Genealogies of Neoliberalism

Longtime readers of this blog should be well aware of the ongoing discussion/debate we've had for the past few years about the genealogy of neoliberalism. New readers should go back and read some of the back-and-forth that occupied so much of the blog's time and space--Neoliberalism at USIH. With that in mind, it looks like we should all read the latest edition of Radical History Review, edited by Mark Soderstrom and Jason Stahl, dedicated to "Genealogies of Neoliberalism." Articles in the issue that seem to speak specifically to USIH:

Brian Tochterman, "Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs"

Ryan Patrick Murphy, "United Airlines is For Lovers?: Flight Attendant Activism and the Family Values Economy in the 1990s"

Stephen Dillon, "Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery"

Jon D. Rossini and Patricia Ybarra, "Neoliberalism, Historiography, Identity Politics: Toward a New Historiography of Latino Theater"

Sergio A. Cabrera, "To Serve God and Housewives?: Gender, Christianity, and the Political Economy of Shopping"

Hollinger on the Protestant Dialectic

The July 2011 edition of the Journal of American History includes David Hollinger’s article, based on his Presidential Address, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity.” In it, Hollinger describes the social thought of those mid-century Protestants, whom he calls “ecumenical Protestants,” who quit thinking in particularistic Christian and American terms and instead began to recognize that “the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.” Seeking justice between peoples became a more important calling than seeking to convert non-Christians.

Hollinger’s essay claims to make two important contributions. First, he argues that a better understanding of mid-century ecumenical Protestant thought helps us come to terms with “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs.” More: “Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world”—such that the United States was an exceptional nation because it was founded as a Christian nation—ideas “that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists.” Ecumenical leaders did not speak for their congregants. In this, Hollinger adds complexity to accounts of secularization that focus on non-religious free thinkers, such as David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Not enough intellectual historians focus on what my friend Bo Peery calls the Christian Left, except perhaps to take note of Niebuhrian realism. So I find this claim uncontroversial.

Hollinger’s second claim is more provocative. He contends that ecumenical Protestants might have lost their grip on Protestant America, but they helped pave the way for a more diverse multicultural America. In making this argument he draws a compelling analogy. I quote Hollinger’s penultimate paragraph in its entirety to give you a flavor:

However we assess the contemporary scene and however we may speculate about the future, certain historical realities ought to be clear. The evangelicals gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of Protestantism just as the Republicans gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of the South. In both cases, the triumph was facilitated by the decisions and actions of the rival party. This analogy, like any, can be carried too far, but just as the nation got something in return for the loss of the South to the Republican party, so, too, did the nation obtain something in return for the loss of Protestantism to the evangelicals: the United States got a more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity. This sympathetic engagement with diversity that has become so visible and celebrated a feature of the public life of the United States is the product of many agencies, but prominent among them are the egalitarian impulses and the capacities for self-interrogation the ecumenical Protestants brought to the great American encounter with diversity during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century. Those impulses and capacities generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of the mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space. Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to offer the United States than did its evangelical rival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.

Compelling stuff, perhaps. But were ecumenical Protestants that influential? Isn’t it more plausible to argue that they were caught up in a new zeitgeist that they had little to do with? In other words, is it correct to attribute, even in part, multicultural America to the influence of ecumenical Protestants? Does Hollinger’s celebration of the ecumenical-multiculturalist vanguard ignore the ways in which multiculturalism has worked so well alongside corporate rule, as I have discussed here and here and here? Obama is a nice synecdoche for this matrix. As the nation’s first black president, he calls attention to a “more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity…” And yet Obama has proven time and again to appease corporate interests—made evident yet again in his role in national debt ceiling ridiculousness.

Hollinger on the Protestant Dialectic

The July 2011 edition of the Journal of American History includes David Hollinger’s article, based on his Presidential Address, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity.” In it, Hollinger describes the social thought of those mid-century Protestants, whom he calls “ecumenical Protestants,” who quit thinking in particularistic Christian and American terms and instead began to recognize that “the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.” Seeking justice between peoples became a more important calling than seeking to convert non-Christians.

Hollinger’s essay claims to make two important contributions. First, he argues that a better understanding of mid-century ecumenical Protestant thought helps us come to terms with “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs.” More: “Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world”—such that the United States was an exceptional nation because it was founded as a Christian nation—ideas “that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists.” Ecumenical leaders did not speak for their congregants. In this, Hollinger adds complexity to accounts of secularization that focus on non-religious free thinkers, such as David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Not enough intellectual historians focus on what my friend Bo Peery calls the Christian Left, except perhaps to take note of Niebuhrian realism. So I find this claim uncontroversial.

Hollinger’s second claim is more provocative. He contends that ecumenical Protestants might have lost their grip on Protestant America, but they helped pave the way for a more diverse multicultural America. In making this argument he draws a compelling analogy. I quote Hollinger’s penultimate paragraph in its entirety to give you a flavor:

However we assess the contemporary scene and however we may speculate about the future, certain historical realities ought to be clear. The evangelicals gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of Protestantism just as the Republicans gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of the South. In both cases, the triumph was facilitated by the decisions and actions of the rival party. This analogy, like any, can be carried too far, but just as the nation got something in return for the loss of the South to the Republican party, so, too, did the nation obtain something in return for the loss of Protestantism to the evangelicals: the United States got a more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity. This sympathetic engagement with diversity that has become so visible and celebrated a feature of the public life of the United States is the product of many agencies, but prominent among them are the egalitarian impulses and the capacities for self-interrogation the ecumenical Protestants brought to the great American encounter with diversity during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century. Those impulses and capacities generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of the mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space. Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to offer the United States than did its evangelical rival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.

