Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

There seems to be a lot of nonsense in the first two pieces, and a certain amount in the last one.
Right from the get-go, we have “Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction.” Really?

Sure, liberal theorists might have talked about such distinctions, but they were never that solid in real life. And indeed, it might be argued that one of the causes of the collapse of our political institutions is precisely the STRENGTHENING of state-society distinctions; where once civic participation by citizens in the workings of the state was quite important, market-driven atomization of the public, re-creating them as consumers, has made society much more separate and estranged from the state than ever before.

Then he says “Cancel culture IS ­corporate and academic culture.” No it isn’t, that’s stupid. Cancel culture is, first of all, as old as the hills. Ostracizing people that gossip paints poorly probably goes back to the dawn of language. In modern urban living it had ebbed for a while just because social networks had not fully adapted to the size of modern populations. But now, with social media, the social networks are more equal to the task, and social faux pas or actual objectionable behaviour are often done in forms that are persistent. When you can point to the offending social act, when it’s right there in print, outrage does not dissipate in the uncertainty of he said/she said. It’s an organic phenomenon coming out of social interactions. And it is as common among the anti-intellectual anti-woke right as it is among the identity-cataloguing liberal woke youth. It happens in corporate and academic settings, sure, but they don’t drive it. Anyone with a kid in their teens to twenties would know this.

Then we get to “The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.” What on earth? Yeah, pull the other one, it has bells on. Is this an American talking? The place with politics controlled by money, the Supreme Court controlled by plutocrats and duly delivering decisions like Citizens United, where the most important political movement in the country is a fascist-lite movement created and controlled by oligarchs for the purpose of destroying policies dangerous to their profits such as whatever is left of taxation of the wealthy, action to transition from fossil fuels, inconvenient public health lockdowns, and anti-racist ideas that could threaten the maintenance of economic underclasses and useful division in the working class. Give me a break.

Then he starts telling a weird story about international institutions which supposedly say something about the dominance of the political over the economic. None of it seems to me to do that, and I think where he goes deeply wrong is encapsulated in this: “Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends.” What neutral institutions would those be then? The institutions were always there to serve ends . . . and you could call those ends “political” but they were about where money would flow. If the point is to collar the world’s resources for cheap, is that political or economic? Again, further on he talks about how American financial might is put into the service of politics . . . but he totally misses that the politics it is put into the service of, is largely the politics of doing stuff for American transnational corporations.

Then he says “The critics of neoliberalism recall the nineties as a time of idealistic, even naive commitment to economic cooperation.” What? I’m a critic of neoliberalism, I recall it as no such thing. Neoliberalism, in its globalized free trade facet, was all about creating races to the bottom in terms of cheapening labour and cutting environmental, safety and financial regulation, not to mention taxes. It was about juicing profits by enabling the moving of production to places with low wages, loose regulation and low taxes, or forcing the lowering of those things by the threat of movement. The idea was to give capital the power of mobility, conferring a key advantage in disputes with stationary states and only slowly movable labour. Idealistic my ass. And I’m far from alone in this assessment; the anti-WTO demonstrations and riots of the late 90s were all about exactly that evaluation. Apparently this guy wasn’t around for the Battle in Seattle.

He has some good points about the ability to use sanctions and get banks to co-operate with them in a way that was never really possible before, and the extension of this to the ability to put financial pressure on individuals. But I don’t think that makes a fundamental break with the past, it’s just a new capability in an old game. Before that there was the blockade of Cuba, McCarthyism, and Nixon’s War on Drugs, which was designed to target blacks and the students of the New Left.

Finally, occasionally the article refers to various things about gays, in ways that never quite get around to connecting the dots. But there’s a general impression that gays having rights is somehow part of this “post-liberal” schtick. That seems unlikely . . . liberalism is all about equal (negative) rights for everyone. It’s just that for a long time, in practice “liberal” states would make a few exceptions, like for gays. Over time, this hypocrisy has come to seem less and less tenable, while the motivations for bashing gays in the first place lost force. They were based in religion and small-community cohesion at the expense of certain designated outsiders. As religion declined and small communities worried about cohesion came to represent less and less of the population, giving gays a hard time lost social importance, while corporate interests had no real reason to exclude people who were just as good consumers as anyone else. Anyway, gay rights is absolutely a liberalism thing and I don’t really understand why the author of the article seems to have some kind of weird bee in their bonnet about it.

Sorry, but I really don’t have much respect for this article. I can agree that there are bad things going down and that there’s authoritarianism happening, but the whole analysis of why and who it serves seems to me totally out to lunch.

Maybe if I have the energy I’ll tackle the other articles.

I think if one actually looks at the legacy families and firms you’ll find huge degrees of continuity stretching back many decades, and even centuries. Who actually owns what at the most basic level doesn’t change much, regardless of war, peace, or ‘revolution’. So forgive me for not being much persuaded by notions of great upheaval of the leadership classes.

@Dan Kelly

These schizoposts are always fascinating.

As to who takes over after the fall of our current elite . . . the proposed candidates worrying people are, after all, also parts of our current elite. And they have no solutions on offer. If pressures on our society become so great that the business-as-usual bosses go down, and either plain fascists or tech-bro fascists take over, the pressures will not go away. I don’t know what the future holds, but it won’t be those dorks, not for all that long. They’ll go down too. Hell, the techbros sense it, that’s why they all have half-baked plans for heavily armed heavily autonomous retreats for after the fall.

They might do a lot of damage first, though.

