—the same combination of image and text—that is capable of traveling across the political divide. Consider, for example, figure 2, which, depending on context and recipient, can be read in two ways: either it contrasts the outpour of grief over the gorilla’s death with a lack of grief in response to the death of people of color, or it conflates false grief over one with exaggerated grief over the other. The polysemic meaning, involving multiple layers of irony, is not resolvable without observing the context of dispersion and the recipients—and even once that knowledge is provided, memes such as figure 2 do not become wholly unequivocal. This polysemic indeterminacy, we can conclude, makes memes conducive to circulation across polarized divides. The indeterminacy of memes not only facilitates different forms of reception among different audiences. Indeterminacy can also be used to address, with one and the same meme, different polarized communities that understand themselves to be one another’s opponents. Not unlike a polarizing politician who rallies his base around himself and unites his opponents in aversion, memes that go viral manage to reach both ingroup and out-group recipients in polarizing fashion. But whereas Donald Trump tends to aim for the most divisive message, creators of memes have the option of choosing the path of ironic, parodic, or satirical indeterminacy to achieve this end. Taking political humor in the populist moment seriously as one particularly effective aspect of expressive polarization deserves more extensive scrutiny than we can deliver here. Further study is necessary to arrive at a better sense of how humoristic repertoires such as irony, parody, satire are employed as central components of expressive polarization. We see these repertoires to be at work in all of the formats touched on in this essay: memes, late-night comedy, right-wing humor, and even the populist rally (for a closer analysis of Trump’s indebtedness to stand-up comedy, see Hall et al.). As we Fig. 2. Viral image macro depicting Harambe Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 283 have begun to suggest, these aesthetic repertoires come to work differently in each of these formats, linking up with complementary polarized affects of resentment and indignation. Yet the recurrence of these repertoires also suggests that they share some important features, no matter which of the polarized affects they help to bolster. Irony, parody, and satire rely on imitation, repetition, and various kinds of alteration (inversion in irony, incongruous juxtaposition in parody, exaggeration in satire). This emphasis on repeating and transforming points to the simple—but no less significant—fact that polarizing acts obsessively pay attention to the other side. In other words, the aesthetics of polarized humor displays a concern with the very relationality on which polarizing us-versus-them constructions are built. Might this not give us reason to reconsider the function of political humor in polarization? Could humor not provide us with a way out of polarization? To provisionally flesh out this idea in conclusion, let us return to the segment of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert discussed earlier. The scene continues beyond the transcript given above. After joking about Trump’s typo— the “infair process”—Colbert continues (still quoting Donald Trump’s twitter feed): He went on, “just a casual reading of the Transcript leads EVERYBODY to see that… [Colbert reads the ellipses as ‘dot dot dot’ etc.] …the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, ‘No Pressure.’ This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going since before I even got elected. Rupublicans [audience laughs], go with substance and close it out! ” Of course, Trump is referring [applause, Colbert pauses], of course Trump is referring to the stars of the VH1 hit “RuPublican’s Drag Race.” (“Trump Pleads,” 0: 40-1: 42) Fig. 3. Graphic of Republican politicians in drag (“Trump Pleads For ‘Rupublicans’ To Defend Him Against ‘Infair’ Impeachment”) 284 J ohannes V oelz with t om F reischläger An on-screen graphic shows drag queen Ru Paul, known from the Reality TV competition series Ru Paul’s Drag Race, surrounded by Republican politicians in drag, among them Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence. The audience reacts with laughter and frenetic applause, during which Colbert comments: “That was a nice graphic” (1: 45). The conservative other is not only made present but is transported into the cultural sphere of the progressive left, exemplified by Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Clearly, this is a case of incongruity humor. But what makes the incongruity of seeing McConnell and Pence in drag funny? Does not the graphic elicit a homophobic laugh, the butt of the joke being less McConnell and Pence than the flamboyance of drag? Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that for a short moment the worldview and ideology attributed to the other is contained in the audience’s very own laughter. We suggest that similar moments of proximity can also be observed in the right-wing humor exemplified by Nick Di Paolo. Not unlike Colbert’s superiority humor, the middle finger humor of the right contains in its core an acknowledgement of the other. This is because it derives its energy from the defiance of the convictions, arguments, and worldviews of the liberal other. Corresponding to Colbert’s graphic, we moreover find that Di Paolo elicits laughter by making his audience momentarily inhabit the worldview and ideology of the other. Di Paolo, as we have seen, creates for his audience a moral demand to laugh, in which not laughing means siding with the enemy. This results in a paradox: the moment the audience is made aware of its duty to laugh, it has to force its laughter. Forced laughing, however, feels close to not laughing at all. In other words, Di Paolo’s imperative to laugh paradoxically forces an audience response that is barely laughter. He pushes his audience into the subject position he has defined as that of the enemy: “faggy fucking liberal.” Thus, while expressive polarization predominantly seems to seal off both polarized parties from each other, both forms of polarized humor, as affectively distinct as they are, carry in themselves moments in which that seal is effectively broken. In this regard, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai make a crucial point about the ways in which humor brings otherwise distant materials into troubling proximity with one another. Comedy theory has tended to foreground detachment, but we think proximity deserves particular attention. In the comedic scene things are always closer to each other than they appear. They are near each other in a way that prompts a disturbance in the air. People can enjoy that disturbance, and one thing they can enjoy in it is that it feels automatic, spontaneous, freed-up. Pressed a little, the enjoyment is not always, hardly ever, unmixed; but in the moment, the feeling of freedom exists with its costliness. There’s a relation between the grin and chagrin; there’s the fatigue from feeling vulnerable because pleasure’s bad objects are not always in one’s control. (Berlant and Ngai 248) The disturbance of proximity—the sudden troublesomeness in the moment of assuming the cultural cosmos of the other—might point to a potential residing in humor to irritate in more ways than one. Expressive polarization is not simply reconstituted with each superiority joke, with each example Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization 285 of middle finger humor. It is also affectively troubled by the proximity of its other, by the switched positions of self and other. 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