Here is a sample.

“Because neoliberalism is not a unitary ’system,’ but a complex, contradictory cultural and political project created within specific institutions, with an agenda for reshaping the everyday life of contemporary global capitalism, analyses of its recent history and hopefull future demise must be diverse, contingent, flexibly attuned to historical change, and open to constant debate and revision.” (Duggan 70)

While I am certainly not the first of us to begin by highlighting the hypocrisy of Duggan’s statements, I must begin by doing so.  One would expect, from the wording above, that Duggan’s analysis itself would be “diverse, contigent, flexibly attuned to historical change, and open to constant debate and revision,” but what the reader gets is a spartan 88 pages of Left-Wing rhetoric that claims to trace the history of neoliberalism with argumentative validity. It’s a sad thing too, because I sympathize with Duggan’s cause.  Nothing makes me more upset than to see someone with whom I agree butcher our shared beliefs with rhetoric and spit them out to be torn up by our ideological competitors.  If I could have advised Lisa Duggan, here is what I would have told  her to do differently:

Why argue, with flaming Left-wing rhetoric, that neoliberals have made a concerted, mischievous effort to protect their own interests? First off, you don’t have the space in your book to come close to proving this, and it just makes you appear embroiled in unabashed partisanship. Why not, instead, devote all your effort to proving that neoliberalism has caused bad things—trickle-up inequality, greed, mass commercialization and consumerism, the current economic crisis, and the list goes on. If your goal is to paint the Progressive Left as offering a better alternative, go the way of Melani McAlister and simply identify the negative elements without attempting to prove their coordination. If McAlister had argued that Cecil DeMille purposely coordinated his film The Ten Commandments with the Suez Canal Crisis to stimulate the American imagination, she would have come off looking equally ridiculous as you do when you argue for some mass-neoliberal conspiracy.  If there is anything Gramsci, Appadurai, and McAlister have taught us, it is that complex and divergent forces often align to create hegemonic systems.  To argue differently is to sound partisan and naïve.

And now, here is why I enjoyed reading The Twilight of Equality:

This book, however aggravating it might be, brings us full circle back to the notion of hegemony with which we began the class.  While I agree, along with everyone else, that Duggan’s methodology should receive a failing grade, she strikes at the heart of hegemonic power structure and what it means for the future of equality.  The notion that corrections within the neoliberal system remain complicit with an overarching project of inequality can and should be proven.  Duggan is bold and ambitious to argue in favor of a powerful, counterhegemonic bloc of progressives.  Her willingness to look at “What next?” is admirable.

So everyone hates this book. I guess I will play devils advocate. Granted, Duggan’s writing style is not very pleasant and often lacks clarity. But in her defense, Duggan does describe her book as a polemic, which gives her more license to make more outrageous arguments.

While there is obviously room for criticism, I think Duggan addresses an important issue.Although I agree that some of her examples confuse cause with consequence, she does point to the important links between neoliberalism and cultural politics outside of the economic arena. For instance, I think that the example Duggan uses in the first chapter of the Womens Studies conference is important if also flawed. It says that the event was used as an excuse by neoliberals to further their goals of limiting government spending on social issues as well as to universities. I think the more important issue here and one which Duggan does emphasize is the fact that disadvantaged groups suffer disproportionately from neoliberal economic policies. Certainly, a women’s studies program will be cut before a math program when university funding is reduced.

I think that there is to some extent an inherent contradiction in stating that you are for both neoliberal economic reforms as well as minority rights since they benefit those classes which are historically and continue to be largely white. I think Duggan’s critique of Andrew Sullivan is also interesting. I think that negative liberties are extremely important; the idea that what I do in my own private life is my own business is important to me. At the same time, solving every social injustice by saying “it’s none of your businesss” denies the very public aspect of being a minority and the way in which such discourses are used in the public square to frame popular discourses on issues such as welfare.

Duggan makes the important point that the arrival of neoliberalism divided the left between those bent on fighting neoliberalism in favor of more class-conscious traditional liberal economics and those who were more interested in identity politics and cultural reform. I think this phenomenon is interesting. If we look at how the growth of neoliberalism affected the right, I think the result was very different. Many who joined Reagan in the 1980s did so because they felt that the welfare state privileged minorities over working-class whites; that all those minority liberation movements were unpatriotic and detrimental to traditional social and religious values. In this way, the Republican ascendancy during the 1980s and its influence during the 1990s definitely benefitted from a confluence of economic reforms with cultural and racial discourses coming out of the 1960s. Thus neoliberalism policies, in tune with conservative economic reforms, benefit from racial and cultural discourses. This is a strength that the Right has and the Left lacks, a coherence between the culturally and economically conservative factions of the 1980s consensus (although I am convinced that this consensus on the right is unravelling at a very quickly).