Compelling stuff, perhaps. But were ecumenical Protestants that influential? Isn’t it more plausible to argue that they were caught up in a new zeitgeist that they had little to do with? In other words, is it correct to attribute, even in part, multicultural America to the influence of ecumenical Protestants? Does Hollinger’s celebration of the ecumenical-multiculturalist vanguard ignore the ways in which multiculturalism has worked so well alongside corporate rule, as I have discussed here and here and here? Obama is a nice synecdoche for this matrix. As the nation’s first black president, he calls attention to a “more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity…” And yet Obama has proven time and again to appease corporate interests—made evident yet again in his role in national debt ceiling ridiculousness.

My Ambivalent Relationship with the Nation

By my title, you might expect to read something deep about my vexed relationship with the American nation. In the midst of end-of-semester grading, something as interesting as that will have to wait. Instead, I briefly offer you an example of why this long-time subscriber to the Nation magazine has what might be termed a love-apathy relationship with that bastion of American left-liberalism. On the one hand, as the last left-ish weekly newsmagazine, it's an important institution. On the other, I've grown tired of the stale predictability of its editorials, which critique the Democrats from the left until it comes to election time, when the specter of Republican rule disciplines Katrina vanden Heuvel's editorial board to step into line. I've become weary of most of the Nation columnists, who harp on the same issues over and over and over: Naomi Klein on the immorality of corporate rule, Katha Pollitt on the constant threat to women, Gary Younge on how weird American racism seems to a black Brit, Eric Alterman on the lack of liberalism among the so-called liberal media punditry. It's not that these writers are always or even often wrong, it's just that dead horses can only be beaten so many times. The only Nation columnist whom I still enjoy reading is that eclectic old Marxist Alexander Cockburn, which speaks to my own interests, but also to the fact that he mixes up his topics enough to keep me coming back. And because he slays conservative and liberal orthodoxies. He even makes counterintuitive, almost deranged arguments denying human-made global warming that I can't help but laugh at.

Keeping such ambivalence and apathy in mind, I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, but decided to re-up based on four wonderful essays that appeared in recent issues. I guess my faith has been restored, for now. Here are links and very brief synopses to these four essays. Enjoy! (I can access the entire articles at the Nation website, but I am unsure if this is because they are free to everyone or if I can get behind the pay wall due to being a subscriber).

1. Corey Robin, "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom." In this essay, CUNY political scientists Corey Robin criticizes how liberals misidentify the source of conservatism's appeal. The article is generated from his forthcoming book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He writes: "Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right's economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion." Instead, he argues that conservatism is appealing because it has best tapped into the deep well of American rhetoric on freedom. He wishes the left would follow suit, and make the case that big business thwarts freedom, not government. We should argue for an empowered government to enlarge freedom, instead of as a source for security and equality, which endorses a passive conception of politics.

2. Joshua Clover, "Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism's Permanent Contradiction." This is a highly entertaining review of two books on neoliberalism. I quote Clover's concluding sentences: "The current catastrophe is a rare creature, to be sure. But it is not a black swan; it is a zombie. It is the last crisis come calling, and the one before that and before that again—not just returned but fortified by the intervening years and the deferral of a reckoning. This crisis that keeps returning, now dressed in finery, now in rags, is evidently not a monster sprung from one particular deviation. Global crisis is, increasingly, the unnatural natural state of modern capital. It will not be laid to rest by fiddling with the alignment of parts, much less returning to a previous mode—these parts, these modes, are what set it shambling forward, hungry, blindly grasping, in the first place."

3. Martha Nussbaum, "What Makes Life Good?" Nussbaum, University of Chicago philosopher, uses empirical, on-the-ground evidence from her studies of women in south Asia to make the case that "measurements of economic growth fail to capture many facets of well-being." It's not a novel argument, but the essay puts it in line with what she describes as a new theory of social justice: the "Capabilities Approach." She describes this approach: "Unlike the dominant approaches, it begins with a commitment to the equal dignity of all people, whatever their class, religion, caste, race or gender, and it is committed to the attainment, for all, of lives that are worthy of that equal dignity. Both a comparative account of the quality of life and a theory of basic social justice, it remedies the major deficiencies of the dominant approaches. It is sensitive to distribution, focusing particularly on the struggles of traditionally excluded or marginalized groups. It is sensitive to the complexity and the qualitative diversity of the goals that people pursue. Rather than trying to squeeze all these diverse goals into a single box, it carefully examines the relationships among them, thinking about how they support and complement one another. It also takes into account that people may need different quantities of resources if they are to come up to the same level of ability to choose and act, particularly if they begin from different social positions."

4. Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak." This is a review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg that is beautifully written and will be of interest to anyone who even remotely agrees with Luxemburg's basic philosophy: "From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace."

My Ambivalent Relationship with the Nation

By my title, you might expect to read something deep about my vexed relationship with the American nation. In the midst of end-of-semester grading, something as interesting as that will have to wait. Instead, I briefly offer you an example of why this long-time subscriber to the Nation magazine has what might be termed a love-apathy relationship with that bastion of American left-liberalism. On the one hand, as the last left-ish weekly newsmagazine, it's an important institution. On the other, I've grown tired of the stale predictability of its editorials, which critique the Democrats from the left until it comes to election time, when the specter of Republican rule disciplines Katrina vanden Heuvel's editorial board to step into line. I've become weary of most of the Nation columnists, who harp on the same issues over and over and over: Naomi Klein on the immorality of corporate rule, Katha Pollitt on the constant threat to women, Gary Younge on how weird American racism seems to a black Brit, Eric Alterman on the lack of liberalism among the so-called liberal media punditry. It's not that these writers are always or even often wrong, it's just that dead horses can only be beaten so many times. The only Nation columnist whom I still enjoy reading is that eclectic old Marxist Alexander Cockburn, which speaks to my own interests, but also to the fact that he mixes up his topics enough to keep me coming back. And because he slays conservative and liberal orthodoxies. He even makes counterintuitive, almost deranged arguments denying human-made global warming that I can't help but laugh at.

