Whatever sort of derision you want to aim at the neoliberal consensus (in all its various manifestations), we shouldn’t pretend the entire enterprise was an abject failure.
Do you or do you not want cheap flatscreens? I’m kidding.
Globalization hoisted untold millions out of abject poverty around the world, and on a strict utilitarian calculus, you could make the case that gain trumps the “losses” that accrued to blue collar workers in America and the lower middle-class across the developed world more generally.
Of course, nobody wants to hear that in America’s Rust Belt, and you run into the same kind of dicey debate when you endeavor to expound the many virtues — economic and humanitarian — of an open-door immigration policy to irritable whites in developed economies.
There’s nothing “wrong,” per se, with tossing aside neoliberalism and the “establishment” under whose watch it metastasized into an all-inclusive prescriptive program for world governance. But in our zeal for change, we should be careful not to embrace self-evidently unserious people for whom societal disaffection is merely an exploitable reservoir of rage capital.
Since the late-1980s, virtually all of the serious people embraced neoliberalism. The idea that the world can be divided into “serious” people and “unserious” ones is true in many respects, but it lends itself to jokes when the serious people get it wrong.
That wouldn’t be especially problematic were it not for the serious people’s incurable penchant for screwing up. When the serious people screw up over and over again, the line between serious and unserious gets pretty blurry, and voters aren’t to be blamed for asking, of the serious people, “Are you serious?”
That’s a simple, but useful, lens through which to view and analyze the enduring appeal of populism and other forms of political extremism since 2015, when the strained neoliberal consensus fractured in earnest across the Western world.
Due in no small part to a lot of ambiguity around the term, neoliberalism, and thereby all the serious people associated with it, are variously blamed for the entire constellation of f-ckups dating back three and half decades, most times fairly, but sometimes not.
The result: Anybody and everybody who can be described as a political centrist or a member of the “establishment” (another nebulous catch-all) needs to go, according to between a third and half of the Western electorate, depending on the country.
The flip side of blanket blame for the political center is blanket acceptance for anyone and everyone who claims to oppose the establishment, even if they’re cartoonish, buffoonish, vile, racist or even criminals and would-be dictators. In fact, democracy itself is increasingly viewed as guilty by association vis-à-vis neoliberalism.
This is a perilous path and the slipperiest of slopes. Really it is. And every week brings some fresh reminder of just how far afield we’re getting on the governance front as a result of what I’d describe as a baby-with-the-bathwater approach to reforming neoliberalism.
In no uncertain terms: There are bad actors out there keen to capitalize on this moment. Marine Le Pen’s one of them. So’s Donald Trump. So’s Nigel Farage. So’s Pierre Poilievre. And so, as it turns out, is Yoon Suk Yeol.
Democracy’s famously messy, and it’s hard to maintain what with humans’ penchant for power and everything that comes with it. Virtually no one engaged in an effort to usurp democratic governance will describe their program as undemocratic. Indeed, some such figures aren’t fully aware of their own undemocratic proclivities. Use the duck rule: If it looks and quacks like a duck, what is it?
We’re at a critical juncture in the West (as usual, I’d remind readers that “West” in this context is a reference to a shared system of ideals, not a strictly geographic term). By and large, we’re failing the test. Just because a lot of the serious people turned out to be unserious in many respects, leading to a string of policy mistakes and disasters, doesn’t automatically bestow legitimacy upon self-evidently unserious people.
Republics. If you can keep them.
At least in the USA, ” the land of self-reliance”, Trump & Co also offer a great set of excuses for your personal failings. As in “it’s not your fault that you cannot get a well-paying job where you can call in sick a few times a month (due to brown bottle flu) because you goofed off in high school and didn’t bother to learn a marketable skill, like being able to read the instructions for a machine. Nope. It’s because of immigrants, racial preferences and, of course, the Chinese!” And those same Chinese are why you became addicted to opiods.
“It’s not your fault” is a winning message.
LOL well said
An additional crucial point , as well noted by Abe Spekle below, is that your hopeless precarity is not due to the economic structure of our country either. It’s all due to immgrants, DEI and the Chinese!
Hopeless precarity?
This is hopeless precarity.
That’s true. Those whining white men in the rural south have nothing to complain about.
In April, H wrote that: “In many (not all, but many) cases, autocrats and autocratic regimes stake their legitimacy in part on the presentation of a perpetual foil. The less successful a given regime is at providing for the needs of its people (where that typically means failing to facilitate good economic outcomes) the more important such narratives become. For Vladimir Putin, the foil is NATO and, less precise, the apostate “West.” For Recep Erdogan, the foil is Fethullah Gulen. For North Korea, the foil is America. For Iran, the foil is Israel. And also America.”
Apparently, for America, the foil is China. (Sorry if I accidentally traffic in pro-China propaganda. Didn’t mean to. Just wanted to echo Derek’s point. Still 100% USA all the way).
Does having a foil also mean we need to go to war against the foil? or can it be theoretical for a long time?
No. If we are serious, we should know what we only have ourselves to blame for our own problems. In the same way China has only itself to blame for its problems. Unless we want to remain in a state of denial that we don’t see the problems coming from within the house. It’s always easier to blame the scapegoats than to admit our own shortcomings. I dare say this thinking is quite popular stateside, where almost everyone tells the next person that the US is the greatest country in the world. I mean, when you’re the greatest, it’s always someone else’s fault. The problem is, it’s not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJh9t9h6Wn0
One thing I frequently remind myself of when I see political leaders, CEOs, coaches/referees, etc. screw up is what would it be like if all of my work got scrutinized to that degree? I’ve made dumb mistakes throughout my career and in my personal life, but I have the luxury of those mistakes impacting few people and not being constantly dissected by the public. I would hazard a guess that’s the same for 99.9999% of people.
Of course if that coach would just pass the ball more, we’d win every game! Let’s hire Bob from Peoria to coach the team since he played junior varsity football and he has enough common sense to pass the ball. Never mind all those fancy analysts and experts who spend their lives dedicated to the sport.
A democracy requires an engaged and educated citizenry. The globalization project was only partially implemented. The gains from trade (the implemented part) were almost entirely diverted to the capital owning class. An informed, educated and engaged citizenry could have used their political power as voters to ensure the gains from trade were largely used for the betterment of society (the part not implemented) rather than diverted to enrich the few.
I should add that as a young, naive economist back in the day, I believed the political will would be there to better the lives of those that were hurt by globalization. I sure got that wrong.
You nailed it–very well done!
H-Man, as you well know the rise and fall of societies is eternal. The hard part is knowing where we are in the rise and fall.
I don’t know for sure, but I feel like this piece is a response to the question I posed in the comments to C’est La vie. If it is, I wanted to say it didn’t go un-noticed and if it’s just a happy coincidence, I’m good with that, too.
I feel like we are all in a mumeration. Flowing, milling turning, order out of chaos.
ON a more descriptive note. I appreciate the different perspectives. H, is more eloquent and knowledgeable than me. Therefore I learn at every interaction. It is correct to not place a halo on the head of the gadfly.
Well damn, I was hoping for a halo!