Securing the Nation: Neoliberalism's U.S. Family Values in a Transnational Gendered Economy

Abstract

Securing the Nation:Neoliberalism's U.S. Family Values in a Transnational Gendered Economy Rebecca Dingo (bio) The Economy of a Culture in Crisis Shortly after the unethical practices of such corporate giants as Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing were exposed by the U.S. media in early 2003, Concerned Women For America (CWA), a conservative right-wing Christian women's organization, published Martha Kleder's article "Values-Based Investing: A Tool for Pro-Family Activists" on the "Culture and Family Institute" portion of their not-for-profit website. 1 Appealing to her audience's fear of the fall of the U.S. economy and capitalism Kleder begins her article by stating, "American capitalism is in crisis" and continues to define this state by using terms such as "broken," "scandal," "shocking," "cheating," and "lying." Kleder employs a rhetoric of crisis that is indicative of many U.S. citizen's late-twentieth-century anxieties about the state of the nation, U.S. culture, and personal desires. She draws upon U.S. nationalism's promises for wealth, democracy, freedom, and individual agency and suggests that these values, like capitalism, are also in crisis. Through practicing what Kleder calls values-based investments, individuals can morally invest in the market and fulfill, for themselves and their community, the values that both U.S. citizenship and contemporary conservative fundamentalist Christianity are purported to provide. Kleder's essay persuades her target audience of other "concerned" right-wing Christian women to consider the intricate relationship between contemporary conservative Christian values, truth, ethics, American nationalism, American culture, and the market. Her timely argument identifies what she suggests is one of the core problems in contemporary American culture: that "Christian values and absolute truth" have been abandoned, resulting in a morality "committed to philosophical relativism, the pure pragmatism" where "ethics is merely the art of staying out of trouble, not the conviction to uphold truth and do what is right."2 In essence, Kleder's rhetoric of crisis appeals to the emotions through taken-for-granted and familiar terms such as truth, responsibility, and family, which she links to contemporary anxieties about the morality of American culture. To assuage this anxiety, Kleder suggests that her audience use their own agency and invest selectively in the market. If one acts morally when investing, then the market will provide the best possible world for the individual, her [End Page 173] or his family, and the nation. Kleder ultimately asks her audience to consider the ethical practices of the companies in which they choose to invest—an ethical concern that I share with many others. Yet, this brief article on the morality of the market communicates much more than the seemingly simple call for individual investors in the global marketplace to choose carefully and responsibly their investment sites. Kleder's article characterizes the rhetorical link between the market, family values, and individual agency. This presumed relationship is persuasive because it builds upon a commonsense belief system of personal intervention that places both individual and national economic security into the hands of each U.S. resident.3 Kleder's essay on the value of moral investing is emblematic of the discursive convergence of market fundamentalism, right-wing Christian fundamentalisms, and neoliberal values that structure the rhetoric of pro-family ethics at the end of the twentieth century.4 Significantly, the majority of contemporary conservative right-wing Christian organizations were established within the mid-1970s and early 1980s. 5 Kleder collapses personal agency, nationalism, and marketplace investing into symbols of faith in God, familial commitment, and dedication to American values. Her article demonstrates the rhetorical slippages between family, nation, and free-market and demarcates the terms and values that thread through the conservative right wing Christian's basic belief system: Faith + Family+ Free-market= Freedom. This belief system is strongly situated in the historical and material circumstances of the late twentieth century. Anxious rhetorics of familial individualism, nationalism, and traditionalism are part of this new neoliberal ideological belief system and cannot be separated from the late-twentieth-century global networks of power. The anxious rhetorics employed by conservative right-wing Christian organizations are related to the cultural and economic shift to post-industrialism in...