Billionaires Who Aim to “Disrupt” Education May Get a Chance Even If Trump Loses
One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is a billionaire for whom education “disruption” is a core cause.
One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is a billionaire for whom education “disruption” is a core cause.
November 3, 2024
Source: TruthOut
If reelected U.S. president, Donald Trump, echoing other Republicans, has said he would shut down the Department of Education. All signs point toward a second Trump term expanding school privatization efforts and discriminatory policies carried out during the first Trump term under hard right billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
But even if Trump loses, the longtime wealthy backers of corporate education reform stand to have sway within a Harris administration.
Megabillionaires have donated and fundraised enormous sums toward Vice President Kamala Harris’s election. Many of these big donors have been key drivers of corporate education reform efforts over the past two decades, from funding charter schools to throwing millions into local school board elections.
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Some also come from Silicon Valley and have vested interests in the new frontier of corporate penetration of public education, which has taken the form of educational technology — or ed tech — products and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI).
“The neoliberal project to make education a profit center has really shifted,” education author and activist Lois Weiner told Truthout, with earlier efforts focused on charter schools and standardized testing. “Now we have another wave,” she said, “and that’s ed tech.”
One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, for whom education “disruption” is a core cause. Powell Jobs oversees the Emerson Collective, a private LLC aimed at reshaping U.S. education, including through a venture capital arm with ed tech investments. News reports suggest that Powell Jobs could stand to influence Harris’s education policies, which the vice president has said very little about.
Silicon Valley and Corporate Education “Reform”
Corporate education reform — or what author Diane Ravitch has called “corporate disruption” — is a decadeslong, bipartisan political effort, led by billionaire donors and government officials, to restructure schools to function more like businesses and, often, privatize public education.
“It’s the neoliberal idea that everything should be thought of as markets, including education,” University of Illinois Chicago education scholar Kenneth Saltman told Truthout. “Students are clients, parents are consumers, schools are businesses and school districts, sometimes metaphorized as a stock portfolio, are a competitive industry,” said Saltman.
Corporate school reform efforts intensified in the early 2000s with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and its high-stakes testing regime, and persisted under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which continued the focus on raising test scores while promoting charter schools and pushing states to compete for federal funds.
Many of the biggest backers of corporate education reform are billionaires from the tech world, including Powell Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings and John Doerr. Collectively, they have poured billions of dollars into a range of political, philanthropic and business efforts to restructure or “transform” education.
For example, a host of billionaires that included Powell Jobs, Hastings, Bloomberg, as well as Eli Broad, Jim and Alice Walton, John Arnold, and many others, donated millions to charter school efforts and pro-charter school board candidates in California in the 2010s.
Billionaires have also put hundreds of millions into their own nonprofit or private initiatives. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have bankrolled charter schools from California to New Jersey, often to little effect, critics say.
Some billionaire donors, like Zuckerberg with his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , have turned toward “philanthrocapitalist” vehicles to pursue their agenda: private firms that give off a philanthropic veneer but operate as opaque LLCs rather than more transparent nonprofits, seeking to influence education policy while often also having business interests tied to education markets.
These billionaire-driven “reform” efforts ultimately work to “redistribute control over decision making away from the public and concentrate it with tech corporations and superrich individuals atop these supposed philanthropic institutions,” said Saltman.
Silicon Valley, Laurene Powell Jobs and Kamala Harris
While some Silicon Valley billionaires are supporting Trump, tech elites, including longtime backers of education “disruption” efforts, are among Harris’s top donors.
These include Gates and Bloomberg, who have each donated $50 million to support Harris’s election, and Hastings, Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg, and others who together have donated tens of millions in their attempt to get the vice president elected.
But more than any other Silicon Valley billionaire, Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, stands to have significant influence in shaping a Harris administration.
Powell Jobs is worth over $15 billion and is one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Silicon Valley. She has backed Harris for over two decades and has contributed millions toward her presidential run. Over the years, Powell Jobs has fundraised and donated millions more toward Democratic candidates more broadly.
Powell Jobs is “one of Ms. Harris’s most essential confidantes” and “has emerged as a powerful player behind the scenes” of her campaign, says The New York Times. The two have attended each other’s intimate family events — Powell Jobs was “one of about 60 people” to attend Harris’s 2014 wedding to Doug Emhoff — and “they have gone on personal trips together, with Ms. Harris at times flying on Ms. Powell Jobs’s private plane.”
