A couple days ago, I linked to Max Forte's January 2017article on The Dying Days of Liberalism How Orthodoxy, Professionalism, and Unresponsive Politics Finally Doomed a 19th-century Project, which included an excellent two-paragraph summary of Max Frank's latest book, Listen Liberal.
I wrote this essay nearly a year ago, and I am recycling it because it explains why those in the seats of power refuse to do anything to help the average citizen. It is more than just greed. It is more like a religious belief that they are better than the rest of us. It infects both parties, but it has been exposed for the rest of the world to see just how deeply embedded this philosophy is within the Democratic party. Meritocracy forms the bedrock of neoliberalism.
Hillary Clinton's election loss was simply the a recent example of a global rout of center-left political parties.
I listened to this earlier today, and thought so highly of it that, voila: here it is for you to consider giving it a hearing yourself. It is two years old, but, believe me, this is one of those interviews that will remain timeless, unfortunately, for many, many years.
Pay especially close attention as Mirowski explains how social media today is pushing people into developing a neoliberal personae without any class identity.
Even though, as I pointed out in my previous diary, the "Left" is at best a point of pride on a few Facebook profiles, the Right feels obliged to restrain any sort of deviance because, you see, austerity planning has its beneficiaries. So they run articles in places like Vox warning us that phenomena like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are not the solution to our problems.
Mark Blyth is a Scottish political scientist and a professor of international political economy at Brown Universit. Blyth first came to my attention when his prediction of Trump's electoral victory--and how it was tied to the vote for Brexit--was widely shared after the USA election.
The growing domination of the populist right-wing over the mainstream, neoliberal center-left gets most of the headlines, but the building rebellion by the left-wing against neoliberalism is no less important.
The latest rebellion is in France.
Definition from Wikipedia:
Yikes.
I wanted to use another word than "beejesus" but I heard recently that swear words in titles get bojoed in web crawlers and whatnot, so ya, I like this place, respect, in digital form. Maybe the Son of God and a little honey will get the spiders dancing...
