The Neoliberal Heel-Turn & The Aestheticization of Politics

In an earlier piece, I discussed the difference between liberalism and leftism. Today, I’d like to examine the way in which modern liberalism has substituted aesthetics & symbolism for action & policy. To do that, we need to understand the roots of modern liberalism, which means looking back to the conservative movement of the 1980s.

Back in those days, conservatism was very much on the rise. Popular conservative governments had emerged in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and they seemed unstoppable. It’s crucial to understand that this was a new kind of conservatism. Consider this Republican poster from the 1950s :

It’s impossible to imagine any conservative of the last 40 years supporting union membership or social security nets, isn’t it? Even job security is anathema to modern conservatism. What happened in the 1980s was the rise of a radical conservatism that sought not to preserve the status quo, as the name “conservative” implies, but to remake society in order to meet extreme ideological goals.

A large focus of this, of course, was the economy. Conservatives had long had qualms about government control over the economy (partly, but certainly not entirely, because of their opposition to communism), but it was the 1980s radical conservatives who decided to do something about it. Their plan was a smorgasbord of privatization, cutbacks, austerity, and union breaking, all of which are key neoliberal doctrines.

Conservatives said that these actions would make like better for ordinary people. Perhaps some of them even believed it. It didn’t work out that way, of course — they just made life worse for almost everyone. A lot of rich people got richer, though, which may have been the point all along.

Eventually liberals wrested power back from the conservatives, but these weren’t the same liberals who had watched in shock a decade early as conservatism took the world by storm. No, these were liberals who had learned their lesson — they’d been taken by surprise once, and they weren’t going to let it happen again.

Unfortunately, the liberals had learned exactly the wrong lesson. Conservatism rose to dominance through hateful social rhetoric, dishonest economic rhetoric, and generally offering to make life better for their supporters, who they took great pains to invigorate.

Liberals took one look at all this and decided that the key point was conservative economics. The conservatives had the right idea about the economy, and the trick was to accept their framework & offer similar economic rhetoric, but to do it better. They were going to out-conservative the conservatives. The end result was predictable — an age of even more privatization, public-private partnerships, austerity, and cuts to social programs. That’s how you get liberals like Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien slashing vital parts of the social safety net.

Did any of this work? Of course not. Once again, it just made the rich richer and the poor poorer. The only real difference was liberal support for “targeted” programs, supposedly meant to ensure that only the worthy would be helped, but which in reality meant forcing needy people to jump through ridiculous hoops and denying people aid based on technicalities.

The real effect was severing liberalism from its traditional base — unions and progressives. Unions, by and large, opposed all these neoliberal policies, because they were obviously bad for union members. To the liberal elite, this meant that unions were being “unreasonable”, since they were against policies that liberals truly thought were necessary, just because those policies were awful & destructive. This pushed liberals into an even closer alliance with big business, Wall Street, and the professional-managerial class.

Progressives & activists experienced a similar trajectory. While liberalism certainly remained more friendly to them than conservatives, progressives are traditionally hostile to neoliberal-style economics, and liberals had become deeply adverse to significant social change. You may recall that gay marriage was legalized in Canada and the United States by the courts, not by legislation. If that isn’t enough, consider the fact that a majority of Americans support universal health care and the legalization of marijuana, positions that are well to the left of the liberal Democratic party. Adopting these positions would seem like a no-brainer for the Democrats — the only way to explain their failure to do so is to understand how deeply committed they are to maintaining the status quo.

(If you were so inclined, you could make the argument that modern liberalism is better understood as conservative, while modern conservatism is better understood as a cult, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

That’s neoliberalism in a nutshell, but to really understand why modern liberalism has embraced the notion of aesthetics as politics, we also have to dig into the notion of technocracy. Simply put, the technocratic movement holds that political decisions should be made by experts who apply their knowledge and skills in a non-ideological way. Ideology and principles are obsolete — there’s no need to debate about whether or not poor people should be left to die in the streets when we can just plug some numbers into a model and act based on the result. Technocracy is, of course, inherently ideological and filled with bias, but it claims not to be, which is a wonderful little pitfall.

