Neoliberalism

Precarity: The American Way

Watch Now: A PRA Roundtable Discussion

The myth of American Exceptionalism is well-understood to be just that, a myth. But the pandemic-induced national recession has thrown into high relief the true American Exceptionalism: life lived in a constant state of precarity. Precarity…

Webinar

Epicenter: Chicago

Reclaiming a City from Neoliberalism

Introduction In many ways, all eyes are on Chicago. The city increasingly finds itself at the epicenter of multiple discourses of violence and safety – from hubristic Presidential tweets claiming federal intervention is necessary to address Chicago’…

Report

The Road to Flint

The Right’s 50-Year Anti-City Agenda

It’s not by chance that the U.S. is full of hollowed-out urban centers. Residents are disproportionately poor and people of color, surrounded by wealthier and Whiter suburbs. It traces back to the Great Migration, which brought great numbers of…

Article

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

The Privatization Strategy of Pioneer Institute and Betsy Devos

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos poses for a photo with students of Saint Andrew Catholic School on March 3, 2017.

On Wednesday, September 12 a federal judge ruled Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s delay of Obama-era regulation of for-profit colleges as “unlawful.” The regulations forgive federal student loans from “misleading, deceitful, and predatory” lending…

Article

Captive Audience

How Prison Ministries Prioritize Salvation Over Justice

As bipartisan reform efforts have steadily drifted rightward, the heavy hand of evangelicals in prison reform efforts has created new kinds of problems. In the eight years I spent researching my book, God In Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison…

Article

California's Prop 47 Savings in Context

On June 8, 2017, the California Board of State and Community Corrections announced the reallocation of $103 million in savings resulting from the passage of 2014’s Proposition 47 criminal justice sentencing reforms to drug treatment, mental health…

Article

Endgame

How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda

More than an actual means of improving policy, “bipartisan criminal justice reform” has become a mantra signifying hope: that people of good will can come together across ideological divides and partisan gridlock to end our country’s overreliance on…

Article

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 5

Neoliberalism and Privatization

Neoliberalism is the economic, social, and political analysis that best describes the startlingly unequal distribution of wealth and power in the U.S. today. Neoliberalism, and the policies it undergirds, results from the triumph of capitalism and…

Article

Survivors' Village at St. Bernard Projects, New Orleans.

It’s been ten years since the Category 3 hurricane named Katrina came ashore in Louisiana, causing over 1,800 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Five years after the storm, Political Research Associates published the below piece in…

Article

Neo-Confederate South Loses Again – This Time to Free-Market Neoliberalism

After nine Black churchgoers were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag is driving a wedge between neo-Confederates and free-market neoliberals.

Article

Who Speaks for Conservative Women?

“Feminisms” for Life, Liberty, and Politics

A white woman holding a sign saying "I am young, I am a woman, I am FOR life"

n 1979, the rise of feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment motivated conservative evangelical Beverly LaHaye to found Concerned Women for America, established as an overtly anti-feminist female voice. Yet CWA has clung to relevance over the years,…

Article

Opening Pandora's Box

The Rise & Fall of the Right's School Voucher Pioneer

A young girl holding a sign that says Celebrate Teachers - Celebrate Choice! National School Choice Week

Polly Williams, the Wisconsin African American lawmaker behind the nation’s first school voucher program, believed vouchers could help students of color in urban Milwaukee. Conservative donors and right-wing think tanks saw her program as opening…

Article

Lincoln, Slave Narratives, and Hollywood’s Neoliberal Agenda

Why does Hollywood keep distorting history to portray exceptional individuals rescuing America from collective problems?

(Editorial note: This essay has been revised and updated from a previous version. 11/5/2014.) Recently, a number of acclaimed films focusing on the life of Abraham Lincoln, slavery, and the Civil War have distorted historical reality to suggest that…

Article

Neoliberal Language Lessons

How right-wing power—along with free-market ideas—shifted from conservative Christians to the Tea Party

In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, political geographer David Harvey traces the triumph of neoliberalism back to a “revolutionary turning-point” in the late 1970s. In the United States, Harvey notes, Ronald Reagan participated in this…

Article

Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor

Higher education is under attack by the neoliberal enterprise. While most colleges and universities are still nonprofit institutions, they have been overtaken by the neoliberal agenda.

Article

Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Piketty, and the Search for Political Economy

Seventy years after the Right embraced von Hayek’s manifesto, does Piketty’s rock-star reception portend a new revolution?

The response to Piketty from liberal audiences, eager to find an analysis deeper than a Paul Krugman column, reflects not only the economic politics of our own time. It also indicates a longing, however tentative, to bring these economic questions…

Article

When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring “First World” status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north.

