Six books to help explain how we got here
Trump and his scary entourage may appear to be some sort of anomaly. They’re not. They are, in truth, the almost predictable outcome of a something set in motion by the ripping up of the social contract in the 1970s. When Thatcher and Reagan ushered in neoliberal economics and when the response from the left was to form either New Labour or the Middle Way, we were set on this course.
The books below help explain — to me, at any rate — how this came about. I’m not adding any commentary — for the most part — but simply including some illustrative quotations.
Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents — Tony Judt (2010)
“How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.” p39
“By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of framed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state.” p119
Death of the Liberal Class — Chris Hedges (2010)
“Capitalism, as Marx understood, when it emasculates government and escapes regulatory bonds, is a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force is plunging us into a state of neofeudalism, endless war, and more draconian forms of internal repression.” p156
“The coup d’état we have undergone is beginning to fuel unrest and discontent. With its reformist and collaborative ethos, the liberal class lacks the capacity or the imagination to respond to this discontent. It has not ideas. Revolt, because of this, will come from the right, as it did in other eras of bankrupt liberalism in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Tsarist Russia. That this revolt will be funded, organized, and manipulated by the corporate forces that caused the collapse is one of the tragic ironies of history. But the blame lies with the liberal class. Liberals, by standing for nothing, made possible the rise of inverted and perhaps soon classical totalitarianism.” p196
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism — Sheldon Wolin (2008)
(It was reading Chris Hedges — especially his weekly Truthdig column — that led me to Wolin. The mention of inverted totalitarianism in the second Hedges extract above is an idea inspired by Wolin.)
“Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of ‘private’ governance represented by the modern business corporation. The result is not a system of codetermination by equal partners who retain their distinctive identities but rather a system that represents the political coming-of-age of corporate power.” pxxi
(And Wolin’s mention of the link to evangelical religions leads neatly back to another Hedges book — American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I recommend this, too, but I wanted to stick to one book per author for this list.)
Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism — Wolfgang Streeck (2013)
“What becomes particularly visible in a study over time is the leading role of the largest and most capitalist countries, the United States, where all the trend-setting development originated: the ending of the Bretton Woods system and of inflation, the growth of budget deficits as a result of tax resistance and tax cuts, the rise of debt-financing of government activity, the wave of fiscal consolidations in the 1990s, finance market deregulation as part of a policy of privatizing government functions, and, of course, the financial and fiscal crisis of 2008.” pxii
“In the rich countries of the West, the long turn to neoliberalism encountered remarkably weak resistance. The high structural unemployment that now became the norm was only one reason for this. The conversion of sellers’ markets into customer markets, together with the burgeoning arts of marketing, ensured ever wider loyalty for the commercialization of social life and stabilized the motivation for work and performance among the general population.” p31
Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy — John F. Weeks (2014)
“As was well recognized across the political spectrum at the end of World War II, unregulated capitalist competition leads not to a free people, but down the dark road to fascism.” pxvii
“The media and right-wing economists consistently misrepresent statistics on public finances. They are motivated by the intention to present public deficits and debt as irresponsible and dangerous. The truth is quite the contrary. Except in rare circumstances, deficits and debt are responsible and safe. Deficits and debt are good things, contributing to social welfare, and public sector surpluses and the absence of debt usually signal public sector dysfunction, bad things for the well-being of households and businesses.” p165
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate — Naomi Klein (2014)
“The braided threads of colonialism, coal, and capitalism shed significant light on why so many of us who are willing to challenge the injustices of the market system remain paralyzed in the face of the climate threat. Fossil fuels, and the deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story written in coal.” p177
“In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive — water — just to keep extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.” p346
Bonus Book (for a bit of basic economics)
23 Things they Don’t Tell You about Capitalism — Ha-Joon Chang (2010)
(A leading economist and Cambridge professor dishes the dirt on neoliberal economics.)
“95 per cent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 per cent, the essential reasoning, if not the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.” pxvii
“Running companies in the interests of floating shareholders is not only inequitable but also inefficient, not just for the national economy but also for the company itself. As Jack Welch recently confessed, shareholder value is probably the ‘dumbest idea in the world’.” p22