Keeping such ambivalence and apathy in mind, I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, but decided to re-up based on four wonderful essays that appeared in recent issues. I guess my faith has been restored, for now. Here are links and very brief synopses to these four essays. Enjoy! (I can access the entire articles at the Nation website, but I am unsure if this is because they are free to everyone or if I can get behind the pay wall due to being a subscriber).

1. Corey Robin, "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom." In this essay, CUNY political scientists Corey Robin criticizes how liberals misidentify the source of conservatism's appeal. The article is generated from his forthcoming book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He writes: "Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right's economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion." Instead, he argues that conservatism is appealing because it has best tapped into the deep well of American rhetoric on freedom. He wishes the left would follow suit, and make the case that big business thwarts freedom, not government. We should argue for an empowered government to enlarge freedom, instead of as a source for security and equality, which endorses a passive conception of politics.

2. Joshua Clover, "Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism's Permanent Contradiction." This is a highly entertaining review of two books on neoliberalism. I quote Clover's concluding sentences: "The current catastrophe is a rare creature, to be sure. But it is not a black swan; it is a zombie. It is the last crisis come calling, and the one before that and before that again—not just returned but fortified by the intervening years and the deferral of a reckoning. This crisis that keeps returning, now dressed in finery, now in rags, is evidently not a monster sprung from one particular deviation. Global crisis is, increasingly, the unnatural natural state of modern capital. It will not be laid to rest by fiddling with the alignment of parts, much less returning to a previous mode—these parts, these modes, are what set it shambling forward, hungry, blindly grasping, in the first place."

3. Martha Nussbaum, "What Makes Life Good?" Nussbaum, University of Chicago philosopher, uses empirical, on-the-ground evidence from her studies of women in south Asia to make the case that "measurements of economic growth fail to capture many facets of well-being." It's not a novel argument, but the essay puts it in line with what she describes as a new theory of social justice: the "Capabilities Approach." She describes this approach: "Unlike the dominant approaches, it begins with a commitment to the equal dignity of all people, whatever their class, religion, caste, race or gender, and it is committed to the attainment, for all, of lives that are worthy of that equal dignity. Both a comparative account of the quality of life and a theory of basic social justice, it remedies the major deficiencies of the dominant approaches. It is sensitive to distribution, focusing particularly on the struggles of traditionally excluded or marginalized groups. It is sensitive to the complexity and the qualitative diversity of the goals that people pursue. Rather than trying to squeeze all these diverse goals into a single box, it carefully examines the relationships among them, thinking about how they support and complement one another. It also takes into account that people may need different quantities of resources if they are to come up to the same level of ability to choose and act, particularly if they begin from different social positions."

4. Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak." This is a review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg that is beautifully written and will be of interest to anyone who even remotely agrees with Luxemburg's basic philosophy: "From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace."

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Žižek on Liberals and the Arab Revolutionary Spirit (and other fun Friday readings)

Six suggestions:
1. Slavoj Žižek, "Why Fear the Arab Revolutionary Spirit?"

In this essay Žižek takes to task those western liberals who are too cautious in their support of the Egyptian revolutionaries and protestors in other nations, arguing that such a move will repeat the mistakes of the past, when western help in shutting down Arab socialism helped give rise to Muslim fundamentalism. He concludes his little op-ed:

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent." Where, then, should Mubarak go? Here, the answer is also clear: to the Hague. If there is a leader who deserves to sit there, it is him.


2. John Summers, "Daniel Bell and The End of Ideology"

In this timely retrospective, Summers wonders why a book that categorized the death knell of socialist utopia is still considered so important. Here's a glimpse:

What is the legacy of The End of Ideology today? I think it lies in the sober, anti-romantic, wiser-than-thou style of political analysis and leadership on display on the night of January 25, hours after Bell died, in Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech. “Obama aims to realize the end-of-ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed,” David Brooks opined in 2009, as if every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy has not feared an uprising from the Left, after the Left put them in power. Two years into Obama’s administration, the ironies and fatuities of the style deserve to be clearly stated. While the president claims the post-ideological, responsible center, he stands accused of promulgating socialism by Americans who have no memory, and little understanding, of socialist ideology; the electorate fights over party dogmas awkwardly labeled neoconservative and neoliberal; civic discourse runs thick with empty rhetoric of rebellion and revolution, interrupted by sporadic episodes of passionless violence; and political society, long lacking the New Deal consensus assumed by Bell and his cohorts, swings from apathy to protest and back again.

And a little more from this piece on how Bell's anti-ideology might have acted as the intellectual correlative of anti-politics, which might help us come to terms with whether or not Bell was a neoconservative:

But if ideology had ended, then how could “the reader” judge the contributions of The End of Ideology? Was Bell a neoconservative, his book an early signpost for the neoconservative path? He rejected the label, though not because he felt free of conservatism. In a minor paradox that gave his book its polemical energy, he claimed that his thesis exempted him from all labels, that he spoke from a nameless position beyond ideology. The neoconservative “designation is meaningless,” he insisted—not wrong, mind you, but “meaningless.” His book represented a “new cultural criticism” that “seeks to transcend the lines of the present debates and to present the dilemmas of the society within a very different framework.” In place of closed ideologies and forgone conclusions, he mated the spirit of openness with the discipline and tentativeness of new facts. In place of wild passion, he embraced “the hardness of alienation, the sense of otherness.”

3. Check out Nemo's excellent review of Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture at the PhD Octopus blog.

Although it is obvious that Nemo mostly likes the book, he does question one of Rodgers's central claims, that intellectuals in the age of disaggregation quit thinking about limits placed upon people by power, instead thinking about the limitlessness of human agency. Nemo writes:"Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors?"

