Markets, myths, and Misrecognitions: Economic populism in the age of financialization and hyperinequality (original) (raw)

2018, Economic Anthropology

In this analysis, I use populism as a term to describe recent conservative social movements and representations. Right-wing populism, as I see it, deploys the rhetoric of reverse discrimination and scapegoating to galvanize political energy in the name of the "common man," within a context of intensifying socioeconomic inequality. Crucially, nostalgic and declensionist political campaigns, from Trumpism to the Tea Party, have framed the "common man" as white, properly masculine, and heterosexual-the rightful heir of the family wage in a moment when this wage has been diminished. And herein lies the conundrum. On one hand, downward mobility, precarity, and suffering characterize disinvested and deindustrializing regions across the United States. Those who were included in the era of postwar prosperity, underpinned by living-wage manufacturing, have witnessed the dismantling of social contracts and are experiencing downward mobility and a crisis of expectation and entitlement. Those who were largely excluded from the benefits of the family wage and other socioeconomic safety nets, namely, working-class people of color, experience an exacerbated inequality, never having fully participated in the postwar stability, and yet facing increased disinvestment with heightened rates of state-sanctioned violence, incarceration, and so-called access to opportunity, such as "subprime" loans. On the other hand, over the past thirty years, the policies, practices, measurements, and values of the US social economy that were ushered in by Reagan, continued by Clinton, and underwritten by Wall Street have enabled financialization and mostly benefited the financial elite. While the scapegoating of undeserving others has long characterized elite conservative agendas, it is important to recognize that one of the central ways in which elites have attempted to market and temper the ravages of these policies has been to frame them in terms of cosmopolitanism, meritocracy, and multiculturalism. Using the concept of "progressive neoliberalism," philosopher Nancy Fraser (2017; see also Bessire and Bond 2017; Brenner 2017) indicts the strategic coupling of multiculturalism with an "anti-provincial," free-market approach to globalization that ends up solidifying a new institutional elite. She argues that the celebration of diversity has lent "charisma" to the "forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization," and that ideals like "diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives" (Fraser 2017). The reactionary populism, then, that has led to Trumpism arose out of real grievances against neoliberal financialization and globalization yet has conflated the policies and practices that benefit the financial elite with