The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born Flashcards
Hegemony - leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others; dominion, supremacy, ascendancy, predominance, mastery, sovereignty
Hegemony is the term for the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole.
Poster child - a person or thing that epitomizes or represents a specified quality, cause,
Donald Trump is the poster child for this hegemonic crisis
Since at least the mid 20th century in the US and Europe, capitalist hegemony has been forged by balancing two central tenets: distribution (who deserves income) and recognition (who deserves rights)
The distributive aspect speaks to the economic structure of society and to its class divisions.
The recognition aspect refers to its status hierarchies.
The Hegemony of Progressive Neoliberalism
Prior to Trump, this dominated American politics.
Sounds like an oxymoron, but is a real and powerful alliance of 2 unlike bedfellows:
1/ Mainstream liberal currents of new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism etc) = PROGRESSIVE
2/ High-end symbolic and financial sectors of US economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood) = NEOLIBERALISM
Plutocrat - a person whose power derives from their wealth.
Plutocratic - relating to or characterized by government by the wealthy
The progressive-neoliberal bloc combined a plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition.
The distributive component was neoliberal. This meant financialization: dismantling barrier to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; deregulating banking and ballooning predatory debt; deindustrialising; weakening unions; and spreading precarious, badly paid work.
Progressive neoliberalism did not dream up this political economy. That honour belongs to the Right: to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
But the rightwing “fundamentalist” version of neoliberalism could not become hegemonic in a country whose common sense was still shaped by New Deal thinking, the “rights revolution”, and a slew of social movements descended from the New Left. It had to be repackaged, given a broader appeal and linked to other non-economic aspirations for emancipation.
Financialization - the process by which financial institutions, markets, etc., increase in size and influence.
(The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Roosevelt in the US between 1933 and 1936. It responded to needs for relief, reform, and recovery from the Great Depression. It included new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and efforts to re-inflate the economy after prices had fallen sharply. The programs focused on what historians refer to as the “3 Rs”: relief for the unemployed and poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.)
It fell to the “New Democrats” to contribute the essential ingredient: a progressive politics of recognition. But the reduction of equality to meritocracy was fateful. It did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to “diversify” it, empowering talented women, people of colour and sexual minorities to rise to the top.
However, its principal beneficiaries could only be those already in possession of the requisite social, cultural and economic capital. Everyone else would be stuck in the basement.
The Defeat of Reactionary Neoliberalism
This second bloc combined a similar neoliberal politics of distribution, with a different reactionary politics of recognition: a vision of a just status order: ethnonational, anti-immigrant and pro-Christian, if not overtly racist, patriarchal and homophobic.
The Hegemonic Gap - and the Struggle to Fill It
The political universe that Trump upended was highly restrictive. It was built around the opposition between two versions of neoliberalism, distinguished chiefly on the axis of recognition (i.e. Multiculturalism vs ethnonationalism)
Obama didn’t seize the opportunity for a major shift away from neoliberalism. Instead, he entrusted the economy to the very Wall Street forces that nearly wrecked it.
Both Sanders and Trump excoriated the neoliberal politics of distribution, but their politics of recognition differed sharply (universalist/egalitarian Sanders versus nationalist/protectionist Trump)
Bait and Switch
Far from governing as a reactionary populist, Trump activated the old bait and switch, abandoning the populist distributive policies his campaign had promised. He failed to lift a finger to rein in Wall Street. Nor has he taken a single step to implement large-scale job-creating public infrastructure projects. Far from proposing tax code reform whose principal beneficiaries would be working-class and middle-class families, he signed on to the Republican version, designed to funnel more wealth to the 1 percent.
Invidious - (of a comparison or distinction) unfairly discriminating; unjust; unfair, prejudicial, discriminatory, iniquitous, weighted, one-sided
Having abandoned the populist politics of distribution, Trump proceeded to double down on the reactionary politics of recognition, hugely intensified and ever more vicious.
Progressive populism is the likeliest candidate for a new counterhegemonic bloc. Combining egalitarian redistribution with nonhierarchical recognition, this option has a fighting chance of uniting the whole working class.
It must highlight the shared roots of class and status injustices in financialized capitalism - a deeply predatory and unstable form of social organisation that liberates capital accumulation from the very constraints (political, ecological, social, moral) needed to sustain it over time.
We must break definitively with both neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it - casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism.
Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc capable of leading us beyond the current crisis to a better world.
