Giroux, 14 Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University

Democracy/Turns case arg

Neoliberalism renders problems personal and quells collective action, preventing deliberative democracy. This causes a litany of social ills – poverty, racism, Ann Coulter to name a few – and turns the case.

Giroux, 5

(Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University,, “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics” 2005 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v032/32.1giroux.html Project Muse LAO)

Within the discourse of neoliberalism, democracy becomes synonymous with free markets, while issues of equality, racial justice, and freedom are stripped of any substantive meaning and used to disparage those who suffer systemic deprivation and chronic punishment. Individual misfortune, like democracy itself, is now viewed as either excessive or in need of radical containment. The media, largely consolidated through corporate power, routinely provide a platform for high profile right-wing pundits and politicians to remind us either of how degenerate the poor have become or to reinforce the central neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature. Conservative columnist Ann Coulter captures the latter sentiment with her comment that “[i]nstead of poor people with hope and possibility, we now have a permanent underclass of aspiring criminals knifing one another between having illegitimate children and collecting welfare checks” (qtd. in Bean 2003, para.3). Radio talk show host Michael Savage, too, exemplifies the unabashed racism and fanaticism that emerge under a neoliberal regime in which ethics and justice appear beside the point. For instance, Savage routinely refers to non-white countries as “turd world nations,” homosexuality as a “perversion” and young children who are victims of gunfire as “ghetto slime” (qtd. in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 2003, para.2, 6, 5). As Fredric Jameson has argued in The Seeds of Time, it has now become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (1994, xii). The breathless rhetoric of the global victory of free-market rationality spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing intellectuals, and governments alike has found its material expression both in an all-out attack on democratic values and in the growth of a range of social problems including: virulent and persistent poverty, joblessness, inadequate health care, apartheid in the inner cities, and increasing inequalities between the rich and the poor. Such problems appear to have been either removed from the inventory of public discourse and social policy or factored into talk-show spectacles in which the public becomes merely a staging area for venting private interests Henry A. Giroux 9 Within the discourse of neoliberalism that has taken hold of the public imagination, there is no way of talking about what is fundamental to civic life, critical citizenship, and a substantive democracy. Neoliberalism offers no critical vocabulary for speaking about political or social transformation as a democratic project. Nor is there a language for either the ideal of public commitment or the notion of a social agency capable of challenging the basic assumptions of corporate ideology as well as its social consequences. In its dubious appeals to universal laws, neutrality, and selective scientific research, neoliberalism “eliminates the very possibility of critical thinking, without which democratic debate becomes impossible” (Buck-Morss 2003, 65-66).This shift in rhetoric makes it possible for advocates of neoliberalism to implement the most ruthless economic and political policies without having to open up such actions to public debate and dialogue. Hence, neoliberal policies that promote the cutthroat downsizing of the workforce, the bleeding of social services, the reduction of state governments to police precincts, the ongoing liquidation of job security, the increasing elimination of a decent social wage, the creation of a society of low-skilled workers, and the emergence of a culture of permanent insecurity and fear hide behind appeals to common sense and allegedly immutable laws of nature.

Drones

The rise of drones in the modern surveillance state is response to a neoliberal society.

Charles Mudede • Feb 7, 2013 at 12:12 pm (“Drones and the Logic of Post-Neoliberalism”, http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/02/07/drones-and-the-logic-of-post-neoliberalism)

The second Iraq war was neoliberalism's abandonment of the New Economy narrative and, in the face of deepening economic crises, its turn to Keynesian militarism (rather than a reversion to its economics—the program it began replacing in 1973) as a way to survive the collapse of its legitimacy, which eventually happened in 2008. But the war failed because, one, it never stopped being a war (the persistence of insurgents) and, two, it also lost legitimacy (no WMDs). Drones can be seen as capitalism's response to the collapse of the 30-year neoliberal project and the decline of Keynesian militarism (which began with the end of history—1989). Drones present power with a form of control that's difficult for the institutions established by mass society (institutions that were key to the formation of state military power—which comes down not to governing a massive population but increasing the speed that it can be transformed into a massive army) to check or disrupt. Because they can operate outside of politics, drones connect with the logic capitalism. But it's precisely by this connection that this form of crisis management has access to and pervades all of the spheres of our market-oriented social production: A tiny new open source drone kit made by Bitcraze is buzzing its way to market this spring, targeted at hackers and modders who want to explore droning indoors as well as out. Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel, and Tobias Antonsson are the engineers behind the Swedish startup now accepting pre-orders for a palm-sized quadcopter called the Crazyflie Nano. (Not to be confused with the Norwegian-made nano-copter used by British troops in Afghanistan.) The trio used only open source material for the project, from mechanics to hardware and code. Not only was it a nod to the open source mantra, it saved them a ton of time; all three have day jobs and have spent the last three years working evenings on the Crazyflie Nano.

