We’re living in a time of extremes: extreme weather conditions, extreme political polarization, and extreme power and income inequality. As TruthOut asks, “How did we get to this point? It certainly didn’t happen overnight. Rather, over the course of the last 30 years, the erosion of social contract the New Deal ushered in has reached a stage such that the United States of America is no longer a democratic republic – or a polity concerned with a shared future.
“Henry A. Giroux, a professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has written extensively on the way in which the political economy has been reconfigured from one that guaranteed citizens a social safety net and promoted paths to a middle class way of life, to a system where a neoliberal oligarchy has accumulated a preponderance of wealth and power that makes democracy impossible, while simultaneously pushing politicians to chloroform the New Deal and Great Society era reforms. The result of this long march to change the fundamental agreement citizens had with their government is a middle and lower class that are compliant, afraid, desperate, and powerless in society- or dispoable. In other words, neoliberal ideologues have squashed democratic movements that use political processes to create a more just and more economically equitable society. Continue reading “Henry A Giroux on neoliberalism”