The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 11

When folks who write about the neoliberal turn write about its history, most of us locate it domestically in the austerity forced upon New York City, and before that in the military coup that forced Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende out of power in favor of military general Augusto Pinochet. In the first real neoliberal experiment, Pinochet, with the help of Chicago economists (“the Chicago Boys”) gutted Chile’s welfare state replacing it with a libertarian’s paradise. By the time Pinochet left, Chile had been transformed and leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had at least one real life example they could use to tout national-level change.

In perhaps the starkest example of a new movement afoot 35 year old Gabriel Boric was elected President of Chile on an anti-Pinochet campaign. He just announced his cabinet, filled with former student protesters and women. Coming into politics a bit over a decade ago leading protests for free education, (a movement that probably caused him to do a 180, jettisoning law school for a new life in politics—he was elected to Congress a short time later), Boric comes into the presidency at almost the perfect time—he’s elected just at the moment Chile decides to rewrite its constitution. None of us would’ve predicted this.

Now it’s highly unlikely that, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends up becoming President in 2028, and even less likely that it happens on the eve of a Constitutional Convention.

But the Boric example speaks to the necessity of a longer time horizon. And also to the importance of movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter and their ability to shift the sense of what’s possible.

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University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel was fired last week—I had to do a double take because I received word through Sports Illustrated of all places—for an inappropriate relationship with an employee. When I read about what he’d done, the first thing I thought about was his October 2021 contract extension. Schlissel was sent to leave his position in July 2023 and the new contract had him making his president’s salary (927K) for an additional two years (including a one year leave) a $2 million lab and then $36K a year in expenses. I thought about the contract not in the what did he give up? way, but because as an example of how corrupting power is. He violated the law using his work email (see full report here) because he thought it didn’t apply to him. And he wasn’t wrong….until he was.

(Years and years ago the leader of an incredibly powerful institution was interested in a friend of mine. The leader was in an area that experienced lockdown—the metropolitan region was closed, no one could go in or out. Yet and still the leader reached out to my friend to see if my friend would be interested in flying to see him. “I thought the city was closed” my friend said. “That doesn’t apply to me.”)

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Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore City’s State Attorney was indicted in federal perjury charges on January 13 and recently filed finance reports state that Mosby and her husband Nick (President of City Council) used campaign money on lawyers to defend themselves. If the Mosby’s are found guilty (and I hope they aren’t—Nick is a friend), to some this will further point to Baltimore corruption, to the inability of Baltimore city government to function as anything other than a money pit.

And there’s a there there.

I make two comments in response. First to the extent there’s corruption in Baltimore, that corruption is both public and private. Further it extends from Baltimore to Annapolis as Governor Hogan’s corruption is pretty much plain to see.

Second, if there is one way that the “being twice as good” thing levied upon racial minorities (and sometimes white women) should matter it is in public service. I don’t expect black faculty to be twice as productive as our non-black white counterparts,  but I do expect us to uphold the values that put us where we are. Point me at a school like Hopkins that has black faculty, a school like Michigan that has black faculty, and I’ll point you to the student led movement that made that possible. And then to the values embedded in that movement that suggest we’re not put here to simply write articles for Contemporary Political Theory but to be something more.

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I wrote earlier in the week about what happened in the Senate. As expected the Senate refused to vote on voting rights legislation because they refused to revisit filibuster rules, and when I say “they” I really mean Sinema and Manchin.

If there’s two silver linings to what looks like a bad week, there’s the fact that the politics in the Democratic Party have shifted enough that it will no longer be possible to run for senate without removing it. And that we now see significant evidence of a movement afoot to make sure that neither Sinema nor Manchin are here come 2026. Or at the very least that their votes won’t matter. Soon it’ll be possible to write “Remember, Chile wasn’t returned to the people in a day” as a way to get people to take a longer and more institutional view about this type of thing.