Yes, another podcast, as if the world needed more…
We are going to try to soft-relaunch “Inflection Point” next week, with our first guest being the highly estimable John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, & How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, and proprietor of Unpopular Front <https://www.unpopularfront.news/>. Stay tuned!…
Back in the days of the Plague, Dylan Riley set in motion a project for a Berkeley Political Economy-Macrohistorical Sociology (do not ask me for the difference) podcast. He recorded a very interesting three-part conversation with UCLA’s Robert Brenner <https://web.archive.org/web/20210422124242/https://n2pe.berkeley.edu/podcast/robert-brenner-and-dylan-riley/>.
But then, as with so many things in the time of the Plague, the project fell into the jaws of entropy.
Now it is time to restart!
I have enthusiasm!
And I have a brand new coäx-cable hardwired connection!
Thus we—Dylan Riley and me—are going to try to soft-relaunch “Inflection Point” next week, with our first guest being the highly estimable John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, & How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605557/whentheclockbroke>, and proprietor of Unpopular Front <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-last-days-of-discourse>.
The original remit for Inflection Point was this:
Our show presupposes that we live in a time of transition…. There was, roughly… a global economic order… roughly comparable to today’s European social democratic capitalism: high taxes, a big welfare state, lots of regulation over corporations. Then… that… was dismantled and replaced with… call it market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism. Since the 2008 financial meltdown, however, neoliberalism has been in crisis… discrediting of free trade as a bipartisan policy objective… distrust of elites… ascent of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right… Neoliberalism… [might become] ascendant again… [or] might not. It could be replaced by a different economic order, or myriad… orders… socialist upheavals… ethno-nationalist regimes… something else entirely…. What comes next?
And that still sounds very good to me.
I reviewed John Ganz’s book last year:
How the Early 1990s Shaped Modern American Neofascism: Reviewing John Ganz: “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, & How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s”
The thread of my argument then:
Since 1870 technological progress has doubled human wealth every generation, promising unparalleled well-distributed prosperity and yet failing to deliver…. The reaction to this broken promise of general well-distributed prosperity has been a constant of modern political life. Now comes John Ganz with his new book, When the Clock Broke, on how the latest version of this story took its sinister shape in the early 1990s. From David Duke’s alarming gubernatorial run to Pat Buchanan’s inflammatory presidential campaign, accompanied the hierarchical ravings of Samuel Francis and Joseph Sobran… a new conservative ideology that rejected racial equality, equality of opportunity, and, indeed, the entire American dream…. How did we get from Reagan’s “Morning in America” conservativism to the conservatism of the Mob and the Race, anyway?…
The forward rush of technological change was not smooth and broad-based. It was narrow and discontinuous. The system could not adapt—could not shift production from consumption to investment and back again to keep everybody at work, and to sustain all of the businesses that were productive for society against commercial crisis-driven bankuptcy and dissolution. The system could not adapt—could not smoothly adopt labor-saving technologies and simultaneously expand the scale of production to avoid placing skills, occupations, livelihoods, industries, and communities in the bullseye that was the “destruction” part of Schumpeterian creative destruction…. [When] what people think ought to be general technology-driven advancing prosperity turns on them, and becomes the threat or the actuality of the loss of position, place, income, and wealth as it is their turn on the bullseye, people react—badly….
In America, for most of the time, the socioeconomic distress produced by creative destruction was manageable: productivity was rising fast enough as technology and natural resources were deployed, intensively enough, those who saw themselves as having a legitimate beef against the system, and had the social power to try to do something about it were relatively small in numbers, and those who valued the system could find resources out of the American technological dividend to buy enough of the discontented off almost all of the time. Until 1992….
Then, with the election of Bill Clinton, the Republican Party followed the lead of Newt Gingrich and began its [long] slide from a party of those who saw the economy and the future as their friend—of millionaires voting with their feet for opportunity and of temporarily embarrassed would-be millionaires who thought things were about to turn around—to a party of those who thought that they did not have enough and that the system was going to try hard to take the not-enough that they had away….
It is the coming of this mode of neofascism and its rise to a place where it currently rules… that is the story John Ganz tells in When the Clock Broke. And I highly recommend the book…. The firebell in the night was the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election, in which former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke made a significant albeit losing impact. Duke’s campaign was marked by a blend of racial appeals and Reaganite rhetoric, addressing issues like welfare dependency, affirmative action, and black crime. This approach alarmed the Republican establishment. It mirrored their own strategies. But it said the quiet things loud: much more overtly racist. And, somehow, Duke’s defeat did not diminish his influence within right wing circles…. Opportunity was scarce. It should be restricted to white men—and not [not included were] white men who were embarrassed by their advantages…
Next week I get to see whether I still think I was right.
Below the fold, my current so-far musings on the issues…
