Back around the period just after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, my Mom and I went to see Nader speak at a packed Ventura, Ca. junior college auditorium. I sat in front w/ the local newspaper photographers w/ their Nikon motor drives, snapping away. (Nader at the end quipped that Kodak film s/b more expensive.) An attractive woman after his speech offered him a ride...looked obvious to me she was offering another type of ride too ;-) He demurred.
On Old Left cultural conservatism see the new book by Lisa Duggan, "The Twilight of Equality : Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy." http://www.beacon.org/press/releases/Duggan%20release.doc The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy by Lisa Duggan
In 1972 when historian Lisa Duggan graduated from high school, the United States was in a lot of trouble; Nixon was president, the country was involved in the Vietnam War, there were persistent and entrenched racial, economic and gender inequalities. Nevertheless, notes Duggan in her new book, as a young person eager to fight for societal change, there was reason to be optimistic. Social movements—women’s liberation, gay liberation, lesbian feminism, black feminism, black nationalists, radical labor activists—proliferated and they all shared a vision of social change based on the downward redistribution of wealth.
Three decades later, the country has witnessed a shocking upward redistribution of wealth. What happened? In The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, Duggan, associate professor of American studies and history at New York University, explores this question by looking at how pro-business activism successfully co-opted the equality rhetoric of the left while steadily eroding the New Deal consensus built during the 1930s and in place through the Great Society era of the 1960s. "Neoliberalism developed over many decades as a mode of polemic aimed at dismantling the limited U.S. welfare state, in order to enhance corporate profit rates," writes Duggan. "The raising of profit rates required that money be diverted from other social uses, thus increasing overall economic inequality."
Linking the economic, political, and cultural aims of contemporary neoliberalism to early Liberal theorists such as John Locke and Adam Smith, Duggan offers an in-depth analysis of how neoliberals have constructed their policy initiatives both globally and in the U.S. Neoliberalism’s most successful ruse, she argues, has been to define economic policy as a matter of neutral, technical expertise not suitably subject to political accountability or cultural critique. Duggan illuminates how neoliberals have mastered the rhetoric of "public" vs. "private" to hide the connections between social and economic questions and facilitate the flow of money up the economic hierarchy. "Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm," she points out, "the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping greater rewards."
The Twilight of Equality? draws on recent history to illustrate how neoliberals have effectively connected their economic goals with politics and culture. Looking, for instance, at a case study of "culture wars" alliances, Duggan traces a sex panic that began over a women's studies conference at SUNY/New Paltz in 1997. She connects the moral discourse there to the tax cutting agenda of New York state corporations. "An intellectually bankrupt women's studies program," she writes, "sucking tax dollars for a carnival of sexual perversion--this image was perfected for the purpose of discrediting and thus reorganizing the state university system."
Discussing how the neoliberal agenda has changed hands from the Republicans in the 1970's and 80's to the New Democrats in the 1990's and back to Compassionate Conservative Republicans in the new millennium, Duggan looks at how neoliberal culture wars attacks gave way to a new rhetoric of equality and superficial multiculturism compatible with the U.S.'s new global business interests. While adopting the left's language of equality, notes Duggan, neoliberals dropped their right wing of religious moralists, "a rump formation for an ascendant mainstream liberalism."
This apparent skewing to the center, argues Duggan, produced a highly damaging Achilles heel in progressive left politics. "As neoliberals have produced issues and languages that connect their economic goals with politics and culture in politically effective ways, progressives and leftists have tended more and more to fall into opposing camps that caricature each other while failing to clearly perceive the chameleon that eludes them." This "identity politics," argues Duggan, in which formerly broad based social movements have been broken up into single-issue organizations dedicated to narrow interests and activities (lobbying, legislation, public and media education, etc.), has resulted in "unproductive battles over economic versus cultural politics, identity- based vs. left universalist rhetoric, theoretical critiques vs. practical organizing campaigns."
In illuminating how identity politics and equality rhetoric have allowed neoliberalists to co-opt formerly marginalized groups, Duggan unravels the arguments of a group of gay writers organized through the Independent Gay Forum. Focusing especially on the writings of The New Republic editor, Andrew Sullivan, she discusses how gay civil rights groups, once part of a broad-based progressive movement, have become narrow-focus groups that have embraced neoliberal language and corporate-decision making models. "Consequently," she notes, "the push for gay marriage and military service have replaced the array of political, cultural, and economic issues that galvanized the national groups as they first emerged from a progressive social movement context several decades earlier."
Ultimately, Duggan urges readers to recognize the shifting and highly effective cultural politics of neoliberalism and calls on the differing sectors of the progressive left to reject Liberalism’s rhetorical separation of economic/class politics from identity/cultural politics. "Only an interconnected, analytically diverse, cross-fertilizing and expansive left can seize this moment to lead us elsewhere," she writes, "to newly imagined possibilities for equality in the twenty-first century."
About the Author Lisa Duggan is associate professor of American studies and history at New York University. She is coeditor of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest and author of Sapphic Clashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity, which won the John Boswell Prize of the American Historical Association in 2001.
Publication Date: November 28, 2003
-- Michael Pugliese