Neoliberal rhetoric slurs the past into the present to keep old enemies alive

Evidence

The transition from past (“the Treaty came to be viewed”) to present tense (“the NIEO operates”) in Kirkpatrick’s remarks is instructive. To suggest that the NIEO functions today through the institution of the General Assembly is to reinscribe the danger that the G-77 agenda poses thirty years after it was declared at the Sixth Special Session, and in so doing to efface the dramatic transformation that has occurred within the international political economy in the intervening three decades. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1816

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how intellectual-network historiography frames the NIEO as a continuing threat; also echoes constructivist claims about how rhetorical framing constructs interests. — connects to: Disputes framed as being about the past really argue about the present — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 1306; People are haunted by futures the Eighties neoliberal turn terminated — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2290
• SEED: Angle: how the strategic use of verb tense in political testimony weaponizes history — past threats relit as present dangers to mobilize policy.