Article

An Uncharitable Choice

The Faith-Based Takeover of Federal Programs

Two presidents in a row have increasingly steered federal grants and contracts to conservative Christian groups—including houses of worship.

Article

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics

When Austerity Opens Cages, Where Do the Services Go?

Barbed wire in a spiral form outside a brown building.

Neoliberal policies that result in institutional closures carry a cost, too. Could communities seize the moment to redirect resources toward self-determination and liberation?

Article

Protesters wearing masks. One protester holding a sign that says "The system isn't broken it was built this way."

As White supremacists shifted tactics in response to mass social movements, they needed a mass electoral base. Neoliberals helped build it for them—and colorblindness helped wipe out some inconvenient historical truths.

Article

From the New Right to Neoliberalism

The Threat to Democracy Has Grown

President Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas participate in the initialing ceremony of the North American Free Trade Agreement in San Antonio, Texas.

The U.S. is in the grip of an unprecedented dominance of right-wing ideologies and policies. Many progressive commentators see that the same band of New Right actors that have long pushed a conservative agenda are up to their old tricks, trying to…

Article

Manufactured Emergency

The Neoliberal Assault on Michigan

Those who want to privatize public services and destroy unions have made some successful incursions into the once union-friendly state. Whether Michiganders can mount an effective resistance remains to be seen.

Article

A group of women at a table, with computers and books.

To say that Sheryl Sandberg ruined my life would be to make the same mistake that Sandberg herself makes—it would be to assume that the successes or failures of an individual woman, feminist or no, equal the successes or failures of feminism.…

Article

A person carrying a sign that reads "Human need not corporate greed"

In 2011, Host Hotels & Resorts, Inc., a corporate partner of the Marriott hotel chain, used a general contractor that it had hired to renovate guest rooms at the Host-owned Copley Marriott in Boston. A convoluted web of…

Article

A group of protesters led by Dr. Rev. William Barber II

An Interview with Rev. Dr. William Barber II, President, North Carolina NAACP

Article

Neoliberalizing Public Higher Ed

The Threat of Free Market Ideology

The current crisis within higher ed is often discussed primarily in terms of rising tuition and student debt, but the debt crisis is just one particularly ugly manifestation of a larger trend involving increased corporate investment in college…

Article

The Attack on Unions

Right-Wing Politics and Democratic Possibilities

A man in winter clothes holding a board that says "walker is a koch-conspirator"

More than a million people watched on Youtube as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sneered at a public school teacher who had the temerity to ask him at a September 2010 town meeting how his policies would help the middle class when so many…

Article

Conservative Campus Organizing

Growing Pains or Arrested Development?

Two students holding a banner that says "Shut down Coulter. Wed 7 PM Wheeler Hall."

“A few years ago,” the Washington Times reported in a story last year, “Jeff O’Holleran said he began to realize that he was different from the other boys he knew…. Yesterday, he said, it was time to come out of the closet. In the middle…

Article

A black and white photo of a Black man in glasses, and a black man in a suit.

In order to understand Black conservatism, it is important to understand the character of the Black bourgeoisie. Developing as it did within the context of white cultural oppression, it is not surprising that the values identified by Black…

Article

A Black man in a suit, and a Black woman in a dress and a hat

For most African Americans the notion of a Black conservative is an oxymoron. The overwhelming majority of us reject conservative political positions because we understand in concrete, everyday, practical terms what conservative policies are and who…

Article

Precarity: The American Way

Epicenter: Chicago

The Road to Flint

Dismantling Public Education One Brick at a Time

Captive Audience

California's Prop 47 Savings in Context

Endgame

#First100Days Crash Course: Week 5

The Long Hurricane - 10 years later

Neo-Confederate South Loses Again – This Time to Free-Market Neoliberalism

Who Speaks for Conservative Women?

Opening Pandora's Box

Lincoln, Slave Narratives, and Hollywood’s Neoliberal Agenda

Neoliberal Language Lessons

Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Rise of Contingent Faculty Labor

Friedrich von Hayek, Thomas Piketty, and the Search for Political Economy

Globalization and NAFTA Caused Migration from Mexico

An Uncharitable Choice

Beyond Prisons, Mental Health Clinics

How Colorblindness Co-Evolved with Free-Market Thinking

From the New Right to Neoliberalism

Manufactured Emergency

Neoliberal Feminists Don’t Want Women to Organize

The Shell Game of Contingent Employment

To Shock the Heart of the Nation

Neoliberalizing Public Higher Ed

The Attack on Unions

Conservative Campus Organizing

Black Conservatives: Part Two

Black Conservatives: Part One

Research