Because of all this, writes The New York Times, Powell Jobs “is positioned to have extraordinary influence, or at least access, in a potential Harris administration.” And no cause may be dearer to Powell Jobs than education reform.
Corporate education reform advocate Marc Porter Magee told The New York Times that if Harris wins, “[Powell Jobs] and her staff could emerge as important players in an administration that has yet to define its K-12 agenda.” “Some have wondered whether, if Ms. Harris wins the election,” wrote the Times, “Ms. Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education, one of her top issues.”
The Emerson Collective
Powell Jobs carries out much of her agenda through the Emerson Collective, a private company she founded in 2004.
Emerson supports the XQ Institute, a nonprofit chaired by Powell Jobs that calls itself the “nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking high school.” Russlynn Ali, an Emerson managing director and XQ’s CEO, previously worked for pro-charter groups like the Broad Foundation, as well as working under Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan from 2009 to 2012.
While its ambitions are lofty, XQ has been criticized for spending lavish amounts on public relations gimmicks and competitions while falling short of its promise to reinvent schools.
“The most discomfiting aspect of XQ is its super-staged self, the distance between what it is, in reality — which is to say another school-reform effort by a big-name philanthropist — and what it rather grandiosely claims to be,” noted a 2019 New York Magazineprofile of Powell Jobs.
Other key players in Emerson’s top leadership also come from the corporate education reform movement and elite Democratic Party circles.
Among them are former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a managing director at Emerson; and Emerson’s senior director of campaigns and deputy chief of staff, Robin Reck, who consulted for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Laura & John Arnold Foundation and Walmart — all backers of corporate school reform.
Another Emerson managing director and top aide to Powell Jobs is David Simas, a former Obama staffer and Obama Foundation CEO.
“Privatizing Schools From the Inside Out”
Emerson Collective also has a venture capital arm that invests in a range of educational ed tech start-ups and businesses such as Amplify, which provides “next-generation curriculum and assessment”; Outschool, which offers “interactive online classes kids’ love of learning”; and others.
Critics of corporate education reform have warned that the corporate-driven infiltration of ed tech products into schools threatens student learning, teacher autonomy and democratic control over public education.
Investors have poured billions into ed tech, including a record high of $20.8 billion in 2021. While ed tech start-ups have struggled more in recent years, Morgan Stanley still projects global ed tech spending to reach $620 billion by 2030.
Through their steady infiltration into schools, ed tech interests are “privatizing schools from the inside out with heavy contracting,” said Saltman.
Companies like Microsoft and Google, and apps like ClassDojo and Khanmigo, are among the many tech players and products penetrating K-12 education, sometimes making their product free to use, critics say, with the longer-term aim of creating consumer dependencies that will translate into profits and market dominance.
“The race is on between the tech giants right now to lock themselves into school processes to such a degree that it becomes impossible to root them out,” Alex Molnar, director of the National Education Policy Center, told Truthout.
Molnar says that data collection is a key interest driving ed tech, with the promise of “personalized” digital education increasing surveillance of students and teachers while allowing companies to gather loads of data to turn into future profits.
“Data is of commercial value, whether or not it has immediate commercial value now, so there is an incentive for companies to turn kids into data production engines,” adds Saltman.
Saltman also says a major problem with corporate ed tech and its techno-utopian promise to redefine education is that it degrades learning by, he writes, presenting “knowledge as delinked from the social world” and “the subject as an atomic consumer of decontextualized fact.”
“All of these technologies make it virtually impossible to teach in ways that are contextual and deal with the relationship between student subjectivity, knowledge and the broader social context,” Saltman told Truthout.
Defenders of democratic public education say a newer concern is the expanding infiltration of corporate-driven AI applications into schools through everything from personalized “tutorbots” to AI lesson-planning “assistants.” Top ed tech investors like GSV Ventures are now hosting major conferences, sponsored by longtime school privatization backers like the Walton Family Foundation, on “the intersection of all things AI in Education.”
A March 2024 report from the National Policy Education Center found that “the adoption of largely unregulated AI systems and applications” would “force students and teachers to become involuntary test subjects in a giant experiment in automated instruction and administration that is sure to be rife with unintended consequences and potentially negative effects.”
