Neoliberalism
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Crashing the Frame
I've thought a lot over the years about persuasion and why it's so difficult, especially when it comes to political values and opinions, and the best conceptual tool that helps me to understand the difficulty is 'frames'. There are individual and group mindframes, and more often than not you can predict the individual's thinking if
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
Commenting on the Konczal post I referred to yesterday: Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy. These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating
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Quote of the Day: Mike Konczal
Talking about the ACA rollout: Some of the more cartoony conservatives argue that this is a failure of liberalism because it is a failure of government planning, evidently confusing the concept of economic “central planning” with “the government makes a plan to do something.” However, the smarter conservatives who are thinking several moves ahead (e.g. Ross Douthat) understand
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Watching Brazil
From "The Social Awakening in Brazil" in the NYT today: For all of Brazil’s achievements over the past few decades — a stronger economy, democratic elections, more money and attention directed toward the needs of the poor — there is still a huge gap between the promises of Brazil’s ruling leftist politicians and the harsh
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
In hindsight, the neoliberal cure was far worse than the New Deal liberal disease. The maturity of the New Deal's system of regulated managerial capitalism coincided with the post-World War II boom and the greatest expansion of the middle class in American history. Consumer advocates, however, blamed it for stifling diversity, libertarians and conservatives claimed
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Why the Coming Common Core State Standards Are a Technocratic Disaster in the Making
Anthony Cody sums it up pretty well. The column is really about how the national teachers' unions, as usual, are on the wrong side of this: The Obama administration's education policies have been, by and large, a disaster. And Republicans are poised to rev up their attack machine on these grounds and teacher unions will be smeared
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Cultural Hegemony
There was a time way back when–in the seventies–when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort
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Quote of the Day: David Harvey
But one persistent fact within this complex history of uneven neoliberalization has been the universal tendency to increase social inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in any society–be it in Indonesia, Mexico, or Britain–to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization . . . . The incredible concentrations
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Commonplace Freedoms
What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can,
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Commodifying the Un-commodifiable
From Michael Sandel's "What Isn't for Sale" in the April Atlantic: This is a debate we didn’t have during the era of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it—without ever deciding to do so—we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is