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"Our analysis has shown that this conservative, anti-public worker agenda works hand-in-glove with both restrictions on reproductive freedom and attempts to curtail voting rights. In 2010, Republican Governor Mitch Daniels argued that conservatives should call a “truce” on culture issues and focus on reducing the deficit. Instead, conservative state governments managed to do both at once: push through a record number of government layoffs while also restricting reproductive freedom and democratic voting rights."
"I had two questions about this that I tried to answer in this article. The first was where these state losses were occurring, and whether there was anything interesting going on with the distribution of lost jobs.
The second question was how the new Tea Party influenced Republican state legislatures, especially Republicans that took over 11 states in the historic 2010 midterm elections, were governing. "
"In the United States, I think the specific move that needs to be made is the recognition that the rank-and-file hostility of Tea Party adherents and sympathizers towards “big government” has an intimate, potentially generative connection to the possibility of a wider mobilization against the powers-that-be, that this is the cognate American form of the energy that’s flowing into protests in India, in Egypt, in the European Union. Which in turn requires a less knee-jerk response by progressives about the wonderful things that government can do or already does. It’s true that government action at all levels of American life could do a great deal of good, that it already secures many fundamental rights and protections, that we are dependent upon that power in so many ways. But when our first response to a fierce, wild and often reactionary anger at “government” is to recite a litany of its benefits, I think we disclose too much our own desire to retain an intimate access to acting within as well as against a deeply entrenched political class. "
"I think this is relevant because it gets at the question of what the modern conservative movement and the Tea Party are all about."
"We mistook Obama for a man of strong convictions. Why? Because he has an aesthetic admiration for people with strong convictions, people with names like Gandhi and King. Yet the emotion of conviction -- a feeling that will not let you go -- is foreign to him now and probably always was."
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The citizen who asked about the Tea Party must have come away thinking that the president was a nice guy whose grasp of specifics was derived from unnamed authorities. A nice guy, however, whose thinking (to judge by his own presentation) hardly rated comparison with the sharp focus and simple solutions of the Tea Party. Rather than confront an opponent, Obama treated his listeners as barely educable children, while propping himself on formulas any clever child would recognize as mere caption-phrases, scattered and unconnected. One cannot help remarking that in the debt-ceiling negotiations, contrary to Obama's expectation, the Tea Party proved eminently willing to "identify specifically" what they wanted to do. The answer was cut Medicare and Social Security rather than raise taxes. And the president was willing to grant what they asked.
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Who was Barack Obama after all? A young politician who excelled at giving sonorous utterance to prepared words (every mass address of the 2008 campaign was done with a teleprompter) and who could defend with ad-lib competence a law or program developed by a suitable conglomerate of others. But Obama lacks the ability to explain a policy or a predicament. He cannot argue. He cannot occupy a position and fight to hold it. He cannot mimic or humor or deflate, or detect those hidden points of leverage that may reshape a public discussion by the force of wit and invention. Not will not, but cannot. It is a kind of ability impossible to hide.
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"In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that hasn’t happened in American politics for 50 years: an ideologically coherent social movement with clear political aspirations has taken shape out of murkier antecedents and disparate tributaries and at least for the moment, it has a very tight hold on the political officials that it has elected. The movement is not interested in the spoils system, its representatives can’t be quickly seduced into playing the usual games. And the movement’s primary objective is to demolish existing governmental and civic institutions. They’ve grown tired of waiting for government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, so they’re setting out with battleaxes and dynamite instead. "
"That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world. Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides. It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction."
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I’ve been thinking a lot about anxiety lately and it is partly because I am so aware of how much anxiety is a feature of everyday discourse in the US when people are just describing their personal state. One of the things I’ve been trying to think about – it is not quite related to the walls question but we will go back to that – is whether the sheer level of anxiety in human beings has been increasing in ways that are commensurate with the loss of certain kinds of boundaries, the denigration of defining features of communities, all that we associate with globalization. I think the answer is probably yes, and I hope somebody will do a study on this: historicizing anxiety and thinking about the history of the human subject in terms of a more anxious subject today than ever before. There are lots of reasons that students, for example, are anxious in ways that I don’t remember being anxious as a college student. There are concerns about performance and job markets, but I am really talking about a world of anxiety that is quite disseminated and quite general and does not simply pertain to the high ambition end of the American middle class.
