[P2P-F] The End of Progressive Neoliberalism

Kevin Flanagan kev.flanagan at gmail.com
Wed Mar 8 00:02:17 CET 2017


The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
Nancy Fraser, January 2, 2017


The election of Donald Trump represents one of a series of dramatic
political uprisings that together signal a collapse of neoliberal hegemony.
These uprisings include the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the
rejection of the Renzi reforms in Italy, the Bernie Sanders campaign for
the Democratic Party nomination in the United States, and rising support
for the National Front in France, among others. Although they differ in
ideology and goals, these electoral mutinies share a common target: all are
rejections of corporate globalization, neoliberalism, and the political
establishments that have promoted them. In every case, voters are saying
"No!" to the lethal combination of austerity, free trade, predatory debt,
and precarious, ill-paid work that characterize financialized capitalism
today. Their votes are a response to the structural crisis of this form of
capitalism, which first came into full view with the near meltdown of the
global financial order in 2008.

Until recently, however, the chief response to the crisis was social
protest -- dramatic and lively, to be sure, but largely ephemeral.
Political systems, by contrast, seemed relatively immune, still controlled
by party functionaries and establishment elites, at least in powerful
capitalist states like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Now, however, electoral shockwaves reverberate throughout the world,
including in the citadels of global finance. Those who voted for Trump,
like those who voted for Brexit and against the Italian reforms, have risen
up against their political masters. Thumbing their noses at party
establishments, they have repudiated the system that has eroded their
living conditions for the last thirty years. The surprise is not that they
have done so, but that it took them so long.

Nevertheless, Trump's victory is not solely a revolt against global
finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but
progressive neoliberalism. This may sound to some like an oxymoron, but it
is a real, if perverse, political alignment that holds the key to
understanding the U.S. election results and perhaps some developments
elsewhere too. In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance
of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism,
multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end
"symbolic" and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley,
and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are
effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially
financialization. However unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to
the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle
serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing
and what were once middle-class lives.

Progressive neoliberalism developed in the United States over the last
three decades and was ratified with Bill Clinton's election in 1992.
Clinton was the principal engineer and standard-bearer of the "New
Democrats," the U.S. equivalent of Tony Blair's "New Labor." In place of
the New Deal coalition of unionized manufacturing workers, African
Americans, and the urban middle classes, he forged a new alliance of
entrepreneurs, suburbanites, new social movements, and youth, all
proclaiming their modern, progressive bona fides by embracing diversity,
multiculturalism, and women's rights. Even as it endorsed such progressive
notions, the Clinton administration courted Wall Street. Turning the
economy over to Goldman Sachs, it deregulated the banking system and
negotiated the free-trade agreements that accelerated deindustrialization.
What fell by the wayside was the Rust Belt -- once the stronghold of New
Deal social democracy, and now the region that delivered the electoral
college to Donald Trump. That region, along with newer industrial centers
in the South, took a major hit as runaway financialization unfolded over
the course of the last two decades. Continued by his successors, including
Barack Obama, Clinton's policies degraded the living conditions of all
working people, but especially those employed in industrial production. In
short, Clintonism bears a heavy share of responsibility for the weakening
of unions, the decline of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and
the rise of the two-earner family in place of the defunct family wage.

As that last point suggests, the assault on social security was glossed by
a veneer of emancipatory charisma, borrowed from the new social movements.
Throughout the years when manufacturing cratered, the country buzzed with
talk of "diversity," "empowerment," and "non-discrimination." Identifying
"progress" with meritocracy instead of equality, these terms equated
"emancipation" with the rise of a small elite of "talented" women,
minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of
with the latter's abolition. These liberal-individualist understandings of
"progress" gradually replaced the more expansive, anti-hierarchical,
egalitarian, class-sensitive, anti-capitalist understandings of
emancipation that had flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As the New Left
waned, its structural critique of capitalist society faded, and the
country's characteristic liberal-individualist mindset reasserted itself,
imperceptibly shrinking the aspirations of "progressives" and
self-proclaimed leftists. What sealed the deal, however, was the
coincidence of this evolution with the rise of neoliberalism. A party bent
on liberalizing the capitalist economy found its perfect mate in a
meritocratic corporate feminism focused on "leaning in" and "cracking the
glass ceiling."

