The Clinton years saw an emergence of the “public-private partnership,” a rallying-cry to solve social problems that governments didn’t seem to have the bandwidth or the desire to take on. [Anand] Giridharadas [Anand Giridharadas’s “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World”1] interprets this alliance as the culmination of the rhetoric of government inefficiency fused with overconfidence in business know-how to solve social issues. .... this outsized faith has clearly failed the very real needs of people and the planet, and it also provided fertile ground to divide groups that would typically share financial and social affinities based on a politics of “left-behind-ism,” political fear-mongering of the unknown, all in the shadow of governments shrinking the very programs that people, particularly poor people, need most in favor of “private” solutions.

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He writes:

To keep disagreement out of one’s panels was not just an aesthetic decision. In some small way, it changed how the world operated because it shaped what ideas got talked about and what solutions got acted on when people left [the] room, and what programs got funded and didn’t, and what stories got covered and didn’t, and it tipped the scale in the direction of the winners once again, ensuring that the friendly, win-win way of solving public problems would remain dominant. People asking big questions about the underlying system and imagining alternative systems would not be attending.

This example emphasizes how, when the interests of Market World are taken as a given, it inherently limits the scope of the conversation, and the amount of conflict that might be tolerated, engendered, or even recognized, and even the range of ideas generated and potential solutions posed. Likewise, in the imaginary of the museum. If, to survive, the museum must be focused on perpetual growth (in its physical plant, collections, budget), the super-stardom of its director and curator, attendance and social media likes, maintaining its always-precarious financial position (extant regardless of scale), ....

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