Giroux, H.A. (2014) - Neoliberalism's War on Democracy (29 pp.)

British Journal of …, 2010

The Social Service Review, 2010

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2009

The British Journal of Sociology, 2011

In this essay, I trace the rise of neoliberalism as the default logic of today’s political economy throughout the world. I examine in detail its animating sources and its underlying philosophical roots. I review how it has come to be the common sense of capitalist political economies across the globe, and how it operates to structure public policymaking and policy design in those societies. I specify the way neoliberalism has influenced welfare policy implementation in the United States. I conclude with considerations on how to get beyond neoliberalism in social welfare policy via what I call a “radical incrementalism” that makes small changes within the existing social welfare policies that lay the groundwork for more progressive changes down the road.

Loïc Wacquant is one of the most important scholars who studied advanced urban marginality, the impoverishment of African-American population living in big cities, the restructuring of relationships between different social classes and one of the most charismatic leftist thinkers in state anthropology. Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity is the second part of a trilogy on urban marginality published by Wacquant 2 .

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Dar-winism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs—No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and national standardized testing—as examples of market-oriented ideologies embedded in the reforms. Further, I rely on Critical Social Theory, following Freire, as a framework to examine how the education policies and programs intersect to potentially impede access to quality education opportunities for children from impoverished backgrounds. I use Freire's conception of Critical Social Theory because of his focus on how education should be used as a transformational mechanism to improve lives rather than a tool to train and inculcate children to imitate and be subservient to the dominant culture. I argue that some federal education policies enacted since 2002 provide examples of the confluence of ideologies that are creating a new meritocracy-based system. The meritocracy-based system will disproportionately penalize poorer students who have less access to out of school experiences that prepare them for formal schooling. Based on punishment triggers embedded in state and federal education policies, a cycle of educational austerity ensues when a student does not achieve a mandatory achievement benchmark. The cycle of austerity can doom some students to under-achievement in the short term and to becoming under-educated in the long term.

Interchange, 2013