The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born by Nancy Fraser;

Author:Nancy Fraser;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

“The Populist Cat Is

Out of the Bag”

Nancy Fraser Interviewed

by Bhaskar Sunkara

Bhaskar Sunkara:

To start with, what prompted you to start writing about progressive neoliberalism? Obviously it became a concept that resonated with so many. Was it rooted mostly in trends you saw in academia or elsewhere?

Nancy Fraser:

Actually, I had been groping toward that concept for many years. Long before I had a name for it, I was using other terms to describe what had gone wrong with the left and center-left, especially in the United States—but more broadly, both in academia and in the larger political sphere. In the nineties, for example, I wrote about the “eclipse of redistribution by recognition”; that language was aimed at diagnosing an imbalance in the thinking and practice of progressive forces whose one-sided focus on identity, status, and culture was obscuring the ascent of neoliberalism, letting the new plutocrats off the hook, if not actually promoting them. Later, in the wake of the 2007–08 financial crisis, I used the phrase “cunning of history” to name the process by which second-wave feminism, or major segments of it, had entered into a “dangerous liaison” with the forces promoting neoliberalism; that was another gesture in the same direction. And then came the extraordinary spectacle of the 2016 election: the rise of Trump, the surprising success of Bernie Sanders, and above all the posture of Hillary Clinton, whom I saw as a poster child for everything that had gone wrong, over the course of several decades, with the new social movements and progressive forces.

In that moment, it just suddenly came to me that progressivism and neoliberalism had converged to form a hegemonic bloc or ruling alliance, and that it needed to be named. A key realization for me, which came in a flash, was the idea that neoliberalism is not a total worldview. Many people believe it is, but in fact it is a political-economic project that can articulate with several different and even competing projects of recognition—including progressive ones. Once I understood that, I saw that, in the United States at least, neoliberalism had most durably articulated with progressivism. Giving that articulation a name felt to me like a big step forward in understanding what was happening.

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