Philip Bobbitt's Theories of Changes in the Constitutional Order

[Eric the Green]

(08-23-2022, 03:37 PM)sbarrera Wrote:

(08-23-2022, 01:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: To say that neoliberalism created any economic prosperity for anyone, as Bobbitt asserted, except for its wealthy promoters, is pure lies and obfuscation. Rachel Maddow straightens out anyone who bothered to pay any attention, which Bobbitt did not.

Bobbitt doesn't say that about the market state, though. He says it creates economic opportunity. Whether or not you can turn opportunity into prosperity is up to you (that's essentially Reagan's message too). That's why I say he's more identifying the shift to the Third Turning mindset than a new kind of order that will last. That order has to come now to correct for the excesses that the market-driven era created.

I stand corrected to a degree. I was seeing his quote that "Neoliberalism improved the world. Unfettered access to US markets (the most valuable in the world) led to twenty plus years of rapid economic globalization that lifted billions of people out of poverty and made many countries rich." So what he meant there was that the USA adopted neoliberalism pretty-much unilaterally which allowed other countries to take advantage of US markets and do better while the USA did not.

If he said that the neoliberal market state creates economic opportunity, I would disagree; it only creates opportunity for the rich to exploit everyone else and keep them poor.

Quote:But again, Bobbitt is on to something with his basic premise that the strategic landscape has changed, and the state has to change with it. I think the big change is with the growth and density of information networks. And the lesson of these past years is that government has not done well in the context of these networks. The videos you posted make the point about how democracy has eroded, to the point of allowing a mountebank to become President for a term. That was in part because social media was used to manipulate the election!

As the videos I posted showed, most people did poorly under neoliberalism in the 1980s even before social media and information networks got going, so it is a largely irrelevant factor in the failure of neoliberal free-market economics policy.

There were many factors that allowed Trump to win, though, and use of social media (especially by folks like Alex Jones, who had been largely excluded from the older media, but also by other manipulation led by a foreign company) played a role, along with the failure of neoliberal policy over 40 years to create an informed, engaged electorate interested in real issues, because politics has since become irrelevant to our lives, as Monbiot pointed out, so that people opted for an anti-politics of slogans and symbols. It was a perfect storm-- of an inadequate opposing candidate who used poor strategy (plus perhaps the fear of electing a woman president), Russian hacking stoking false scandals, Republican voter suppression, removal of civics classes in schools for many years, social-media-stoked conspiracy-theory rebellion, the talents of the celebrity demagogue himself, as well as the atomized and alienated condition of the public-- that was also deceived enough after 40 years of false neoliberal freedom slogans to still support a neoliberal candidate (Trump) who presented himself as some kind of populist, nationalist leader who alone could fix things and Make America Great Again, but who actually offered only more neoliberal policy peppered with prejudice that was more-overtly "trump-eted" than it had already been peppered-with in the past.

Calling "cultural neoliberalism" such things as affirmative action and multi-culturalism, is not correct. That is social liberalism, pro-diversity. Neoliberalism has no connection with this. Quite the opposite. It stokes resentment among whites to social programs, taxes and regulations on business by libruls supposedly making people give away their hard-earned money to ethnic groups who are freeloaders. This is probably the most important and most-persuasive aspect of neoliberalism, which garners its greatest support in rural white regions of the USA in election after election-- support for Republican candidates who promote neoliberalism and prejudice/resentment-- two sides of the same coin.

Obfuscation about Trump's nationalism and supposed populism to hide his neoliberal policies, and confusion over the term neoliberal to apply it to some kinds of true liberalism as your article author does, is a major factor that hides the damage that Trump Republicans continue to do-- right down the line in the tradition of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, Pinochet, Gingrich, Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Uncle Thomas, Marjory Taylor Greene, etc.