<nettime> "talented" women, minorities, and gays

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
Nancy Fraser, January 2, 2017


The election of Donald Trump represents one of a series of dramatic 
political uprisings that together signal a collapse of neoliberal 
hegemony. These uprisings include the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, 
the rejection of the Renzi reforms in Italy, the Bernie Sanders campaign 
for the Democratic Party nomination in the United States, and rising 
support for the National Front in France, among others. Although they 
differ in ideology and goals, these electoral mutinies share a common 
target: all are rejections of corporate globalization, neoliberalism, 
and the political establishments that have promoted them. In every case, 
voters are saying "No!" to the lethal combination of austerity, free 
trade, predatory debt, and precarious, ill-paid work that characterize 
financialized capitalism today. Their votes are a response to the 
structural crisis of this form of capitalism, which first came into full 
view with the near meltdown of the global financial order in 2008.

Until recently, however, the chief response to the crisis was social 
protest -- dramatic and lively, to be sure, but largely ephemeral. 
Political systems, by contrast, seemed relatively immune, still 
controlled by party functionaries and establishment elites, at least in 
powerful capitalist states like the United States, the United Kingdom, 
and Germany. Now, however, electoral shockwaves reverberate throughout 
the world, including in the citadels of global finance. Those who voted 
for Trump, like those who voted for Brexit and against the Italian 
reforms, have risen up against their political masters. Thumbing their 
noses at party establishments, they have repudiated the system that has 
eroded their living conditions for the last thirty years. The surprise 
is not that they have done so, but that it took them so long.

Nevertheless, Trump's victory is not solely a revolt against global 
finance. What his voters rejected was not neoliberalism tout court, but 
progressive neoliberalism. This may sound to some like an oxymoron, but 
it is a real, if perverse, political alignment that holds the key to 
understanding the U.S. election results and perhaps some developments 
elsewhere too. In its U.S. form, progressive neoliberalism is an 
alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, 
anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and 
high-end "symbolic" and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, 
Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, 
progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive 
capitalism, especially financialization. However unwittingly, the former 
lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and 
empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss 
policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once 
middle-class lives.

Progressive neoliberalism developed in the United States over the last 
three decades and was ratified with Bill Clinton's election in 1992. 
Clinton was the principal engineer and standard-bearer of the "New 
Democrats," the U.S. equivalent of Tony Blair's "New Labor." In place of 
the New Deal coalition of unionized manufacturing workers, African 
Americans, and the urban middle classes, he forged a new alliance of 
entrepreneurs, suburbanites, new social movements, and youth, all 
proclaiming their modern, progressive bona fides by embracing diversity, 
multiculturalism, and women's rights. Even as it endorsed such 
progressive notions, the Clinton administration courted Wall Street. 
Turning the economy over to Goldman Sachs, it deregulated the banking 
system and negotiated the free-trade agreements that accelerated 
deindustrialization. What fell by the wayside was the Rust Belt -- once the 
stronghold of New Deal social democracy, and now the region that 
delivered the electoral college to Donald Trump. That region, along with 
newer industrial centers in the South, took a major hit as runaway 
financialization unfolded over the course of the last two decades. 
Continued by his successors, including Barack Obama, Clinton's policies 
degraded the living conditions of all working people, but especially 
those employed in industrial production. In short, Clintonism bears a 
heavy share of responsibility for the weakening of unions, the decline 
of real wages, the increasing precarity of work, and the rise of the 
two-earner family in place of the defunct family wage.

As that last point suggests, the assault on social security was glossed 
by a veneer of emancipatory charisma, borrowed from the new social 
movements. Throughout the years when manufacturing cratered, the country 
buzzed with talk of "diversity," "empowerment," and 
"non-discrimination." Identifying "progress" with meritocracy instead of 
equality, these terms equated "emancipation" with the rise of a small 
elite of "talented" women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all 
corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter's abolition. These 
liberal-individualist understandings of "progress" gradually replaced 
the more expansive, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-sensitive, 
anti-capitalist understandings of emancipation that had flourished in 
the 1960s and 1970s. As the New Left waned, its structural critique of 
capitalist society faded, and the country's characteristic 
liberal-individualist mindset reasserted itself, imperceptibly shrinking 
the aspirations of "progressives" and self-proclaimed leftists. What 
sealed the deal, however, was the coincidence of this evolution with the 
rise of neoliberalism. A party bent on liberalizing the capitalist 
economy found its perfect mate in a meritocratic corporate feminism 
focused on "leaning in" and "cracking the glass ceiling."