Saltman has written that AI applications are also means for expanding surveillance of students and teachers. “It’s not clear to me that there are AI-based forms of pedagogy that are advantageous over in-person teaching and learning,” said Saltman. “There are lots of ways these approaches are worse,” he added, including that “they erode teacher autonomy.”
Molnar sees a “substantive danger” in AI’s race into schools, which he called an “opaque, unaccountable mechanism that has been developed and is controlled by corporate interests for their own purposes.”
“We’re going to have a very high cost socially because of Silicon Valley,” says Molnar. “As these systems become enmeshed in schools, you essentially are giving monopoly control over a democratic institution to these corporations, which is very dangerous.”
Toward Democratic Education Technology
The concerns over ed tech aren’t inherently about the increased use of technology in education. Saltman says if education technology were separated from corporate profiteering and “attentive to social context and the relationship between student experience and the broader social world students inhabit,” it could potentially be beneficial in schools.
“Unfortunately, I think that technology in education has largely been used to replicate and worsen some of the worst tendencies of the prior era,” he said, referring to earlier iterations of corporate school reform.
“It’s bad because it’s not democratic,” adds Weiner. “It’s a continuation of the neoliberal project’s attack on democratic schooling.”
The Democratic Party platform supports things like increased funding of public schools and free and universal preschool, and opposes the use of private school vouchers. Running against Trump, Harris has been endorsed by major teachers unions, and groups supporting public education have praised her past record on a range of topics, including supporting improving teacher pay and increased fundings for schools. Harris’s campaign website itself says little about K-12 education or what her education department would look like.
With so much fundraising and donations flowing toward Harris from billionaire education disruptors like her close friend Powell Jobs, critics of corporate education reform worry about the implications for the education policies of a potential Harris administration.
“What’s concerning is the possibility of people, with tremendous financial interests in getting their products into public schools, having the capacity to influence educational policy,” said Saltman.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
If reelected U.S. president, Donald Trump, echoing other Republicans, has said he would shut down the Department of Education. All signs point toward a second Trump term expanding school privatization efforts and discriminatory policies carried out during the first Trump term under hard right billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
But even if Trump loses, the longtime wealthy backers of corporate education reform stand to have sway within a Harris administration.
Megabillionaires have donated and fundraised enormous sums toward Vice President Kamala Harris’s election. Many of these big donors have been key drivers of corporate education reform efforts over the past two decades, from funding charter schools to throwing millions into local school board elections.
Stay in the loop
Never miss the news and analysis you care about.
Some also come from Silicon Valley and have vested interests in the new frontier of corporate penetration of public education, which has taken the form of educational technology — or ed tech — products and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI).
“The neoliberal project to make education a profit center has really shifted,” education author and activist Lois Weiner told Truthout, with earlier efforts focused on charter schools and standardized testing. “Now we have another wave,” she said, “and that’s ed tech.”
One of Harris’s biggest donors and closest confidants is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, for whom education “disruption” is a core cause. Powell Jobs oversees the Emerson Collective, a private LLC aimed at reshaping U.S. education, including through a venture capital arm with ed tech investments. News reports suggest that Powell Jobs could stand to influence Harris’s education policies, which the vice president has said very little about.
Silicon Valley and Corporate Education “Reform”
Corporate education reform — or what author Diane Ravitch has called “corporate disruption” — is a decadeslong, bipartisan political effort, led by billionaire donors and government officials, to restructure schools to function more like businesses and, often, privatize public education.
“It’s the neoliberal idea that everything should be thought of as markets, including education,” University of Illinois Chicago education scholar Kenneth Saltman told Truthout. “Students are clients, parents are consumers, schools are businesses and school districts, sometimes metaphorized as a stock portfolio, are a competitive industry,” said Saltman.
Corporate school reform efforts intensified in the early 2000s with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and its high-stakes testing regime, and persisted under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which continued the focus on raising test scores while promoting charter schools and pushing states to compete for federal funds.
Many of the biggest backers of corporate education reform are billionaires from the tech world, including Powell Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings and John Doerr. Collectively, they have poured billions of dollars into a range of political, philanthropic and business efforts to restructure or “transform” education.
For example, a host of billionaires that included Powell Jobs, Hastings, Bloomberg, as well as Eli Broad, Jim and Alice Walton, John Arnold, and many others, donated millions to charter school efforts and pro-charter school board candidates in California in the 2010s.
