The One Word Guaranteed to Make the Corporate Pundit Class Squirm
By Sam Kriss / AlterNet
Technocratic elites and their apologists once justified their social standing by claiming simply to know more about the things that matter than everybody else. Maybe it was even a better time. But now it's gone, and ignorance is power.
A ruling class, dizzying itself with the simultaneous beliefs that most people are fundamentally stupid and don’t know what’s good for them, and that one can exert influence by appealing to the vague cultural markers ordinary people like, has decided to become vigorously, monumentally stupid. You can see this process play out whenever one of its leading journalists is forced to reckon with the word "neoliberalism."
The same people who love to dream up strange and senseless new conceptual systems, who pore over the minor details of insurance law with a philatelist’s perverse giddiness, who think that "innovation" or "aspiration" are good and worthwhile concepts, will suddenly slacken their jaws and cross their eyes, and insist that one of the most studied and documented concepts in modern sociology simply has no meaning. Do you really expect ordinary people to know what you mean if you start talking about something as dry and academic as neoliberalism? Do you really think you could use it to "to strike up a conversation with some strangers in a bowling alley in Toledo"?
That line belongs to New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who recently penned a diatribe titled "How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals." He claims that "neoliberal" has become a term of abuse, by which socialists try to distinguish themselves from good moderate liberals. It’s a meaningless term, he claims, entirely useless "as an analytic tool." But by using this epithet, the left can pretend that the Democratic Party was once the home of a robust New Deal social democracy, but has been hijacked by right-leaning forces. Exactly how all this happened is never actually discussed.
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