So, despite Duggan’s unappealing style and the way she attacks people who probably don’t deserve it, I think project of uncovering the connections between neoliberal economic policy and other racial and sexual discourses is important. If I’ve learned anything from American Studies, it’s that everything, even economic theory, has another side to it.

Okay. I didn’t like Twilight of Equality, either. And I was more than prepared to write a blistering critique of her lack of clear organizational framework and general propensity for reduction. Since I see that several others before me have taken to it – in the best places noticing Duggan’s sweeping categorization of neoliberals – I’ll try to stick to her argument.

Because despite all of her inflammatory language and a number of things that are plainly manipulated to fit her case, she is definitely making an argument here about the relationship between cultural politics and neoliberalism that merits analysis (though I’m not so sure that the “attack on democracy” part is much more than unsupported provocation). I think the strength lies in noticing that we perceive capitalism and free market structures as somehow devoid from the cultures/identities that they cut across. As she notes, it is not a practice limited to conservatives but rather a nearly uniform conception of economics (i.e. as a hard science rather than a social science).

Part of the problem in talking about the Twilight of Equality is her complete failure to distinguish what or who a neoliberal actually is, at times conflating it entirely with conservatives but at others recognizing the more wide sweeping philosophy which goes well outside of the Republican Party. Moreover, she paints subtle processes as a seemingly coherent project – when, much like the book itself, they are in fact amalgamations of numerous forces and interest at work. Another reductive problem is that she conflates all ‘progressive’ movements as single issue groups which have an anti-neoliberal agenda in common despite their differing focuses (they just can’t get their act together to recognize that?).  

Yet she should be commended for willing to thinking “big,” if you will, and look at very large scale behaviors. The risk, of course, is that she leaves herself wide open to criticism (and then invites it openly by using a particular rhetoric). Again, though I’m not quite sure I’d call it a ‘broadly controlling corporate agenda,’ there are undoubtedly important links between corporate money making ventures and the continual marginalization of social groups that meet in the politics of ‘neoliberals.’

I can’t figure out what kind of audience Duggan’s Twilight of Equality aims to reach.  Over the course of her screed, she manages to alienate AND insult so many different groups, and while she says repeatedly that the tides of neoliberalism can be turned back, she doesn’t give much guidance as to how to combat them.  Her only advice to activists seems to be to combat the sinister cabal of neoliberals as a unified movement.  Easier said that done!

Suggesting that the development of single issue interest groups is a new phenomenon, Duggan appallingly dismisses many modern groups like NARAL and the HRC for their narrow focuses.  First of all, I don’t think the “single interest group phenomenon” is new at all; throughout world and American history, single interest political parties and interest groups have cropped up in response to different events and questions at various moments.  The abolitionists had a pretty narrow focus, too–to end slavery in the United States.  Did that mean that abolitionists were complicit in some sort of early breakdown of unification? Obviously, she sets her argument pretty clearly in another context, the 1970s, 80s and 90s, but her time frame seems calculated only to make her arbitrary argument.  The splintering of these interest groups has happened over time and not necessarily in reaction to neo-liberalism.

Secondly, as Steve suggests, what’s the big deal about single interest groups?  In an ideal world, it would be great if neoliberalism’s opponents could solidify into one united front, dedicated to protecting rights and preventing the upward distribution of resources.  In the absence of that ideal, groups have tailored–and sometimes narrowed–their goals and focus in order to achieve maximum results.  Its hard, for most people, to take issue with groups that are just trying to achieve results in whatever way they can.

Duggan’s portrayal of neo-liberals is general, reductive and simplistic.  She paints them all with a broad brush and attributes very evil motives to their policies and goals.  It’s as if she believes there’s a yearly coordinating conference to which they are all invited and at which they hatch their diabolical plots to grasp resources out of the hands of the poor and stuff the coffers of corporate America.  I don’t necessarily want to defend neo-liberals, but anyone can see that this description doesn’t fit all who subscribe to neo-liberal beliefs.   In lumping Reagan, the two Bushes and Clinton together into one evil neo-liberal political conglomerate, she ignores key political differences in order to highlight some of their few similarities, but she should remember that you can’t just cherry pick select examples to make your argument.  Of course, in the examples she cites, neo-liberals seem like a sinister, vindictive group, but she’s only telling her limited, well-chosen side of the story.

