Learning From the Right, Fighting for the Left: Resisting Neoliberalism in Schools

• In Event: 61.028 - Understanding and Resisting the Neoliberal Takeover of Schools and Society: A Theoretical, Pedagogical, and Historical Intervention

Abstract

Every day, students and teachers across the United States and Canada face the
dehumanizing demands of the neoliberal order: privatize what has historically been seen
as public, organize social and cultural practices to be in line with “free market” principles,
and make synonymous the needs of the capitalist economy and the purposes of school
(see Apple, 2001; 2006; Author, 2013; Harvey, 2005; Hursh, 2007; Lipman, 2011;
Robertson, 2008). In order to resist this neoliberal assault on the capacity and potential
for radical humanizing pedagogies and practices, we need to do more than look to
scholars from the left. While invaluable for our struggle to insist and secure a schooling
experience that places the needs of students, teachers, and communities ahead of the
needs of capitalists, it becomes important – if not essential – that we also take seriously
the lessons made available from neoliberalism’s proponents. In this paper I discuss what
“lessons” are made available in the work of former Republican Presidential candidate and
political commentator Pat Buchanan’s (2011) writings on “The End of White America”
and “The White Party” as he elaborated in Suicide of a Superpower. I show
how neoliberal ideologies are embedded in his nationalist “commonsense”
(Kumashiro, 2009) and how educators can better recognize the entanglement of
nationalism, racism, and neoliberalism and carve out spaces of resistance from which to
work “toward justice.”
In this paper I first discuss some of the major arguments in Buchanan’s text, tracing his
demographic arguments about the shifting racial landscape in the United States as he
applies it to economic, social, and political concerns. Buchanan’s central thesis can be
understood as a criticism of the declining power of white people in national elections.
His arguments are beset with white supremacist, nationalist, and neoliberal
assumptions – white supremacist because of the implicit claims of white dominance;
nationalist because of the threat to the nation posed by immigration and growing racial
heterogeneity; and neoliberal because of his unproblematic reliance on the demands of
capital as those that must be acted upon and upheld. As Buchanan combines and
collapses these ideologies, he gives us lessons to follow as we carve out our own
practices of resistance. If the Right seeks to collapse the desires of white supremacy, U.S.
exceptionalist nationalism, and unfettered neoliberal capitalism into one edifice – all
referred to as “traditional American values” – this means that the three, in ways discussed
at length in the full paper, need (see Author, 2011) one another in order to continue to
function the way they do. That is, without white supremacy or nationalism, neoliberalism
could not have the same overriding hegemonic control as it presently does. The paper
concludes with a discussion of relevant insights from educational scholarship that work to
counter nationalist and white supremacist schooling and the ways such work can also be
adapted and “reinvented” (see Freire, 2006) to resist the demands of neoliberalism and
enact a more humanizing and liberatory pedagogy.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College