Democracys Critics
COLIN GORDON at Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/democracy-in-chains-review-nancy-maclean-james-buchanan
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We know a lot about the rise of the Right in postwar America. We have plumbed its social history, calling attention to the singular importance of Southern resistance to civil rights; the ways in which the “crabgrassroots politics” of white resentment flourished in the suburbs of Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Orange County; and the peculiar amalgam of fundamentalism and libertarianism — a “strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers,” as Rick Perlstein puts it — that mobilized, distracted, or conned its followers.
We have traced the contours and timing of the “right turn,” the business mobilization that stuttered through the postwar era before riding the turmoil of the 1970s to deal decisive blows against labor, against the economics and politics of growth, and against the entire postwar social contract. And we have begun to unravel the predatory logic of neoliberalism, that toxic combination of “free” markets and unfree people.
We know a lot about the ways in which a “winner-take-all” society marked by rising inequality and insecurity is an essentially political project, created and sustained not by the retreat of policy but by policy choices. Economically and politically, the system is rigged, the rules rewritten to redistribute income upwards and ensure that it stays there. And we now have a pretty good grasp of the political infrastructure — nationally and in the states — that bankrolls, advances, and disguises this agenda.
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It establishes the Jim Crow roots of the modern right, not just through the GOP’s southern strategy but through shared doubts about the compatibility of property rights and democratic rule. It demonstrates that the lurch right in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Iowa represents not some existential crisis of a forgotten working class but the triumph of a long push to use statehouses as laboratories for autocracy. It understands the post–Citizens United wave of “dark money” as but the most recent chapter in a long history of corporate stealth and influence.
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