Billionaires have also put hundreds of millions into their own nonprofit or private initiatives. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have bankrolled charter schools from California to New Jersey, often to little effect, critics say.
Some billionaire donors, like Zuckerberg with his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative , have turned toward “philanthrocapitalist” vehicles to pursue their agenda: private firms that give off a philanthropic veneer but operate as opaque LLCs rather than more transparent nonprofits, seeking to influence education policy while often also having business interests tied to education markets.
These billionaire-driven “reform” efforts ultimately work to “redistribute control over decision making away from the public and concentrate it with tech corporations and superrich individuals atop these supposed philanthropic institutions,” said Saltman.
Silicon Valley, Laurene Powell Jobs and Kamala Harris
While some Silicon Valley billionaires are supporting Trump, tech elites, including longtime backers of education “disruption” efforts, are among Harris’s top donors.
These include Gates and Bloomberg, who have each donated $50 million to support Harris’s election, and Hastings, Doerr, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg, and others who together have donated tens of millions in their attempt to get the vice president elected.
But more than any other Silicon Valley billionaire, Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, stands to have significant influence in shaping a Harris administration.
Powell Jobs is worth over $15 billion and is one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Silicon Valley. She has backed Harris for over two decades and has contributed millions toward her presidential run. Over the years, Powell Jobs has fundraised and donated millions more toward Democratic candidates more broadly.
Powell Jobs is “one of Ms. Harris’s most essential confidantes” and “has emerged as a powerful player behind the scenes” of her campaign, says The New York Times. The two have attended each other’s intimate family events — Powell Jobs was “one of about 60 people” to attend Harris’s 2014 wedding to Doug Emhoff — and “they have gone on personal trips together, with Ms. Harris at times flying on Ms. Powell Jobs’s private plane.”
Because of all this, writes The New York Times, Powell Jobs “is positioned to have extraordinary influence, or at least access, in a potential Harris administration.” And no cause may be dearer to Powell Jobs than education reform.
Corporate education reform advocate Marc Porter Magee told The New York Times that if Harris wins, “[Powell Jobs] and her staff could emerge as important players in an administration that has yet to define its K-12 agenda.” “Some have wondered whether, if Ms. Harris wins the election,” wrote the Times, “Ms. Powell Jobs might want a formal role in the administration, such as secretary of education, one of her top issues.”
The Emerson Collective
Powell Jobs carries out much of her agenda through the Emerson Collective, a private company she founded in 2004.
Emerson supports the XQ Institute, a nonprofit chaired by Powell Jobs that calls itself the “nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking high school.” Russlynn Ali, an Emerson managing director and XQ’s CEO, previously worked for pro-charter groups like the Broad Foundation, as well as working under Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan from 2009 to 2012.
While its ambitions are lofty, XQ has been criticized for spending lavish amounts on public relations gimmicks and competitions while falling short of its promise to reinvent schools.
“The most discomfiting aspect of XQ is its super-staged self, the distance between what it is, in reality — which is to say another school-reform effort by a big-name philanthropist — and what it rather grandiosely claims to be,” noted a 2019 New York Magazineprofile of Powell Jobs.
Other key players in Emerson’s top leadership also come from the corporate education reform movement and elite Democratic Party circles.
Among them are former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a managing director at Emerson; and Emerson’s senior director of campaigns and deputy chief of staff, Robin Reck, who consulted for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Laura & John Arnold Foundation and Walmart — all backers of corporate school reform.
Another Emerson managing director and top aide to Powell Jobs is David Simas, a former Obama staffer and Obama Foundation CEO.
“Privatizing Schools From the Inside Out”
Emerson Collective also has a venture capital arm that invests in a range of educational ed tech start-ups and businesses such as Amplify, which provides “next-generation curriculum and assessment”; Outschool, which offers “interactive online classes kids’ love of learning”; and others.
Critics of corporate education reform have warned that the corporate-driven infiltration of ed tech products into schools threatens student learning, teacher autonomy and democratic control over public education.
Investors have poured billions into ed tech, including a record high of $20.8 billion in 2021. While ed tech start-ups have struggled more in recent years, Morgan Stanley still projects global ed tech spending to reach $620 billion by 2030.
Through their steady infiltration into schools, ed tech interests are “privatizing schools from the inside out with heavy contracting,” said Saltman.
