Essay:Neoliberalism part 1

Neoliberalism has been the defining political ideology of the Reagan era (1981-present) and has played a major role in disasters ranging from financial meltdowns, to environmental destruction, to the rise of the Alt-Right. This is the first installment in a series of essays on the topic of Neoliberalism.

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is that it's a modified form of liberalism that favors the Free Market; Neoliberalism is founded on an economic version of the Just World hypothesis in which the market ensures people get what they deserve, and our society is essentially meritocratic.

Under this worldview it is impossible to answer the problems of economic inequality and the concentration of wealth and corporate power because those things are not recognized as negatives in the first place. Wealth becomes seen as an indicator of somebody's moral worth, so poverty is blamed on the poor and the rich are assumed to deserve their wealth. The impact of generational wealth and the advantages/disadvantages people have thanks to the circumstances of their birth are ignored.

The meritocracy myth leads to the bogus assumption that racism and sexism are personal moral issues with no meaningful relationship to structural power. With that assumption in place, Neoliberals can criticize any attempted institutional approach to addressing inequality and blame women and minorities for their own problems without being called racist or sexist (or so they think). From this perspective affirmative action is interpreted as giving jobs to unqualified women and minorities.

Neoliberalism conflates capitalism with democracy and sees participation in "the market" as the ultimate expression of freedom. Neoliberals believe regulation and taxation should be minimized (though they disagree on exactly how little). If an unregulated market leads to formation of monopolies or to a handful of large firms dominating an entire industry, then according to Neoliberalism that concentration of power is just the will of the market rewarding them for their efficiency. In other words consumer freedom is sacrificed in the name of the Free Market.

Neoliberals also don't have a problem with state intervention on behalf of the rich, in other words "Corporate Welfare". The excuse is that if the government gives money to people who are already rich then they will grow the economy and create jobs; this comes in the form of subsidies as well as tax-cuts on the rich. Somehow giving everything to the rich and hoping it'll trickle down to the rest of us is seen as preferable to the government just helping us directly.

Neoliberals also tend to treat Free Trade and Globalization like forces of nature, rather than as the products of human agency; in fact Neoliberals frequently talk about "the Market" as though it were a karmic force of nature.

It's worth acknowledging that Neoliberalism isn't strictly a rightist or leftist philosophy. Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of Establishment politicians in both the Democratic and Republican party and it's not hard to see why. Our government is caught in a cycle of cronyism where rich people donate money to get politicians elected, those politicians support policies that benefit their rich donors so they keep receiving money and getting elected. This corruption is a systemic issue not a partisan one.

Neoliberalism no longer appeal to the majority of the American people, especially millennial and Gen zers. Most of us know that Neoliberalism isn't working and were pissed off at the Establishment.

Why do I think Neoliberalism lost popularity?

There's pragmatic reasons and then there are more psychological and emotional reasons. On the pragmatic side Neoliberal economics has broken promises and led to higher income inequality and lower economic mobility. As Donald Trump said "the American dream is dead". For once I agree with him. The Great Recession and the subsequent Bank Bailouts also did a lot to disillusion people about Neoliberal capitalism.

On the more psychological and emotional side I believe Neoliberalism was only able to thrive in the first place because of the Cold War and the social acceptance of low-key racism.

Cold War

At the cultural level, America has always celebrated radical individualism, as epitomized in the frontiersman image. The frontiersman image was always been mythical, a product of revisionist history. The ideological conflict embedded in the Cold War made it easy to popularize a rhetoric that conflated capitalism with both democracy and individualism. The Cold War fostered a denial about the limitations of market capitalism and antipathy towards anything associated with communism, including collective economic action.

It's been 28 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Millennials (here defined as anyone born from (1982-2002) and Gen Z (everyone born since 2003) have never known a world in which the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to the United States, therefore we don't have the same reflexive disgust towards socialism or the same blind trust in capitalism.

Race+Class

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" John Steinbeck

There's a grain of truth to that potentially apocryphal quote. The myth of the rugged individualist has been part of American culture for a long time but belief in this delusion has historically been been a privilege denied to women and black people. This quote is also misleading. Once upon a time we did have a strong labor movement in this country.

I think this next quote gives a better picture of why Neoliberalism (and previous similar ideologies) were able to be accepted.

"If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you." Lyndon B Johnson

America has a long history of getting white middle and working class people to support an economically unjust system by turning them against black people. Even those skeptical that we lived in a meritocracy could still support an unjust system as long as it provided them with somebody to look down on. This doesn't necessarily have to be black people either, it can also refer to women and to the LGBT.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” Lee Atwater: 1981

By the late 1970's however overt bigotry became increasingly marginalized, and this gave rise to Dog Whistle politics so that people could express bigotry while maintaining plausible deniability. The older more brutally honest racism of the past was replaced by a subtle more insidious racism: Neoliberal Racism.

Neoliberal Racism affirms racial hierarchy by first presupposing the existence of meritocracy and a free market and then by denying that said inequality has anything to do with race. Old racist stereotypes continued to be reproduced in the media, particularly though the way crime was depicted, and continued to be internalized by both black and white Americans. It took PC Culture a little while to catch up to this low-key racism but eventually it did happen.