by
Jacobin
View all notes
The American right [...] is on the march again. In some sense, this resurgence is hard to understand. If you buy the thesis that the Right is driven by a defense of hierarchy and privilege and draws its energy from opposition to a strong left, its strength is almost incomprehensible. It’s hard to think of a time when American capital and capitalists were so politically secure. [...]
what more do they want
[...] for most of the twentieth century, while the GOP was usually more conservative, especially on economic issues, than the Democrats, there was a great deal of ideological diversity within the two major parties. The Republican Party also had a liberal wing, just as the Democrats had a conservative wing.
[...]
[...] the GOP of the 1950s and 1960s often had a stronger civil rights record than the Democrats, because the Dems still had a large Southern component.
Into the 1960s, the Republicans often were stronger on civil liberties than Democrats as well. [...]
alas
Movement conservatives were undeterred by Goldwater’s massive loss and continued with their plot to take over the Republican Party. A year later, Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket, with the conscious aim of drawing enough votes away from the liberal Republican John Lindsay to elect the Democratic candidate, Abe Beame, and thereby weaken the GOP’s left flank. (The contrast with liberals, who shy away from any third-party challenge that might lead their party to a loss, is a vivid symptom of their lack of conviction.) [...]
[...] At the 1980 Republican convention, the one that nominated Ronald Reagan, the party dropped support for the era from its platform for the first time since it was adopted in 1940. The nomination of Reagan marked the victory of the Right in the Republican Party.
ERA = Equal Rights Amendment ("Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex")
[...] many of the businesspeople who pushed the neoliberal agenda in the 1970s were neither movement conservatives nor self-made entrepreneurs but career managers. They were often socially liberal. But they objected to the host of new claims along what we’d later call identitarian lines (gender, race, etc.) as well as an explosive growth in social regulations (environment, workplace safety, and the like, as opposed to more narrowly drawn economic regulation of prices and product lines), which they felt were annoying restrictions on the free play of capital. [...]
their solution: forming PACs (legalised by the FEC in 1975) that argued, among other things, that corporations had no social responsibility (in the same vein as Milton Friedman)
[...] Has globalization become a euphemism for imperialism or are these distinct phenomena?
LP: I think one should try to retain these terms in somewhat of a separate way. I don’t think that we should transfer all the meaning that the word capitalism or global capitalism or even globalization has to the term imperialism. I think imperialism is very much a state thing. It is associated with the stage of capitalism we’re in, and its global nature, but it’s not quite the same thing.
I think globalization or global capitalism is about some of the things that Doug referred to at the beginning, this massive increase in the proportion of world gross national product that is traded internationally—the enormous flow of capital, including foreign direct investment, both of which entailed therefore the need for the flow of money for financial capital to grease the wheels of trade and foreign direct investments and of course on the basis of that, one gets a whole lot of financial capital feeding on itself. Not all of which is speculation. Some of it is risk management and so on. So you get this enormous body of financial capital at a global level, always centered primarily on Wall Street, to some extent, and the City of London. And a lot of the surplus of what is produced in the world ends up back in those places where it’s reallocated, even if it’s produced in China or wherever.
So I think globalization is a real thing and I think it’s also associated to some extent with this fourth industrial or technological revolution we’re living through—the digital revolution or the computer revolution. I don’t think it’s caused by it but it’s an element in it that is part of this process of globalization. And a lot of people point to that calling it things, like Manuel Castells does, the “network society” and so on, which may be going too far, but it’s an important element in it.