We think of it as "of the Left", but there's also nothing to stop "the Right" from buying the idea that everything is just about Power. Then if you keep at that line of thought pretty soon you turn into a Nazi. Or at the very least, you will hear all claims from "the Left" about "care" or "empathy" with knowing cynicism.
And my perception is that these ideas have begun to spread subliminally throughout the culture, particularly among people who are younger or more educated. Everyone becomes more guarded. The social anxiety ramps up. The persona you see is increasingly a mask. The wall goes up a mile high and ten feet thick.
Have you ever met a friendly dog (stereotypically, perhaps, a golden retriever), that has never been mistreated? It will walk up to you wagging its tail; it is happy to meet you, because you are a person, and people, it has learned, are friendly and good.
Next: Have you met a skittish street-dog, the kind that shop-owners kick and curse as a cur, that walks around with nimble jumpy motions, with its tail between its legs?
The dog is a social animal, and is a model for humans. I observe that we humans are turning into the second, skittish type. You could call it a process of "de-domestication". We are all going feral. Uncivilized.
Life as a social animal is difficult to tolerate when your amygdala is constantly firing around others. But that's exactly the emotional effect of these ideas. And they are infecting everyone.
My counter-hypothesis - maybe this is what happens when the heights of power and wealth keep getting higher and higher. We are transforming more and more into a dog-eat-dog society. This is how civilizations have fallen repeatedly over the past and we are increasingly turning to a new gilded age.
How is inheriting wealth creating value?
I think this ship sailed long long ago.
After a quick skim of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#HistPris I think I can relate the idea of power-knowledge to something with which I am much more familiar: closed loop control theory.
Under that model, it makes sense that one's ability to control would be dependent not only upon how good one's effectors may be ("power"?) but also upon how good one's sensors may be ("knowledge"?). (let alone questions of system identification!)
But that could easily be me using the wrong prism ("observability/controllability") for analysis.
> The key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
> On Foucault’s account, the relation of power and knowledge is far closer than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for which “knowledge is power” means that knowledge is an instrument of power, although the two exist quite independently. Foucault’s point is rather that, at least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know.