The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons

Jonathan P. Eburne, Benjamin Schreier, JONATHAN PAUL EBURNE, BENJAMIN SCHREIER

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780253026873
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Essays on intellect, passion, alienation, and America's geeky subcultures. What happens when math nerds, band and theater geeks, goths, sci-fi fanatics, Young Republican debate poindexters, techies, Trekkies, D&D players, wallflowers, bookworms, and RPG players grow up? And what can they tell us about the life of the mind in the contemporary United States? With recent years bringing us phenomena from #GamerGate to The Big Bang Theory, it's clear that nerds, policy wonks, and neoconservatives play a major role in today's popular culture. The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons delves into subcultures of intellectual history to explore their influence on contemporary American intellectual life. Not limiting themselves to describing how individuals are depicted, the authors consider the intellectual endeavors these depictions have come to represent, exploring many models and practices of learnedness, reflection, knowledge production, and opinion in the contemporary world. As teachers, researchers, and university scholars continue to struggle for mainstream visibility, this book illuminates the other forms of intellectual excitement that have emerged alongside them and found ways to survive and even thrive in the face of dismissal or contempt.

PART I

THROUGH GLASSES, DORKILY

1

WONK MASCULINITY

DENNIS ALLEN

Sometime during the summer of 2013, Rick Perry, then governor of Texas, began wearing glasses. Now, these were not just any glasses but a pair of very big, very obvious, black-framed spectacles reminiscent of Clark Kent, which the media, with some consistency, referred to as “nerd glasses.” Since Perry’s general self-presentation had up until then run toward an extremely traditional “man’s man” image, this change prompted considerable speculation in the press. Ultimately, the pundits’ consensus was that after a disastrous performance in the 2011 Republican primary campaign, including a debate in which he forgot one of his main talking points and was unable to name the third of three government agencies he would close down, Perry was trying to rebrand himself as an intellectual, or, at the very least, as reasonably intelligent. As Scott Greer succinctly put it in the Daily Caller, the glasses are “clearly an attempt to transform himself from a swaggering bro to a knowledgeable policy wonk.”¹ Thus, the glasses represent a new Rick Perry, who, as his wife Anita has remarked, now reads constantly and who has spent the last couple of years meeting with various experts to get up to speed on economic policy.² The effect on his political fortunes aside, Perry’s attempt at self-fashioning raises a number of questions, including one of the major questions that this chapter will address. If a wonk is something like a nerd, and if popular culture has traditionally told us that it’s bad to be a nerd, is being a nerd now a good thing? Or, to put that question in a more academic way, does the wonk signal a reconfiguration of our conceptions of the value of various types of contemporary masculinity? This question actually derives some of its momentum from the almost universal assumption in the press that, as was the case with Clark Kent himself, Rick Perry’s glasses are something like a disguise, a gestural appropriation of an undervalued secondary form of masculinity, a nerdish bookishness, that is not only not “real” masculinity but that is probably not who Perry actually is. After all, one of Perry’s recent photo ops showed him reverting to a form of masculinity that was both more traditional and more typical of him. With aviator sunglasses replacing his “nerd glasses,” carrying a gun and wearing a flak jacket, he and Sean Hannity patrolled the Texas/Mexico border looking for encroaching hordes of illegal immigrants. Yet, even if—actually, especially if—we conclude that Perry’s new image is inauthentic, merely a superficial attempt to rebrand himself, the very fact that Perry would want to be seen as a wonk suggests that it might be as valuable, and possibly even as masculine, to read a book as to wander through the sagebrush with a gun. Being a wonk must be a good thing, right?