Our armament culture creates a obsession of drones in popular culture

The deadly serious tone of counter-terrorism discourse is somewhat undermined by the excesses of armament culture and the evident but suppressed child-like pleasures that drive police militarisation. However the fusion of technology, pleasure and militarism within the drone has potentially grave implications. It signals that a consumer militarism driven by cultural and emotional linkages between violence and masculinity is being indulged by the nation state as part of a systematic militarisation of internal security. The evident gap between the fantasy and the reality of the policing drone becomes secondary to its role as a prop within the performances of militarised masculinity that are central to ‘war’ (on crime/ drugs/terror) as a governing strategy. Cole (2013a) notes that much of the controversy over American use of drones overseas pertains to disagreements over the definition of war, and yet in relation to internal security, a militarised ideology of crime control is so hegemonic and pervasive that it has circumvented basic ethical and legal debate. However there is an obvious similarity between the ‘signature strikes’ of military drones that kill otherwise unknown targets on the basis of a ‘profile’ of suspicious activity (Cole 2013b), and the manner in which disadvantaged and ethnic minority communities are differentially impacted by new surveillance technologies and paramilitary policing strategies, sometimes to lethal effect (see McCulloch and Sentas 2006). Singer (2012) has asked ‘Do drones undermine democracy?’ by reducing the political risks associated with engaging in war, but the same question might be asked in relation to police drones and ‘playing’ at war. Within armament culture, boys and men are enjoined to seek simulations of war in order to affirm their relations with one another and establish their masculine bona fides; peace appears positively boring in comparison. Like other manifestations of armament culture, drones are appealing to police because they are embedded within a pervasive cultural code of military signs and symbols promising the rush and thrill of masculine conflict and, ultimately, victory. For Baudrillard (1981) the signs within such cultural systems are free-floating and entirely interchangeable however this paper has highlighted how militarism retains its compelling qualities because it offers imaginary solutions to the contradictions inherent in material, social and economic relations. As such, it retains its linkages to the ‘real’ even as it penetrates and obscures it, reconstituting gendered anxieties into internal and external ‘threats’ whose neutralisation legitimises self-renewal through violence. Behind the prerogatives of the pleasure and thrill of the drones is an emerging mode of governmentality that does not recognise the social and economic determinants of crime. Instead it views criminals as potential targets for a weaponised engagement through which militarised masculinity can be renewed for the aggrandisement of police, as individuals and as a group, but also for the neoliberal state. Anecdotal reports of female drone pilots are making their way into the mass media (e.g. Abe 2012) but the linkage between femininity and militarism is not a straightforward story of empowerment but rather it continues to be characterized by official efforts to ‘maintain the sorts of masculinity that enhance militarism’ (Enloe 2000: 271). The predominance of men in paramilitary units, and the overt reconstruction of an aggressive masculinity within the paramilitary ethos more generally, suggests that the militarization of crime control is a mode by which threatened formations of masculine values and practice are preserved within a changing social and cultural landscape. Central to this dynamic are the feelings of pleasure and excitement that intersect in the drone, and hence the integration of such technology into policing symbolises a dual obfuscation: Crime as ‘game’, or crime as ‘war’? Or crime as ‘war game’? Crime control strategies based on the ‘logic’ of armament culture, with its dreams of omniscient surveillance and supreme firepower, have Toys for the Boys 173 123 consistently produced results counter to their stated aims by inciting resistance to ‘shock and awe’ tactics. Nonetheless the failings of militarism as a mode of crime control is continually eclipsed by a technological fetishism based on militarised hardware that promises triumph and affirmation through violence. This is a telling measure of the potency of militarism as a symbolic code of gendered displacement and defence against social change