And so I still question what she intended to achieve here.  As I mentioned earlier, the book doesn’t really read like a “how-to” guide for those who would counter the neo-liberal movement; it doesn’t seem to be targeted at activists or at interest group leaders themselves.  It is certainly an academic discourse but her snide tone often makes me question her arguments.  Good for her for writing some inflammatory prose, but I don’t think her argument holds much power to change anything.

Lisa Duggan is what many people I know would call a whiny bitch. Since this is supposed to be an academic forum, I will restrain myself as best I can from peppering this response to her book The Twilight of Equality with references to this quality of her personality. That said, I forge onward to the text itself.

The Twilight of Equality is a work so categorically absurd in substance and presentation that it is difficult to dignify it with a well-reasoned response. Since Duggan feels that presenting an organized argument to her readers is less important than force-feeding us ultra-liberal conspiracy theories substantiated by cherry-picked examples that are questionably analyzed, I counter by simply selecting the pieces of her text which I find most disagreeable and hacking them to bits in as disorganized a fashion as I possibly can. If this seems ludicrous and unfair to her work, I apologize with the caveat that it is only as ludicrous and unfair as the fact that I just spent two hours reading her book.

One fundamental fact of history of which Duggan seems ignorant is that the Founding Fathers were not stupid people. When they devised our republican system, replete with its separation of powers and checks and balances, they did so with the intention of curbing the volatile passions of the general public, thereby providing the new nation with a modicum of stability upon which to build in its nascent years. The effect of this decision was that swift change to the political system of any kind—whether in the form of small-scale legislation, or alterations to fundamental documents—would always take a lot of time. Put more bluntly, shit doesn’t just change overnight. A corollary effect of this decision is that the most effective agents of change are those who understand how the American governmental system works and, by extension, how they can attempt to make it work for them.

Seemingly devoid of this understanding of the American republic and the functioning of its governmental institutions, it is easy to understand why Duggan would incorrectly lambaste single-issue groups like the NAACP and NARAL for attempting to practice “the politics of the possible” rather than remaining parts of a more cohesive progressive movement. In her eyes, these groups are simply giving in to the big, bad, neoliberal conspiracy, one which aims at all costs and with all its might to “promote mechanisms that either shore up or establish inequalities of power, rank, wealth, or cultural status” (Duggan, xviii). Duggan is simply incapable of seeing that, since sweeping change across a broad spectrum of issues is nearly impossible in American government, going it alone with a narrow focus is the best way for these groups to work for their constituencies. It’s not weakness or self-centeredness that drives interest groups such as these; on the contrary, it is the desire to be practical in order to actually see things progressing for their constituencies rather than sitting back and whining and bitching from a NYU office about the lack of a true progressive movement (oops, I told myself I wasn’t going to do that).

Milton Friedman, the man whom many consider to be the father of neo-liberalism, concisely posited that, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Lisa Duggan would have us believe that the seemingly benign Mr. Friedman actually included an addendum to this famous line: “…because I will take it from you if you do not give me your wallet and your dignity, first.”

I do not buy it.

Duggan argued that neo-liberalism is not simply a set of economic policies, but that it also encompasses a subversive slate of cultural characteristics that is being forced upon the denizens of the world. Furthermore, she contended that neo-liberalism is silently working to shackle the people of the world to a chain forged of ignorance, racism and self-interest and that it is doing so beneath a façade of mutual gain and multicultural tolerance. She asserted that there exists a pervasive neo-liberal conspiracy at the highest echelons of political leadership and that this conspiracy is hampering the social movements which would bring change.

The feeling which one gets after reading Duggan’s book is not unlike the sensation which one receives after examining a tabloid cover. One half of the mind really wants there to be mutant squirrels giving zookeepers the runabout, the other half is the buzz-killer who reproachfully intones the simple truth: “Nuh uh.” Unlike the tabloid authors who know that their articles are nonsense (one hopes), Duggan steadfastly continued to avow a worldview which simple reason seems to reject. Amidst her unwillingness to relent, her rhetorical fallacies utter the confession which she will not.

One such fallacy is seen in her eagerness to create a vast neo-liberal “other” which she slanderously brands with undeserved labels and unfairly populates with speakers of distinct origins.  In her discussion of the controversy over the conference at SUNY, she implies that neo-liberals are necessarily cultural curmudgeons who are quick to avow intolerance and are slow to practice empathy. Later, she paints gay activist Andrew Sullivan with a similar conservative brush. Her methods of characterization and branding are simply unfounded. Simple reason must conclude that neo-liberalism be seen as distinctly separate from the vices of ignorance, racism and prejudice. It is towards these vices which she should direct her anger, not toward neo-liberalism.

