Ronald Reagan's infamous "it's morning in America" slogan, used as part of his 1984 presidential campaign, paved the way for a set of market-driven policies that historians faithful to the human record will be compelled to rename twilight in America to signal a historical crisis fueled less by a spirited hope for the future than by a shocking refusal to be held accountable to and for it. The policies that informed Reagan's neoliberal agenda have given way to the intense assault now being waged by his more extremist governmental descendants on all vestiges of the democratic state. This brutal evisceration includes a rejection and devaluing of the welfare state, unions, public values, young people, public and higher education; and other political, social and economic institutions and forces in American life that provide a counterweight against the political power of mega-corporations, the rich and the powerful.
In order to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful corporations, the formative cultures, social formations and institutions necessary for a viable democracy are under a wide-ranging assault. The intensity and barbarism of such an attack is evident in the current right-wing attempts to dismantle crucial social safety nets, collective bargaining rights, unions and the regulatory constraints on powerful corporations. This conservative assault is not just about the enactment of reactionary government policies; it is also about the proliferation of a war at home, the collateral damage of which is harsh and brutalizing, especially for young people, the unemployed, the elderly, the poor, and a number of other individuals and groups now bearing the burden of the worst economic recession since the 1920s. But there is more at stake than an increase in the hard currency of human suffering; there are also disturbing signs that American society is moving toward an authoritarian state largely controlled by corporations and a financial elite.
As the public spaces for cultivating democratic values, critical citizens and compassionate social relations disappear, American society gives rise to an army of anti-public intellectuals, a powerful center-right media and cultural apparatus and a system of public and higher education, all of which largely function to undermine dialogue, dissent and critical thinking in American life. As politics is rewritten as a script to serve the rich and powerful, the democratic elements of social life are emptied out, along with an ongoing and well-financed conservative campaign to further sabotage those public spheres which enable a culture of questioning and modes of collective struggle to develop.
Politics has now become an extension of war, and the call to austerity a metaphor for a politics of disposability. With the collapse of the social state, those citizens viewed as disposable are now subject to a form of necropolitics in which the social contract, however inadequate, is viewed as a drain on government resources, and any notion of social protection is viewed as a pathological form of dependence. Complaints by right-wing politicians and conservative pundits about the growing federal deficit and their call for a harsh politics of austerity are both hypocritical and disingenuous: Hypocritical, given their support for massive tax breaks for the rich that will cost $850 billion for the next two years - more than the entire 2009 government bailout - and disingenuous, given their blatantly transparent goal of implementing a market-based agenda that imposes the burdens of decreased government services and benefits on the backs of the poor, young people, the unemployed, the working class and middle-class individuals and families. In this transparent scenario, austerity measures apply to the poor, but not to the rich, who continue to thrive under polices that produce government bailouts, support deficit producing wars, tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation policies that benefit powerful corporations. The conservative and right-wing politicians and policy wonks calling for shared sacrifices made in the name of balancing budgets have no interest in promoting justice, equality and the public good. Their policies maximize self-interest; support a culture of organized irresponsibility; and expand the pathologies of inequality, military spending and poverty. Clearly, there is much more at stake in the current war against democracy than the right-wing ideological assertion that shared sacrifices have to be made in the name of balancing budgets. In a socio-economic climate marked by deep economic and social inequalities, the call for shared sacrifices and responsibilities translates in the hallowing out of social services, public spheres and educational resources that are vital to a democracy. Austerity in this script translates into an agenda that combines punishing policies with the elimination of the formative cultures and safety nets that make a decent life and political culture possible.
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Democracy has become a ritual controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy individuals and corporate power mongers. And, yet, as the corporate and right-wing political stranglehold is tightened around the necks of the elderly, workers, young people and those marginalized by class and race, coalitions and the seeds of new social movements are taking shape in states across America and beginning to fight back. Workers, the elderly and young people are demonstrating in large numbers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Montana, Tennessee, and other states against the assaults being waged on unions, public servants and the social state in the name of concentrated corporate and political power.(5)
Public service workers, young people, educators, and others who now occupy the liminal space of political resistance are once again struggling to make official power visible, especially in terms of the toll it takes on those who are viewed as excess, unworthy of government supports and often excluded from the benefits of a good life. At the same time, protesters organizing in Wisconsin and other cities are making clear the necessity to recognize that power is not entirely subsumed within a politics of domination, and that there is a growing and increasingly collective resistance to the assaults being waged on those marginalized by class, race, age and ethnicity. What is being learned from these struggles is that if democracy is to be reclaimed as a radical idea - "the idea that people can control the functioning of society [and that] people should make decisions about all the issues that affect them" - it is crucial for progressives and others to struggle to create those formative cultures that enable people to translate private injustices into social and systemic problems. At stake here is a notion of democracy that refuses to be reduced to the dictates of a market society. Such a view is crucial for those emergent social movements and struggles that suggest that democracy is once again being viewed as the "sharing of an existence that makes the political possible."
The current upsurge in collective resistance against the corporate state will succeed if it speaks to and connects with a broader crisis of public values, the eclipse of a democratic public spheres and the disappearance the social state. If the principles of democracy are not to be turned against themselves in order to further the savage assaults waged on the American people by advocates of casino capitalism, it is crucial that emerging social movements emphasize what the late Tony Judt called the raising of social questions through a language that stresses the importance of public goods, shared responsibilities and a language that connects private troubles with social considerations. Hopefully, what we will see from those fighting the nightmare in America is both a narrative of critique and possibility, one that attempts to recast the public conversation about memory as a condition for learning, higher education as a crucial public good, academics as public intellectuals, critical agency as a basis for social responsibility and democracy as the radical frame through which meaningful political struggle becomes possible once again. We don't need delusional appeals to Reagan's invocation of "morning in America" from those politicians who have become lackeys for the rich and corporate elite. On the contrary, we need justice in America, and that demands more than crowd-pleasing slogans. And that requires the kind of struggles that we see in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states where the very principles, social relations and institutions that make for a viable democracy are under siege.
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