surveillance tools and weapons to a full range of clients, from gated communities to privately owned for-profit prisons.
The stories we tell about ourselves no longer speak to the ideals of justice, equality, liberty, and democracy. The landscape of American politics no longer features towering figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., whose stories interwove moral outrage with courage and vision and inspired us to imagine a society that was never just enough. A culture that once opened our imagination now disables it, overwhelming the populace with nonstop marketing that reduces our sense of agency to the imperatives of ownership, shopping, credit, and debt. But these are not the only narratives that diminish our capacity to imagine a better world. We are also inundated with stories of cruelty and fear that undermine communal bonds and tarnish any viable visions of the future. Different stories, ones that provided a sense of history, social responsibility, and respect for the public good, were once circulated by our parents, religious institutions, schools, and community leaders. Today, the stories that define who we are as individuals and as a nation are manufactured by corporate media that broadcast the lifestyles of celebrities, billionaires, and ethically frozen politicians who preach the mutually related virtues of an unbridled free market and a permanent war economy. The power to reimagine, doubt, and think critically no longer seem possible in a society in which self-interest has become the “only motive force in human life and competition” and “the most efficient and socially beneficial way for that force to express itself.”2
These stories reciting the neoliberal gospel are all the more powerful because they seem to defy the public’s desire for rigorous accountability, critical interrogation, and openness as they generate employment and revenue for right-wing think tanks and policy makers who rush to satisfy the content dictates of corporate media advertisers. Concealing the conditions of their own making, these stories enshrine both greed and indifference, encouraging massive disparities in wealth, health, nutrition, education, housing, and debt. In addition, they sanctify the workings of the market, forging a new political theology that inscribes a sense of our collective destiny to be governed ultimately and exclusively by market forces. Such ideas surely signal a tribute to Ayn Rand’s dystopian society, if not also a rebirth of Margaret Thatcher’s nonfiction invocation of the mantra of the wealthy: there is nothing beyond individual gain and the values of the corporate order.
The stories that now dominate the American landscape, and of which I write in the following pages, embody what stands for common sense among market and religious fundamentalists in both mainstream political parties: shock-and-awe austerity measures; tax cuts that serve the rich and powerful and destroy government programs that help the disadvantaged, elderly, and sick; attacks on women’s reproductive rights; attempts to suppress voter-ID laws and rig electoral college votes; full-fledged assaults on the environment; the militarization of everyday life; the destruction of public education, if not critical thought itself; and an ongoing attack on unions, social provisions, and the expansion of Medicaid and meaningful health care reform. These stories are endless, repeated by the neoliberal and neoconservative walking dead who roam the planet sucking the blood and life out of everyone they touch—from the millions killed in foreign wars to the millions at home forced into underemployment, foreclosure, poverty, or prison.
All of these stories embody what Ernst Bloch has called “the swindle of fulfillment.”3 That is, instead of fostering a democracy rooted in the public interest, they encourage a political and economic system controlled by the rich but carefully packaged in a consumerist and militarist fantasy. Instead of promoting a society that embraces a robust and inclusive social contract, they legitimate a social order that shreds social protections, privileges the wealthy and powerful, and inflicts a maddening and devastating set of injuries upon workers, women, poor minorities, immigrants, and low- and middle-class young people. Instead of striving for economic and political stability, they impose on Americans already marginalized by class and race uncertainty and precarity, a world turned upside-down, in which ignorance becomes a virtue and power and wealth are utilized for ruthlessness and privilege rather than a resource for the public good.
Every once in a while we catch a brutal glimpse of what America has become in the narratives spun by politicians and corporate elite whose arrogance and quests for authority exceed their interest to conceal the narrow-mindedness, power-hungry blunders, cruelty, and hardship embedded in the policies they advocate. The echoes of a culture of cruelty can be heard in politicians such as Senator Tom A. Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who believes that social assistance to those in need of a place to live, work, or more equitable salaries should be cut in the name of austerity measures. We hear it in the words of Representative Mike Reynolds, another Republican from Oklahoma, who insists that government bears no responsibility to improve access to college education through a state program “that provides post-secondary education scholarships to qualified low-income students.”4 We see evidence of the culture of cruelty in the policies of liberal and right-wing politicians who refuse to extend unemployment benefits, have cut $8 billion from the food stamp program (SNAP), which primarily benefits children, and have opted out of Medicaid expansion. These decisions will be deeply consequential. A Harvard University and CUNY study . . . found that the lack of Medicaid expansion in these opt-out states will result in about 7,000 to 17,000 deaths a year.5 Similar indications of the culture of cruelty are on display in the call on the part of right-wing billionaire Charles Koch who reaps billions of dollars yearly from his investments while simultaneously calling for the abolition of the minimum wage.6 We find evidence of a savage culture of cruelty in numerous policies that make clear that those who occupy the most marginalized sectors of American society—whether low-income families, communities of color, or young, unemployed, and failed consumers—are considered entirely disposable in terms of ethical considerations and the “grammar of human suffering.”7
In the name of austerity, budget cuts are enacted and fall primarily on those individuals and groups who are already disenfranchised, and will thus seriously worsen the lives of those people now suffering the most. For instance, Governor Rick Perry of Texas has enacted legislation that refuses state participation in the Obama administration’s Medicaid expansion; as a result, health care coverage will be denied to over 1.5 million low-income residents of Texas.8 This is not merely partisan politics. It is an expression of a new form of savagery and barbarism aimed at those now considered disposable in a market-centered society that has embraced a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest mentality. Not surprisingly, the right-wing appeal to job-killing and provision-slashing now functions as an updated form of medieval torture, gutting a myriad of programs that will quickly add up to profound suffering for the many and benefits for only a small class of predatory bankers, hedge-fund managers, and financiers who leech off society.
The general response from progressives and liberals does not take seriously the ways in which the extreme right wing articulates its increasingly pervasive and destructive view of American society. For instance, the proposals of the new extremists in Congress are often treated, especially by liberals, as cruel hoaxes that are out of touch with reality or as foolhardy attempts to roll back the Obama agenda. On the left, such views tend to be criticized as a domestic version of the tactics employed by the Taliban—keeping people uneducated and ignorant, oppressing women, living in a circle of certainty, and turning all channels of information into a mass propaganda machine of fundamentalist Americanism.9 All of these critiques take aim at a deeply authoritarian agenda. But such commentaries do not go far enough. Tea Party politics are about more than bad policy and policies that favor the rich over the poor, or for that matter about modes of governance and ideology that represent a blend of civic and moral turpitude. In this instance, the hidden political order represents the poison of neoliberalism and its ongoing attempt to destroy those very institutions whose purpose is to enrich public memory, decrease human suffering, protect the environment, distribute social provisions, and safeguard the public good. Neoliberalism, or what can be called the latest stage of predatory capitalism, is part of a broader project of restoring class power and consolidating the rapid concentration of capital. It is a political, economic, and political project that constitutes an ideology, mode of governance, policy, and form of public pedagogy. As an ideology, it construes profit making as the essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and an irrational assertion that the market both solves all problems and serves as a model