Companies like Microsoft and Google, and apps like ClassDojo and Khanmigo, are among the many tech players and products penetrating K-12 education, sometimes making their product free to use, critics say, with the longer-term aim of creating consumer dependencies that will translate into profits and market dominance.
“The race is on between the tech giants right now to lock themselves into school processes to such a degree that it becomes impossible to root them out,” Alex Molnar, director of the National Education Policy Center, told Truthout.
Molnar says that data collection is a key interest driving ed tech, with the promise of “personalized” digital education increasing surveillance of students and teachers while allowing companies to gather loads of data to turn into future profits.
“Data is of commercial value, whether or not it has immediate commercial value now, so there is an incentive for companies to turn kids into data production engines,” adds Saltman.
Saltman also says a major problem with corporate ed tech and its techno-utopian promise to redefine education is that it degrades learning by, he writes, presenting “knowledge as delinked from the social world” and “the subject as an atomic consumer of decontextualized fact.”
“All of these technologies make it virtually impossible to teach in ways that are contextual and deal with the relationship between student subjectivity, knowledge and the broader social context,” Saltman told Truthout.
Defenders of democratic public education say a newer concern is the expanding infiltration of corporate-driven AI applications into schools through everything from personalized “tutorbots” to AI lesson-planning “assistants.” Top ed tech investors like GSV Ventures are now hosting major conferences, sponsored by longtime school privatization backers like the Walton Family Foundation, on “the intersection of all things AI in Education.”
A March 2024 report from the National Policy Education Center found that “the adoption of largely unregulated AI systems and applications” would “force students and teachers to become involuntary test subjects in a giant experiment in automated instruction and administration that is sure to be rife with unintended consequences and potentially negative effects.”
Saltman has written that AI applications are also means for expanding surveillance of students and teachers. “It’s not clear to me that there are AI-based forms of pedagogy that are advantageous over in-person teaching and learning,” said Saltman. “There are lots of ways these approaches are worse,” he added, including that “they erode teacher autonomy.”
Molnar sees a “substantive danger” in AI’s race into schools, which he called an “opaque, unaccountable mechanism that has been developed and is controlled by corporate interests for their own purposes.”
“We’re going to have a very high cost socially because of Silicon Valley,” says Molnar. “As these systems become enmeshed in schools, you essentially are giving monopoly control over a democratic institution to these corporations, which is very dangerous.”
Toward Democratic Education Technology
The concerns over ed tech aren’t inherently about the increased use of technology in education. Saltman says if education technology were separated from corporate profiteering and “attentive to social context and the relationship between student experience and the broader social world students inhabit,” it could potentially be beneficial in schools.
“Unfortunately, I think that technology in education has largely been used to replicate and worsen some of the worst tendencies of the prior era,” he said, referring to earlier iterations of corporate school reform.
“It’s bad because it’s not democratic,” adds Weiner. “It’s a continuation of the neoliberal project’s attack on democratic schooling.”
The Democratic Party platform supports things like increased funding of public schools and free and universal preschool, and opposes the use of private school vouchers. Running against Trump, Harris has been endorsed by major teachers unions, and groups supporting public education have praised her past record on a range of topics, including supporting improving teacher pay and increased fundings for schools. Harris’s campaign website itself says little about K-12 education or what her education department would look like.
With so much fundraising and donations flowing toward Harris from billionaire education disruptors like her close friend Powell Jobs, critics of corporate education reform worry about the implications for the education policies of a potential Harris administration.
“What’s concerning is the possibility of people, with tremendous financial interests in getting their products into public schools, having the capacity to influence educational policy,” said Saltman.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Trump’s rise the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital.
November 3, 2024
Source: Common Dreams
Trashware Art Kamala Trump Debate Boxing Vector 03 By Setvin
With just a few days left until Election Day, the fact that the race to the White House between U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely tight is truly mind-boggling. Reason dictates that the Democrats should be set to win a landslide, but what could very well happen instead is the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
Unfortunately, there are some good reasons why this is a tightly fought election. First, the cold truth is that Kamala Harris is not an inspiring leader. What’s even worse is that she is a flip-flopper. She’s changed her position on fracking and on the infamous border wall (she is now against fracking natural gas bans and seems to be leaning in favor of building more border wall) and hasn’t done enough to explain her policy positions on several issues, including Medicare for All. Rational voters would not fail to take notice of such shortcomings in a presidential candidate.
