Weekend Reading: I wrote about the pre-history of Trump’s rise, the nature of Trumpism, and the radical politics of white despair – based on John Ganz’s masterful “When the Clock Broke”
The Origins of Trumpism and the Birth of the Present.
Much too long to summarise here, but ESSENTIAL reading for anyone who wants to understand where America (and the Right everywhere) is today.
#Neoliberalism (#Reaganomics) didn't just deliver lower growth, as well as increasing poverty for the bottom 50%, but also will allow #fascists to gain power. And they really are fascists. Not cautious old-fashioned #Conservatives, but #NeoNazis, à la 1930s.
A quote: "I cannot express how deeply unsettling it is to be a university researcher, an international expert on climate social science, and recognise so recently, so very late in the game, what we are up against."
Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, 2024
Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time. It shapes us in countless ways, yet most of us struggle to articulate what it is. Worse, we have been persuaded to accept this extreme creed as a kind of natural law. In Invisible Doctrine, journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison shatter this myth.
This essay by Jag Bhalla, on "The Dark Origins of Optimism and its Current Cheerful Evils", is one of the best pieces I've ever read on this. Maybe the best (also many links). Enjoy.
"As Voltaire knew, optimism is often an elite-serving demon in disguise"
@pvonhellermannn tausendmal thank you for posting this piece! I wish I could boost it many times! One great quote - "Carrying on with neoliberal recipes (i.e., market optimism) is the best way to extend these cheery chart trends —just keep the faith in free markets, rational greed, and tech. What a superbly elite-soothing message. It must be such a relief for the rich to see the world through these self-flattering, rose-colored glasses— Pinker casts plutocrats as the heroes driving humanity’s glorious gains." What a great and much-needed takedown of Pinker. #capitalism#neoliberalism#capitalist#CapitalismKills
(Some) ignorant leftbros: "Class first! No idpol!"
Scholars of right wing politics/economics: "All these right-wing thinkers are much more comfortable thinking about the blurred lines between sexual and economic politics than many thinkers on the left. And they understand that Keynesianism rests on a certain kind of sexual contract. Any challenge to this order—whether it be an escalation of wage or benefit claims, or the flight from sexual normativity, or unmarried women claiming welfare benefits—disrupts the fiscal and monetary calculus on which Keynesianism rests."
Above remark from "The Extravagances of Neoliberalism", an interview of Melinda Cooper (author of "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance") by Benjamin Kunkel, in The Baffler.
Jonathan Chait is real mad that leftists aren't taking liberal shit anymore. I got the link from archive.is to avoid giving his BS any extra clicks. It's way longer than it needs to be. This paragraph caught my attention though because it's at least an attempt at clarifying what liberals see as leftism and why they're wrong (which is why they should shut the fuck up, because they have been proven so very fucking wrong, so often, and for so long):
I don’t want to bore you...
lol
by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism,
Funny how liberals hate defining liberalism
so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective.
This is incorrect. Leftists differ radically on how much state action over markets is needed. What unites leftists is the belief that we need democracy in economic realms as well as political ones. (I personally don't accept fully authoritarian MLs as leftists, one can debate that, but that's where I stand.) Liberals think it's just fine for us to have democratic politics but for most people to work for institutions that are run as dictatorships.
...On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed.
Sort of true, but Chait tellingly leaves out the substance of the leftist critique, the reason why they think that political liberalism is a recipe for maintaining inequality, to wit: the lack of democracy in most people's workplaces. If economic power is concentrated while political power is distributed, then inevitably political power will become concentrated as well. Because money is power.
Anyway, Chait hates "Solidarity" the book and he also hates solidarity the concept. Of course he gets paid to represent left-of-center thought at major USA publications. Feel free to discuss your disgust for this type of guy further in replies.
Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education by Henry A. Giroux, 2014
An accessible examination of neoliberalism and its effects on higher education and America, by the author of American Nightmare .
Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education reveals how neoliberal policies, practices, and modes of material and symbolic violence have radically reshaped the mission and practice of higher education, short-changing a generation of young people.
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader ed. by Alfredo Saad-Filho & Deborah Johnston
Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology shaping our world today. It dictates the policies of governments, and shapes the actions of key institutions such as the WTO, IMF, World Bank and European Central Bank. Its political and economic implications can hardly be overstated.
Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique by Dieter Plehwe & Bernhard Walpen & Gisela Neunhöffer
Neoliberalism is fast becoming the dominant ideology of our age, yet politicians, businessmen and academics rarely identify themselves with it and even political forces critical of it continue to carry out neoliberal policies around the globe. How can we make sense of this paradox? Who actually are "the neoliberals"?
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West by Wendy Brown
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?
In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence by Kristin Bumiller
In an Abusive State puts forth a powerful argument: that the feminist campaign to stop sexual violence has entered into a problematic alliance with the neoliberal state.
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian
In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.
Strange, isn't it, that the values of real people — the things most of us truly care about — are not reflected at ALL in the values of our hegemonic capitalist consumerist culture...
You know what has always amazed me, people who can afford all this daily, even in their 80s, they will hop on a helicopter in Long Island fly down to lower Manhattan 7am, to be ready for that "killing trade" ... then do it again 5-6 days a week.
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternate realities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments—in cities, deserts, and in the middle of the sea—are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares.
Empire in the Age of Globalisation: US Hegemony and Neo-Liberal Disorder by Ray Kiely
This book examines the relationship between US hegemony and contemporary globalisation. Kiely reveals the weaknesses of globalisation theory, and argues that we can only approach a proper understanding of the contemporary world order by linking globalisation to debates on capitalism, imperialism, neo-liberalism and universal human rights.
Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed
With its dream worlds of power, commercialization, and profit making, neoliberalism has ushered in new Gilded Age in which the logic of the market now governs every aspect of media, culture, and social life-from schooling to health care to old age.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so.
David Harvey has been a key figure in misleading the world on the nature of #neoliberalism
He portrays history of neoliberalism in a period where neoliberal transformation has completed, not begun. State powers have already been transferred to capital's institutions and away from governments. Puppets portray it as a choice in politics
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
“I am sick of higher education leaders, I am sick of neoliberal thinking, I am sick of scarcity mindsets, I am sick of austerity, I am sick of senior management lacking morals, I am sick of education being decimated, I don’t know how we hang on + do important work for students”
Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester (UK), Uppsala (Sweden), and Bergen (Norway). Formerly director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, he also is one of the scientists most relied upon by Greta Thunberg in her assessment of where we stand and what we must do now.
In a hard-hitting new article, Professor Anderson delivers some truths we may not want to hear. This is how it begins...
For a flip-of-a-coin chance of staying at or below 1.5°C we have, globally, just five to eight years of current emissions before we blow our carbon budget. For a good chance of 2°C this extends to 15 to 18 years. We are using up the 1.5°C budget at a rate of about 1% each month, and the 2°C budget at around 0.5% each month.
But it’s not being spent evenly. According to new research by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the wealthiest 1% of people on the planet are responsible for double the greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest half.
This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change. These extend from well-funded advertising to pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
This dangerous framing is compounded by a generally supine media owned or controlled by the 1%. Many climate experts also reside in the 1% or seek funding from them, with the dangerous repercussion of giving the impression of objective conclusions. Add to this the reflected glory of hobnobbing with the elites and the prestige of honours awarded to those supporting hierarchical norms – and the closure of alternative narratives for addressing climate change is complete.
This may all sound flippant. But I argue that the tendrils of the 1% have twisted society into something deeply self-destructive. Layer upon of layer of lies and delusion have left us ill-equipped to address so many of our problems, of which climate change is only one symptom.
There is much more in the full piece, including an introductory passage that describes how Professor Anderson has been censored in his attempts to get this message out to the public. Must-read!