vostok
Well-Known Member
Henry Giroux joins us to talk about his new book, “America at War With Itself,” and the meaning of neoliberalism.
“It operates off the assumption that markets should not just govern the economy, but govern all of social life,”
Giroux adds.
“It believes that the market is basically the answer to solving all problems, that profit-making is basically the essence of democracy, that the only obligation of citizenship is consumerism. It celebrates the values of privatization, deregulation and consumption. It suggests that businesses should regulate themselves. It argues that self-interest is the highest ideal with respect in some way to addressing the common good. It has a deep disdain for public goods, for the common good. It operates off the assumption that competition in a kind of shock-like mode of interaction is the only way to really survive in society. It embraces a kind of warlike assumption regarding social relations, meaning that the best way to get ahead is to pit oneself with each other.”
(https://www.amazon.com/America-Itself-City-Lights-Media/dp/0872867323)
Amazon Review
"In book after book, decade after decade, Henry Giroux has joined Noam Chomsky among our most prolific, clear-sighted public intellectuals. His latest, America at War with Itself, begins with Donald Trump's rise in the 2016 election as symptomatic of the anti-democratic forces Giroux has anatomized in American society, including the sway of authoritarianism, violence, militarism, and 'the terror of neoliberalism.' This book provides bracing revelations of the evasion of cogent causal analysis in our mainstream public discourse. For example, 'The call for gun rights conveniently side steps and ignores criticizing a popular culture and corporate controlled media which uses violence to attract viewers, increase television ratings, produce Hollywood blockbusters, and sell video games that celebrate first person shooters. . . . Such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues.'"—Donald Lazare, author of Thinking Critically About Media and Politics and Why Higher Education SHOULD Have a Leftist Bias