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Obviously, a strong conception of a global citizen, a cosmopolitan ideal, could have that global citizen actually living and connecting to a particular place, but most theories of the global citizen and of the global village insignificantly honor the need for a human-scale sense of place. A nation-state is too big for that sense of place but human communities provide it, and so do slightly larger or even non-human ways of bounding what and who we are. I do think that is really important and I don’t think that political theory will get us very far if it can’t acknowledge and attend to that particular dimension of being human.
"As both later Sartre and Badiou recognized, the only way to produce change is through the production of collectives or subject-groups capable of lifting us out of seriality. Yet the only way to produce collectives is through the formation of a sensus communis. This means that questions of the distribution of meanings, of ideological sequences, is crucial to any leftist project. It means that questions of “the sense of the world”, to quote Nancy’s term, are central to leftist political engagement. A recognition of this, I believe, is why thinkers like Badiou and Zizek have, of late, been so interested in the figure of Saint Paul. Yet such questions of distribution cannot simply focus on what senses are distributed, but must also focus on strategies of distribution. Enough for now."
"The real jaw dropper is this person’s proposals about the benefits of big business: Big business creates products, jobs, and wealth. How can anyone who has watched the last fifty plus years of deregulation believe this? What fantasy world are they living in? Under deregulation we’ve seen the massive disappearance of jobs as they’re shipped elsewhere where production is far cheaper (meaning that it is of little help to either the people who take over those jobs nor, obviously, to those that lose them). In the United States we have seen massive wage stagnation for decades. We have also seen a significant growth in unemployment. We have also seen a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Finally, we have witnessed recurrent unstable markets that endlessly go through boom and bust cycles. All of these phenomena are a direct consequence of “pro-business” policies premised on the idea of trickle down economics where it is assumed that deregulation, lower taxes, etc., will produce jobs and wealth for all. The exact opposite is true."
"But mostly what happens, what the Republicans expect to happen because they work to make it happen, is that people either don’t allow themselves to think about it or they scapegoat.
They don’t have to think about their kids, don’t have to worry about them. Their kids are going to be fine. Their kids and grandkids are going to be among the winners. It’s their kids who’ll suffer. Them. Those others. The losers."
"This liberty-order distinction is instructive, but it got me thinking: it’s simply incorrect to imply that American conservatism tilts unequivocally in “live free or die” directions. Here I would call attention to David Sehat’s book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, about the rise and fall of the American Protestant moral establishment. Sehat points out that, insofar as the Christian Right has mobilized since the 1960s to reassert a moral establishment in the midst of an increasingly secular and individualistic public sphere, it is hardly libertarian. "
"What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” he wrote. "
"The tea party and the loudest, most strident voices of anti-abortion politics love to flirt with the idea of armed revolution. This is, for the most part, just adolescent foolishness -- a kind of fantasy play-acting that can be summed up in a single word:
Wolveriiiiiines!
By pretending to believe that America is on the verge of collapse into a totalitarian tyranny, they can pretend to themselves that they are the vanguard of a courageous resistance. The Red Dawn fantasy isn't all that different from any other childhood fantasy about what if there were dragons? And what if I was brave and good and strong? And what if I slew the dragon and everybody cheered for me because I was brave and good and strong and I slew the dragon? Wouldn't that be cool?"
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But what of those who are caught up in this fantasy who are not unhinged? What of the millions of tea-partiers or decriers of the abortion "Holocaust" with their signs calling for "refreshing" blood and "second amendment remedies"? What are we to make of their fabricated fears of imminent tyranny and their ridiculous pose of revolutionary vigilance?
I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." When they say that "abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country," simply say, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn't require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn't ever really there in the first place.
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At the core of their pretense is that fantasy I described above: "What if I was brave and good and strong ... wouldn't that be cool?" The attraction of this fantasy is the fear, or the knowledge, that the fantasist is not brave or good or strong. Liberating them from this fantasy, then, should involve giving them the opportunity to acquire or develop those characteristics in reality rather than in fantasy. It should involve inviting them to be brave and good and strong and pointing to the myriad real-world opportunities to exhibit or develop those traits.
There are few dragons here in the real world, but there are wounds that need binding, messes that need cleaning, houses that need building, children that need mentoring, elders that need respecting, stories that need telling, projects that need volunteers. With all the real problems of the real world, who has time for slaying imaginary dragons? Get them involved in reality and the fantasy can't compete.
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"Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project). The poison they’ve helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.
By Christopher Hitchens"
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As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine! It may be true that the Tea Party’s role in November’s vote was less than some people feared, and it’s certainly true that several of the movement’s elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass “literature” has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that’s been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.
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