Dear John & Others:
Bill Clinton's "It's the Economy, Stupid!" strategy followed the same one used
very successfully by Ronald Reagan in 1980. In Reagan's case, he asked
U.S. citizens directly, "Are YOU better off than you were four years ago?"
Not only does that slogan situate all important matters in the economic
sphere (or the market, as typically conceived today) but also it reduces
politics to a matter of simply calculating
one's own immediate financial best interest. Additionally, such a tack
effectively
"dehumanizes" the market and the economy, divorcing economic indicators from
their social, political and moral contexts--except as they relate to the
individual who's
in a strong enough respurce position to be thinking about raises, taxes,
and stocks.
As a strategy of political expediency, it's brilliant. In terms of deeper
and longer-term implications for politics and ethics, it's disastrous. As
Jacob Weisberg described so eloquently in the _New York Times Magazine_,
Jan. 25, 1998, the U.S. has become a "community of investors," who
understand politics largely by looking at their own pocketbooks at a
particular moment.
Fortunately, a number of important critiques of this perspective on human
affairs have been advanced in just the past few years--see, e.g., Richard
Sennett's _The Corrosion of Character_.
--George Cheney
George Cheney
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Communication Studies
The University of Montana-Missoula
Missoula, MT 59812
USA
tel.: 406-243-4426
fax: 406-243-6136
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
