In his essay, “Comforting the Comfortable: Extreme Makeover Home Edition‘s Ideological Conquest,” Winslow writes:
Since the 1970s, our society has moved from a liberal biopolitic, where the government assumed a large measure of responsibility for providing the resources, social provisions, and modes of education for citizens, to a neoliberal society where market fundamentalism, the vilification of big government, and new forms of authoritarianism have reduced the government’s responsibility in responding to social problems/common good (Giroux, 2006, p. 25). In this neoliberal age, where social services are sliced to the bone, the American citizenry is left with a poor, elderly, and infirmed population that stands in direct contradiction to the American Dream and the myth of the classless society. (269)
According to Winslow, how do shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition sustain the dominant ideology of neoliberalism while providing help for a few poor families who are “deserving” of assistance?