My only quibble here is with the notion that the struggle between the representatives and the represented bursts onto the scene with the Tea Parties. This is something I have been grappling with in my own mind for quite some time—trying to understand how we could possibly have arrived at a situation where something very much resembling fascism (regardless of what one chooses to call it) once again threatened our democratic norms (however frayed). It is safe to say that I see the situation as "overdetermined," though I readily admit that's a bit of a cop out.
Clearly the Republican party changed its rhetoric in the 1990s, no doubt over a despondency that Reagan was gone and much of the state apparatus remained more or less intact. Think of Pat Buchanan's campaign for president and Newt Gingrich's aggressive reinvention of the House GOP. But let's go back to Reagan himself and the desire to shrink the government to a size where it could be strangled to death.
But I find myself going even further back, to Lewis Powell's famous memo of 1970. Already at that point—even before the oil crisis and the mid-70s inflation—elements of capital were eager to launch a kind of counter-revolution. I'm not suggesting that those elements should be regarded as fascist. Buchanan perhaps, maybe even Gingrich. But Powell and the Reaganites were standard issue reactionaries interested in redistributing wealth upward. My point is only that these all prepared the ground for the Tea Parties, so that when the crisis came the ideology and the rhetoric were already in wide circulation on the right. (I'm leaving out the obviously important role played by talk radio, mainly Rush Limbaugh, and then Fox News).
Thanks. I knew that what I was saying in my comment was not terribly original. As I said, I was offering a minor quibble with John's remark about the Tea Parties. And as I also noted, this is just one aspect of the problem I have been trying to answer to my own satisfaction for some time. For me the real puzzle is the overturning of the welfare state and the turn to neo-liberalism, which, it seems to me, is the ultimate background to the present crisis. I remember during the Reagan 80s thinking that the right's goal was to turn back the clock to the fifties, to undo the social and cultural changes of the sixties. Only later did I begin to see that the goal was to undo the New Deal, and I was thoroughly puzzled by the fact that they would want to dismantle the apparatus that saved capitalism and turned the U.S. into the world's hegemon. And I am still puzzled by it all. The twin crises of the seventies—oil and inflation—were not on such a scale that the global order of capitalism was threatened. And the fact of the Powell memo reminded me that capital's determined assault on organized labor and state regulation—its determination to undo the conditions that had produced the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the postwar decades; to wreck a system that had seemingly solved capitalism's recurring problem of lurching from crisis to crisis—was already under way. But why? Was the rate of profit really falling so precipitously? To me, this is the great puzzle.
Yes, this is related to the now often-forgotten fact that post-WWII conservative Christian Democratic gov’ts were often the prime movers of the European welfare state. Again, the objective was to save capitalism from itself via the regulatory state and distributivist programmes. The gradual demise of that paradigm in conservative ideology probably has much to do with the destruction of labor power due to technology-driven massive productivity increases and the growing financialization of the corporate sector. A story detailed by Piketty and others.
Interesting. Thanks. I confess have not read Piketty. I cut my teeth on the neo-Marxian New Left view of the welfare state as the new Leviathan, totalitarianism with a human face that organized the economy in a way that ameliorated class conflict by redefining workers as consumers and offering them an ever expanding panoply of commodities. But I suppose that the rationalization of society ultimately ran up against the inherent irrationalism of capitalism's need to squeeze every last sou out of its productive capacity.
"This material may be protected by copyright"? ;-) Is this a way of saying that Trumpism is a reworking of old intellectual property?
My only quibble here is with the notion that the struggle between the representatives and the represented bursts onto the scene with the Tea Parties. This is something I have been grappling with in my own mind for quite some time—trying to understand how we could possibly have arrived at a situation where something very much resembling fascism (regardless of what one chooses to call it) once again threatened our democratic norms (however frayed). It is safe to say that I see the situation as "overdetermined," though I readily admit that's a bit of a cop out.
Clearly the Republican party changed its rhetoric in the 1990s, no doubt over a despondency that Reagan was gone and much of the state apparatus remained more or less intact. Think of Pat Buchanan's campaign for president and Newt Gingrich's aggressive reinvention of the House GOP. But let's go back to Reagan himself and the desire to shrink the government to a size where it could be strangled to death.
But I find myself going even further back, to Lewis Powell's famous memo of 1970. Already at that point—even before the oil crisis and the mid-70s inflation—elements of capital were eager to launch a kind of counter-revolution. I'm not suggesting that those elements should be regarded as fascist. Buchanan perhaps, maybe even Gingrich. But Powell and the Reaganites were standard issue reactionaries interested in redistributing wealth upward. My point is only that these all prepared the ground for the Tea Parties, so that when the crisis came the ideology and the rhetoric were already in wide circulation on the right. (I'm leaving out the obviously important role played by talk radio, mainly Rush Limbaugh, and then Fox News).
Yeah that's true and the subject of my book partly!
I look forward to it!
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trumpism-was-born-in-the-90s/
yeah i mean jeet's piece is great but ive been writing about this for a while https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-year-the-clock-broke-ganz
I did not mean to imply otherwise!
I had just read that piece and it felt very relevant to William's comment.
Thanks. I knew that what I was saying in my comment was not terribly original. As I said, I was offering a minor quibble with John's remark about the Tea Parties. And as I also noted, this is just one aspect of the problem I have been trying to answer to my own satisfaction for some time. For me the real puzzle is the overturning of the welfare state and the turn to neo-liberalism, which, it seems to me, is the ultimate background to the present crisis. I remember during the Reagan 80s thinking that the right's goal was to turn back the clock to the fifties, to undo the social and cultural changes of the sixties. Only later did I begin to see that the goal was to undo the New Deal, and I was thoroughly puzzled by the fact that they would want to dismantle the apparatus that saved capitalism and turned the U.S. into the world's hegemon. And I am still puzzled by it all. The twin crises of the seventies—oil and inflation—were not on such a scale that the global order of capitalism was threatened. And the fact of the Powell memo reminded me that capital's determined assault on organized labor and state regulation—its determination to undo the conditions that had produced the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the postwar decades; to wreck a system that had seemingly solved capitalism's recurring problem of lurching from crisis to crisis—was already under way. But why? Was the rate of profit really falling so precipitously? To me, this is the great puzzle.
Yes, this is related to the now often-forgotten fact that post-WWII conservative Christian Democratic gov’ts were often the prime movers of the European welfare state. Again, the objective was to save capitalism from itself via the regulatory state and distributivist programmes. The gradual demise of that paradigm in conservative ideology probably has much to do with the destruction of labor power due to technology-driven massive productivity increases and the growing financialization of the corporate sector. A story detailed by Piketty and others.
Interesting. Thanks. I confess have not read Piketty. I cut my teeth on the neo-Marxian New Left view of the welfare state as the new Leviathan, totalitarianism with a human face that organized the economy in a way that ameliorated class conflict by redefining workers as consumers and offering them an ever expanding panoply of commodities. But I suppose that the rationalization of society ultimately ran up against the inherent irrationalism of capitalism's need to squeeze every last sou out of its productive capacity.