so let's see if this helps reconcile in some way the parallel conversations in here:
neoliberalism encompasses both republicans and moderate democrats--you know, like the dlc and the clinton administration--moderates. i know, i know the right has expended alot of effort trying to portray these folk as "leftists" but that's mostly a distraction. meaningless except in the imaginary grid-space of conservatives. it has had functions, they're obvious if you think about them, but they bore me now. neoliberalism is that "market" oriented ideology around which a movement took shape across the 1970s that connected back (thanks to the workings of the hoover institution i think, personally) to populist conservatism of the 1920s and to hoover as a way of situating itself in opposition to fordism, to the new deal---in other words, to the last socially viable form of capitalism (you wouldn't think this was the case if you focused on the opposition to the vietnam war and civil rights movement etc.---but if you look at the bigger picture, it's true)....the conditions of possibility for the ascendance of this ideology were put into place under nixon...thatcher/reagan are the key transitional figures--the making-explicit of a much longer and internal process of implosion of the left was its opportunity,,,the systematic blurring of information and ideology its main device for dissemination--and it has been the way things are thought and operate at the level of the dominant order in the united states since the reagan period.
that means reagan, bush 1, clinton, bush2.
that means republican republican democrat republican,
that means the center democrats AND the republican administrations were responsible for this politically.
so there's no point in this petty he said/she said of locating this or that action in this or that administration since the reagan period IF you see what's coming apart here as neoliberalism itself.
seems to me that folk can't get their heads around what's happening so they pretend it's something that fits into their frame of reference---but it's the frame of reference that IS the problem and that is coming undone as we write.
another way---the dominant order consists of different factions that rotate every 4 years. the conflict over the presidency is a conflict over which patronage networks will have privileged access to resources by alliances with the political faction that runs the show. but SOMETIMES there are periods of mutation. we are entering one of them. mutation throws alot of cards in the air. neoliberalism as the naturalized ideology of the pastr 30 years is particularly ill-suited to mutation.
that is one of a hundred reasons why it is coming apart at the seams, and very quickly.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
Last edited by roachboy; 10-02-2008 at 07:53 AM..
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