Neoliberalism

For the first time in decades, meaningful alternatives to the current political and economic system of the previous four decades are now possible to imagine. The neoliberal consensus is facing a moral, intellectual, and popular legitimacy crisis in both Europe and the Americas, having failed to deliver either the growth or broad prosperity that its ideologues once promised, and facing strong electoral challenges from both the socialist left and the nationalist right.

This turn of circumstances has provoked a defensive response from neoliberalism’s most ardent supporters and others involved in the ideology’s political and cultural hegemony. “Reminder: Liberalism Works, and Marxism Has Always Failed,” Jonathan Chait declares anguishedly. James Traub screams angrily, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses!” While most candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are channeling the spirit of Tony Blair’s famous 1998 call to neoliberal technocracy and making familiar appeals to moderation and tepid meliorism, “not left, not right, but forward” has once again become the median posture among those seeking the Democratic nomination for president.

But over the last few years, another strange phenomenon has emerged: many prominent liberals and centrists insisting that neoliberalism is either a ghost produced by leftists or, alternately, a concept so ethereal that it defies definition and hence serves no meaningful function. Even as the contours of the neoliberal order become ever-more visible as its political prospects weaken and its economic fortunes decline, some commentators in Britain and America, in particular (arguably neoliberalism’s most significant ideological beachheads in the 1980s and 1990s), can’t seem to resist this strange line of argument.

Arguments

1. Claims categorically that neoliberalism does not exist or, at the very least, no longer has a meaningful existence. In his breathtakingly humorless review of The Chapo Guide to Revolution, Politico’s Bill Scher writes, “Nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign.” Or, to take the petulant words of former Clinton sycophant Tom Watson:, “There are no neoliberals in the United States Congress — not one. There isn’t one in any of the country’s statehouses, either. The white academic left, on the other hand, uses it as a working and current ideology on a regular basis.”
2. A second, related theory claims that the phrase originated as an epithet used reductively by leftist trolls trying to defame anyone who crosses their path. In a July 2017 post headlined “How ‘Neoliberalism’ Became the Left’s Favorite Insult of Liberals,” Chait maintains that liberalism has stayed mostly stable and unchanging (thus making “neo” a redundant and derogatory appendage). This argument is based on the astonishingly ahistorical premise that liberal politicians had no influence in the overall rightward movement that followed the 1970s, and that they have not wavered in their essential commitments since the New Deal, notably in economic policy.
3. Another argument, arguably more symbolic variation of the form, claims that the term “neoliberal” has become too vague or imprecise to have any actual relevance. Ben Chu takes aim at the common claim made by those on Labour’s Corbynite left that the EU is a neoliberal organization in an editorial for the Independent, which he says is nonsensical, conspiratorial, and even vaguely sinister. Ed Conway, in part repeating Chait, asks, “What is neoliberalism, and why is it an insult?” While socialists and others on the Left want to label everything they don’t like as “neoliberal,” no one can agree on what the term means, he writes: You could pick any one of Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches over the past few years for . . . examples. The Grenfell Tower was a tragedy of neoliberalism . . . Austerity was a product of neoliberalism. The City is neoliberal, the government is neoliberal, the press is neoliberal . . . Despite the fact that neoliberalism is frequently referred to as an ideology, it is oddly difficult to pin down. For one thing, it is a word that tends to be used almost exclusively by those who are criticizing it — not by its advocates, such as they are (in stark contrast to almost every other ideology, nearly no one self-describes as a neoliberal). In other words, it is not an ideology but an insult.

All of these arguments — and others like these, share some common features. The first is poor, or incomplete history. Far from being immaterial or abstract, neoliberalism was the deliberate project of a small group of intellectuals who, over the course of decades of well-funded organizing and masterful political maneuvering — particularly during the economic crises that afflicted Keynesian social democracy in the 1970s — gradually succeeded in elevating their ideology to the pinnacles of institutional and cultural power. The neoliberal ascendency first captured the old right (in Britain’s Tory Party, the disappointments of the Heath era gave way to the more dynamic and confrontational ethos of Thatcherism, just as Nixon and Ford were succeeded by Reaganism in America), but thanks to the agency of figures like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it eventually secured a foothold in the center-left. The new generation of ideologues who came to dominate Western liberalism in the 1990s were hardly dragged kicking and screaming into the embrace of its more market-zealous incarnation. On the contrary, New Labour acolytes and Atari Democrats were among the most ardent supporters of neoliberalism, and sought out to realign their parties with the new right’s consensus. Given these observable shifts, it is simply ahistorical to claim that liberalism has been ideologically stagnant or that its transformation into neoliberalism during the 1990s did not occur; similarly, it is ahistorical to claim that liberal politicians like Clinton or Obama were simply victims of a generalized rightward drift, akin to a severe weather event, rather than deliberate practitioners of an ideology. If today’s liberal politicians are referred to as neoliberals, it’s because the Left rejects the consensus they aim to maintain and believes that a more compassionate alternative is both conceivable and desirable.

Leaving aside the historical specifics, what about the second main component of the debate — that the term “neoliberalism” is either too broad or too contentious to be useful?

This is the fulcrum of Klein, Conway, and Chu’s reasoning, and like many erroneous arguments, it contains some truth. For starters, there is some uncertainty surrounding the term — but that’s only due to the fact that what it refers to is so broad. Taken at face value, neoliberalism is a mix of classical liberal philosophy and neoclassical economics that amounts (at least on paper) to a governance ethic that views individual freedom as best realized under a regime of limited government activity, favors private enterprise over public ownership, and is skeptical of government regulation. However, neoliberalism also refers to: an existing set of interconnected economic and political institutions; a conscious ideological offensive that transformed global politics in the 1980s and 1990s and the boundaries of acceptable public policy since; a set of principles that guide elected leaders of both the Right and the liberal center, whether they are conscious adherents to neoliberal philosophy or not; and the near-totalizing reality of life under the pressures and logics of late capitalism.

For some, this is sufficient grounds to reject, disregard, or severely limit the use of the phrase — in some cases to the point that it is no longer a recognized part of current life. Identifying or isolating a set of political beliefs as a causal agent becomes essentially worthless if they may be applied too widely, according to this view. After all, how useful is a name that applies to politicians as disparate as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama?

But we might just as easily draw the opposite conclusion. The ubiquity of a particular phenomenon does not make discrete analysis of it useless; if anything, such omnipresence makes identifying it a more urgent and critical task. A phenomenon so widespread that it appears to be present in politics, economics, and culture is hardly a chimera, and many commentators’ apparent reluctance to recognize or even acknowledge its valence as a term can only be seen as a symptom of neoliberalism’s continued stranglehold on our political, cultural, and intellectual lives. Something tends to disappear from your field of focus the longer it has been a part of your reality. To put it another way, the more prevalent an object or phenomena becomes, the easier it is to take it for granted. Following its first disruptive entry in the 1980s, neoliberalism quickly got ingrained in our collective consciousness, to the point where many people now find it difficult to recollect a time before it existed, let alone imagine a future without it. An ideology achieves hegemony precisely when it ceases to be an ideology: its assertions become axioms; its theories become dogma; its arcane vernacular becomes the lingua franca; and its assumptions are buried under “common sense.”

The fact that neoliberalism is still so poorly understood in the political mainstream whose borders it now encircles reflects both the stunning scale of its counterrevolution and the tremendous challenge ahead of those of us who seek to destroy it. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time: it is diaphanous and invisible at the same time, and it is internalized and inescapable. On the other hand, this weird and frequently narcotic dissemination could point to something far more promising.