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26 New Persp. Q. 2 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/nwpsp26 and id is 1 raw text is: America in Shock America is in shock. It is not because of the unusual sight of the first black President taking up residence in the White House. Barack Obama's profile, after all, is more familiar to the diverse population of today's ethnically and racially hybrid America than the fast disappearing WASP identity of George Bush. Sooner or later, but always, politics codifies cultural change, not the other way around. America is in shock because our economic and financial landscape is suddenly unrecognizable. In the space of a few short months we have morphed from the citadel of free-market capitalism and freewheeling consumerism-from a land of high-flying hedge funds, Hummers and homes that doubled as ATM machines-to a M E N T system in which the banks, insurance companies, mortgage industry and auto manufacturers are quasi-socialized. Adding to the shock is the fact that middle-class investors have seen their portfolios, upon which they depend for retirement, diminished by nearly half. The tax-and-spend epithet that defined America's partisan politics for decades has been replaced overnight with a bipartisan mantra calling for a nearly trillion-dollar fiscal stimulus. No sooner had Milton Friedman been laid to rest (he died in 2006) than John Maynard Keynes was resurrected. Amazingly, even the historical aversion to industrial policy in the United States has yielded to urgent demands for political oversight of private enterprise, starting with the Big 3 in Detroit. The year 2008 is thus likely to go down in American history as an even more piv- otal moment than 2001, when the 9/11 terrorrist attacks occurred, because the life of the average American is going to be shaped far more by the consequences. We're not talking about the inconvenience of lining up to go through metal detectors at the airport. We're talking about the transformation of the American model itself. Joseph Stiglitz was not exaggerating when he quipped to me earlier this year that the fall of Wall Street is to market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to com- munism. Just like that, we're in a different era. I'* WINTER 2009 COM

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