Actually, Rodgers does make one glaring exception to his rule: race. In his Chapter Four, "Race and Social Memory," he contends that though many sought liberation from the past in their optimistic attempts to re-imagine a limitless future—a postmodern future where power was inoperative—blacks could not escape the confines of power and history, written as they were onto their skin. So instead of seeking to escape history, they sought to flip it to their advantage. Black became a source of pride, history a point of continuity.

This leads me to my next reading suggestion:


4. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

I just read this book for the first time alongside a class of undergraduate students. I found it beautifully written and cogently argued. It's more political and biographical than intellectual history, though Joseph does pause to analyze key texts such as Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In short, I highly recommend this book.

5. Bill McKibben, "Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?"

This is short. But I found it to be good ammunition for those illogical people in your lives who make the fallacious argument that the cold weather and storms we're experiencing refute global warming. (This coming from someone who spent two hours digging out my car on Wednesday.)

6. Ben Alpers, "Neoliberalism (Slight Return)"

In the hopes of rescuing this post from getting lost in the shuffle, please check out what I guess might be the last post on our long debate about neoliberalism. In conclusion, Ben and I agree on this important matter (which I wrote in my previous post):

"The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts."

Happy Friday!

Daniel Bell: Neoconservative?

Daniel Bell has been remembered twice here in the past week. First, briefly by Ben Alpers, and second by Andrew Hartman in a reflection on Bell's 1992 analysis of the Culture Wars.

My contribution to this conversation is to point you toward a Slate.com essay on Bell by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg worked on a project about Dwight Macdonald, and had an occasion to interview Bell (among other New York Intellectuals). The article paints Bell as an engaging, honest, skeptical, and predictably bright member of his intellectual community. But Weisberg adds to our ongoing discussions about neoconservatism and neoliberalism by taking issue with Ben's characterization of Bell as a "charter neoconservative" (though Ben calls that classification "idiosyncratic). Here are the money passages from Weisberg (bolds mine):

Bell seemed to write about everything under the sun and managed to be deep about all of it. But that is not what most distinguishes him from his peers, who were nothing if not polymaths. Unlike so many of the writers on the left who grew up in the 1930s, and whose basic political commitments now look fundamentally misguided, Bell was consistently on the right track. He was never a Stalinist or a Trotskyist in the 1930s; didn't flirt with anarchism, pacifism, or the New Left in the 1960s; and had no patience for neoconservatism in the 1980s. Bell memorably described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." Though his thinking certainly evolved over the years—in truth, he was more a socialist in his sociological analysis than in his economic prescriptions—he stayed true throughout his life to a fundamentally reasonable set of social democratic ideals.

Bell...was a generous and humane character. After founding the Public Interest with Kristol in 1965, Bell left in the mid-1970s rather than breaking up a close friendship over politics. Without him, the magazine's skeptical take on Great Society liberalism calcified into a rigid ideological stance, and it became far less interesting.

So it looks like one of the debates that will play out in the future historiography of neoconservatism is whether Bell qualifies as a true member. And even if his name has been associated with the movement in the past, historians (and historically-minded biographers) usually consider a full life's work before making a final judgment.

Finally, for your reading pleasure, I offer this group remembrance of Bell from Dissent. The contributors include Michael Kazin (nephew of Bell), Morris Dickstein, and Daniel A. Bell (who called Daniel Bell "Dan The Elder"). - TL

Daniel Bell: Neoconservative?

Daniel Bell has been remembered twice here in the past week. First, briefly by Ben Alpers, and second by Andrew Hartman in a reflection on Bell's 1992 analysis of the Culture Wars.

My contribution to this conversation is to point you toward a Slate.com essay on Bell by Jacob Weisberg. Weisberg worked on a project about Dwight Macdonald, and had an occasion to interview Bell (among other New York Intellectuals). The article paints Bell as an engaging, honest, skeptical, and predictably bright member of his intellectual community. But Weisberg adds to our ongoing discussions about neoconservatism and neoliberalism by taking issue with Ben's characterization of Bell as a "charter neoconservative" (though Ben calls that classification "idiosyncratic). Here are the money passages from Weisberg (bolds mine):

Bell seemed to write about everything under the sun and managed to be deep about all of it. But that is not what most distinguishes him from his peers, who were nothing if not polymaths. Unlike so many of the writers on the left who grew up in the 1930s, and whose basic political commitments now look fundamentally misguided, Bell was consistently on the right track. He was never a Stalinist or a Trotskyist in the 1930s; didn't flirt with anarchism, pacifism, or the New Left in the 1960s; and had no patience for neoconservatism in the 1980s. Bell memorably described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." Though his thinking certainly evolved over the years—in truth, he was more a socialist in his sociological analysis than in his economic prescriptions—he stayed true throughout his life to a fundamentally reasonable set of social democratic ideals.

Bell...was a generous and humane character. After founding the Public Interest with Kristol in 1965, Bell left in the mid-1970s rather than breaking up a close friendship over politics. Without him, the magazine's skeptical take on Great Society liberalism calcified into a rigid ideological stance, and it became far less interesting.

So it looks like one of the debates that will play out in the future historiography of neoconservatism is whether Bell qualifies as a true member. And even if his name has been associated with the movement in the past, historians (and historically-minded biographers) usually consider a full life's work before making a final judgment.

Finally, for your reading pleasure, I offer this group remembrance of Bell from Dissent. The contributors include Michael Kazin (nephew of Bell), Morris Dickstein, and Daniel A. Bell (who called Daniel Bell "Dan The Elder"). - TL

Neoliberalism (Slight Return)

This is a too-long delayed reply to Andrew’s long and thoughtful rejoinder to my most recent comments on neoliberalism (us), neoliberalism (e), and neoliberalism (unmodified).*

(I hope that at least some of our readership is thinking "finally Ben is responding to that post." I fear most of you are thinking "oh no...not this discussion again."  If you're in the former group--or are a glutton for punishment in the latter one--follow me below the fold....)