The result was a "progressive neoliberalism" that mixed together truncated
ideals of emancipation and lethal forms of financialization. It was that
mix that was rejected in toto by Trump's voters. Prominent among those left
behind in this brave new cosmopolitan world were industrial workers, to be
sure, but also managers, small businessmen, and all who relied on industry
in the Rust Belt and the South, as well as rural populations devastated by
unemployment and drugs. For these populations, the injury of
deindustrialization was compounded by the insult of progressive moralism,
which routinely cast them as culturally backward. Rejecting globalization,
Trump voters also repudiated the liberal cosmopolitanism identified with
it. For some (though by no means all), it was a short step to blaming their
worsening conditions on political correctness, people of color, immigrants,
and Muslims. In their eyes, feminists and Wall Street were birds of a
feather, perfectly united in the person of Hillary Clinton.

What made possible that conflation was the absence of any genuine left.
Despite periodic outbursts such as Occupy Wall Street, which proved
short-lived, there had been no sustained left presence in the United States
for several decades. Nor was there in place any comprehensive left
narrative that could link the legitimate grievances of Trump supporters
with a fulsome critique of financialization, on the one hand, and with an
anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-hierarchical vision of emancipation, on
the other. Equally devastating, potential links between labor and new
social movements were left to languish. Split off from one another, those
indispensable poles of a viable left were miles apart, waiting to be
counterposed as antithetical.

At least until the remarkable primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, who
struggled to unite them after some prodding from Black Lives Matter.
Exploding the reigning neoliberal commonsense, Sanders's revolt was the
parallel on the Democratic side to that of Trump. Even as Trump was
upending the Republican establishment, Bernie came within a hair's breadth
of defeating Obama's anointed successor, whose apparatchiks controlled
every lever of power in the Democratic Party. Between them, Sanders and
Trump galvanized a huge majority of American voters. But only Trump's
reactionary populism survived. While he easily routed his Republican
rivals, including those favored by the big donors and party bosses, the
Sanders insurrection was effectively checked by a far less democratic
Democratic Party. By the time of the general election, the left alternative
had been suppressed. What remained was the Hobson's choice between
reactionary populism and progressive neoliberalism. When the so-called left
closed ranks with Hillary Clinton, the die was cast.

Nevertheless, and from this point on, this is a choice the left should
refuse. Rather than accepting the terms presented to us by the political
classes, which oppose emancipation to social protection, we should be
working to redefine them by drawing on the vast and growing fund of social
revulsion against the present order. Rather than siding with
financialization-cum-emancipation against social protection, we should be
building a new alliance of emancipation and social protection against
financialization. In this project, which builds on that of Sanders,
emancipation does not mean diversifying corporate hierarchy, but rather
abolishing it. And prosperity does not mean rising share value or corporate
profit, but the material prerequisites of a good life for all. This
combination remains the only principled and winning response in the current
conjuncture.

I, for one, shed no tears for the defeat of progressive neoliberalism.
Certainly, there is much to fear from a racist, anti-immigrant,
anti-ecological Trump administration. But we should mourn neither the
implosion of neoliberal hegemony nor the shattering of Clintonism's iron
grip on the Democratic Party. Trump's victory marked a defeat for the
alliance of emancipation and financialization. But his presidency offers no
resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no secure
hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and unstable
situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this situation,
there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to build a new
new left.

Whether that happens will depend in part on some serious soul-searching
among the progressives who rallied to the Clinton campaign. They will need
to drop the comforting but false myth that they lost to a "basket of
deplorables" (racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and homophobes) aided by
Vladimir Putin and the FBI. They will need to acknowledge their own share
of blame for sacrificing the cause of social protection, material
well-being, and working-class dignity to faux understandings of
emancipation in terms of meritocracy, diversity, and empowerment. They will
need to think deeply about how we might transform the political economy of
financialized capitalism, reviving Sanders's catchphrase "democratic
socialism" and figuring out what it might mean in the twenty-first century.
They will need, above all, to reach out to the mass of Trump voters who are
neither racists nor committed right-wingers, but themselves casualties of a
"rigged system" who can and must be recruited to the anti-neoliberal
project of a rejuvenated left.

This does not mean muting pressing concerns about racism or sexism. But it
does mean showing how those longstanding historical oppressions find new
expressions and grounds today, in financialized capitalism. Rebutting the
false, zero-sum thinking that dominated the election campaign, we should
link the harms suffered by women and people of color to those experienced
by the many who voted for Trump. In that way, a revitalized left could lay
the foundation for a powerful new coalition committed to fighting for all.


from
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-
neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime at kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:



--
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20170307/e862ffe3/attachment.html>


More information about the P2P-Foundation mailing list