| foxes are in charge of the henhouse |
Jan. 14th, 2017|09:25 pm |
- "When we get to the point of sorting this all out, we will recognize the historical irony that the family similarities (as well as whatever actual affinities or ties there may be, but that is irrelevant to this observation, really) linking Donald Trump’s beliefs and practice of politics with Russian models are the fruits of the post-Cold-War transformation of the world that America, more than any other state, engineered. The flaws of Russian society are an expression, in hypertrophied form, of the worst aspects of the neoliberal order. Now we get to experience them ourselves. In other words, this is the moment when the neoliberal chickens come home to roost in Washington."
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- "And its instructive that Trump's win was not just about money (Clinton outspent him). Its about the relationships between money, power and the horizon of possibility in a world in which there is no future except the zero-sum game of competitive accumulation. I'm a hopeless idealist, of course, but I think that the reason Trump won is that, in an ideological dead-end campaign in which neither he nor Clinton offered a vision of the future as a hopeful and shared project for humanity, Trump chose the alternative in a far more emphatic manner than Clinton, telling voters that the only thing they needed to worry about was themselves, at the expense of all others."
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- " Neoliberal, in my book: deregulation of transnational finance and multinational corporations, combined with a dampening of progressive tax codes and commitments to social welfare, combined with transparent borders for money and trade, but for labor only under special circumstances and not for migration, all supporting a winner-takes-all ideology of capital accumulation by elites and corporations, backed up by a global security regime enforced by a powerful state that is imbricated in the corporate elites. This is the world that the USA invented in the 1980s and which has grown more and more extreme in its basic features since then, with only some minor corrections under Obama. Russian society is a parody of this world, but it is one that the hegemonic powers helped to come into being because it looked more or less right to them, especially in its general willingness to play the geopolitical and economic games by our rules, until it no longer did."
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-"or it just started winning. Putin's idea all along was that he must be allowed to do what the Americans do. Like, we can invade Georgia and Ukraine because they invaded Kosovo (he is on the record saying that)"
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"I'm not convinced. The idea and the institutions of the common market which then evolved into EU were a reaction to WWII and earlier yet to the dominant position US assumed in world economy after WWI. Hitler's Arian Europe was the same idea - creation of a powerful European empire to counter the Anglo-am world (this is what attracted the French Right to the Nazis). Yes, there has been growing inequality and privileging of capital over labor (Pickety) but Obama has done a lot to reverse the trend. ACA is just one extraordinary example. I don't deny systemic problems that the critique of neoliberalism points out, but there is also Chance, as in Comey's letter, or the self-emasculation of Labour Party in UK, and, of course, there is culture, including race, identity politics, new social media, etc. The cultural factor is enormous: essentially many trump voters cut their noses to spite their face. Finally, there is Technology and the speeding up of everything. Big cities are doing ok. Small and rural are left behind, culturally, technologically, economically. So, I prefer a multi-causal situational explanation that includes culture and chance (shit happens) to an overarching political economic theory. In any case, this is better discussed over dinner - in the old liberal democratic tradition. Let's make a date!" |
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