On Sep 29, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
"We did not lose the battles of ideas," she said in a recent speech to
the American Sociological Association. "We were not outsmarted and we
were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we
were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think
tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by
the makers of tanks."
That must be a comforting thought. If only it were that simple.
[the problem, in the end, is that Redburn's own ideology interferes
with his ability to read the book.]
It's an awful review, no doubt. But that quote from Klein is a rather
weak explanation of the right's ideological victory in reasonably
democratic countries like the U.S., UK, Australia, New Zealand, and
even Canada. It's not easy to explain the degree and duration of
popular assent to neoliberalism, but somebody's got to do it. And we
did, at least to some degree, lose the battle of ideas. Time to dust
off Stuart Hall's old essay on how Thatcherism became the common
sense of the British masses.
Doug
