The socialist meaning of participatory democracy faded while the politics-of-the-self meaning triumphed.

Evidence

Miller uses these diverging explanations of participatory democracy to argue that it was a loose, flexible, shifting, capacious term that could encompass, in productive, useful ways, multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings. I agree with Miller, but would also argue that these meanings fall into two fairly clear clusters—what I am calling the politics of the self, represented by Hayden and most clearly by Jeffrey, as opposed, in Ross’s and Flacks’ views, not just to politics in some more traditional sense, though it is that, but in particular to the tradition of Enlightenment socialist utopianism. In phs as a characteristic sixties text, these two meanings coexist as if they were the same thing, as they seemed to some extent to do in the minds of the phs authors. But in postmodernity, the latter, socialist meaning recedes—defeated, discredited, disavowed. Note Bob Ross’s tone of puzzled but defiant disillusionment in his mid-eighties interview with Miller: ”To this day I know that this is what I meant [”socialism in an American accent”] and I thought it was what my colleagues meant by participatory democracy” (144). — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 433

Categorization

• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern politics runs on spin rather than totalized official lies. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 715; Participatory democracy politics of the self displaced social structural politics — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 468; Meritocratic individual success coincided with working-class collectivism’s decline. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1553 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Participatory democracy politics of the self displaced social structural politics #corroborates (0.95) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 468
• Meritocratic individual success coincided with working-class collectivism’s decline. #expands (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1553
• Economization displaces democratic self-rule and its supporting institutions. #expands (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 15