Photo by Mark Taylor | CC BY 2.0
Donald J. Trump may be many things, but coy is not among them. What you see is what you get.
Last week we got renewed sanctions against Iran, tweets dissing Arnold Schwarzenegger and other grave matters of state, and most shocking of all the NYT story “president takes hair-growth drug.”
Meanwhile, top State Department officials and the First Lady have evacuated Washington. And Israel, it’s rumored, will nominate Trump for the Noble Peace Prize.
Consolidation of the Neoliberal State
As hard as it is to accept, Richard Nixon was the last liberal president in the New Deal tradition. Since that time hardly a major piece of progressive legislation has emerged from Washington.
Jimmy Carter gave us the first tentative pushbacks with privatization and deregulation, harbingers of the prolonged death throes of liberalism. The floodgates were opened with Ronald Reagan. The neoliberal torrent accelerated with Bill Clinton. His NAFTA and “ending welfare as we know it” were rollbacks best accomplished by a Democrat, because resistance would have been greater from a Republican. The trajectory continued with Bush and then Obama seamlessly carrying the neoliberal project forward.
The neoliberal state is replacing the last vestiges of the New Deal. The latter took some responsibility for social welfare. In effect a pact that capital would rule but workers would be bribed with a small cut of the spoils of their labor. Under the neoliberal order,…