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Interchange – Selling Democracy: Part One of The Way of Neoliberalism

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It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe. It’s all around us – yet we hardly it notice most of the time. It’s a matrix of ideas, incentives, and assumptions that shape our politics, our economy, and our lives.

Today we kick off the first show in a four-part series we’re calling “The Way of Neoliberalism” on the political, social, and cultural ideology of our time.

In our first episode “Selling Democracy” we survey the neoliberal project and attempt to get a handle on just how pervasive it is.

wendy-brownGUEST
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric, and where she is a core faculty member in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She is the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution; Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity; and Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics among others.

SEGMENT ONE
An examination of the origins of neoliberalism through the lens of Michel Foucault. According to Brown, Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics (lectures he delivered in 1978 and 1979) presciently described the outlines of neoliberalism back when it was still in its early stages.

SEGMENT TWO
Even as it presents inherent inequality and substitutes democratic values with pure market competition, we find ourselves driven to think of our lives, even our most quotidian decisions, in terms of human capital. A special emphasis on the ways we “drug” ourselves with anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants; and “child doping” with Adderall to give little Jack and Jill a head start in the world.

SEGMENT THREE
We look at the cost of neoliberalism’s stealth revolution: Economizing our values into language that sounds progressive, but replaces deeper concepts like the good life and the common good. We also dive into a couple of real-world examples of neoliberalism’s corrosive and sometimes absurd effects: like when Indiana national guardsmen find themselves in Iraq, supposedly teaching the people who live at the site of civilization’s ancient agricultural revolution how to farm wheat.

MUSIC
“The Waters to Swim In” by NYCYPCD
“Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash
“False Advertising” by Bright Eyes
“Love for Sale” by Ahmad Jamal

phil_headshotNEXT TIME
Part Two in our series, The Way of Neoliberalism: Selling Ignorance, with Philip Mirowski. Mirowski is Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Nortre Dame. His most recent book is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Step one in constructing the neoliberal world order is to create confusion. Ignorance is a “good” to be fostered among the teeming masses. Of course this is the exact opposite of what a democracy needs to survive.

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

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