From The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America’s Disimagination Machine by Henry A. Giroux
Tea party politics are about more than bad policy and policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude. In this instance, the hidden political order represents the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempts to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory, decrease human suffering, protect the invironment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good. Neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest stage of predatory capitalism, is part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital.
As a mode of governance, neoliberalism imposes identities, subjects and ways of life detached from civic accountability and government regulations. Driven by the survival-of-the-fittest ethic, neoliberal practices buy into the rights and privileges of business and private ownership and are removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a political project, neoliberalism is wedded to the privatization of all public resources, the selling off of state holdings and functions, the deregulation of finance and labor, the elimination of welfare and unions, the deregulation of trade in goods and capital investment, and the marketization, commercialization and commodification of all aspects of everyday life.
Neoliberalism creates a political landscape devoid of public accountability, access and agency, which is to say devoid of democracy itself. As a predatory competition for hoarding profit, neoliberalism produces massive inequality in wealth and income, shifts political power to financial elites, destroys all vestiges of the social contract, and increasingly views ‘unproductive’ sectors – most often those marginalized by race, class, disability, resident status, and age – as suspicious, potentially criminal, and ultimately disposable. It thus criminalizes social problems and manufactures profit by commercializing surveillance, policing and prisons.
The views and concerns of elite private privilege and competitive ownership now outcompete and replace notions of the public good, civic community, and solidarity. Under neoliberalism the social is pathologized while violence and war are normalized, packaged and marketed as cartoons, video games, television, cinema and other highly profitable entertainment products. Neoliberalism indebts the public to feed the profits of the rich by spending obscene amounts on militarization, surveillance and war. In the end it becomes a virulent antagonist to the very institutions meant to eliminate human suffering, protect the environment, uphold the rights of unions, and provide resources for those in need. As a rival to egalitarianism and the public good, neoliberalism has no real solutions to the host of economic, political and social problems generated as its by-products.
At the heart of neoliberalism narratives is a disimagination machine that spews out stories inculcating a disdain for community, public values, public life and democracy itself. Celebrated instead are pathological varieties of individualism, distorted notions of freedom, and a willingness to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from chronic impoverishment and joblessness to homelessness.
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