Let me start by agreeing with one thing Andrew wrote:

The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts. 

I think this is correct.  Neoliberalism (us) is a more local phenomenon than neoliberalism (e), and in that sense it is less important.  This is not to say that it is unrelated to similar phenomena in other countries.  Certainly the ascent of the "New Democrats"--very much the successors of the neoliberals (us)--during the late 1980s and 1990s was paralleled by the ascent of New Labour in the UK and similar, roughly rightward movements among many of the social democratic parties of continental Europe.

"A-ha," I can hear Andrew saying, "isn't that your neoliberalism (e)?  I told you neoliberalism (e) = neoliberalism (us)!"

Not so fast.  Let me reiterate my problem with equating neoliberalism (us) (and its European cousins) with neoliberalism (e).  As I outlined in my original post, neoliberalism (us) was designed by its founders to be an alternative both to what they called "paleoliberalism" (really the dominant strain of post-New Politics liberalism of the 1970s) and to the various American conservatism as embodied in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  But those conservatives, to whom the neoliberals (us) hoped to be the principal alternative, were, in turn, the defining example of neoliberalism (e) to those thinking about neoliberalism in that sense.

So while, in the 1980s, self-described US neoliberals were certainly neoliberals in the European (or global) sense, all US neoliberals in the European (or global) sense were not neoliberals in the US sense.  Indeed, neoliberalism (us) was to a great extent created to engage in a battle within neoliberalism (e), though virtually nobody in this country would have called neoliberalism (e) "neoliberalism" at the time.

Equating neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e) makes a hash out of 1980s American politics, much of which took place within the horizon of neoliberalism (e).  Indeed, for all the explanatory power of neoliberalism (e) in the world today, one of my problems with it as an all-purpose explanation (as it occasionally rather crudely becomes) is that neoliberals often disagree with each other about important things....in part because of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism (e).  In countries like the US and the UK, most mainstream politics for the last three decades has consisted of arguments within neoliberalism (e).  And while it's meaningful and important to point this out, we should avoid the Vulgar Naderism** of declaring that there are no differences whatsoever between the (neoliberal (e)) Republicans and the (neoliberal (e)) Democrats.

So onto Andrew's second apparent disagreement with me, which concerns the relationship between neoliberalism (e) and neoconservatism.***

Again, let me start by noting a substantial area of agreement.  I certainly agree that neoconservatives have something to do with neoliberalism.   Like virtually every other political ideology in the world today, neoconservative thought is marked by its taking place in the context of a national and global economy largely dominated by neoliberalism.  And like most other successful recent US political movements, neoconservatives are neoliberals (e).****

The neoconservative take on neoliberalism (e) is distinctive, in ways that Andrew explores very productively in his post.*****

"Neoliberalism" (us) was coined, in part, as both a parallel and a contrast to "neoconservatism." But "neoconservatism," though it appeared on the scene well after neoliberalism (e) was born, was not coined in relationship to "neoliberalism" at all.  And as a species of neoliberalism (e), neoconservatism does not contrast with it.

All of which brings me back to where this overly long and rambling post (sorry folks!) more or less began: American politics, at least for most of the last half century or so, has often been organized around the words "liberal" and "conservative," and a variety of variations of them. Among these have been "neoconservative" and "neoliberal" (us).  Both US liberalism and US conservatism are protean; each shifts to a great extent in relation to the other. In contrast, the referent of "neoliberalism" in the global sense is much more stable.

Most, though not all, US liberals and US conservatives in recent decades have also been neoliberals (e).  And the neoliberals have been dominant on both the American right and left (two more terms with different meanings elsewhere that are often used interchangeably with "conservative" and "liberal" in US political discourse).

As historians, we want to be able both to see American political thought in a global context and to understand and account for political arguments within the US, even when those arguments are taking place in a fairly narrow political space.  To do the former, we need to be able to think about neoliberalism (e).  To do the latter we need, among many other things, to think a little about neoliberalism (us)...at least when we're thinking about the 1980s.  And we need to understand that neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us) are not the same thing.

One final thought, a bit further afield: does anyone else find it peculiar how infrequently capitalism has been mentioned in these various posts on neoliberalism?

_________________________________________________________________________

* For those who haven't been following this discussion and for some reason feel moved to do so, it more or less starts here and continues here. Then read Andrew's post referenced above and you're up to speed.

** I use this term with (some) apologies to Ralph Nader, who is perhaps more responsible for Vulgar Naderism than Marx is responsible for Vulgar Marxism, but who nevertheless deserves at least somewhat better than to be reduced to it.

*** Believing that he has erased the distinction between neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us), Andrew writes

I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education. 

But, in fact, nothing in what follows has anything whatsoever to do with self-described, 1980s US neoliberals (i.e. neoliberalism (us)).

**** Not to beat a dead horse, but this is, yet again, evidence that we cannot simply equate neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e).  The self-described US "neoliberals" of the 1980s defined themselves in part against neoconservatism, which was in a period of enormous growth in influence.


***** On the particularities of the neoconservative brand of neoliberalism (e), see also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81-85.

Neoliberalism (Slight Return)

This is a too-long delayed reply to Andrew’s long and thoughtful rejoinder to my most recent comments on neoliberalism (us), neoliberalism (e), and neoliberalism (unmodified).*

(I hope that at least some of our readership is thinking "finally Ben is responding to that post." I fear most of you are thinking "oh no...not this discussion again."  If you're in the former group--or are a glutton for punishment in the latter one--follow me below the fold....)


Let me start by agreeing with one thing Andrew wrote:

The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts. 

I think this is correct.  Neoliberalism (us) is a more local phenomenon than neoliberalism (e), and in that sense it is less important.  This is not to say that it is unrelated to similar phenomena in other countries.  Certainly the ascent of the "New Democrats"--very much the successors of the neoliberals (us)--during the late 1980s and 1990s was paralleled by the ascent of New Labour in the UK and similar, roughly rightward movements among many of the social democratic parties of continental Europe.

