On 9/20/2010 4:17 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
> I made this point before: idealizing Europe is not just naive. It is
> also the cudgel used by neo-liberal onslaught over here.
I sort of agree but for different reasons and I would put it differently. Liberals in the US - and I'm thinking especially about American Prospect types like Tom Geohagan - do idealize Europe. But the problem isn't that they depict it as being much better off than the US; it is much better off, and in almost every way. The problem is that they show Europe without the politics. These strong unions, big welfare states, and (relatively) civilized political discourse "somehow" just got there in some mysterious way. And when these structures are periodically weakened and sanded down, that "somehow" happens for unexplained reasons and it's mentioned only in passing.
There's a deep unwillingness to acknowledge that capitalism is a class society, which means it's constantly, endogenously generating pressures to eliminate these structures - and that they only come into being or get protected through militant struggle animated by ideology. In the Geohagan imaginaire, it just takes one big push, the structures come into place, and then we can thankfully forget about capitalism and enjoy our a self-perpetuating "middle-class society," the one we "used to have" in the 50's and 60's but then somehow lost. Well how the fuck did we lose it?
SA