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多文化共生・統合人間学演習Ⅶ
Neoliberalism and the Return to Populist Politics
This class will consider the recent rise of populist movements across America and, to a lesser extent, across Europe. We will work off the premise that the return to populist politics began as part of a reaction to the advance of neoliberalist policies since the late 1970s, and the endemic forms of inequality and disenfranchisement that they have produced in that span of time.
Neoliberalist policies were largely seen as bankrupt in America and Europe in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, leading to widespread populist opposition against them on both the right (e.g., Tea Party) and the left (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). But it is the right-wing version that has made the boldest political inroads in recent years, in the form of Trump administration in the United States, the vote in Britian to leave the European Union, and in the rise of parties such as the Alternative for Germany, France’s National Front, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Austrian People’s Party, and the Jobbik Party in Hungary. In many cases these populist right-wing parties have made significant gains or won outright majorities in their respective parliaments, not only through the scapegoating of immigrants and foreigners, but by appealing to those disenfranchised by neoliberalist policies enacted by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
The situation has been further complicated in America where the rightwing populist reaction against the established neoliberal hegemony has conversely led to further entrenchment of it. Although the advent of the Trump administration has resulted in the temporary retreat of certain aspects of the neoliberal project—withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), for example, and the threat to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), along with anti-immigration policies—it has advanced numerous others, including widespread deregulation, the general dismantlement of the administrative state and its social support programs, tax cuts for the elite, and the consolidation of economic-political power in the wealthiest one-percent. The result is that neoliberal hegemony, which had gradually assimilated itself into both the right and left in the United States and Britain in the 1990s and beyond, has now moved decidedly to the right, embracing discourses and policies of discrimination, racism, abuse, and xenophobia.
Is this the new form that neoliberalism has taken in the wake of the financial crisis? Has neoliberal hegemony made a pact of convenience with the populist radical right in order to ensure its survival? Or were the two always closer than anyone cared to admit? Where is the left in all this? Does it even have a future? We will approach these and other questions through readings drawn from figures such as Mark Blyth, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Ernesto Laclau, Wolfgang Streek, Yanis Varoufakis, and Slavoj Zizek. We will begin by first considering the history of neoliberalism and the conditions that led to its emergence as a hegemonic form of economic-political thought, before turning to its current coopting of the populist reaction against it.
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