Is modern liberalism technocratic? Look at the 2020 Democratic primaries, in which Elizabeth Warren was considered a strong candidate because she “did the homework” and “had a plan”. The content of her plans wasn’t an issue — the simple fact that she had one was considered a virtue. Similarly, look at Kamala Harris’ plan for student debt relief, which offered up to $20 000 of debt forgiveness (a tiny fraction of what many people owe), but only for Pell Grant recipients who run small business for at least 3 years in disadvantaged communities. That’s quite possibly the epitome of technocratic neoliberalism.

(As a side note, the liberal embrace of technocracy may go a long way towards explaining why the Democratic party has been so bad at handling the Republicans over the last couple decades. Democratic politicians seem to genuinely see Republican politicians as reasonable people, largely guided by logic & facts, working in good faith towards effective government — their only difference, according to the Democrats, is ideology. All of that is obviously false, and the only way not to realize it is if you’ve been blinded by technocracy.)

So, if we accept that modern liberalism is defined by neoliberalism and technocracy, what does that mean for politics as aesthetics? Simply put, liberalism has abandoned most of its previously held principles and given up on the possibility of real change. To be a liberal today is to accept that things aren’t going to get better, and that your own political party either can’t or won’t help you.

Liberals cling to symbols and aesthetics because that’s all they have left. When Nancy Pelosi sarcastically clapped at a Trump speech, that was a huge deal (even though Pelosi quickly admitted that her applause was sincere). Later, when Pelosi ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of The Union speech, that was another Moment with a capital M. The fact that Pelosi had voted for massive increases in Trump’s military budget was beside the point. Similarly, the fact that Barack Obama was a young, cool, Black man made him an icon — despite his drone programs, his failure to tackle Wall Street, his lackluster health care reform, and his dearth of actual accomplishments.

Let me be absolutely clear, because I know a lot of people will misinterpret that last paragraph : representation matters, and not just for symbolic or aesthetic reasons. It’s a real and important force, and we shouldn’t undervalue it. Symbols and aesthetics are also important, if only because it’s hard to convince people to vote for you using only a black and white pamphlet filled with bullet points about municipal tax rates and sewage management.

However, the main business of politics is to use power in order to carry out policy. Without that, you’re not a politician, you’re a celebrity. In giving up both principles, which motivate change, and the will to enact change, modern liberalism has abandoned the whole point of politics. The entrenched liberal establishment is still able to feather its nest, thanks to close relations with big business, but ordinary liberals are left with nothing but aesthetics to cling to.

That’s why they turned Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had only 1 Black clerk (out of more than 100 during her time on the Supreme Court), and who had a problematic history on racial issues in general, into the Notorious RBG. That’s why Robert Mueller, who testified in front of the Senate in favour of attacking Iraq & who supported widespread NSA surveillance of Americans, became a liberal icon. When aesthetics are all that matter, you can create heroes out of whole cloth. Substance has been wholly rejected and image is all that matters.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the liberal establishment had such a hard time understanding Bernie Sanders. At first they described Bernie’s followers as a “cult”, but once Bernie lost & began supporting Biden, they were completely thrown off by the idea that Bernie’s supporters weren’t necessarily going to follow suit. What the Democratic establishment never understood, what they could never understand, is that Bernie’s support wasn’t based on personality, it was based on policy. Because they only understand aesthetics, they assumed his popularity was a product of aesthetics. The possibility that actual policy might get people out to vote was baffling to them, and so was the idea that Americans had an appetite for significant change.

What does this say for the future of liberalism? Nothing good. Our world is faced with crisis after crisis, from COVID-19 to the rise of fascism to climate change. The status quo is fundamentally unable to deal with any of these issues, but all modern liberalism can offer is the status quo, maybe with a few minor tweaks. That doesn’t augur well for Biden’s presidency, and if the Republicans manage to replace Trump with a competent fascist, that spells serious trouble for everyone on Earth.