IMO, Hedges’ line about “Corps for Harris/Dems” vs. “Oligarchs for Trump/GOP” is glib and wrong.

To make sense of the political fault-lines dividing financial “elites” in the US these days, start with a little history.

By 1990, the Democratic Party – which had depended on Union money for decades – was out of money (thanks to the intentional destruction of US Unions by the GOP). But Wall Street – which had supported the GOP since the Civil War – was no longer a purely WASPy club, and the Clintons were able to cut deals with some Big Donors who were scared by the influence of the Religious Right in the Reagan GOP. They also got money from Silicon Valley, a new center of financial power dominated by new millionaires who worshiped only Mammon (and themselves).

Loss of (some) money from Wall Street/FIRE sector has tilted the Donor mix of the GOP toward Extractive Industries (Oil/Gas/Coal, Mining, and Big Ag now counts as “extractive”). Those Corps are *really* focused on eliminating Environmental and Safety regulations (this explains the GOP’s drift toward AGW denial across the last 2 decades). Those are large Corps, with many thousands of employees, and managers who work their way up (from the middle, not the bottom). Those people are more likely to have rural roots, experience, and social connections, ergo more likely to be socially conservative (and religious!).

FIRE sector Corps are more Urban, and their managers are more “urbane” – and less religious. They want to reduce *financial* regulations, but their businesses don’t have the massive environmental and safety problems that the Extractive sector does, so they don’t care about eliminating EPA and OSHA.

Bottom line: the split between “Elites” in the USA is now a fight between rural Extractive Industries supporting the GOP and urban FIRE sector Corps who have bribed the Democratic Party to cover for them.

The big news recently is that Silicon Valley has changed sides and is now supporting Trump (probably because they see that his “policy positions” are always up for auction).

@Dan Kelly,

“Glad you’re fascinated. ”

Don’t you mean ‘facinated’? 😉

@Soredemos,

Why bring up Hedges’ wife (of 20, not 30 years younger, who he apparently needs an excuse to procreate with?) when making a point of not focusing on personalities? Especially when lecturing about “micro-details that don’t coalesce into anything”?

But that isn’t part of some grand conspiracy worldview where I think he’s some sort of controlled agent.

I don’t think Hedges reports to agent X and that his whole life is one of an operative, a la Mark Lane. He’s probably much more a grifter, though I do wonder how he got the passport being that he certainly never lived in Switzerland for even one year, let alone a decade. There may be a simple explanation for this. I don’t know.

He was an embedded NY Times reporter. He is a NY Times bestselling author.

My anger is because I feel like I’ve been fooled by these guys.

I don’t need to read any more Chris Hedges NY Times bestsellers that say some version of the same thing he’s been saying for eons. And I don’t think the world needs any more of it.

He does that literacy project with the people in jail which is nice. But then there are so many people we’ve never heard of who do the same sorts of things everyday. I have.

I think the way language is used is very important. I notice that Chris Hedges uses a lot of ‘we’ statements, his most popular probably being ‘war gives us meaning.’

War doesn’t give me meaning, Chris. That is a statement that you shoud make for yourself if that is the way you feel.

But obviously a person saying ‘War gives me meaning!’ is going to sound like a psychopath, so he turns it into a ‘we.’

Does he mean the state? War manufacturers? Military and poltical leaders? A large portion of the US population?

His audience is comprised of almost entirely anti-war people.

Again, I understand the response to my argument is one along the lines of what I just wrote, i.e. he’s not talking about ‘you’ or ‘me’ specifically, but the general tenor of the nation, particularly post 9/11. But he should say that then. Don’t make ‘we’ statments that by virtue of the language you are using include me as a reader or listener in your grand pronouncements.

Again: War does not give me meaning. I don’t get a hard-on when discussions of military strategy come up. I look at such things as unfortunate realities of our modern world that, yes, must be engaged in. But not so that they give me meaning.

Speaking of Warlord Oligarchs, a memory from several decades ago rose to the surface of my mind.

Several decades ago, a member of my family ( who was it? ” Oh . . . we don’t worry about that”) learned to fly helicopters. For whatever the reason, his/her name was made known to some local group of Warlord Oligarch Wannabes who had bought themselves an entire mesa somewhere in Colorado and were going to build a commanding-heights castle-fortress-bunker retreat for themselves on top of it. Access in and out was to be by helicopter only. And they reached out ( through a contact) to my relative and offered herm a position being a helicopter pilot for this wannabe Mesatop Warlord community. HeeShee asked me what I thought about that. I said it sounded like a nasty evil little group of people hoping to put 21st century technology in service to a 13th century social system. I suggested not taking the job. And HeeShee ended up not taking the job. Was it something I said? I like to think so.
( And maybe the group was an imaginary scam and a hoax to begin with. Luckily my relative never even had to find out).

the extremes of “neoliberalism” — and they are “extremes” even if they are weirdly synthesized probably by professional propagandists without ideological convictions anyone would recognize as belonging to the spectrum of the 19th or 20th century — are opening up possibilities for ideologies of authoritarian conservatism to sound sensible and realistic and even humane.

I get why “gay rights” come up so often in the narratives of these “new” conservatives. It is a reaction to the reaction, so to speak, to the strange extreme of advocating feminism and gay rights to the extremes of men in women’s sports or hysterectomies for confused 15-year-olds. Someone deliberately wants to provoke. And, create opportunities for conservative voices to sound sensible. It is part of a deliberately created fabric of ideological confusion and agnatology.