“justice,” and the “social state” of any viable meaning. Arundhati Roy captures the antidemocratic nature of this process in the following insightful comment:
This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being “anti-progress,” “anti-development,” “anti-reform,” and of course “anti-national”—negativists of the worst sort. To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.6
From the ailing rib of democracy there is emerging not only an aggressive political assault on democratic modes of governance, but also a form of linguistic and cultural authoritarianism that no longer needs to legitimate itself in an idea because it secures its foundational beliefs in a claim to normalcy.7 The undoing of democracy to which Roy refers—and the dystopian society that is emerging in its place—can be observed in the current subordination of public values to commercial imperatives and an increasingly militarized carceral state. That is, Americans are now openly monitored and evaluated by an authoritarian system whose ideology, hierarchies, practices, and social formations cannot be questioned or challenged without triggering the full deterrent power of the surveillance state—the enforcement arm of the neoliberal financial order. This is a mode of predatory capitalism that presents itself as a universal social formation without qualification, a social form encircled by ideological and political certainty, and a cultural practice that replaces open civic powers with a closed set of consumer choices. As a result, corporate predation is emerging as a normalized form of low-intensity ambient violence that is conscripting all political differences, viable alternatives, and counter-readings of the world into the service of a financial elite and a savage form of Social Darwinism.
Despite their increasing ubiquity, the current mechanisms of diversion and their hidden order of politics have received some scrutiny. Robert Reich, for one, has asserted that any debate about the national debt should not only be about the broader issue of inequality but also should address crucial political questions regarding the increasing concentration of power and “entrenched wealth at the top.”8 We also see deeper analysis in Frank Rich’s insistence that the endless debate conducted largely in the mainstream media about Washington being dysfunctional misses the point. Rich argues that behind the media’s silly argument that both parties are to blame for the current deadlock lies a Republican Party strategy to make the federal government look as dysfunctional as possible so as to convince the wider American public that the government should be dismantled and its services turned over to for-profit private interests. In fact, a number of recent critics now believe that the extremist nature of the current Republican Party represents one of the most difficult obstacles to any viable form of governance. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, two prominent conservative commentators, have recently argued that not only have moderates been pushed out of the Republican Party, but they are for all intents and purposes “virtually extinct.” Mann and Ornstein go even further by stating:
In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.9
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has further emphasized the dire effects of extremist politics on democracy, describing the Republican Party’s “corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous.” He states that Americans are “now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical.” With the most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age having passed the Citizens United decision, “those who have the money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute.”10
In addition, a tradition of progressive intellectuals has long alerted the public to the decades-long transformation of the United States from a weak democracy to a spirited authoritarian state. Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Chris Hedges, Angela Davis, Sheldon Wolin, Stanley Aronowitz, Robert Scheer, Robin D. G. Kelley, Matt Taibbi, Susan George, and David Theo Goldberg, among others, have challenged the permanent war economy, the erosion of civil liberties, the moral bankruptcy of the liberal intelligentsia, the corporate control of the media, the criminal wars of repression abroad, the rise of the torture state, and the increasing militarization of everyday life.
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