"A-ha," I can hear Andrew saying, "isn't that your neoliberalism (e)?  I told you neoliberalism (e) = neoliberalism (us)!"

Not so fast.  Let me reiterate my problem with equating neoliberalism (us) (and its European cousins) with neoliberalism (e).  As I outlined in my original post, neoliberalism (us) was designed by its founders to be an alternative both to what they called "paleoliberalism" (really the dominant strain of post-New Politics liberalism of the 1970s) and to the various American conservatism as embodied in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  But those conservatives, to whom the neoliberals (us) hoped to be the principal alternative, were, in turn, the defining example of neoliberalism (e) to those thinking about neoliberalism in that sense.

So while, in the 1980s, self-described US neoliberals were certainly neoliberals in the European (or global) sense, all US neoliberals in the European (or global) sense were not neoliberals in the US sense.  Indeed, neoliberalism (us) was to a great extent created to engage in a battle within neoliberalism (e), though virtually nobody in this country would have called neoliberalism (e) "neoliberalism" at the time.

Equating neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e) makes a hash out of 1980s American politics, much of which took place within the horizon of neoliberalism (e).  Indeed, for all the explanatory power of neoliberalism (e) in the world today, one of my problems with it as an all-purpose explanation (as it occasionally rather crudely becomes) is that neoliberals often disagree with each other about important things....in part because of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism (e).  In countries like the US and the UK, most mainstream politics for the last three decades has consisted of arguments within neoliberalism (e).  And while it's meaningful and important to point this out, we should avoid the Vulgar Naderism** of declaring that there are no differences whatsoever between the (neoliberal (e)) Republicans and the (neoliberal (e)) Democrats.

So onto Andrew's second apparent disagreement with me, which concerns the relationship between neoliberalism (e) and neoconservatism.***

Again, let me start by noting a substantial area of agreement.  I certainly agree that neoconservatives have something to do with neoliberalism.   Like virtually every other political ideology in the world today, neoconservative thought is marked by its taking place in the context of a national and global economy largely dominated by neoliberalism.  And like most other successful recent US political movements, neoconservatives are neoliberals (e).****

The neoconservative take on neoliberalism (e) is distinctive, in ways that Andrew explores very productively in his post.*****

"Neoliberalism" (us) was coined, in part, as both a parallel and a contrast to "neoconservatism." But "neoconservatism," though it appeared on the scene well after neoliberalism (e) was born, was not coined in relationship to "neoliberalism" at all.  And as a species of neoliberalism (e), neoconservatism does not contrast with it.

All of which brings me back to where this overly long and rambling post (sorry folks!) more or less began: American politics, at least for most of the last half century or so, has often been organized around the words "liberal" and "conservative," and a variety of variations of them. Among these have been "neoconservative" and "neoliberal" (us).  Both US liberalism and US conservatism are protean; each shifts to a great extent in relation to the other. In contrast, the referent of "neoliberalism" in the global sense is much more stable.

Most, though not all, US liberals and US conservatives in recent decades have also been neoliberals (e).  And the neoliberals have been dominant on both the American right and left (two more terms with different meanings elsewhere that are often used interchangeably with "conservative" and "liberal" in US political discourse).

As historians, we want to be able both to see American political thought in a global context and to understand and account for political arguments within the US, even when those arguments are taking place in a fairly narrow political space.  To do the former, we need to be able to think about neoliberalism (e).  To do the latter we need, among many other things, to think a little about neoliberalism (us)...at least when we're thinking about the 1980s.  And we need to understand that neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us) are not the same thing.

One final thought, a bit further afield: does anyone else find it peculiar how infrequently capitalism has been mentioned in these various posts on neoliberalism?

_________________________________________________________________________

* For those who haven't been following this discussion and for some reason feel moved to do so, it more or less starts here and continues here. Then read Andrew's post referenced above and you're up to speed.

** I use this term with (some) apologies to Ralph Nader, who is perhaps more responsible for Vulgar Naderism than Marx is responsible for Vulgar Marxism, but who nevertheless deserves at least somewhat better than to be reduced to it.

*** Believing that he has erased the distinction between neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us), Andrew writes

I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education. 

But, in fact, nothing in what follows has anything whatsoever to do with self-described, 1980s US neoliberals (i.e. neoliberalism (us)).

**** Not to beat a dead horse, but this is, yet again, evidence that we cannot simply equate neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e).  The self-described US "neoliberals" of the 1980s defined themselves in part against neoconservatism, which was in a period of enormous growth in influence.


***** On the particularities of the neoconservative brand of neoliberalism (e), see also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81-85.

The President's Tie

In the 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama wore bi-partisanship around his neck--his tie was neither red nor blue but some color blend of the two. His veep, Joe Biden, seemed to have on a tie of blue with red stripes, perhaps worn in solidarity with the president. In the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Arizona, people expect at least a nod in the direction of civility, a notion, as intellectual historian James Kloppenberg made clear in his recent book on Obama and in his keynote address to the 2010 USIH conference, that the president has trafficked in for a long time. So in this purplish haze, did Obama offer a way for us to channel our "e pluribus unum"?

Yes, as long as we are on board with the president--preferably riding in a high-speed train between two cities that run on "clean energy." As Kloppenberg makes clear in his analysis of Obama, the president enjoys a good debate, but does not see compromise as the ultimate goal of democratic deliberations. He does not hesitate to state, as he did in the State of the Union, that we should do something because "it is the right thing to do." It was the right thing to do to pass a comprehensive healthcare bill. It was the right thing to do to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was the right thing to do to initiate Race to the Top. He also included a list of things that were not so much wrong, but ultimately not right, such as, extending tax cuts for the nation's wealthy; targeting illegal immigrants and their children (especially when they are in college or the military); and, giving in to Tea Party demands to close down half the federal government.

