With [the] obvious exceptions of Bush and Cheney themselves, since the midterms virtually every major Bush administration figure involved in a major scandal has been forced out….
My first reaction to this list is note that Democratic electoral success and subsequent investigations have led to a significant amount of resignations, but has not resulted in a significant change in Bush administration policy. I think this is connected to progressive campaigns against the Bush administration focusing on individuals committing criminal, incompetent, and unethical acts, rather than on a core set of values as to how government should be run….
We get the scalps from the criminals, the incompetent, and the unethical, but we are not changing the policies. I think this is a demonstration of the weakness of the anti-ideological argument many have pushed on the Democratic side for these past few years, not to mention serves as another example of the general ineffectiveness of technocratic liberalism when faced with the ideological, conservative movement. It isn't just about Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld or Gonzales. It is about a different vision for the way government should function, and the values that are at the core of those visions. We are not doing a very good job of articulating our values in these disputes, and so we end up with a lot of scalps, but also with very little change in the operation of the federal government itself.
Bowers is certainly right, and this basic difficulty will only be exacerbated when the Bush Administration has finally been eclipsed for good and the left discovers to its appalled shock that the personalizing focus on Bush and Cheney themselves over the last half-decade (understandable enough given just how flabbergastingly awful all these scoundrels and imbeciles have been personally) rather than on the deeply and insistently inculcated neoliberal and libertopian assumptions of the incumbent corporate-militarist establishment that brought us this Republican Rogues Gallery in the first place (not to mention any number of corporatist partisan Democrats, I'm afraid) will have left these dumb devastating dominant narratives relatively unscathed in the aftermath.
The True Believers of market fundamentalism will still intone their poisonous pieties without pause. They will continue to genuflect toward a never-existing "spontaneous order" whose "natural" efficiencies yield only best outcomes and which is always only hampered by "government interference" when, indeed, it is governmental articulation, regulation, and enforcement of production and trade protocols that bring "market orders," such as they are, into being as such. They will continue to defend the right of fictive "corporate persons" to lie in their advertising in the name of "free expression," to externalize social costs in the name of "liberty," to confiscate commonwealth in the name of "innovation," to enforce unaccountability in the name of "privacy," all the while denying and disabling these values for actually-existing persons. They will still demand deregulation without end (pretending that this is not the call for lawlessness that it quite obviously is), they will still champion the privatization of infrastructure and public services (pretending that this is not the call for looting and elite unaccountability that it quite obviously is), they will still deride the democratizing promise of general welfare while demanding welfare for the already rich stealthed as "defense," even when its impact is mostly disastrously destabilizing (pretending that this is not the elitist class warfare that it quite obviously is), and so on.
A vanishingly small minority of self-styled "intellectuals," mostly inexperienced online dupes who have swallowed the hook of an Ayn Rand potboiler or one of Hayek's suave marketeer meditations will earnestly mean what they say when they say these things, sad to say, and for these there is always the hope that they might accidentally trip over some feature of the actual world while their nose is stuck in one of their castles-in-the-air manifestoes and that they will come to their senses eventually (hey, it happened to the kid who happened to be me two decades ago), but the overabundant majority of free marketeers are either cynical opportunists spewing rhetorical cover for ongoing confiscatory wealth concentration from which they benefit or imagine that they will likely eventually benefit, or are pampered thoughtless beneficiaries of these policies who comfortably and uncritically mouth prevailing platitutes, come what may, however senseless, insulated (they imagine, probably falsely) from consequence by a slick soap bubble of privilege.
Be that as it may, be assured that the complacent establishment, certainly the wingnut thinktanks (all Very Serious), and the corporate media will be utterly undaunted by the catastrophic failures, the corruption, and the criminality that has ensued from the concrete implementation of their actual "ideas" in the long night of Movement Conservatism in America and neoliberalism around the globe -- indeed, they will regard (or opportunistically claim to do) these failures as failures to completely implement their ideology, demanding always only ever more of the same, never discerning in the worldly devastation they author the impact of their otherworldly faith in "natural markets" or "natural elites" with which they happen to identify -- the two faiths are inextricable with one another.
It is this neoliberal/libertopian faith that must be decisively demolished if the world is to learn the lesson of the Bush Administration as the climax of the neoliberal era and to usher in an urgently necessary planetary progressive era in its stead. Although the point of Bowers's comment is to castigate the dem-left blogosphere for its superficial satisfaction with forced resignations and its failure to popularize the necessary critique of neoliberal and libertopian ideology, and although I think Bowers's comment is a welcome and necessary one, it is also right to say that, as far as I can tell at least, this task of articulating and communicating ideological critiques of neoliberalism while articulating and communicating planetary progressive alternatives has nonetheless been taken up most forcefully by the democratic-left blogosphere, such as it is. It is the planetary progressive netroots that are getting the word out at last where well-meaning others in the academy and among genuinely progressive traditional institutions have failed to do for generations now even while their work has been righteous. Peer-to-peer networked democracy (especially as it is connected with emerging planetary Green consciousness and organizing, in my view) is the best and most promising force on offer to shatter the corporate-militarist crust of convention the academic and activist democratic-left has been hacking away at too fruitlessly for too long and to inspire the education, agitation, and organizing for a more democratic, sustainable, diverse, consensual, progressive planet.
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