08-24-2022, 10:16 AM
(08-24-2022, 08:44 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(08-24-2022, 12:06 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(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.
That quote was actually from John Robb, another blogger who was springboarding off of Philip Bobbitt's work. But Bobbitt may well have said something similar.
I think everyone is right here. The era of globalization/neoliberalism that began with the Reagan revolution was accompanied by massive global economic growth and a rising global middle class. But it also led to a hollowing out of the middle class in the United States, largely due to the all the outsourcing and the fact that capital is much freer to move than labor is. Robb says as much in the quote above: other countries took advantage of US markets and did better than the USA. MAGA is a backlash against this.
And to your point, the rich have done better than the poor in this regime. Inequality has grown as well as overall wealth growing. These aren't contradictory points.
I agree, except MAGA is not really just a backlash against outsourcing, but only partially, and it's totally misdirected toward the resentment against what Robb calls "cultural neoliberalism", but isn't. It's just prejudice and replacement theory. If MAGA were just about global free trade, then its adherents would be pro-labor liberal Democrats and Berniebros. Trump found it much easier to enact already-established neoliberal policies (like tax cuts) and his social conservatism and prejudice (like immigration restriction and welfare cuts) than to do much about economic globalism.
And hollowing out of the American middle class is not "largely due to all the outsourcing" but even more due to the wealthy hogging the wealth here in the USA through tax cuts, deregulation and social spending cuts, which prejudiced rural whites support with their lopsided votes for Republicans and Trump supporters and their gerrymandered districts thanks to the disaster of Nov.2, 2010. Making Trump out to be primarily an anti-globalist populist instead of a neoliberal deceptively whitewashes the Trump regime and its followers.