As many commentators note, this Obama speech was heavy on policy ideas and bit lighter on soaring rhetoric. There were still moments, though, that illustrated Obama's command of the rhetorical presidency--he had a "I'm not a socialist" moment near the end of the speech when he declared to a rousing standing ovation that no one in the House chamber would want to be in any country other than the United States. Fair enough, Obama made it clear he has no intention of turning Swedish. But such assurances had little effect on the Michelle Bachmann projects around the country and their constant state of seemingly satisfying paranoia. I say satisfying because never has paranoia been meted out with the kind of smiles worn by the Minnesota representative and Alaska's (least?) favorite daughter.

But what of Obama's plan to re-imagine the American dream as a high-tech, highly-educated future? With references to another imagined landscape, the Kennedy years of Camelot, Obama suggested that Americans realized their potential as dreamers when they looked beyond the end of their noses--toward the moon, or, at least, at some other superpower.

This blog has engaged in some excellent discussion on two issues that seem fundamental to Obama's vision--the power of a free market mentality and the promise of American education. I would like to hear from my fellow bloggers on what they saw in Obama's vision. Did Obama err on the side of the market or did he propose a plan to harness (regulate) the market for the interests of the nation? Is Obama a neo-liberal warlord, or the pragmatist of Kloppenberg's analysis? And finally, did Obama offer a revision of the American dream? Consider two statements to contrast, the first from George W. Bush's last State of the Union in January 2008 and the second from Obama last night.

"In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our Nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens. And so in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free peoples to make wise decisions and empower them to improve their lives for their futures.

To build a prosperous future, we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy." George W. Bush, 2008 State of the Union

"We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit –- none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don’t have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything is possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth." Barack Obama, 2011 State of the Union

The President's Tie

In the 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama wore bi-partisanship around his neck--his tie was neither red nor blue but some color blend of the two. His veep, Joe Biden, seemed to have on a tie of blue with red stripes, perhaps worn in solidarity with the president. In the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Arizona, people expect at least a nod in the direction of civility, a notion, as intellectual historian James Kloppenberg made clear in his recent book on Obama and in his keynote address to the 2010 USIH conference, that the president has trafficked in for a long time. So in this purplish haze, did Obama offer a way for us to channel our "e pluribus unum"?

Yes, as long as we are on board with the president--preferably riding in a high-speed train between two cities that run on "clean energy." As Kloppenberg makes clear in his analysis of Obama, the president enjoys a good debate, but does not see compromise as the ultimate goal of democratic deliberations. He does not hesitate to state, as he did in the State of the Union, that we should do something because "it is the right thing to do." It was the right thing to do to pass a comprehensive healthcare bill. It was the right thing to do to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was the right thing to do to initiate Race to the Top. He also included a list of things that were not so much wrong, but ultimately not right, such as, extending tax cuts for the nation's wealthy; targeting illegal immigrants and their children (especially when they are in college or the military); and, giving in to Tea Party demands to close down half the federal government.

As many commentators note, this Obama speech was heavy on policy ideas and bit lighter on soaring rhetoric. There were still moments, though, that illustrated Obama's command of the rhetorical presidency--he had a "I'm not a socialist" moment near the end of the speech when he declared to a rousing standing ovation that no one in the House chamber would want to be in any country other than the United States. Fair enough, Obama made it clear he has no intention of turning Swedish. But such assurances had little effect on the Michelle Bachmann projects around the country and their constant state of seemingly satisfying paranoia. I say satisfying because never has paranoia been meted out with the kind of smiles worn by the Minnesota representative and Alaska's (least?) favorite daughter.

But what of Obama's plan to re-imagine the American dream as a high-tech, highly-educated future? With references to another imagined landscape, the Kennedy years of Camelot, Obama suggested that Americans realized their potential as dreamers when they looked beyond the end of their noses--toward the moon, or, at least, at some other superpower.

This blog has engaged in some excellent discussion on two issues that seem fundamental to Obama's vision--the power of a free market mentality and the promise of American education. I would like to hear from my fellow bloggers on what they saw in Obama's vision. Did Obama err on the side of the market or did he propose a plan to harness (regulate) the market for the interests of the nation? Is Obama a neo-liberal warlord, or the pragmatist of Kloppenberg's analysis? And finally, did Obama offer a revision of the American dream? Consider two statements to contrast, the first from George W. Bush's last State of the Union in January 2008 and the second from Obama last night.

"In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our Nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens. And so in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free peoples to make wise decisions and empower them to improve their lives for their futures.

To build a prosperous future, we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy." George W. Bush, 2008 State of the Union

"We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit –- none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don’t have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything is possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth." Barack Obama, 2011 State of the Union

Neo-Liberal-Conservative America (some recent educational history)

“Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in.”

Just when I thought I could let the discussion of neoliberalism rest for now, the comment thread at Ben’s most recent post on the subject sparked my wish to seek more clarity.

Ben writes:

And it’s fascinating to compare [an essay on the origins of U.S. neoliberalism] to more recent essays like Wendy Brown's “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec., 2006), pp. 690-714; http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452506), which is equally innocent of neoliberalism (us). Instead, Brown discusses “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” (e) as somehow parallel constructs, though the first is more exclusively American:
“The problematic of this essay is well-suited to the analytics of dreamwork. This is the problematic of thinking together American neoconservatism—a fierce moral-political rationality—and neoliberalism—a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation and that does not align exclusively with any political persuasion.”
Here's the problem (or at least a problem) with all this: although neoliberalism (us) may be an instance of neoliberalism (e), they are not the same thing...and, in fact, neoliberalism (e) pretty much encompasses all “mainstream” US political positions of (at least) the last thirty years or so (it’s called the “Washington consensus” ‘cause it's a consensus, after all).
So while “neoliberalism” (us) was, indeed, constructed as a parallel contrastive term to “neoconservatism,” “neoliberalism” (e) really doesn’t work as contrastive with “neoconservatism,” despite its linguistic similarity.

