ABSTRACT
After the recent presidential election, expectations have been high for some kind of sea change in the United States. Hopes for the end of the war in Iraq, a resuscitation of the middle class, and stemming the problems caused by climate change have all been discussed on the blogosphere. But as pundits ponder and debate whether we are in a new era, some critics see a continuation of past ideologies. Most telling, the recent collapse of the stock market has not brought criticism from the new administration regarding the centrality of the market in our lives, rather only a desire to reform its ways. As one observer noted, “Obama’s ideology refl ects the developing synthesis, one that attends to both the power of market forces and the need for government action to ameliorate the dislocation that those forces create.”2
