Hard Lessons: Neoliberalism, Education, and the Politics of Disposability

Abstract

In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago when it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated ‘”dreamworlds” of consumption, property, and power’ had returned to the United States with a vengeance.[1] The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and lionized that bygone period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even with the economic blowout and its now visible register of corruption and greed on the part of Wall Street bankers and traders, the dominant press cannot relinquish its love affair with the super-rich, regardless of how greedy they appear. How else to explain stories about how the rich are going through hard times as exemplified in their either moving out of their high-priced mansions into more modest million-dollar condos or being forced to give up riding in limos for more discreet modes of transportation? In some cases, these highflying entrepreneurs of the now devalued Gilded Age are celebrated because of their unmitigated belief in the gospel of wealth and their sheer courage to spend in tough times. Or, as the New York Times puts it, ‘When the times get tough, the smart spend money’.[2] And while tent cities are emerging all over the country, the ultra-rich provide a lesson in what it means to be ‘smart’, capitalizing on their spending habits by buying $14-million condos in New York City, dishing out $3000 at the Goldbar Lounge for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac, or paying $656,000 for a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible.[3] What these stories often forget to mention is the legacy of corporate swindling, corruption, and financial adventurism that was responsible for bankrupting the country. There is more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neo-feudal world-view in which self-interest and the laws of the market are seen as the only true measure of politics. There is also an attack on the idea of the social contract – the state’s provision of minimum guarantees of security – and the very notion of democratic politics. Moreover, in this free-wheeling, deregulated market society, the citizen is reduced to a consumer, or if labeled as a flawed consumer, rendered as excess, redundant, and disposable. Rampant greed, market deregulation, and cut-throat individual competition, lauded in this world of free-market fundamentalism, have produced over the last thirty years an unparalleled degree of social inequality in the United States along with massive dislocations in the basic foundations of society. Clearly, any understanding of the present financial crisis and its disastrous effects has to include a consideration of free-market fundamentalism or neoliberalism and the ideologies, cultural