Against Empire. Matthew T. Eggemeier

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Against Empire - Matthew T. Eggemeier страница 6

Against Empire - Matthew T. Eggemeier Theopolitical Visions

Скачать книгу

Mouffe, 140.

      29. Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe, 140.

      30. Importantly, both Schüssler Fiorenza and West maintain that democracy is an internal norm of Christianity. See Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 7, and West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 18ff. and 91ff.

      chapter 1

      Ours is a period of profound social upheaval. A prominent symptom of this upheaval is the collapse of public confidence in the normative institutions of liberal democracy. This crisis has been gestating for many years, but two events crystallize the contradictions of our cultural moment: the political and military debacles in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) and the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Combined with the exploitation of long-simmering racial resentments for political gain, the fundamental crises of the military and financial institutions of the liberal order created an opening for the emergence of the right-wing populist movements now ascendant.

      As discussed in the introduction, these political formations have attempted to undermine features of democracy that block the expansion of plutocratic and racist policies. In the United States, the dominant response among critics to the ascendancy of Trump’s authoritarian populism has been to diagnose it as an aberration and to argue that if he is defeated in 2020 order will be restored to the American political system. This interpretation is either extraordinarily naïve about American history or a disingenuous attempt to pathologize an individual rather than criticize an entire system. In either scenario, the result is to inoculate the American public from a confrontation with the economic, political, and cultural contradictions that have generated the politics of exclusion now on the rise in the United States.

      In this chapter, we examine these conditions by criticizing the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony that preceded this authoritarian populist formation and prepared the ground for its ascendency. We first analyze neoliberalism as the dominant economic-political formation in our world today that serves to economize both the political and cultural realm and that has generated a widespread sense of nihilism among certain demographics in the United States. Second, we examine neoconservatism as an ideological and policy orientation that plays a critical role in the maintenance of a neoliberal order via both its cultural politics as well as foreign policy commitments. We conclude the chapter by examining the alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservatism with religious conservativism as well as its mutation into an authoritarian populist and white nationalist politics under Trump.

      Neoliberalism

Скачать книгу