It seems that no poorly constructed argument may pass without a healthy serving of hypocrisy and Duggan is only too happy to oblige. In her tangential critique of the work of Andrew Sullivan she charged that he has constantly engaged in caricature of the left. Her argument is severely weakened by the fact that her entire book is, in fact, a caricature of neo-liberalism. Her rhetorical ability is further undermined by another instance of hypocrisy. She accused the writer Todd Gitlin of unjustly creating a “monstrous political ‘other’” and of unfairly assigning membership to those who clearly should not belong in the same grouping. Her accusation could very well be made toward herself when one considers her handling of such individuals like Candace De Russy and Andrew Sullivan.

Her authorial professionalism is also highly suspect. In one instance she refers to those in Andrew Sullivan’s ideological corner as “the neo-liberal gang of gays.” This is not the type of language which an author uses if he or she wishes to be taken seriously.

In any critique that I am asked to make, I earnestly attempt to find at least one object of praise. Sure enough, even with missteps of rhetoric abound, there is one facet of Lisa Duggan’s work which deserves commendation:

Its length.

Since this area of study has been one in which many scholars have been active, it may seem difficult to envision what impact my research will have. That said, in my research into the secondary sources which have been annotated in an attached bibliography, I have discovered that scholars in the field have engaged in several debates, and that in the process they have focused their efforts on insignificant details rather than important broader trends. For example, two separate scholars disagree on the extent to which Batman was co-opted by OWI’s propaganda monologue during World War II, or if he was co-opted at all. My research would settle this debate and others like it that are occurring between scholars in this field. In so doing, my work will move to redirect the conversation between scholars to what I feel is the most important element of this area of study: how Batman comic books during this period reflect broader trends in American society. I will draw the conclusion that these comics illustrate the pervasiveness of the Allied war effort during the 1940s in American life, as well as the neurosis which characterized America’s view of unsavory societal elements like juvenile delinquency and homosexuality during the 1950s. This conclusion will illuminate the nationalism that was prevalent in the United States during a period as it was constantly waging war—both abroad against fascism, and at home against undesirable, “un-American” sectors of society.

The final chapters of Epic Encounters offered an interesting take on an important but frequently overlooked question: how does nationalism manifest itself in times of crisis?

McAlister’s chapter on the Iranian hostage crisis and its implications for American foreign policy demonstrated the simultaneously unifying and divisive strains of nationalism which emerge when a nation is “under attack.”  One of McAlister’s central points in this chapter is that the media’s non-stop coverage of the hostages framed the way average Americans understood the crisis as it was going on and the way they understood the Middle East from then on out.  In this instance, as was the case on and after September 11, American nationalism manifested itself in different ways at different moments.

In the first instance, the hostage crisis solidified American nationalism, giving the American people something very tangible–their fellow citizens–around which to rally.  Yellow ribbons, nightly newscasts, failed rescue attempts, images of the blindfolded hostages: all these served to rally Americans and encouraged them to imagine the hostages as members of their own, larger American family.  McAlister repeatedly mentions ABC’s coverage of the hostage crisis, entitled America Held Hostage.  Though she doesn’t say it outright, this title was extremely significant in that it suggested that as long as some Americans were held in captivity, so too were all Americans; instead of choosing a title like “Americans Held Hostage,” ABC chose a title which placed an undeniable emphasis on the whole of the national identity rather than any single person’s.

Still, McAlister is right to point out that the news media walked a very fine line between presenting the hostage situation as a national crisis, worth the time, empathy and patriotism of all, and as a deeply personal crisis for those families who were directly affected.   By constantly reminding viewers of the families left waiting anxiously, the media portrayed the hostages as both innocent individuals and as national symbols.  Within the individual stories and sufferings, American nationalism encouraged all citizens to see themselves in the hostages and to pay attention to their plight.

In times of crisis, such as this one, the nationalist response was swift.  While nationalism may sometimes seem dormant, it can rear its head at the slightest provocation, especially in times of crisis.  This was one of those moments, and the hardening of American nationalism, facilitated by the media, created an “us versus them” shorthand that reduced the Islamic world to a monolithic, undifferentiated geographic blob; it was easier for the media to portray–and for Americans to understand–the crisis in black and white images and rhetoric.  As the subsequent sections of this chapter point out convincingly, the portrayal of the crisis and the nationalistic response it provoked did not end when the hostages were released–it manifested itself in various cultural, political and economic outlets in the decade to come.