Well, maybe. In a rather strange piece about Rick Perry’s transformation in the Economist, Will Wilkinson begins to answer that last question. Arguing that Perry’s disastrous debate performance was not a reflection of his innate intellectual abilities but could instead be attributed to the fact that Perry was medicated because of pain from spinal fusion surgery, the explanation given by Perry’s campaign itself, Wilkinson suggests that the glasses may indeed be part of a “subtle repositioning in Rick Perry’s performance of masculinity.” As Wilkinson sees it, the glasses are both a concession to age and part of a related attempt to soften Perry’s abrasive alpha male persona by displaying a certain vulnerability. According to Wilkinson, this vulnerability is intended not only to produce empathy in voters but to suggest that, as a result of his travails, Perry himself might have learned to be empathetic to their concerns. All of this is plausible enough, but Wilkinson’s underlying conceptions about the relative value of these various types of masculinity become evident in the conclusion of the essay in a formulation that is bizarre even if we take into account that it is almost certainly tongue-in-cheek: “He’s your handsome Texas grandpa. He could still strangle you to death with his bare hands, but his back hurts a little, and he cares. It’s not a message a truly dim-witted candidate would try to send.”³ Now, leaving aside the question of whether it might not, after all, be dimwitted to suggest that an aspirant to the job of commander in chief is in chronic pain, we can focus instead on how Perry’s masculinity is implicitly framed here. Although Wilkinson acknowledges that masculinity is a performance, at least in public self-presentations in the political realm, the essay nonetheless takes Perry’s machismo to be, if not innate, the most natural pose for him. If Perry is thus a “tough guy,” as Wilkinson would have it, the glasses become a sign of a certain diminution of masculinity, whether that is attributed to the depredations of age or to a calculated image of empathetic vulnerability or both. Even more crucially, rather than seeing the glasses as Perry’s adoption of an alternative but positive form of masculinity, a stance as the intelligent, informed wonk, Wilkinson can only view them negatively, as if anything other than being the “tough guy” were cause for sympathy.

If “real” masculinity is alpha male machismo, then this is indeed its inevitable tragedy. At some point you’ll get old enough that you can no longer bench press a small Fiat or are too tired to strangle someone with your bare hands, and then you’re no longer a man. Fortunately, as gender studies has insistently pointed out, masculinity is not a unitary or singular quality and hence not an either/or, a successful or failed performance of that one way of being, the assumption underlying Wilkinson’s piece. At any given historical moment, there are multiple types of acceptable masculinity.⁴ The central project of this chapter will be to examine the emergence of the wonk as a significant moment in an ongoing reconfiguration of the landscape of twenty-first-century masculinities. I will suggest that the wonk is a site of identity that lies somewhere between the jock and the nerd, to use only one formulation of a familiar binary understanding of contemporary types of men. As such, the wonk signals a shift from a conception of masculinity based on physical or psychological dominance to a masculinity whose value is derived from expertise and rationality. Yet, as we will see, precisely because of this liminal status, the wonk is also the site where some of the tensions and incoherencies inherent in our ideas of masculinity emerge. It is in this sense that Rick Perry may, after all, be emblematic, not simply because his public persona wavers between “gun-toting cowboy guarding the border” and “economics expert nerdishly boring the voters in New Hampshire,” and not even because this wavering raises questions about who, what sort of man, he really is.⁵ Finally, Rick Perry the Wonk is significant because that identity produces an evaluative aporia about wonk masculinity itself: Do those glasses represent the laudable knowledge of the expert or the sad vulnerability of the aging jock?

Definitions

So what, then, actually is a wonk? “An expert on intricate policies,” we learn from Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang, with the added notation that, more generally, the term can mean “a studious or hardworking person.”⁶ Particularly since the latter definition is fairly expansive, it might be best to start by narrowing down our field of inquiry. This chapter will focus on the wonk as a political identity category, as a type of politician or political figure, if only because that is still the sense in which the term is most commonly used (e.g., “a policy wonk”) while expertise in other highly specialized fields is usually designated by “nerd” or “geek” (as in “computer geek”), identities with which, as we’ll see, the wonk nonetheless shares some affinities. Even more specifically, I’d like to focus on male wonks, not simply because most policy wonks are still male, but also because I would like to investigate the ways in which the category of the wonk is, precisely, constructed as a particular type of masculinity, how it is, by default, assimilated to maleness, if you will.⁷ Finally, this chapter will not concern itself with matters of policy themselves, with the details, say, of various budget proposals, but rather with how the individual proposing them is gendered and, as an inevitable corollary of that, with how that individual is sexualized, although, as we will see, it is finally not possible to completely separate the gender of the politician from the gender of his politics.

