Abstract
I begin with two quotes that I believe signal the presence of another war somewhat removed from the Iraqi conflict, a war being waged on the domestic front that feeds off the general decay of democratic politics and reinforces what neoliberals cheerfully call the death of the social This war is ostensibly aimed against “big government,” which is really a war against the welfare state and the social contract itself—this is a war against the notion that everyone should have access to decent education, health care, employment, and other public services. The first quote comes from Debbie Riddle, a current Texas state representative. The second quote comes from Grover Norquist, the president of the Americans for Tax Reform and arguably Washington’s leading right-wing strategist.
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Notes
George Steinmetz, “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism; Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 13:2 (Spring 2003): 329.
Bill Moyers, “Deep in a Black Hole of Red Ink,” Common Dreams News Center (May 30, 2003). Available on-line: www.commondreams.org/views03/0530-.
Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 54.
Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Boston: South End Press, 2003), p. 34.
Ulrich Beck, “The Silence of Words and Political Dynamics in the World Risk Society,” Logos 1:4 (Fall 2002): 1.
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso Press, 2003), pp. 30–31.
These ideas are taken from Benjamin R. Barber, “Blood Brothers, Consumers, or Citizens? Three Models of Identity-Ethnic, Commercial, and Civic,” in Cultural Identity and the Nation State ed. Carol Gould and Pasquale Pasquino (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), p. 65.
Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism (Washington and London: Cassell, 1997), p. 3.
I address this issue in Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond Beyond 9/11 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
Zygmunt Bauman provides the same sort of analysis in analyzing the state of the poor under neoliberalism He argues the poor are excluded and often charged with the guilt of their exclusion, and thus seen as dangerous and a threat to society. See Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998), especially chapter 5, “Prospects for the Poor,” pp. 83–98.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002-reprint), p. 12.
Steven R. Donziger, ed., The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), p. 101.
Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, III (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 149. Of course, while Castells is right about the conditions of labor, he underemphasizes the huge surplus of labor around the world. This is made clear in another ILO report that states that about a quarter of the labor force around the world is unemployed and a third underemployed.
End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Exploitation (ECPAT), Europe and North America Regional Profile, issued by the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm, Sweden (August 1996), p. 70.
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso Press, 2003), p. 10.
Lynn Worsham and Gary A. Olson, “Rethinking Political Community: Chantai Mouffe’s Liberal Socialism,” Journal of Composition Theory 19:2 (1999): 178.
The wonderful distinction between hegemony lite and hegemony from which I have developed this idea comes from Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 202–207.
Edward Said, “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Reflections On Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 501.
Carol A. Stabile and Junya Morooka, “‘Between Two Evils, I Refuse to Choose the Lesser,’” Cultural Studies 17:3 (2003): 338.
See Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001). 51.
Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The Progressive Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (March–April 2002): 63–67.
Alain Touraine, Beyond Neoliberalism (London: Polity, 2001), p. 50.
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© 2005 Peter Pericles Trifonas
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Giroux, H.A. (2005). The War Against Children and the Shredding of the Social Contract. In: Trifonas, P.P. (eds) Communities of Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981356_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981356_1
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