Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In the words of Stanford anthropologist Philippe Bourgois, who compared his field experiences in El Salvador and East Harlem, authorities were able to transmogrify the direct political and structural violence of class struggle into the decentered, depoliticized everyday violence of capitalist terror, under which the strong and lucky are forced to outrun their own families just to survive.xvii This formulation is structurally similar to the domestic new ideological admixture the Hoover Institution strategized to exploit through Reagan: Confuse class relations by foregrounding the individual. Capital-gains tax cuts accomplish that, and so does shooting into a crowd of civilians with a helicopter gunship.