Neoliberalism, Oligarchy, the New McCarthyism: Can America Survive?

Walt Kelly, POGO, 1953. Click on the image for a better jpeg.

America has gone through this before, and survived. But will it survive this time?

The formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938, The National Security Act of 1947, and the spectre of McCarthyism from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, all cast a cold spell on liberty and freedom of speech in the United States. These were terrible times, but certain features of American society allowed the country to endure:

-- A growing middle-class with increasing wealth and political influence, along with increased leisure time for thought, reflection, and civic participation.

-- The suddenly-opened doors of college and university education to people who could not have afforded such things before the introduction of the G.I. Bill (the Servicemen's Readjustment Act) of 1944, along with an explosion of affordable paperbacks that opened up worlds of thought and literature to the working class.

-- A strong civil society, formed of unions, churches, town halls, colleges and universities, fraternal organizations, and active public spaces where people could meet, mingle, and share concerns.

These pillars of democracy and civic participation no longer exist in post-1970s America. Neither Democrats nor Republicans consider such foundations important; what matters in their neoliberal non-society are transactions of the market, by the market, for the market. In such a world-view, merely human concerns are obsolete.

Over the course of decades, America has removed all of the defences that once protected the country from HUAC, from McCarthyism, from the power of oligarchs and demagogues. A crumbling, hollowed-out society must now face a neoliberal cliff, perhaps even fascism, but without organization, without solidarity, and without hope.

Can Americans prevail?

I want them to prevail. But I have my doubts.