The New Economy and the Modern South (review)

Michael Dennis's book, The New Economy and the Modern South, offers a much needed look at the impacts of the contemporary economic thinking on local and state levels. Using Virginia's recent history as a case study, Dennis draws a carefully researched, exhaustive, and emotionally charged portrait of the state as it undergoes a transformation to what he terms the "New Economy," which includes deindustrialization, deregulation, and globalization. There is no mistaking where Dennis stands: "Virginia's experience illustrates what was at the core of the American experience in the late twentieth century: the loss of political control and economic stability by working people." (p. 5).

Taking much of his theoretical framework from Karl Polanyi's classic studies about the emergence of the market-driven society, Dennis attacks the growth of the libertarian economic ethos. Globalization has been an important tool in the monetarist-libertarian attack on the rights of labor and the welfare state, but it is just one tool: "In fact, the globalization trope distracts attention from the most significant development of the era: the rise of an ideology that placed the unfettered marketplace at the center of American life." (p. 1). The larger problem for Dennis is the growing dominance of corporatist vision, with its emphasis on atomistic individualism, government-business cooperation, and celebration of the marketplace as the proper arbiter of all social questions.

The author is unequivocal and outspoken in his opposition to the New Economy, attacking it with a mixture of unyielding facts and populist fervor. His criticism is based on a plethora of solid sources and expressed with sharp and evocative prose, resulting in the narrative of the economic dislocation that is often both accurate and appealing. The march of globalization and New Economy in Virginia, the South, and the United States have created losers as well as winners, as most economic paradigm shifts tend to do. Dennis's work is primarily interested in the losers and negative effects of the change.

Despite its occasional effectiveness and factual accuracy, Dennis's powerful and emotive assault too often flirts with populist agitprop. His long list of culprits for Virginia's latest struggles includes Republicans, New Democrats, corporations, IMF, WTO, NAFTA, globalization, technology, and, fundamentally, capitalism itself. The heaviness of his assault, unfortunately, makes his work less effective, and certainly alienates those who do not share Dennis's vision of both the past and the present. This is a story of perpetrators and victims, winners and losers, black hats and white hats.

Dennis contrasts the evils of the New Economy with the factories and shop floors of the immediate post-World War II decades. The book's view of the South's industrial past is often beset by a curious undertone of romantic nostalgia. The tobacco factories and textile mills have acquired an attractive, nostalgic patina. Dennis's assumptions about industrial jobs that paid living wages and offered security come across like whiff of madeleines for a Proustian scholar. Improvements in the characteristics of work, labor's new access to education, and the revolutionary advances in the region's racial attitudes receive only passing reference and exist to complement the book's general tone of decline and disappointment. For example, Dennis's argument claiming that "...the official color blindness of the era made the burden of racial discrimination even heavier" for Virginia's African Americans is perplexing in light of observable realities and the region's racial history (p. 281).

This criticism aside, the book is valuable reading for anybody interested in Southern economic development, globalization, and the political economy of the post-WWII United States. Despite its occasional gloom-and-doom hyperbole, it offers a useful counterbalance to the often pollyannaish narrative of the New Economy, as told by the globalization romantics and chamber-of-commerce types. The book should be an excellent catalyst for many graduate seminar debates.