turns the principles of democracy against democracy itself. Americans now live in an atomized and pulverized society, “spattered with the debris of broken interhuman bonds,”21 in which “democracy becomes a perishable commodity”22 and all things public are viewed with disdain.
Neoliberal Governance
At the level of governance, neoliberalism has increasingly turned mainstream politics into a tawdry form of money-laundering in which the spaces and registers that circulate power are controlled by those who have amassed large amounts of capital. Elections, like mainstream politicians, are now bought and sold to the highest bidder. In the Senate and House of Representatives, 47 percent are millionaires—the “estimated median net worth of a current US senator stood at an average of $2.56 million while the median net worth of members of Congress is $913,000.”23 Elected representatives no longer even purport to do the bidding of the people who elect them. Rather, they are now largely influenced by the demands of lobbyists, who have enormous clout in promoting the interests of the elite, financial services sector, and megacorporations. In 2012, there were just over fourteen thousand registered lobbyists in Washington, DC, which amounts to approximately twenty-three lobbyists for every member of Congress. Although the number of lobbyists has steadily increased by about 20 percent since 1998, the Center for Responsive Politics found that “total spending on lobbying the federal government has almost tripled since 1998, to $3.3 billion.”24 As Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger succinctly put it, “A radical minority of the superrich has gained ascendency over politics, buying the policies, laws, tax breaks, subsidies, and rules that consolidate a permanent state of vast inequality by which they can further help themselves to America’s wealth and resources.”25 How else to explain that the 2013 bill designed to regulate the banking and financial sectors was drafted for legislators by Citigroup lobbyists?26 There is more at stake here than legalized corruption, there is the arrogant dismantling of democracy and the production of policies that extend rather than mitigate human suffering, violence, misery, and everyday hardships. Democratic governance has been replaced by the sovereignty of the market, paving the way for modes of governance intent on transforming democratic citizens into entrepreneurial agents. The language of the market and business culture have now almost entirely supplanted any celebration of the public good or the calls to enhance civil society characteristic of past generations. Moreover, authoritarian governance now creeps into every institution and aspect of public life. Instead of celebrating Martin Luther King for his stands against poverty, militarization, and racism, US society holds him up as an icon denuded of any message of solidarity and social struggle. This erasure and depoliticization of history and politics is matched by the celebration of a business culture in which the US public transforms Bill Gates into a national hero. At the same time, civil rights heroine Rosa Parks cedes her position to the Kardashian sisters, as the prominence of civic culture is canceled out by herd-like public enthusiasm for celebrity culture, reality TV, and the hyper-violence of extreme sports. The older heroes sacrificed in order to alleviate the suffering of others, while the new heroes drawn from corporate and celebrity culture live off the suffering of others.
Clearly, US society is awash in a neoliberal culture of idiocy and illiteracy. It produces many subjects who are indifferent to others and are thus incapable of seeing that when the logic of extreme individualism is extended into the far reaches of the national security state, it serves to legitimate the breakdown of the social bonds necessary for a democratic society and reinforces a culture of cruelty that upholds solitary confinement as a mode of punishment for thousands of incarcerated young people and adults.27 Is it any wonder that with the breakdown of critical education and the cultural apparatuses that support it, the American public now overwhelmingly supports state torture and capital punishment while decrying the necessity of a national health care system? Fortunately, there are signs of rebellion among workers, young people, students, and teachers, indicating that the US public has not been entirely colonized by the bankers, hedge fund managers, and other apostles of neoliberalism. For example, in Connecticut, opponents of public-school privatization replaced three right-wing, pro-charter school board members. In Chicago, reform efforts prevented the city from outsourcing the lease of Midway Airport and breast cancer screening for uninsured women. And, in Iowa, as a result of pressure from progressives, the governor rejected corporate bids to purchase Iowa’s statewide fiber-optics network.
Neoliberal governance has produced an economy and a political system almost entirely controlled by the rich and powerful—what a Citigroup report called a “plutonomy,” an economy powered by the wealthy.28 I have referred to these plutocrats as “the new zombies”: they are parasites that suck the resources out of the planet and the rest of us in order to strengthen their grasp on political and economic power and fuel their exorbitant lifestyles.29 Power is now global, gated, and driven by a savage disregard for human welfare, while politics resides largely in older institutions of modernity such as nation states. The new plutocrats have no allegiance to national communities, justice, or human rights, just potential markets and profits. The work of citizenship has been set back decades by this new group of winner-take-all global predators.30 Policies are now enacted that provide massive tax cuts to the rich and generous subsidies to banks and corporations—alongside massive disinvestments in job creation programs, the building of critical infrastructures, and the development of crucial social programs ranging from health care to school meal programs for disadvantaged children.
Neoliberalism’s massive disinvestment in schools, social programs, and an aging infrastructure is not about a lack of money. The real problem stems from government priorities that inform both how the money is collected and how it is spent.31 More than 60 percent of the federal budget goes to military spending, while only 6 percent is allocated toward education. The United States spends more than $92 billion on corporate subsidies and only $59 billion on social welfare programs.32 John Cavanagh has estimated that if there were a tiny tax imposed on Wall Street stock and derivatives transactions, the government could raise $150 billion annually.33 In addition, if the tax code were adjusted in a fair manner to tax the wealthy, another $79 billion could be raised. Finally, Cavanagh notes that $100 billion in tax income is lost annually through tax haven abuse; proper regulation would make it costly for corporations to declare “their profits in overseas tax havens like the Cayman Islands.”34
At the same time, the financialization of the economy and culture has resulted in the poisonous growth of monopoly power, predatory lending, abusive credit card practices, and misuses of CEO pay. The false but central neoliberal tenet that markets can solve all of society’s problems grants unchecked power to money and has given rise to “a politics in which policies that favor the rich … have allowed the financial sector to amass vast economic and political power.”35 As Joseph Stiglitz points out, there is more at work in this form of governance than a pandering to the wealthy and powerful: there is also the specter of an authoritarian society “where people live in gated communities,” large segments of the population are impoverished or locked up in prison, and Americans live in a state of constant fear as they face growing “economic insecurity, healthcare insecurity, [and] a sense of physical insecurity.”36 In other words, the authoritarian nature of neoliberal political governance and economic power is also visible in the rise of a national security state in which civil liberties are being drastically abridged and violated.
As the war on terror becomes a normalized state of existence, the most basic rights available to American citizens are being shredded. The spirit of revenge, militarization, and fear now permeates the discourse of national security. For instance, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the idea of habeas corpus, with its guarantee that prisoners have minimal rights, has given way to policies of indefinite detention, abductions, targeted assassinations, drone killings, and an expanding state surveillance apparatus. The Obama administration has designated forty-six inmates for indefinite detention at Guantánamo because, according to the government, they can be neither tried nor safely released. Moreover, another “167 men now confined at Guantanamo . . . have been cleared for release yet remain at the facility.”37
With the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012, the rule of legal illegalities has been extended to threaten the lives and rights of US citizens. The law authorizes military
