It is simultaneously the case that neoliberalism is what you think it is and it is not what you think it is. Simultaneously lambasted by the staunch left and right and sometimes for similarly motivated reasons. Some such motivations are sound, some are slightly disoriented, and I have felt there is a specific need for the conservative critiques of neoliberalism to be recalibrated in light of recent shifting trends of popular conservative outlooks into somewhat concerning territory.
Many unexpected persons – such as those on the right wing – are starting to doubt maximal liberty as an admirable political and economic model for human flourishing and have greater sympathies for forms of central command. Such people cite as the main culprit in their strife as the excess of unchecked free forces and monetary mechanisms resulting of “neoliberalism.”
It is important to realise that neoliberalism’s flaws are specifically and genuinely related to its own sympathies for central command and technocracy. This is then juxtaposed with a signalled sympathy and affirmation for market activity as a means to prosperity, and this principally – and almost solely – differentiates neoliberalism from forms of explicit leftism. However, this neoliberal affirmation of markets is based on faulty and disoriented premises from the original reasons that freed market forces are affirmed by true adherents of liberty. The extent to which market activity will produce economic prosperity will be taken entirely for granted. Closest attention is paid to the aggregate nationwide (or worldwide!) macroscopic outcomes (particularly economic outcomes) whilst the microscopic understanding of actors’ incentives and general ease of activity on the ground level are strongly deprioritised or just outright ignored. The central banks and the finance ministers will voluntarily designate the interest rates and print a couple of billions here and there, thinking that they are truly able to tinker around with specified outcomes of an entire national economy. As if they are God. The fact that the unenlightened plebs – who have at most half a PhD! – will still go to work every day to earn their living – as is second-nature to any with divine commitment to provide for themselves are their immediate loved ones – and help to counterbalance the excesses of central banks’ monetary expansions with the tax revenue they generate is all taken as a complete given!
This is not a part of the principled philosophy of those with an affirmation of liberty.
We were first set on this path many decades ago with neoliberalism’s formative years in primarily Anglospheric intellectual realms of the 1930s. Walter Lippmann published his influential 1937 book “The Good Society” which is a vast and thorough consideration of the crisis of defining liberty in a time when many Western nations were at a crossroads of all manner of differing tyrannies. It certainly has its merits as an insight into what such intellectual minds in the otherwise free Anglosphere were personally feeling in realtime as tyranny in continental Europe was unfurled before their very eyes. It also does a particularly thorough job of coming to a good defence of the Anglospheric ideals of liberty and it is in this that the pioneering of neoliberalism helpfully diverges itself from other ideology which strongly affirms a role for the modernist state. However, the latter half of the book, after its preliminary assessments, is when it bares its teeth.
Lippman it will often firmly state his rejection of all types of the then-occurring manifestations of political and economic collectivism. There is indeed a noticeable affirmation of free market commitments to economic activity, but with the genuinely reasoned underpinnings for this left naïvely and negligently untreated, withered and misunderstood. This is then rebalanced and reaccommodated with a particular antithesis of a staunch laissez-faire; flirtations with an suspiciously-justified central determination of outcomes. Just like flirtations between humans; they are often seemingly insignificant enough to be considered harmless and gratifying enough for humans to need little restraint in indulging in them, regardless of any infidelity that may or may not be implied by it. Subtle and well-disguised, sweet and innocent, tempting and seductive. But when given the time to be drawn out for many years unchecked, eventually quite detrimental and destructive. And that is where we find ourselves now
The original United States constitution is an exercise in a system of law and government ultimately neutral to specified aggregate outcomes. And it has been to the United States’ detriment that, since the advent of neoliberalism, it has absent-mindedly acted so unfaithfully towards its origins. As a flirtatiously unfaithful spouse who has such naïve understanding of the long-term implications of what he is possibly doing to undermine his vow of fidelity.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. – special assistant and “court historian” to John F Kennedy, intellectual, social theorist – said in a speech in 1962:
“Jefferson is today remote and irrelevant … a figure, not of present concern, but of historical curiosity.”
And as John F Kennedy himself said in 1961:
“the Constitution was written under entirely different conditions. It was written during a period of isolation. It was written at a time when there were thirteen different units which had to be joined together and which, of course, were extremely desirous of limiting the central power of the government. That Constitution has served us extremely well, but … it has to be made to work today in an entirely different world from the day in which it was written.”
Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas said in the same year
“The President is hobbled in his task of leading the American people to consensus and concerted action by the restrictions of power imposed upon him by a Constitutional system designed for an 18th century agrarian society far removed from the centers of world power. It is imperative that we break out of the intellectual confines of cherished and traditional beliefs and open our minds to the possibility that basic changes in our system may be essential to meet the requirements of the 20th century.”
And later in 1963
“Government by the people is possible but highly improbable … The case of Governments by elites is irrefutable insofar as it rests on the need for expert and specialized knowledge”
It was claimed by the neoliberals that it is not enough for the state and the law to be predominantly neutral to aggregate outcomes but must instead have an active consciousness and participation in guiding them. But of course, not socialism! That would be crossing the line! However when the changeover to a more firmly aggregate-outcome-conscious method of governance is so drawn out and gradual over the course of multiple decades, the line can be crossed quite inconspicuously. The 1960s was clearly a big turning point on that front.
In the present day, we have this confounding silliness of those who have decided that they are taking up a newly defined neoliberalism for the twenty-first century, with the deluded grandeur that this time around, the recipe for the medicine is properly refined. Neoliberalism has failed since the 1930s to act successfully on all manner of its original stated concerns which go beyond the liberal principles of the more traditional branch preceding it. Large relative disparities of wealth still exist. Epidemics of criminal violence and drug abuse are widespread. Families are broken. Large corporations are still as apparently hegemonic as they were when the original concerns about their excessive market shares were first stated a century ago. Life satisfaction is particularly slim for a great many number of people. Major national economies in the world are seemingly no less volatile and no more resilient to major crises and crashes. Certainly, there is a vast array of explanations and interpretations of all these present phenomena, but it is quite clear to see that the neoliberal model has done very little to alleviate them. If the libertarians have anything to say about it, they have exacerbated the problem. Just like the stubborn proponents of socialism after the failed results of their experiments are laid bare to see, there seems to be no lesser need for centrally-commanded wisdom of elites in addressing the issues of the day.
Neoliberalism has been a significant component of the intersection of the Venn diagram of the Democrat and Republican policies (but obviously more prominently realised by Democrats) for nearly a whole century. It had been ever more hegemonic than that in Europe, to even more disastrous consequences. It tolerates the expansion of major Pan-European economic and political conglomeration whilst otherwise paradoxically claiming that the efforts are all in the best interests of truly distancing Europe from the legacy of Naziism, fascism and communism. It claims that we must have greater taxation and regulation on environmentally harmful economic activity and expert-informed central command on which new energy sources to invest in, with descent and scepticism propagandised against and quashed, whilst simultaneously promoting its own campaigns of concrete-heavy urbanisation for the plebian masses and other silly “renewable” energy projects (carrying their own far share of awkward environmental damages) beyond the organic immediate demand for them. It claims to stand for freedom of religious observance and freedom of conscience whilst otherwise being incredibly sympathetic to anti-discrimination laws that are very easily conducive to abuses and unjustified lawful discrimination and harassment of those who hold a worldview with the slightest conformity to the traditions and wisdom of the ancients. It claims to stand for good monetary and fiscal policy whilst otherwise tolerating the existence of the Federal Reserves, International Monetary Funds and WorldBanks of the world. It claims to stand in contrast to political and economic collectivism whilst tolerating the United Nations and their great leniency towards the Soviet Union and their infiltration into the institution of the United States that resulted from it, and their leniency towards China – and all manner of other dictatorial hellholes on the planet sitting on their “committees of human rights” – in the twenty-first century.
(Oh, and sole usage of postal balloting in elections is totally fine)
These are not people who believe in maximal utility of liberty for human flourishing. Neither are the malignant outcomes of today a result of or to be laid at the foot of initiatives with the genuine presupposition of maximal liberty in political affairs.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
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FURTHER READING
- https://fee.org/articles/what-is-neoliberalism-anyway/
- https://mises.org/wire/neo-liberalism-laissez-faire-interventionist-state
- https://archive.org/details/pdfy-v8vZP_IcjiWOZ9Qm/mode/2up
- https://exponentsmag.org/2020/02/16/what-is-neoliberalism/
- https://exponents.substack.com/p/what-neoliberals-believe
- https://monoskop.org/images/9/9f/Lippman_Walter_The_Good_Society.pdf
- https://www.centerfornewliberalism.org/
- https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/thinkpieces/looking-at-the-world-through-neo-liberal-eyes-2
- https://cdobro.medium.com/whats-a-neoliberal-good-for-ac4bea831397