Some of you may know that my academic monograph is forthcoming in January 2021. You can preorder now from the OU Press website and it will be shipped in early January.
At only $24.95, it’s an incredibly affordable monograph.
Here’s the link: https://www.oupress.com/books/16122730/homeland
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are having real problems reaching out to groups that they will need to win election. Clinton is losing young voters, including young women. Sanders has not managed to appeal to many minority voters (although after sharp and intelligent criticisms, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Hector Luis Alamo will vote for Sanders and he significantly reduced Clinton’s lead with Latinos in the Nevada caucus). They have struggled to explain their lack of support among these populations, but it’s relatively easy.
Their political identities and primary lenses for viewing the world were forged in the midst of mid-20th century modernist certainty. That is, their key identities—class for Sanders, gender for Clinton—were formed during a moment in history when these constructs were seen in monolithic, whole, and certain terms. For socialists, and other leftists, class trumped race and all other identities were bourgeois mystification, fabrications made up by a capitalist elite to divide the working-class. Gender too was similar. Women were one in a global sisterhood of solidarity against male-based exploitation. In the students groups of the long decade of the ‘60s that proved formative for Sanders and Clinton, gender and class were primary, unquestionable truths—truths that would speak to power and bring it down.
But, the student groups of ‘60s and ‘70s were overwhelmingly white and middle-class. The universals that these explanatory monoliths were based in were flawed. People of color, and especially women of color, found the rigidity of the groups’ explanatory models limiting. There were already cracks in the facades of solidarity forming in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Clinton and Sanders have carried these limitations with them into their politics of a very different century with a very different economy.
William Deresiewicz’s incisive cover story in the August issue of Harper’s, “The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold its Soul to the Market,” criticizes higher education for its misshapen form and circumspect goals at the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to Deresiewicz, this is the age of neoliberalism, an era and an ideology that reduces all values, skills, and thought to its monetary value. “The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of a person,” he writes.
This is not a new critique. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, capitalism has certainly produced its fair share of discontents. Marx wrote of the alienated working class reduced to nothing but the value of their labor sold on the market. Henry David Thoreau wrote of the “mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation” as the industrial revolution eliminated the singularity of homespun products and replaced them with standardization and mass production. If all products and parts were undifferentiated and interchangeable, so too were the people. Critiques of this kind would continue through the New Left and Generation X, but are limited among the millennial generation—a generation that seems to have made peace with capitalism.