I think this chapter fit very nicely with McAlister’s final chapter, for more than just the obvious reason that they both deal with terrorism.  In their use of visual rhetoric–the images of hostages, newscasters, firefighters, and dismantled statues–both chapters reveal how American nationalism manifests itself in times of crisis (often very forcefully, at least initially) and how nationalism and the media combine to immediately create American narratives.  While much of our recent readings have focused on post- and trans-nationalism, two interesting and real phenomena, I think these chapters show that, at least in times of national turmoil, nationalism is the ideology that reigns supreme.

One thing that struck me from the chapter “The Good Fight” was McAlister’s explanation of the mobilization of evangelicals as a political force backing Israel. In McAlister’s words:

“they [evangelicals] developed a specific…interest in military and foreign policy issues, related to their almost obsessive fascination with the question of how and when the last great war – the war to end all wars – would come about. The Apocalypse at Armageddon would be horrific…would also be the one truly just war, with Jesus himself fighting on the side of righteousness” (McAlister 178)

Drawing parallels between Biblical foresight and modern politics is a strange enterprise which, in the end, places the nation-state (a relatively new, historical creation) within the context of ancient religious prophesy. Evangelicals accepted that the “truly just war,” the war between good and evil, the war in which Jesus takes sides, is in fact a war between nations and that the first harbinger of this war is in fact the creation of the modern state of Israel. This reminded me of our first class in which we compared the rhetoric of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which privileged the individual, and that of NSC-68, which privileged the nation. How can a judgment day come down to a battle between nations? What about the individuals within each nation? I’m sure doctrinally these questions can be worked out, but surely it is a tribute to the imaginative power of the nation that rapture itself is seen in alignment with nation-state politics and the context of the Cold War.

Overall, I really enjoyed these last three chapters. In short, I bought it. The last chapter and the conclusion seemed separate from the rest of the book as a way to quickly bring the reader up to the present, with less interesting cultural work, but who am I to judge. I do think that McAlister did a good job of describing how cultural representations of the Middle East have, in their “uncoordinated junctures” created an impressive body of representation which can itself become part of the history-making process.

McAlister’s distinction between more conservative and liberal film representations of terrorism nuances her argument and allows her to account for different emerging representations of terrorism and the Middle East. Certainly, Exodus does a lot of cultural work – largely unintentionally – that Black Sunday was much more intentional about. Exodus, whose screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten, actually calls for a two-state solution in the final moments of the film (youtube has the whole film in 20 parts). Certainly, Trumbo is not subscribing to the militant anti-Soviet rhetoric of NSC-68 and scorned anti-liberal McCarthyism. But the fact that Exodus does not fit neatly into the Cold War discourse of the first chapters of McAlister’s book doesn’t necessary weaken her argument. The point, after all, is that many disparate representations of the Middle East, from the Suez to Exodus to the hostage crisis, all together form an important if nuanced connection between America and the Middle East such that the Middle East all together becomes an important piece of the American identity.

The last thing I found really interesting was the recurrent use of the imagery and rhetoric from the Entebbe mission throughout the 1970s and 1980s. McAlister did not extend this metaphor beyond the 1980s, and missed what I think are potential ideological and discursive (if I dare use such a philosophical term) links between Entebbe, the Iran-Contra affair, Iraq, and finally Strauss and neoconservatives. This was probably a wise decision on McAlister’s part, since such parallels are perhaps as outrageous as describing the October War as the second sign of the rapture. However, parallels do exist. Entebbe – as McAlister herself portrays it – set an example in which violent, unilateral action was privileged over multilateral action, diplomacy, and respect for the sovereignty of nations. In the case of Entebbe, Israel violated international protocol as well as Uganda’s own sovereignty. In a way, such actions could be construed as detrimental to the legitimacy of the nation. Instead, much like representations of the Gulf War absorbed their liberal-multicultural challenge with figures like Colin Powell, American foreign policy established the Entebbe example as the means by which to strengthen the American nation. Indeed, pre-emptive, unilateral justice was declared U.S. policy by the Bush Administration; it was our way of fighting terror, of not negotiating with terrorists, of propagating democracy, and in Strauss’s words, of standing up to tyranny and rejecting the moral relativism that pervades and compromises modern international affairs. Just a thought.