[lbo-talk] The Twilight of Equality Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

[Michael Pugliese]

The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack 
on Democracy
by Lisa Duggan (Author) Editorial Reviews
> From Publishers Weekly
Sometime during the 1990s, conservative Republicans adopted the rhetoric of 
multiculturalism, liberal Democrats announced the end of welfare and thus, 
neoliberalism was born. Duggan, a professor of American studies and history 
at New York University, offers a thoughtful study of how ongoing, 
bipartisan sponsorship of free market economics has eclipsed social 
democracy and culture over the past 20 years. But neoliberalism's most 
insidious characteristic, argues Duggan (Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, 
and American Modernity), is its wolf-in-sheep's-clothing claim of 
multicultural neutrality, purporting to isolate the "natural" processes of 
capitalism from sticky issues of class, race and identity. President 
Clinton, for instance, publicly supported antiracist, inclusionary policy 
while simultaneously pushing through NAFTA-legislation that promoted, 
according to Duggan, the inherently racist, classist structures of global 
capitalism. In a provocative case study, the author examines the way 
conservative Republicans clamped down on a women's studies conference at 
SUNY New Paltz, threatening academic freedom with a battle cry for family 
values. Duggan sees this incident as part of a larger neoliberal project to 
erode and marginalize "downwardly distributive" social movements like 
feminism and civil rights that threaten the current social order. The 
result is a dangerous schism of leftist concerns: gay activists currently 
embrace a more mainstream direction instead of trying to disrupt the status 
quo, while NARAL focuses exclusively on abortion rights, ignoring the 
larger context of social, political, economic and cultural inequality. 
Duggan's well-reasoned argument is that true progressive change must occur 
not in parts but as a unified whole.

-- 
Michael Pugliese
American imperialism  has been made plausible and attractive in part by the 
insistence that it is not imperialistic.
Harold Innis, 1948
http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm