What happens?

Yesterday the news came that Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar dropped out of primary contention. The day before it was Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who called a halt to his bid to be the candidate for the Democratic party.  I assume both are throwing their support to former Vice President Joe Biden. Certainly no one has to speculate about the society the current president and his party will create, if they have four more years of power.

Following the line of thought from Wendy Brown’s book, Undoing the Demos, the question that rises to consciousness or percolates as a grim apprehension in the unconscious is what the new order will mean for women, for every citizen of female gender.

The question:

When this rationality prevails, when the activity of human capital appreciation becomes the ubiquitously governing norm, when through responsibilization, privatization, and dismantled infrastructure, along with the dissemination of neoliberal metrics to every sphere of existence, — this bad ontology becomes the governing truth of the Euro-Atlantic world today.

What happens when homo oeconomicus becomes the real in every sense of the word?

The answer:

Gender subordination is intensified…..
The intensification occurs through the shrinking, privatization, and/or dismantling of public infrastructure supporting families, children, and retirees. Such infrastructure includes, but is not limited to affordable, quality early childhood and after school programs, summer camps, physical and mental health care, education, public transportation, neighborhood parks and recreation centers, public pensions, senior centers, and social security.

When these public provisions are eliminated or privatized, the work and/or cost of supplying them is returned to individuals, disproportionately to women. …Women are uniquely penalized to the extent they remain disproportionately responsible for those who cannot be responsible for themselves.

— Excerpt Undoing the Demos Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown p. 105

To summarize in ordinary language: you are to be human capital.

For this among other reasons I intend to employ every means at my disposal to defeat the current occupant of the White House and his party.

The lives of many are in the balance.