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Donkees

(31,085 posts)
Wed Jul 26, 2017, 07:29 AM Jul 2017

Corbyn and Sanders Show That Neoliberalism Has Failed to Privatize Hope

By Ronald Aronson TODAY 6:00 AM

Excerpts:

A new consensus has emerged among young people that is definitely social democratic—as that term has traditionally been used—or democratic socialist—as Bernie and Jeremy have described themselves. By whatever name, young people are insisting on social solutions to social problems. This consensus rejects the privatizing and individualizing trends that have prevailed since the late 1970s.

Remarkably, this generation—raised, educated, and shaped to neatly fit what Zygmunt Bauman calls “individualized society”—is thinking, aspiring, and acting collectively. They are repudiating spurious but once-galvanizing Reaganite claims to limited government and personal responsibility, turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher’s goal of replacing the “collectivist society” with a “personal society.” In the latest election, the new social democrats/democratic socialists demonstrated that three decades of concerted effort have not changed “the heart and soul of the nation” in quite the way that Thatcher wished for.

They were brought up to be self-seeking entrepreneurs, not to feel responsible for each other. They were primed to accept that every last corner of the world, and their own lives, would be organized by the logic of the market. They were taught to see social contradictions as personal, not political problems—to live by Thatcher’s dictum that “there are individual men and women and there are families…. There is no such thing as society.” Yet, instead of becoming cynical free agents, young people are drawn to the sincerity of Corbyn and Sanders. Against the flashy marketing of their opponents, these men express the humility of old-fashioned values such as fairness and equality. As recent surveys show, young people raised to ensure capitalism’s future have become deeply skeptical of it and many are instead drawn to something called “socialism.”

While many in the older generation have learned to shift for themselves and ignore their social side, the younger generation cannot. The unrestrained harshness of the bottom line helps explain this turn, because rising inequality and economic insecurity have become especially intolerable to young people facing their future. In addition, at least two kinds of generational awareness have heightened their sense of social belonging: threats to the environment and global interconnectedness.

The perils of climate change predispose anyone growing up today to see herself as belonging to the ever-more-besieged natural world: linked with, dependent on, and worried about natural processes and beings everywhere. They increasingly live on the planet Earth.

https://www.thenation.com/article/corbyn-and-sanders-show-that-neoliberalism-has-failed-to-privatize-hope/





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Corbyn and Sanders Show That Neoliberalism Has Failed to Privatize Hope (Original Post) Donkees Jul 2017 OP
Great article.. disillusioned73 Jul 2017 #1
May you stay 'forever young' :) Donkees Jul 2017 #2
Great song... disillusioned73 Jul 2017 #3
 

disillusioned73

(2,872 posts)
1. Great article..
Wed Jul 26, 2017, 08:12 AM
Jul 2017

I gain hope from our youth.. which I am no longer a part of in body - in mind, I still feel like a kid @ times.. I hope I am able to instill in my son the values of social awareness..

"While many in the older generation have learned to shift for themselves and ignore their social side, the younger generation cannot. The unrestrained harshness of the bottom line helps explain this turn, because rising inequality and economic insecurity have become especially intolerable to young people facing their future."

Donkees

(31,085 posts)
2. May you stay 'forever young' :)
Wed Jul 26, 2017, 02:09 PM
Jul 2017


Published on Mar 14, 2015
This live version of "Forever Young" is taken from The Last Waltz which was held on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976.
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