The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, turning public schools into 'education prisons' and state policies that bail out investment bankers, leaving millions in poverty and insecurity.
With the advent of neoliberalism, or what some call free-market fundamentalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption throughout society of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinism.
As a theater of cruelty and a mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism undermines all forms of solidarity while simultaneously promoting the logic of unrestricted individual responsibility. But there is more at stake here than an unchecked ideology of privatization.
For example, as the welfare state is dismantled, it is being replaced by the harsh realities of the punishing state as social problems are increasingly criminalized and social protections are either eliminated or fatally weakened.
The harsh values of this new social order can be seen in the increasing incarceration of young people, the modeling of public schools after prisons and state policies that bail out investment bankers, but leave the middle and working classes in a state of poverty, despair and insecurity.
But it can also be seen in the practice of socialism for the rich. This is a practice in which government supports for the poor, unemployed, sick and elderly are derided.
That's because they either contribute to an increase in the growing deficit or they undermine the market-driven notion of individual responsibility.
And yet, the same critics defend, without irony, government support for the rich, the bankers, the permanent war economy, or any number of subsidies for corporations as essential to the life of the nation, which is simply an argument that benefits the rich and powerful and legitimates the deregulated wild west of casino capitalism.
Of course, this form of economic Darwinism is not enforced simply through the use of the police and other repressive apparatuses.
It's endlessly reproduced through the cultural apparatuses of the new and old media, public and higher education, as well as through the thousands of messages and narratives we are exposed to daily in multiple commercial spheres.
In this discourse, the economic order is either sanctioned by God or exists simply as an extension of nature.
In other words, the tyranny and suffering that is produced through the neoliberal theater of cruelty is unquestionable, as unmovable as an urban skyscraper.
Long-term investments are now replaced by short-term gains and profits, while compassion is viewed as a weakness and democratic public values are scorned because they subordinate market considerations to the common good.
Morality in this instance becomes painless, stripped of any obligations to the other. As the language of privatization, deregulation and commodification replaces the discourse of the public good, all things public, including public schools, libraries and public services.
They are viewed either as a drain on the market or as a pathology. At the same time, inequality in wealth and income expands and spreads like a toxin through everyday life, poisoning democracy and relegating more and more individuals to a growing army of disposable human waste.
The embrace of a type of rabid individualism, anti-intellectualism and political illiteracy is also at work in the Tea Party movement.
As social protections disappear, jobs are lost, uncertainty grows and insecurity prevails, Tea Party members express anger over a weakened social state that represents one of the few institutions capable of providing the capital, policies and safety nets necessary to protect those who have been shaken by the economic recession.
And, yet, in light of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans, the Tea Party movement wants to abolish government and expand even more the deregulated capitalism that has unsettled the lives of so many of its members.
As the belief in the libertarian agent, free of all dependencies and social responsibilities blows up in the face of the current economic meltdown, anger replaces critique and ignorance informs politics.
Members of the Tea Party are angry because they have been jolted into recognizing how fragile their so-called individual freedom actually is and that it is the government that is somehow responsible for making them feel so vulnerable.
Maybe so, but there is also something else at work here, less metaphysical and more pedagogical - a kind of intellectual vacuum produced at different levels of American society that cultivates ignorance, limits choices, legitimizes political illiteracy and promotes violence.
Celebrity culture puts much of the population in a moral coma and perpetual state of ignorance. Coupled with a pedagogy of economic Darwinism that is spewed out daily in the mainstream media, large segments of the population are prevented from connecting the dots between their own personal troubles and larger social problems.
In this case, the larger structural elements of a corrupt economic system disappear, while the suffering and hardship continues and the bankers and other members of the financial criminal class run to the banks to deposit their obscene bonuses.
The commercial machinery and repressive apparatuses run by the neoliberal and right-wing zombies have undermined public space and condemned more and more people to the status of disposable populations.
It's all the more crucial that academics, artists, and other intellectuals mobilize their resources in order to fight the loss of vision and the exhaustion of politics that has paralyzed American society for decades.
The key is to link struggles that have for decades been seen as discrete, with a broad anti-capitalist project whose objective is the radical transformation of economic, political, personal and social relations.
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