In short, the American left responded to the attack on the welfare state, colapse of Keynesianism, and emergence of a neoliberal consensus by forfeiting its historical solidarity with workers and the poor, retreating from the state, and losing the sense that collective solutions to large-scale systemic inequalities are possible and necessary. The failure of solidarity was manifest perhaps most acutely in President Bill Clinton's destruction of welfare guarantees (aid to families with dependent children) in favor of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (capped at five years) in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Republicans didn't eliminate welfarej Democrats, the party associated with the interests of the·poor and the working class since the Depression, did.
This failure of solidarity is closely linked to the left's withdrawal from the state-even as various elements on the right developed strategies for funding and winning electoral campaigns, interpreting the Constitution, and re"W!iting laws, even as corporate and business interests steadily increased their political investments, the left failed adequately to defend what had long ago been won, namely, the notion that the most fundamental role of the state is ensuring a minimal social and economic standard below which no one is allowed to fal. Indeed, many dismissed the state as useless and outmoded, preferring to theorize instead a politics beyond the state (a move which left an open field for conservative strategists) .27
Finaly, as it overlapped with a reluctance to ofend any particular desires for freedom, backing away from the state resonated with a sense that there is no alternative to the market. And rather than simply an approach to the distribution of goods and services, this sense is more profoundly a sense of political ineficacy: we can't do anything about anything. In part, the loss of agency results from the prior acceptance of the inevitability of capitalism. But it results as well from an underlying skepticism toward uttering the word we, toward speaking for others and thereby risking overlooking their specific diferences.
The splintering and collapse of the left constitutes a political trauma. Technology fetishism responds to this trauma, acknowledging and denying it at the same time. For many, new media let them feel as if they are making a contribution, let them deny the larger lack of left solidarity even as their very individualized and solitary linking and clicking attests to the new political conditions.
TECHNOLOGY
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