![\"\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/wrong-side-of-capitalism.jpg\" "\\"wrong")
<\/a><\/p>\nToo often in the world of social justice, we assume ours is the only movement at work. But there are always opposing movements, organizing and strategizing to advance right wing worldviews. When we don\u2019t pay attention, we fail to see the power of these movements until it’s too late, in the \u201cend-debates\u201d of policy change when we’re in a defensive scramble.<\/p>\n
In 1996 President Clinton enacted sweeping and punitive changes to welfare laws. In doing so, he fulfilled one of the core goals of the Contract With America. For those who don\u2019t remember, that was the\u00a0conservative agenda<\/a> touted by Newt Gingrich during the 1994 congressional elections, halfway through Clinton\u2019s first term. The policy ideas it contained came from the Heritage Foundation, one of the foremost right wing think tanks. How did a Democratic president end up enacting right wing policy? That\u2019s the potency of right wing movements. Over the last 50 years they have successfully pulled the political spectrum further and further rightward, so much that both Presidents Clinton and Obama have implemented policies that are firmly part of right wing ideology. And as my partner Scot has described so well in Race Files<\/a>, the right has repeatedly used racial politics as an effective lever for their projects.<\/p>\n The strategy behind the Contract with America ended up sweeping in a Republican majority in both the House and Senate in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, by capitalizing on white racial resentment. Like the Southern Strategy of the 1960s, which appealed to racism to flip the South from Democratic to Republican, the Contract with America relied on the view that government programs like welfare benefited African Americans at the expense of a backsliding white middle class.<\/p>\n Clinton\u2019s passage of welfare reform reflected this general rightward drift, which has taken a huge toll on communities of color both in the United States and in the Global South. He also expanded the prison system, enacted damaging free trade policies, and created the harshest immigration policies since the era of exclusion acts. Understanding where these right wing ideas came from, and how they got mainstreamed and embraced by Democratic leadership, is a key part of our challenge as racial justice activists.<\/p>\n The Oxford online dictionary defines ideology as \u201ca system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.\u201d Last summer, I boned up on right wing ideology, and on the history of race and empire. One of the things I struggled with was the difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives. It\u2019s not easy, because both political camps are so dominant that there\u2019s less and less room to name and challenge their ideas. Both have used race and the politics of whiteness to expand American Empire, and both have deeply shaped people\u2019s everyday lives within and beyond the United States. Here\u2019s what I learned:<\/p>\n Neoliberalism is a descendant of\u00a0liberal ideas, but not the way you might think.<\/strong> It gets presented as a kind of “new” liberalism, because liberalism as a theory was about small government and individual freedoms. Most of us forgot that, and\u00a0tend to think of liberalism as state intervention to ensure widespread economic security. Neoliberalism was in fact a class backlash against<\/em>\u00a0what we think of as liberal policies like the welfare and public works programs that were created in response to the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted \u201cNew Deal\u201d programs in the 1930s to provide relief for the poor, to stimulate the economy, and to reform the financial sector to avoid another depression. The New Deal was a kind of class compromise \u2013 economic growth through free trade, but constrained by government programs and regulations. By the end of WWII, the share of national income by the top 1% had fallen, and it remained stagnant for a while. With strong growth, it didn\u2019t matter much. But once growth collapsed and inflation soared in the 1970s, the share of wealth by the top 1% plunged from about 35% in 1965 to 20% in 1975. And then<\/em> the 1% rallied. This is where neoliberalism comes from. Neoliberals argue that the surest path to widespread prosperity is to free capital from government constraints. In other words, privatize everything, absolutely \u2013 healthcare, land, water, prisons, communications, food production\u2026 you name it. For the 1%, it has worked smashingly. The ratio of median compensation for workers to CEO salaries went from 30:1 in 1970 to more than 500:1 in 2000.<\/p>\n Neoliberalism manipulates ideas like human dignity and individual freedom.<\/strong> Don\u2019t be fooled. Neoliberals tout these as \u201cthe central values of civilization\u201d \u2013 in opposition to fascism, dictatorships, communism, and all things bad, including all forms of state intervention. Their logic claims that state intervention threatens freedom by substituting collective decisions for individual choice. But what do they mean by freedom? In reality, neoliberals have undermined structures for democratic decision-making, even challenging state sovereignty. Corporations, for example, can now challenge health and environmental regulations as trade barriers. Neoliberalism has also done profound damage to families, social safety nets, indigenous attachments to the land, and as economist David Harvey puts it, \u201chabits of the heart\u201d world over. It seeks to bring all human action and interaction into the domain of the market, all in the name of freedom.<\/p>\n Neoconservatives descend from liberals.<\/strong> Again, their ideas get presented as a “new” form of conservativism. While it’s true that they are part of the political right, it’s important to realize that there are sectors much further to the right of them that claim that they<\/em> are the true conservatives. \u201cNeocons\u201d as they\u2019re affectionately called, were once liberals who in the 1950s and \u201860s supported the Civil Rights Movement and racial integration, but who opposed the Soviet Union. Unlike neoliberals, they generally supported New Deal policies but felt that the expansion of those programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the more radical politics that emerged as part of the New Left in the 1960s, went too far. The antiwar, Black Power and Third World liberation movements all needed to be contained, for fear of \u201cmob rule\u201d. In the \u201870s, in the Democratic Party, some of today\u2019s neocons backed Henry \u201cScoop\u201d Jackson instead of anti-war candidate George McGovern. Jackson supported liberal social policies, but favored increased military spending and a hard line against the USSR. Among those who worked for Jackson was future neocon and Undersecretary of Defense under the Bush-Cheney administration, Paul Wolfowitz. His legacy is largely responsible for today\u2019s post-9\/11 War on Terror and U.S. foreign policy line. This includes the idea of preemptive attack, that the United States has the right to attack governments that pose potential threats to U.S. security, even if those threats aren\u2019t immediate. Neocons are responsible for today\u2019s state of permanent war. They are interventionists, particularly when it comes to Middle East policy, and are often Islamophobic. Like neoliberals, they use the language of freedom and democracy to rationalize their actions.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/objects-us-west-1.dream.io\/racefiles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/Islamo-fascism1-533x400.jpg\" "\\"Islamo-fascism1\\"")
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