The result was a "progressive neoliberalism" that mixed together 
truncated ideals of emancipation and lethal forms of financialization. 
It was that mix that was rejected in toto by Trump's voters. Prominent 
among those left behind in this brave new cosmopolitan world were 
industrial workers, to be sure, but also managers, small businessmen, 
and all who relied on industry in the Rust Belt and the South, as well 
as rural populations devastated by unemployment and drugs. For these 
populations, the injury of deindustrialization was compounded by the 
insult of progressive moralism, which routinely cast them as culturally 
backward. Rejecting globalization, Trump voters also repudiated the 
liberal cosmopolitanism identified with it. For some (though by no means 
all), it was a short step to blaming their worsening conditions on 
political correctness, people of color, immigrants, and Muslims. In 
their eyes, feminists and Wall Street were birds of a feather, perfectly 
united in the person of Hillary Clinton.

What made possible that conflation was the absence of any genuine left. 
Despite periodic outbursts such as Occupy Wall Street, which proved 
short-lived, there had been no sustained left presence in the United 
States for several decades. Nor was there in place any comprehensive 
left narrative that could link the legitimate grievances of Trump 
supporters with a fulsome critique of financialization, on the one hand, 
and with an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-hierarchical vision of 
emancipation, on the other. Equally devastating, potential links between 
labor and new social movements were left to languish. Split off from one 
another, those indispensable poles of a viable left were miles apart, 
waiting to be counterposed as antithetical.

At least until the remarkable primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, who 
struggled to unite them after some prodding from Black Lives Matter. 
Exploding the reigning neoliberal commonsense, Sanders's revolt was the 
parallel on the Democratic side to that of Trump. Even as Trump was 
upending the Republican establishment, Bernie came within a hair's 
breadth of defeating Obama's anointed successor, whose apparatchiks 
controlled every lever of power in the Democratic Party. Between them, 
Sanders and Trump galvanized a huge majority of American voters. But 
only Trump's reactionary populism survived. While he easily routed his 
Republican rivals, including those favored by the big donors and party 
bosses, the Sanders insurrection was effectively checked by a far less 
democratic Democratic Party. By the time of the general election, the 
left alternative had been suppressed. What remained was the Hobson's 
choice between reactionary populism and progressive neoliberalism. When 
the so-called left closed ranks with Hillary Clinton, the die was cast.

Nevertheless, and from this point on, this is a choice the left should 
refuse. Rather than accepting the terms presented to us by the political 
classes, which oppose emancipation to social protection, we should be 
working to redefine them by drawing on the vast and growing fund of 
social revulsion against the present order. Rather than siding with 
financialization-cum-emancipation against social protection, we should 
be building a new alliance of emancipation and social protection against 
financialization. In this project, which builds on that of Sanders, 
emancipation does not mean diversifying corporate hierarchy, but rather 
abolishing it. And prosperity does not mean rising share value or 
corporate profit, but the material prerequisites of a good life for all. 
This combination remains the only principled and winning response in the 
current conjuncture.

I, for one, shed no tears for the defeat of progressive neoliberalism. 
Certainly, there is much to fear from a racist, anti-immigrant, 
anti-ecological Trump administration. But we should mourn neither the 
implosion of neoliberal hegemony nor the shattering of Clintonism's iron 
grip on the Democratic Party. Trump's victory marked a defeat for the 
alliance of emancipation and financialization. But his presidency offers 
no resolution of the present crisis, no promise of a new regime, no 
secure hegemony. What we face, rather, is an interregnum, an open and 
unstable situation in which hearts and minds are up for grabs. In this 
situation, there is not only danger but also opportunity: the chance to 
build a new new left.

Whether that happens will depend in part on some serious soul-searching 
among the progressives who rallied to the Clinton campaign. They will 
need to drop the comforting but false myth that they lost to a "basket 
of deplorables" (racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and homophobes) 
aided by Vladimir Putin and the FBI. They will need to acknowledge their 
own share of blame for sacrificing the cause of social protection, 
material well-being, and working-class dignity to faux understandings of 
emancipation in terms of meritocracy, diversity, and empowerment. They 
will need to think deeply about how we might transform the political 
economy of financialized capitalism, reviving Sanders's catchphrase 
"democratic socialism" and figuring out what it might mean in the 
twenty-first century. They will need, above all, to reach out to the 
mass of Trump voters who are neither racists nor committed 
right-wingers, but themselves casualties of a "rigged system" who can 
and must be recruited to the anti-neoliberal project of a rejuvenated left.

This does not mean muting pressing concerns about racism or sexism. But 
it does mean showing how those longstanding historical oppressions find 
new expressions and grounds today, in financialized capitalism. 
Rebutting the false, zero-sum thinking that dominated the election 
campaign, we should link the harms suffered by women and people of color 
to those experienced by the many who voted for Trump. In that way, a 
revitalized left could lay the foundation for a powerful new coalition 
committed to fighting for all.


from
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser

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