practices at work in the Obama administration also include the US government’s use of state secrecy to provide a cover for practices that range from the illegal use of torture and the abduction of innocent foreign nationals to the National Security Association’s use of a massive surveillance campaign to monitor the phone calls, e-mails, and Internet activity of all Americans. A shadow mass surveillance state has emerged that eschews transparency and commits unlawful acts under the rubric of national security. Given the power of the government to engage in a range of illegalities and to make them disappear through an appeal to state secrecy, it should come as no surprise that warrantless wiretapping, justified in the name of national security, is on the rise at both the federal and state levels. For instance, the New York City Police Department “implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens [by infiltrating] mosques and universities [and] collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes.”40 The US public barely acknowledged this shocking abuse of power. Such antidemocratic policies and practices have become the new norm in US society and reveal a frightening and dangerous move toward a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism.
Neoliberalism as the New Lingua Franca of Cruelty
The harsh realities of a society defined by the imperatives of punishment, cruelty, militarism, secrecy, and exclusion can also be seen in a growing rhetoric of insult, humiliation, and slander. Teachers are referred to as “welfare queens” by right-wing pundits; conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that Michael J. Fox was “faking” the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease when he appeared in a political ad for Democrat Claire McCaskill; and the public is routinely treated to racist comments, slurs, and insults about Barack Obama by a host of shock jocks, politicians, and even a federal judge.41 Poverty is seen not as a social problem but as a personal failing, and poor people have become the objects of abuse, fear, and loathing. The poor, as right-wing ideologues never fail to remind us, are lazy—and, for that matter, how could they truly be poor if they own TVs and cell phones? Cruel, racist insults and the discourse of humiliation are now packaged in a mindless rhetoric as unapologetic as it is ruthless—this has become the new lingua franca of public exchange.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney echoed the harshness of the new lingua franca of cruelty when asked during the 2012 campaign about the government’s responsibility to the 50 million Americans who don’t have health insurance. Incredibly, Romney replied that they already have access to health care because they can go to hospital emergency rooms.42 In response, a New York Times editorial stated that emergency room care “is the most expensive and least effective way of providing care” and such a remark “reeks of contempt for those left behind by the current insurance system, suggesting that they must suffer with illness until the point where they need an ambulance.”43 Indifferent to the health care needs of the poor and middle class, Romney also conveniently ignores the fact that, as indicated in a Harvard University study, “more than 62% of all personal bankruptcies are caused by the cost of overwhelming medical expenses.”44 The new lingua franca of cruelty and its politics of disposability are on full display here. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we live in a time when revenge has become the cure-all for most of our social and economic ills.
Neoliberalism and the Retreat from Ethical Considerations
Not only does neoliberal rationality believe in the ability of markets to solve all problems, it also removes economics and markets from ethical considerations. Economic growth, rather than social needs, drives politics. Long-term investments are replaced by short-term gains and profits, while compassion is viewed as a weakness and democratic public values are derided. As Stanley Aronowitz points out, public values and collective action have given way to the “absurd notion the market should rule every human activity,” including the “absurd neoliberal idea that users should pay for every public good from parks and beaches to highways [and] higher education.”45 The hard work of critical analysis, moral judgments, and social responsibility have given way to the desire for accumulating profits at almost any cost, short of unmistakably breaking the law and risking a jail term (which seems unlikely for Wall Street criminals). Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech in the film Wall Street has been revived as a rallying cry for the entire financial services industry, rather than seen as a critique of excess. With society overtaken by the morality of self-interest, profit-seeking weaves its way into every possible space, relationship, and institution. For example, the search for high-end profits has descended upon the educational sector with a vengeance, as private bankers, hedge fund elites, and an assortment of billionaires are investing in for-profit and charter schools while advocating policies that disinvest in public education. At the same time the biotech, pharmaceutical, and defense industries and a range of other corporations are investing in universities to rake in profits while influencing everything from how such institutions are governed and define their mission to what they teach and how they treat faculty members and students. Increasingly, universities are losing their power not only to produce critical and civically engaged students but also to offer the type of education that enables them to refute the neoliberal utopian notion that paradise amounts to a world of voracity and avarice without restrictions, governed by a financial elite who exercise authority without accountability or challenge. Literacy, public service, human rights, and morality in this neoliberal notion of education become damaged concepts, stripped of any sense of reason, responsibility, or obligation to a just society.
In this way, neoliberalism proceeds, in zombie-like fashion, to impose its values, social relations, and forms of social death upon all aspects of civic life.This is marked by not only a sustained lack of interest in the public good, a love of inequitious power relations, and a hatred of democracy. There is also the use of brutality, state violence, and humiliation to normalize a neoliberal social order that celebrates massive inequalities in income, wealth, and access to vital services. This is a social Darwinism without apology, a ruthless form of casino capitalism whose advocates have suggested, without irony, that what they do is divinely inspired.46 Politics has become an extension of war, just as state-sponsored violence increasingly finds legitimation in popular culture and a broader culture of cruelty that promotes an expanding landscape of selfishness, insecurity, and precarity that undermines any sense of shared responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many young people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, legitimated through market-driven laws that embrace self-promotion, hypercompetitiveness, and surviving in a society that increasingly reduces social relations to social combat. Young people today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for oneself and to reduce the obligations of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture.
Gilded Age vengeance has also returned in the form of scorn for those who are either failed consumers or do not live up to the image of the United States as a white Christian nation. Reality TV’s overarching theme, echoing Hobbes’s “war of all against all,” brings home the lesson that punishment is the norm and reward the exception. Unfortunately, it no longer mimics reality, it is the new reality. There is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, and public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the construction of the social state and the formation of a sustainable democratic society. Nowhere is the dismantling of the social state and the transformation of the state into a punishing machine more evident than in the recent attacks on youth, labor rights, and higher education being waged by Republican governors in a number of key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio.
What is often missed in discussions of these attacks is that the war on the social state and the war on education represent part of the same agenda of destruction and violence. The first war is being waged for the complete control by the rich and powerful of all modes of wealth and income while the second war is conducted on the ideological front and represents a battle over the very capacity of young people and others to imagine a different and more critical mode of subjectivity and alternative mode of politics. If the first war is on the diverse and myriad terrain of political economy the second is being waged though what C. Wright Mills once called the major cultural apparatuses, including public and higher education. This is a struggle to shape indentities, desires, and modes of subjectivity in accordance with market values, needs, and relations. Both of these wars