In order to define the wonk, then, it would first seem to be necessary to distinguish that identity from the nerd and the geek. In Nerds, psychologist David Anderegg parses out some of the differences between a wonk and a nerd. The stereotypical nerd, he argues, is defined by five qualities. A nerd is not sexy, is interested in technology, is not interested in personal appearance, is enthusiastic about things that bore everyone else, and, finally, is persecuted by the jock, an equally stereotypical category.⁸ Above all, Anderegg adds, the nerd is distinguished by a lack of self-consciousness reminiscent of preadolescence. Interestingly, for our purposes, while Anderegg devotes some attention to articulating the differences between a nerd and a geek (the former term, he argues, tends to denote an unappealing appearance while the latter indicates a grasp of arcane knowledge), he spends very little time discussing the wonk.⁹ In fact, his treatment of the wonk implicitly suggests that that figure actually falls in a liminal space within the nerd/jock duality. At times, Anderegg uses “wonk” as synonymous with “geek” or “nerd,” primarily in cases of someone who, like Bill Gates, is famous for his technological expertise. Yet, finally, Anderegg suggests that the wonk may be a separate, and clearly separable, identity category. Discussing the 2000 election as a classic confrontation between a nerd (Al Gore) and a jock (George W. Bush), Anderegg is careful to point out that this view of that electoral contest is a construction that artificially fits the candidates to the stereotypes since, after all, Gore is not physically awkward or unattractive just as George Bush is not really all that athletic. What doomed Gore to the nerd category, Anderegg continues, is that he seemed smug about his knowledge, and in this respect he differed from Bill Clinton, who was also knowledgeable but rarely seemed self-satisfied about his expertise. As such, Clinton represents an entirely different sort of political figure: “He was the ur-wonk, the man who made the term ‘wonk’ what it is today, because we all needed a term to describe someone as brainy as Clinton was who was, at the same time, so manifestly unnerdy.”¹⁰

Unfortunately, this looks like a far more precise definition than it actually is. Nor is that problem solely due to the vagueness of the description “brainy but unnerdy.” Crucially, the imprecision here arises because the definition is primarily comparative. A wonk is a smart “non-nerd,” and this process of definition by juxtaposition, rather than by the recounting of definitive qualities, fits with Anderegg’s larger point about the 2000 election in particular and about nerds in general, which is that the terms “nerd” and “jock” ultimately derive their meanings from each other. A nerd is, basically, a non-jock just as a jock is a non-nerd. Now, clearly, the two positions are associated with particular qualities that are both seen as opposites and subject to a cultural valuation, a point to which I’ll return. For the moment, though, it seems important to stress that the crucial structure here is this binary difference itself, or, as Anderegg suggests, the real stereotype is not the identities of the jock and the nerd but the struggle between them.¹¹ Thus, as with the Gore versus Bush election, the candidates are assimilated to preset roles that do not fit them very well. Although Anderegg does not devote much attention to the point, what the wonk thus does is to disrupt this binary in Anderegg’s taxonomy, and I would like to suggest that it does so in ways that may mark a shift in contemporary ideas of masculinity. To understand that, however, we need to look at some actual wonks and see, specifically, what kind of men they are.

The Wonk as Jock

I’d like to turn now to two contemporary policy wonks, Paul Ryan and Peter Orszag, both budget experts, to see exactly how their public personas can help us further articulate a definition of the wonk and, in the case of two relatively famous photos of them, how those media depictions simultaneously complicate that definition. We can begin with Ryan, who may very well be the contemporary politician whose name is most frequently associated with the label. Writing during the run-up to the 2012 election, Alec MacGillis did a profile piece on Ryan in the New Republic that both confirms and elaborates on Anderegg’s definition of the wonk as smart but not really nerdy. Noting that Ryan worked as a personal trainer while studying up on policy during his early years in Washington, MacGillis makes clear that part of Ryan’s success comes not only from his knowledge of domestic economic matters but from qualities, such as athleticism and a certain charisma, that have traditionally been associated with the jock. One of MacGillis’s main points is that fewer people in Washington today understand the inner workings, the details, of government than was formerly the case, so that Ryan’s knowledge stands out, but he goes on to note that “it also didn’t hurt tha...