Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?: Western Civilization, the Longue Durée, and the Culture of Neoliberalism

The James Baldwin–William Buckley debate in 1965 embodied a momentary longue durée skirmish: a collision of inherited cultural and economic assumptions guided by two related scales of world-historical geography. Zoomed into a local-national level, the first scale involved the articulation of the post– World War II American dream. Imagined as a secure standard of living for white Americans (defined as a male, family wage-earning person), this scale historically found implementation through federally subsidized westward expansion, the racial-gendered hierarchy achieved through settler colonialism, slavery, and the Jim Crow aftermath, and after World War II, the federally subsidized suburbs (including infrastructure