Neoliberal Individuals
Note: This post may be helpful in understanding the ideas here and in other posts in this series.
Many of my early posts at Emptywheel were devoted to neoliberalism. I focused on its impact on the national economy. I saw it as the intellectual (I use the term loosely) force behind the deregulation policies of both legacy parties in the post-Reagan era. These policies gave us several financial crashes that hurt millions of Americans. Also, they gave us at least 813 billionaires who have taken control of our government.
I thought that the success of Biden’s Keynesian economic policies proved once and for all that neoliberalism was trash. I was wrong.
Neoliberalism had another deadly barb: homo economicus. This cursed idea is that human beings are isolated rational consumers focused on maximizing their own utility in head-to-head conflict with other consumers. This is a stupid, evil idea. I thought that even religious fundamentalists would reject it because their preachers insist that humans were created in the image of the Almighty, and conflict-based consumption could never be an attribute of an all-powerful Deity. I was wrong.
People who hold this view of themselves think that everything they have is the result of their own actions, and is the just reward for their goodness and risk-taking. If they have little or nothing, it’s their own fault. They aren’t good enough at the conflict, and deserve what they get.
An ideal alternative
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition lays out a better view of human nature. I say better because it emphasizes the potential of our species. In my last post I quoted this summary of her thinking on our current situation.
For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. …
Snip
Arendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key features: these are world alienation .… World alienation refers to the loss of an intersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means of which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of reality.
Arendt thinks we have lost the source of our power as human beings. In Chapter 28, she says that our power comes from our ability to engage with each other in the public sphere by speech and action. Power disappears when that ability is not present. She writes:
What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. Kindle Edition p. 200, my paragraphing.
I read Arendt as saying that we have the ability to make and enforce decisions as a group, but only if we are prepared to meet each other in open discussion, in a setting where “words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities” and actions are used “to create new realities”. I think she is saying that we have lost this capacity.
Arendt contrasts forms of government arising from her conception of power with tyranny. Chairman Mao said that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Arendt disagrees. She says that isn’t power, it’s violence.
Tyrants destroy power by isolating the tyrant from the subjects, and by isolating the subjects from each other. The primary tool of the tyrant is violence, which, she says, is stronger than power. Subjects might be able to pursue their own interests in arts, crafts, or manufacture. But they are impotent, they lack the power to dream new dreams, to create new realities. She says that the tyrant has the ability even to take from the subjects their own projects. This is what happened in George Orwell’s 1984.
Discussion
1. The theoretical framework of Arendt’s views of power seems to harmonize with my story of human evolution through cooperation.
2. There is no place for speaking and acting in our current political structure. The Republicans are a top-down group. The rubes who support it take their marching orders from its lieutenants, especially right-wing preachers, right-wing talking heads, and the incredible array of anti-vaxxers, Qrazies, and grifters on right-wing social media. They gain power by isolating their voters from alternative views.
The Democratic Party is just as bad, but in a different way. How many times have you written a legislator on an issue and gotten a reply email saying thank you for your interest I love to hear from you little people vote for me and give me money now go buy stuff?
There are plenty of smart people identifying problems and offering solutions, and plenty more working to sharpen those ideas. But professional Democrats don’t listen. They pat you on the head and smirk behind their hands. When things don’t go their way they blame you. We have forged places to do this public work, but we are ignored by the rich people and out-of-date incumbents who dominate the party..
Democratic politicians do not see the left as an element of power. I have no idea where they think power comes from. Money? Incumbency? Their magnetic personalities?
2. The people who voted for Trump are responsible for our immediate situation. They refused to participate in good faith in the political system. Their motivation is irrelevant. They want something and like good neoliberals they don’t care how they get it. Politics is a field of conflict, just like the fight for resources. They have internalized the neoliberal view of themselves as chimpanzees fighting over a termite mound.
If that means supporting a tyrant, then fine. The tyrant will crush their competitors and give them what they want.
3. The people who didn’t vote in the last election abdicated their own potential power and their own capacity to participate in power. They quietly submit to whatever damage Trump and his henchmen inflict on them and their families. They have internalized the second part of Homo Economicus: they believe they deserve whatever happens to them. They are passive and unseeing, unable even to recognize the depravity of their treatment.
4. I think both Trump voters and non-voters are to blame for our current situation. They cannot escape their responsibility and I will not excuse their behavior.
But they didn’t act randomly. Their attitudes are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads.
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Front page image by Lear 21 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,
I’ve never believed that people are rational consumers, not even in freshman general-ed economics. We can claim to be – but we do buy on whims.
I am a lifelong Democrat. But I no longer write to my elected representatives. Their responses are platitudinous generalizations combined with pleas for money. While I can tolerate the first and have long come to expect it, I have grown weary of the incessant money-grubbing. I never write them to ask them how much money should I give them.
