Neoliberalism has infected democracy – opposition in all public spheres is key

Fortunately, the corporate capitalist fairytale of neoliberalism has been challenged all over the globe by students, labor organizers, intellectuals, com munity activists, and a host of individuals and groups unwilling to allow democracy to be bought and sold by multinational corporations, corporate swindlers, international political institutions, and those government politi cians who willingly align themselves with multinational, corporate interests and rapacious profits. From Seattle to Genoa, people engaged in popular resistance are collectively taking up the challenge of neoliberalism and reviving both the meaning of resistance and the sites where it takes place. Political culture is now global and resistance is amorphous, connecting students with workers, schoolteachers with parents, and intellectuals with artists. Groups protesting the attack on farmers in India whose land is being destroyed by the government in order to build dams now find themselves in alliance with young people resisting sweatshop labor in New York City. Environmental activists are joining up with key sections of organized labor as well as groups protesting Third World debt. The collapse of the neoliberal showcase, Argentina, along with numerous corporate bankruptcies and scandals (notably including Enron), reveals the cracks in neoliberal hegemony and domination. In addition, the multiple forms of resistance against neoliberal capitalism are not limited by a version of identity politics focused exclusive ly on particularized rights and interests. On the contrary, identity politics is affirmed within a broader crisis of political culture and democracy that con nects the militarization of public life with the collapse of the welfare state and the attack on civil liberties. Central to these new movements is the notion that neoliberalism has to be understood within a larger crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. Democracy in this view is not limited to the struggle over economic resources and power; indeed, it also includes the creation of public spheres where individuals can be educat ed as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities, and knowledge they need to perform as autonomous political agents. I want to expand the reach es of this debate by arguing that any struggle against neoliberalism must address the discourse of political agency, civic education, and cultural politics as part of a broader struggle over the relationship between democratization (the ongoing struggle for a substantive and inclusive democracy) and the global public sphere. We live at a time when the conflation of private interests, empire build ing, and evangelical fundamentalism brings into question the very nature, if not the existence, of the democratic process. Under the reign of neoliberal ism, capital and wealth have been largely distributed upwards, while civic virtue has been undermined by a slavish celebration of the free market as the model for organizing all facets of everyday life (Henwood 2003). Political culture has been increasingly depoliticized as collective life is organized around the modalities of privatization, deregulation, and commercialization. When the alleged champions of neoliberalism invoke politics, they substitute "ideological certainty for reasonable doubt," and deplete "the national reserves of political intelligence" just as they endorse "the illusion that the future can be bought instead of earned" (Lapham 2004a, 9,11). Under attack is the social contract with its emphasis on enlarging the public good and expanding social provisions?such as access to adequate health care, housing, employment, public transportation, and education? which provided both a safety net and a set of conditions upon which democracy could be experi enced and critical citizenship engaged. Politics has been further depoliticized by a policy of anti-terrorism practiced by the Bush administration that mim ics the very terrorism it wishes to eliminate. Not only does a policy of all embracing anti-terrorism exhausts itself in a discourse of moral absolutes and public acts of denunciation that remove politics from the realm of state power, it also strips community of democratic values by defining it almost exclusively through attempts to stamp out what Michael Leeden, a former counter-terror expert in the Reagan administration, calls "corrupt habits of mind that are still lingering around, somewhere"(qtd. in Valentine 2001, para.33). The appeal to moral absolutes and the constant mobilization of emergency time coded as a culture of fear configures politics in religious terms, hiding its entanglement with particular ideologies and diverse rela tions of power. Politics becomes empty as it is reduced to following orders, shaming those who make power accountable, and shutting down legitimate modes of dissent (Giroux 2004).