Immigration, Technology, and the Winding Road to Trump

“Neoliberal economic policies have deepened the anxiety of many rural conservatives, who felt they were gradually being ‘replaced’ or outdated by an economic system which no longer prioritized the resource, industrial, and agricultural sectors.”

Introduction

“The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche…Yet in the dialectical leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of Culture 17 modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media speech (far enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors of Esperanto or Basic English), which itself then becomes but one more idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes. And that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into professional and disciplinary jargons (but also into the badges of affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion) is also a political phenomenon…”

Fredric Jameson, The Postmodern Condition

This article is intended as something of a sequel to my earlier pieces on post-modernism in general. In the first, I discussed the characteristics of post-modern philosophy, particularly as articulated in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In the second article, I discussed how many authors interpret post-modernism as an epoch or culture in the history of developed and rapidly developing states. In these two pieces, I made it clear that I thought it was more beneficial and interesting to understand post-modernism along the cultural and epochal lines discussed in the second article. But I did not provide an extensive discussion of my own opinions on the topic, largely because I wanted to let the authors speak for themselves to the extent possible.

In this brief article, I will sketch out my own approach to explaining the relationship between neoliberal society and post-modern culture. This will be important for understanding why we have seen a specifically post-modern form of identity politics emerge. Neoliberal society and what Fredric Jameson calls post-modern culture generate the material and ideological conditions for the emergence of identity politics. For many years we have witnessed the political ramifications of these developments on the left and on the liberal center, the emergence of the so-called New Left of identity politics and its various critics. Now we are witnessing the emergence of a specifically post-modern form of conservatism that is currently ascendant across the globe.