I want to politely disagree with my colleague Ben on two fronts.

First, Ben’s careful spadework in separating out neoliberalism (us) from neoliberalism (e), though an interesting distinction, will, I suspect, in the longue durée mean very little. Neoliberalism (e) is now neoliberalism (g) (global). And neoliberalism (g), in the eyes of most people, is neoliberalism (e and us). In a fascinating interview about his most recent book on Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm, simply the best at historical periodization, speaks matter-of-factly about neoliberalism as our latest historical epoch (here, in the context of discussing why Marx and Marxism is relevant again):

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

Hobsbawm is obviously using the term neoliberalism in the sense of Ben’s neoliberalism (e). But he thinks neoliberalism (e) is in fact neoliberalism (us-e) and that neoliberalism (us-e) became neoliberalism (g). This seems right to me and this seems like the best use of the term in most contexts. The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts.

This leads me to my second disagreement with Ben: I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education.

Milton Friedman, one of the original neoliberal thinkers, actually wrote quite a bit about education during the 1950s (I cover this to some degree in chapter 5 of my book Education and the Cold War). He grounded his educational theory in both economic and political principles. On the one hand, as a laissez-faire economist, Friedman was an early proponent of educational privatization, believing that education would function more efficiently if subjected to the market. He believed that imposing the costs of education on parents would “equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.” In other words, relieving taxpayers of the burden of paying for the educations of other people’s children would be a non-intrusive way of regulating those inclined to multiply beyond their financial means. On the other hand, as a libertarian political theorist, Friedman lamented the “nationalization” of education that had given rise to an “education industry” disinclined to constrain its own power and reach. As a solution, he proposed a voucher system that would empower parents as educational buyers, presenting them with a range of educational options. According to Friedman, vouchers would have the doubly beneficial effect of forcing schools to be more cost effective and of breaking the “education industry” monopoly. (See: Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955].)

In short, Friedman innovated neoliberal solutions to education in the sense that neoliberalism is all about introducing market principles to solve otherwise intractable social problems that government supposedly cannot solve. However, other than business elites, the majority of Americans in the 1950s were not yet amenable to thinking of their children’s education as they might consider a commodity such as a kitchen appliance. I would argue—and here is where I disagree with Ben—that neoconservatives were crucial in popularizing such neoliberal thinking.

One of the central achievements of Irving Kristol’s Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary is in convincing so many intellectuals and policymakers that the government often makes social problems worse. In the realm of education, the Coleman Report (1966) became legendary in neoconservative policy circles for supposedly proving that educational equity was unattainable via policy measures. In other words, the Coleman Report became the holy grail of those who contended that spending more money on the education of poor children was a waste of resources. It became the touchstone for those who argued instead that educational “excellence”—in other words, high standards measures by a testing regime—was the only means of ensuring educational improvement.

I just completed reading Chester Finn’s memoir, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik. Finn is the longtime neoconservative educational policy thinker who started his career in the 1970s working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and who also worked in Reagan’s department of education under the guidance of William Bennett. He’s written widely on educational “excellence” and in support of school choice, or Friedman’s “vouchers.” In Troublemaker, Finn repeatedly refers to a “post-Coleman consciousness.” In other words, this report, which had neoliberal policy implications but was trumpeted most widely by neconservatives, forever changed the game for Finn and for the neoconservative educationists who would eventually win the national debate. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top are national policies rooted in “post-Coleman consciousness.”

One interesting note, based on Wendy Brown’s definition of neoconservatism as “a fierce moral-political rationality”: neocons like Finn are distinguishable from neoliberals like John Chubb and Terry Moe, who wrote the bible of school choice—Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990)—in that he, in addition to supporting market solutions, believed in a strong, patriotic, anti-relativist curriculum. As such, Finn joined the fierce neoconservative critique, led by Lynne Cheney, of the 1994 National History Standards. In Troublemaker, Finn lumps his critique of the history standards together with his treatment of the national English standards, created around the same time:

the quest for standards was… weakened by the credulous expectation that self-interested experts, mostly free from the discipline of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers—and sometimes free from leading university scholars in their own fields—could successfully distill from their own cherished subjects the essential skills and knowledge that kids should learn in school, and could do so while (a) avoiding political correctness, (b) sparing schools from the savage internecine disputes within the field, and (c) producing a manageable document of essential curricular guidance rather than a kitchen-sink tome with the heft of the Los Angeles phone directory… The dismaying results ranged from incoherent blather (English) to left-leaning political correctness (history)… The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to condemn the history standards, and an early draft of the English standards was so vapid that Clinton’s Education Department cut off further funding (173).

Finn’s longtime collaborator Diane Ravitch had a similar take on the National History Standards in her magnum opus Left Back (2000): “The abortive attempt to create national standards revealed… the wide gap between avant-garde thinkers in the academic world and the general public” (174). Together, Finn and Ravitch founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981 to push for neoliberal-neoconservative reforms. In 1988 they co-authored What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (not much).

As most of USIH readers are probably aware, Ravitch, unlike Finn, has recently made an intellectual U-Turn (Tim blogged about this back in May). Ravitch the neocon, it seems, is not happy with the destructive consequences of neoliberal educational policy. Ravitch has even become the biggest critic of Bill Gates the educational philanthropist. (Check out this great Ravitch interview on the topic of Gates.) I admire Ravitch’s flip-flop, since, as Joanne Barkan demonstrates in a devastating critique of educational philanthropists like Gates, neoliberalism has been just as destructive to education as it has been to the economy. Thanks neocons!