America's Descent into Madness

Abstract

This article describes America's descent into madness under the regime of neoliberalism that has emerged in the United States since the late 1970s. In part, this is due to the emergence of a public pedagogy produced by the corporate-owned media that now saturates Americans with a market-driven value system that undermines those formative cultures and public spheres necessary to educate a critical and engaged citizenry. A culture of illiteracy, cruelty, and punishment is circulated through the various stories that America now tells about its self—stories that are narrated by the one percent and legitimated by the anti-public intellectuals who work for them. Neoliberal stories occupy a dead zone inimical to the promises of a substantive democracy and must be challenged by making education central to any viable notion of politics. Stories that invoke collective struggle, public memories of resistance, and modes of individual and collective agency are needed to inspire a populist politics and an organized social movement. America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. (le Carré)