Second, Kamala Harris represents a party that has lost the working class and is perceived as being one with the elites. Harris’ own campaign has been too focused on winning over wavering Republicans, preferring to share the stage with Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban over progressive icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-N.Y.), and attacking Trump as a threat to democracy.
Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.
Both strategies appear to have backfired. First, because working-class people represent a much larger segment of the electorate than wavering Republicans, and because cozying up to anti-Trump Republicans and receiving the endorsement of the warmongering Cheneys has alienated progressives. Second, exhorting citizens to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket because Trump represents a threat to democracy isn’t making inroads with average folks who are mainly concerned with how to make ends meet. Most adult citizens have no confidence in U.S. institutions and in fact mistrust the electorate system, which is why millions of citizens do not bother to vote and the voter turnout in the U.S. trails that of many other Western countries.
Third, Harris has not distanced herself from the Biden approach on Israel and Gaza, which has been nothing short of a moral catastrophe, and has subsequently alienated the young, progressive and non-white voters who overwhelmingly sided with President Joe Biden in 2020. Not only that, but she and the Democrats have managed to create the impression among a large swath of voters that they are now the real warmongers, which is not far from the truth.
In the meantime, Trump’s support has remained stable and defined in spite of what he says. Trump exerts a cult-of-personality influence over his followers like no other populist leader in the Western world. Of course, this is the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital. Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.
Neoliberalism must be understood not only as an economic project, but also as a political and cultural project. And nowhere else in the Western world is civil society’s neoliberal transformation so pronounced as it is in the United States. Even the right to unionize, a fundamental human and civil right, faces massive challenges due to the political power of the corporate world. This is because democracy in the U.S. has always been of a very fragile nature and the consolidation of democratic ideals has faced resistance and opposition down to this day. Under such circumstances, the rise of the authoritarian strongman government that Donald Trump represents must be seen as an inevitable outcome.
Indeed, the unwavering appeal of Donald Trump among his supporters, in spite of all his crimes and scandals, speaks volumes both about the nature and scope of the cultural divide in the U.S., as well as about the political and economic effects of neoliberalism. This is the only way to understand why the white working class and less-educated voters, the traditional base of the Democratic Party, have flocked to Republicans in recent decades and now represent Trump’s base. White working-class and less-educated voters broke ranks with the Democratic Party when the New Democrat faction severed completely its ties with the “New Deal” policies and embraced in turn economic policies that are the backbone of the neoliberal project.
By the same token, the old stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich and the elite no longer holds sway with many voters. And there is ample evidence to explain why this is the case. Virtually all of the wealthiest congressional districts across the country are now represented by a Democrat, while it is the Republicans who claim to represent the people who struggle.
In the end, it is probably not mind-boggling at all that election polls show a very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of registered voters said that the economy is the most important issue for them in the 2024 presidential election. And in a final Financial Times poll, voters expressed preference for Trump over Harris to lead the economy.
Of course, analyses that expose Trump’s myths about the economy and warnings by experts that his own economic plans would worsen inflation and wreak havoc on U.S. workers and businesses while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots either do not reach his supporters or simply leave them unfazed. In either case, indifference to truth is a symptom of our extremely polarized times and, in a society that has lost its vision for the common good and has allowed in turn the rich to hijack the political system, all that matters now is that people believe in their own reasoning. Demagogues like Trump are fully aware of the existing social realities and not only exploit the available circumstances but make an art out of the belief that reality is what you make of it.
As sad as it may be, the 2024 presidential election is a choice between neoliberal fascism and neoliberal business as usual. Some would say there is still a difference between the two options; others might call it irredeemable politics. But these are the only two choices that U.S. voters have.
CJ Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
Trashware Art Kamala Trump Debate Boxing Vector 03 By Setvin
With just a few days left until Election Day, the fact that the race to the White House between U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remains extremely tight is truly mind-boggling. Reason dictates that the Democrats should be set to win a landslide, but what could very well happen instead is the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
Unfortunately, there are some good reasons why this is a tightly fought election. First, the cold truth is that Kamala Harris is not an inspiring leader. What’s even worse is that she is a flip-flopper. She’s changed her position on fracking and on the infamous border wall (she is now against fracking natural gas bans and seems to be leaning in favor of building more border wall) and hasn’t done enough to explain her policy positions on several issues, including Medicare for All. Rational voters would not fail to take notice of such shortcomings in a presidential candidate.
