On the Angel of History

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

"Social progress has ceded the historical stage to individual actions, values, tastes and personal success, just as any notion of the common and public good that once defined the meaning of progress is rendered as pathological, the vestige of a kind of socialist nightmare that squelches any possibility of individual freedom and responsibility. If progress even in its mythic register was once associated, however flawed, with lifting the populace from the bondage of necessity, suffering and exploitation, today it has been stripped of any residual commitment to the collective good and functions largely as a kind of nostalgic relic of a historical period in American history in which a concept of the social state "was not always a term of opprobrium" or a metaphor for state terrorism.(7) The language of progress, however false, has been replaced by the discourse and politics of austerity - which is neoliberal code for making the working and middle classes bear the burden of a financial crisis caused by hedge fund operators, banking and investment houses and the mega-rich.(8)

"The catastrophe that marks the current historical moment no longer wraps itself in the mantle of progress. On the contrary, the storm brewing in the United States and other parts of the globe represent a kind of anti-progress, a refusal to think about, invest in or address the shared responsibilities that come with some vision of the future and "the good society." Composing meaningful visions of the good society that benefit citizens in general, rather than a select few, are now viewed as "a waste of time, since they are irrelevant to individual happiness and a successful life."(9)Bounded by the narrow, private worlds that make up their everyday lives, the American public has surrendered to the atomizing consequences of a market-driven morality and society and has replaced the call for communal responsibility with the call to further one's own interests at all costs. The social and its most significant embodiment - the welfare state - is now viewed as an albatross around the neck of neoliberal notions of accumulation (as opposed to "progress"). Society has become hyper-individualized, trapped by the lure of material success and stripped of any obligation to the other." 

Giroux, "In The Twilight of the Social State" (2011).