Capitalist Ideology Missing
Another thing missing in The Price of the Ticket is the ascendancy in the dominant public discourse of a corporate neoliberal ideology in which the nation’s “pervasive racial hierarchies collapse,” in the words of Henry Giroux, “into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class and color for not working hard enough” and “refusing to exercise individual initiative.” Even as an insidious, increasingly invisible racism “functions” as “one of the deep and abiding currents in everyday [American] life,” Giroux notes, this discourse works “to erase the social from the language of public life as to reduce all racial problems to private issues [of]…individual character and cultural depravity.”
Neoliberal ideology “can imagine public issues only as private concerns.” It sees “human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” on the part of those most victimized by structural oppression and super-empowered actors atop the nation’s steep and interrelated hierarchies of class, race, gender, nationality, and empire.
“The more they weaken the left, social hand of the state the more they call into being and strengthen the right, authoritarian hand of the state.”