Second, Kamala Harris represents a party that has lost the working class and is perceived as being one with the elites. Harris’ own campaign has been too focused on winning over wavering Republicans, preferring to share the stage with Liz Cheney and billionaire Mark Cuban over progressive icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (D-N.Y.), and attacking Trump as a threat to democracy.
Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.
Both strategies appear to have backfired. First, because working-class people represent a much larger segment of the electorate than wavering Republicans, and because cozying up to anti-Trump Republicans and receiving the endorsement of the warmongering Cheneys has alienated progressives. Second, exhorting citizens to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket because Trump represents a threat to democracy isn’t making inroads with average folks who are mainly concerned with how to make ends meet. Most adult citizens have no confidence in U.S. institutions and in fact mistrust the electorate system, which is why millions of citizens do not bother to vote and the voter turnout in the U.S. trails that of many other Western countries.
Third, Harris has not distanced herself from the Biden approach on Israel and Gaza, which has been nothing short of a moral catastrophe, and has subsequently alienated the young, progressive and non-white voters who overwhelmingly sided with President Joe Biden in 2020. Not only that, but she and the Democrats have managed to create the impression among a large swath of voters that they are now the real warmongers, which is not far from the truth.
In the meantime, Trump’s support has remained stable and defined in spite of what he says. Trump exerts a cult-of-personality influence over his followers like no other populist leader in the Western world. Of course, this is the result of the ongoing erosion of the political culture in the U.S. under neoliberalism, which has essentially become the dictatorship of big financial capital. Neoliberalism is incomparable with democracy as it alters society’s balance of power overwhelmingly in favor of big capital, transforms citizenship into an exercise of consumer choice, and undermines policy initiatives aimed toward the common good.
Neoliberalism must be understood not only as an economic project, but also as a political and cultural project. And nowhere else in the Western world is civil society’s neoliberal transformation so pronounced as it is in the United States. Even the right to unionize, a fundamental human and civil right, faces massive challenges due to the political power of the corporate world. This is because democracy in the U.S. has always been of a very fragile nature and the consolidation of democratic ideals has faced resistance and opposition down to this day. Under such circumstances, the rise of the authoritarian strongman government that Donald Trump represents must be seen as an inevitable outcome.
Indeed, the unwavering appeal of Donald Trump among his supporters, in spite of all his crimes and scandals, speaks volumes both about the nature and scope of the cultural divide in the U.S., as well as about the political and economic effects of neoliberalism. This is the only way to understand why the white working class and less-educated voters, the traditional base of the Democratic Party, have flocked to Republicans in recent decades and now represent Trump’s base. White working-class and less-educated voters broke ranks with the Democratic Party when the New Democrat faction severed completely its ties with the “New Deal” policies and embraced in turn economic policies that are the backbone of the neoliberal project.
By the same token, the old stereotype of the Republicans as the party of the rich and the elite no longer holds sway with many voters. And there is ample evidence to explain why this is the case. Virtually all of the wealthiest congressional districts across the country are now represented by a Democrat, while it is the Republicans who claim to represent the people who struggle.
In the end, it is probably not mind-boggling at all that election polls show a very close race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of registered voters said that the economy is the most important issue for them in the 2024 presidential election. And in a final Financial Times poll, voters expressed preference for Trump over Harris to lead the economy.
Of course, analyses that expose Trump’s myths about the economy and warnings by experts that his own economic plans would worsen inflation and wreak havoc on U.S. workers and businesses while increasing the gap between the haves and the have-nots either do not reach his supporters or simply leave them unfazed. In either case, indifference to truth is a symptom of our extremely polarized times and, in a society that has lost its vision for the common good and has allowed in turn the rich to hijack the political system, all that matters now is that people believe in their own reasoning. Demagogues like Trump are fully aware of the existing social realities and not only exploit the available circumstances but make an art out of the belief that reality is what you make of it.
As sad as it may be, the 2024 presidential election is a choice between neoliberal fascism and neoliberal business as usual. Some would say there is still a difference between the two options; others might call it irredeemable politics. But these are the only two choices that U.S. voters have.
CJ Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).
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