As a mode of governance, neoliberalism imposes identities, subjects, and ways of life detached from civic accountability and government regulations. Driven by a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, neoliberal practices buy into the rights and privileges of business and private ownership and are removed from matters of ethics and social costs. As a political project, neoliberalism is wedded to the privatization of all public resources, the selling off of state holdings and functions, the deregulation of finance and labor, the elimination of welfare and unions, the deregulation of trade in goods and capital investment, and the marketization, commercialization, and commodification of all aspects of everyday life.
Neoliberalism creates a political landscape devoid of public accountability, access, and agency, which is to say devoid of democracy itself. As a predatory competition for hoarding profit, neoliberalism produces massive inequality in wealth and income, shifts political power to financial elites, destroys all vestiges of the social contract, and increasingly views “unproductive” sectors—most often those marginalized by race, class, disability, resident status, and age—as suspicious, potentially criminal, and ultimately disposable. It thus criminalizes social problems and manufactures profit by commercializing surveillance, policing, and prisons.
The views and concerns of elite private privilege and competitive ownership now out-compete and replace notions of the public good, civic community, and solidarity. Under neoliberalism the social is pathologized while violence and war are normalized, packaged and marketed as cartoons, video games, television, cinema, and other highly profitable entertainment products. Neoliberalism indebts the public to feed the profits of the rich by spending obscene amounts on militarization, surveillance, and war. In the end, it becomes a virulent antagonist to the very institutions meant to eliminate human suffering, protect the environment, uphold the right of unions, and provide resources for those in need. As a rival to egalitarianism and the public good, neoliberalism has no real solutions to the host of economic, political, and social problems generated as its by-products.
At the heart of neoliberal narratives is a disimagination machine that spews out stories inculcating a disdain for community, public values, public life, and democracy itself. Celebrated instead are pathological varieties of individualism, distorted notions of freedom, and a willingness to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of social problems ranging from chronic impoverishment and joblessness to homelessness. Within this rationality, markets are not merely freed from progressive government regulation—they are removed from any considerations of social costs. And even where government regulation does exist, it functions primarily to bail out the rich and shore up collapsing financial institutions, working for what Noam Chomsky has termed America’s only political party, “the business party.”10 The stories that attempt to cover up America’s embrace of historical and social amnesia at the same time justify authoritarianism with a soft edge and weaken democracy through a thousand cuts to the body politic. How else to explain the Obama administration’s willingness to assassinate U.S. citizens suspected of associating with outlaw groups and to secretly monitor the email messages, phone calls, Internet activity, and text messages of its citizens? Or to use the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to arrest and indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or trial, maintain an unjust military tribunal system, and use drones as part of a global assassination campaign to kill not just people suspected of crimes but also any innocent person who happens to be nearby when these weapons detonate near them? As Jonathan Turley points out: “An authoritarian nation is defined not just by the use of authoritarian powers, but by the ability to use them. If a president can take away your freedom or your life on his own authority, all rights become little more than a discretionary grant subject to executive will.”11
Ultimately, these acts of abuse and aggression offer evidence of a new reality emerging in the United States that enshrines a politics of disposability, in which growing numbers of people are considered to be a dispensable drain on the economy and thus an affront to the sensibilities of the rich and powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most Americans now work simply to get by in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting ahead and accumulating property and power, especially for the ruling elite, is the only game in town. In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or redundant. But what is new about the politics of disposability that has become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which such antidemocratic practices have become normalized in the existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now matched by a culture of cruelty defined by the slow violence of debt, impoverishment, wartime military recruitment, criminalization, incarceration, and silent misery. Private injuries not only are separated from public considerations, but historical narratives of structural impoverishment and exclusion are ignored, scorned, or simply censored, as they are in states like Arizona that have forbidden books by Mumia Abu-Jamal, Howard Zinn, and Winona LaDuke from public schools.12 Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such stories might be shared are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the plight of communities who are disadvantaged, disenfranchised, and preyed upon. There is a particularly savage violence in the stories that now shape matters of governance, policy, education, and everyday life, one that has made America barely recognizable as a civilian democracy.
Any viable struggle against the authoritarian forces that dominate the United States must make visible the indignity and injustice of these narratives and the historical, political, economic, and cultural conditions that produce them. For this reason, in The Violence of Organized Forgetting I present a critical analysis of how various elitist forces in American society are distracting, miseducating, and deterring the public from acting in its own interests. Dominant political and cultural responses to current events—such as the ongoing economic crisis; income inequality, health care reform, Hurricane Sandy, the war on terror, the Boston Marathon bombing, Edward Snowden’s exposure of the gross misdeeds of the National Security Agency, and the crisis of public schooling—represent flashpoints that reveal a growing disregard for people’s democratic rights, public accountability, and civic values. As political power becomes increasingly disconnected from civic, ethical, and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.
From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these criminogenic and death-dealing forces is undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social services and suppressing opportunities for democratic resistance. Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the neoliberal machinery of civic death effectively weakens public supports and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and speaking about politics in the twenty-first century. But even more than neutralizing all forms of viable opposition to the growing control and wealth of predatory financial elites, responses to social issues are increasingly dominated by a malignant characterization of disadvantaged groups as disposable populations. How else to explain the right-wing charge that the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly are moochers and should fend for themselves? This is not simply an example of a kind of hardening of the culture, it is also part of a machinery of social and civic death that crushes any viable notion of the common good, public life, and the shared bonds and commitments that are necessary for community and democracy.
Before this dangerously authoritarian mind-set has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the coercive forces shaping U.S. culture—and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It is not enough for people of conscience only to expose the falseness of the stories we are told. Educators, artists, intellectuals, workers, young people, and other concerned citizens also need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our communities and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative, one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. Why are not millions protesting in the streets over these barbaric