The Death of Neoliberalism

At her father’s funeral, Meghan McCain said, “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness.” In a way, she was right, but in fact, American greatness has been dead for quite some time. Sen. John McCain’s funeral represented more the hastening death of neoliberalism, which is what killed American greatness.
Yesterday’s ceremony at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. was what many pundits called a gathering of the resistance. It was rightly seen as a rebuke to Donald Trump, and a paean to bipartisanship.
But make no mistake, bipartisanship has been dead for quite some time. The rise of ideologues on the right has put left in the lurch. Practically speaking, when only one party is willing to compromise, the center of gravity will move the other way. And that is what has happened in America.
Over the last five decades, the center of gravity in American politics has moved to the right. We didn’t get there though bipartisanship, we got there by the Republicans playing hardball, and the Democrats refusing to fight back. Look at how Sen. McConnell sat on Judge Garland’s nomination for nearly a year, and how Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is being pushed through in a hurry, with less than a complete record. And what is the so-called “resistance” doing about it?
Absolutely nothing.
Why have the Democrats refused to fight back? The simple answer is that they are beholden to the same corporate interests as are the Republicans. The net result is that American politics are farther to the right now than they have been in a century. And the crowd in the National Cathedral included most of the living players in that shift. It was a shift built on Southern Strategy racial animus, divisive culture warfare, and anti-intellectual prevarication.
The rightward shift was also built on neoliberalism. In short, neoliberalism was the 18th century ideal of individual rights over the rights of the king and the church. It was the vitiating force behind the fall of colonialism, and the rise of the nation state. But, soon enough, capitalism seized power, and individual rights became subordinate to property rights. Laissez faire neoliberalism made the nation state a servant to capitalism.
But that hasn’t stopped neoliberals from trying to paint a picture of ideals. In his final words, McCain said,
“To be connected to America’s causes — liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people — brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures.”
Last year, receiving the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal, McCain said,
“We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.”
The reality of American power is quite different than McCain’s ideal. Since World War II, we have had fifty-three “military interventions” (i.e., invasions) in no fewer than thirty-seven countries.* Were these invasions for “equal justice” and the “dignity of all people”? Are the people of Yemen, today, being liberated from tyranny and poverty, or is their feeble Shi’ite resistance being crushed by a powerful coalition of petrostates?
So, when the Washington Post says that McCain
“accomplished as much as any politician of his time toward restoring some sense of equilibrium — and of truth, honor and integrity — to the governing of a nation that he served well and courageously in war and in peace.”
What they are saying is that he served a now-outdated state apparatus, where political parties conspired to strengthen the military industrial complex, the corporate state, at the expense of human rights, at home and abroad.
Donald Trump’s proto-fascism replaced McCain’s neoliberal politics. Property rights have completely usurped human rights. Now, not only are moderate Republicans clutching at their pearls, despite their role in the shift to the right, but Democrats have lost their cover, and can no longer play along with this new, overt brand of corporatism, in the spirit of bipartisanship.
With McCain goes the Democrat’s myth of the “good Republican.” The New York Times makes the point,
“Though for much of his career his votes on the Senate floor were mostly along party lines, his periodic challenges to Republican orthodoxy made him more popular among independents, Democrats and the tattered remnants of his party’s moderate wing than with the absolutists in the party’s base.”
McCain’s “periodic challenges” gave Democrats just enough cover to go along with outrageous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and ever-increasing Pentagon budgets. McCain never saw a war or a Pentagon budget he didn’t like, and neither did most of the people who attended his funeral — Republican and Democrat alike. The fact that Henry Kissinger, the architect of many of the corporate state’s worst human rights atrocities, and arguably a war criminal himself, was prominently featured at McCain’s funeral, tells us that we have firmly closed our eyes to our own human rights abuses.
We can safely say, as Meghan McCain did yesterday, that the American greatness realized after World War II is officially dead. Now the question is: will neoliberal fealty to corporate power die as well? Or will we once again embrace the comfortable lie behind neoliberal politics? Donald Trump will almost certainly be impeached, but the ensuing battle will necessarily involve a coalition of capitalist centrists with weakened moral authority. Their ability to regain power has thus also been weakened.
Will we continue to willfully turn a blind eye to the excesses of the American empire? Will we cheer on bipartisanship, even when we realize that it is actually harming us? To get a good outcome to these questions, to paraphrase Finley Peter Dunne, we need to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. Lifting the veil on the lie that was neoliberal capitalist bipartisanship will anger many, but they are precisely the people who need to be angered.
*American military interventions since World War II:
1. China I 1945–46
2. Syria I 1949
3. Korea 1950–53
4. China II 1950–53
5. Iran I 1953
6. Guatemala I 1954
7. Tibet 1955–70s
8. Indonesia 1958
9. Cuba 1959
10. Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960–65
11. Iraq I 1960–63
12. Dominican Republic I 1961
13. Vietnam 1963–74
14. Brazil 1964
15. Belgian Congo 1964
16. Guatemala II 1964
17. Laos 1964–73
18. Dominican Republic II 1965–66
19. Peru 1965
20. Greece 1967
21. Guatemala III 1967–69
22. Cambodia I 1969–70
23. Chile 1970–73
24. Argentina 1976
25. Turkey 1980
26. Poland 1980–81
27. El Salvador 1981–82
28. Nicaragua 1981–90
29. Cambodia II 1980–85
30. Angola 1980
31. Lebanon 1982–84
32. Grenada 1983–84
33. Philippines 1986
34. Libya I 1986
35. Iran II 1987–88
36. Libya II 1989
37. Panama 1989–90
38. Iraq II 1991
39. Kuwait 1991
40. Somalia I 1992–94
41. Iraq III 1992–96
42. Bosnia 1995
43. Iran III 1998
44. Sudan 1998
45. Afghanistan I 1998
46. Yugoslavia — Serbia 1999
47. Afghanistan II 2001-present
48. Iraq IV 2002–03
49. Somalia II 2006–07
50. Iran IV 2005-present
51. Libya III 2011
52. Yemen 2016-present
53. Syria II 2016
