The Democrats’ rebuke in recent mid-term elections and eternally low approval ratings for Congress suggest that a large number of people perceive that something is broken with American politics. What doesn’t appear to be as widely understood are the changes to Western political economy that have taken place over the last forty years that could best be described as a neo-liberal (fascist) coup. The traditional left / right divide theorized to be embodied in oppositional politics, Democrats versus Republicans, has been supplanted by the unified economic agenda of the radical right with ‘political’ differences consigned to cultural issues being decided at the state and local levels. American politics ‘works,’ to the extent the term was ever applicable, through a residual mythology that posits distinct realms of the economic and the political. Economists write implicitly or explicitly about capitalism (e.g. ‘markets’) as if the federal, state and local governments weren’t fully integrated with ‘markets’ through government funded research and development, military entanglements in the interests of capitalists, regulations, transfers and expropriation. Politicians speak of foreign and domestic programs, legislation and regulations as if the resulting economic outcomes were unrelated to their form and intent. These tendencies are nowhere more evident than in ‘trade’ agreements, the political framework of ‘market’ relations.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:15:03 +0000
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