In A Consumer's Republic, Lizbeth Cohen describes three waves of consumerism in the United States. Crucial to each wave is the symbolic role of the consumer, that is, of the consumer as a recognized identity in a democratic polity. In each time period, Cohen's consumers provide symbolic locations from which one might gaze at American society, positions from which citizens might see themselves and thus from which they might be efectively mobilzed. Among her examples are the loyal female citizens of World War II whose consumer choices were central to the domestic front; the African Americans demanding equal treatment in restaurants, stores, theaters, parks, pools, and busesj the grassroots participants in mass campaigns for safe products, fair labels, and equitable credit. These consumers serve as ego ideals, points of symbolic identification, gazes in front of �horn people might imagine themselves in their activities as consumers and thus view themselves and these activities as likeable, admirable. 53
Cohen's active consumer-citizens difer signifcantly from neoliberalism's consumers. "Whereas the activities and political engagements of consumers under Keynesianism centered on the consumption of necessitiesfood, transportation, housing-to day's consume:t;". is primarily a consumer of excess, armed with credit cards and perpetualy revising her identity: Juliet B. Schor construes the "new consumerism" in terms of a compulsion to purchase luxry goods so as to keep up with televised images of afluence. 54 Other commentators similarly describe consumerism in terris of relentless marketing, obsessive purchasing, and luxry fever. 55 Crucial to their acc unts is the image of the consumer as compelled to buy, as a manik with a credit card driven to create a lifestyle for herself. Still others address the efects of neoliberalism's intensifcation of consumerism. Ronalda Munck writes, "The whole consumer process-from conception to sale, through advertising, marketing and fashion building-has fragmented identities and made them mar� fluid as consumption is continuously revolutionized:' 56
Emerging from these descriptions is the consumer as a kind of strange attractor quite unlike the stable symbolic identities the welfare state endeavored to preserve and disciplinary society worked to provide. The excessive consumer is as dynamic, volatile, and free as the neoliberal market itself.
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