You are not alone in your disaffection: Quinnipiac has just released a new poll showing Dem Party approval being historically underwater, 31/56 (their narrative is near the top of the page, just below the section on Musk’s also-underwater rating):
https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3918
Meanwhile, we’re looking at a DNC leadership vote on Sunday, with the Party’s neoliberal mavens backing Ben Wikler, who has a pretty good grassroots pedigree. He’s running against Tim Walz’ mate, Ken Martin and several other likely also-rans. Martin was an intern with Paul Wellstone, so that’s a plus, and his achievements in MN (and around the country) are impressive.
Whoever gets that job has a massive uphill climb to execute, and in very short order. When Harris picked Walz, btw, I was highly skeptical that the author of the “GOP is weird” meme would bring the offensive power necessary to her team. He was too tame by much more than half, as it turned out. Vance wiped the floor with him in their debate, and Walz completely blew Vance admitting that Trump lost in 2020:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/4/2274658/-The-Bombshell-From-the-Walz-Vance-Debate-That-No-One-Caught
Here’s how the whole race might have changed if Walz’ actually had a fighter’s mindset in that debate:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/4/2274658/-The-Bombshell-From-the-Walz-Vance-Debate-That-No-One-Caught#comment_89774377
That was just one of many dropped balls last year. If the Dems are to get us out of this catastrophe, no punches can be pulled going forward, and they need to shed the big money ball and chain. When fighting an oligarchy, having oligarchs in your corner are much more than just counterproductive.
I’m a long time lurker, and enjoy the discussions. I just wanted to chime in…
If you (or anyone might) have the time and patience, you could volunteer with your local Democratic Party. Of course, where I’m from, the Republicans are constantly battling each other, pulling pathetic stunts, and filing lawsuits. No one needs more of that, so I wouldn’t even consider volunteering with that bunch. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, here or anywhere else.
But the local Dems produce good pols and win races—things you want a party to do. The meetings are also run efficiently and well, that’s nice, too. Even our US senators have to watch the time limit for presentations or their mics are cut! I’ve learned by volunteering that we can also get the right results when doing the right things regarding equity and making sure every voice is heard.
My favorite memory of this was when a county assembly was simply voting on adding members to a committee, and the group of us decided to nominate a slate of candidates from the meeting by acclamation, if the number of candidates wasn’t more than the number of seats available on the committee. One by one, volunteers nominated themselves, but each woman said that they would bow out if the number of candidates exceeds the limit. No man did the same, and the limit was reached. When the last man volunteering remarked that he often witnessed women demurring in mixed groups, he found quick concurrence, support from by-laws and leadership. For my part, I called out someone’s grasping mention of “quotas,” and we quickly got back on track. We proposed that the nomination repeat and any volunteers who had dropped out can try again, and the result this time was that four women from our county joined the state committee on “representation” or some such (so it was a good call, all around).
I guess if you really want to say something to your representatives, you could also show up at local events and monthly meetings where they attend (and the numbers of the audience are manageable, meaning your question(s) may get a meaningful answer, or at least, an attentive public hearing).
Just like the saying goes, we have the best government money can buy. And now it’s truer than ever after Elon Musk, being the richest person in the world, just bought the entire US government by financing Trump’s campaign and his GOTV operation.
But this is true for democrats as well. If you haven’t done it yet, try reading one of Lawrence Lessig’s books on campaign finance, or listen to one of his talks. He describes really well how most politicians spend most of their time not on legislation or interacting with the public, but raising money. The reality of US politics is that to stay in the race and get reelected, you need to continuously raise money. Funding becomes the single most important factor in politics, and this is even more so after Citizens United.
That’s exactly what neoliberalism is. The flavor of liberalism which is adapted for campaign financing and donor-friendly. We can’t fix this without fixing campaign finance.
That’s absolutely correct, and without a new SC to overturn CU, I’m at a loss as to how that happens in the meantime. That ruling made the US a baked-in oligarchy, did it not?
Interestingly, Ben Wikler, the Party honchos’ choice for DNC chair (vote happens this Sunday), has Lessig as a fan — at least that was the case when Wikler was hosting the MoveOn podcast, The Good Fight (which fizzled due to lack of cash 9 years ago).
If we’re going to beat these bastards, though, it won’t be because we outspend them. It has to be some kind of political guerilla warfare — inventive, hard-hitting and surprising. The fact that the two leading DNC Chair candidates are white males isn’t a great fit for the “surprising” aspect.
The big wild cards, imo, are crypto and AI; the future is now and it smells like a dystopian catastrophe. It’s all such a cobbled up mess. It’s like an Ayn Rand fever dream.
You aren’t familiar at all with Wikler’s approach to party organization.
That’s not a question. It’s obvious from your comment that you are completely unfamiliar with what Wikler did to turn around Wisconsin’s vertical descent into a red state. Not his work on a podcast but his work as a state party chair.
I don’t give a rat’s ass what “the Party honchos” think — you should name them, by the way, instead of generally waving your arm around at some nebulous group of people using a term intended to be a cryptic pejorative. I expect the DNC chair to have solid chops when it comes to party building, organizing, and fundraising for candidates along with good messaging skills because that’s what we need at scale. Several past chairs like Tim Kaine and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz didn’t have that, and the most recent chair missed some component because the DNC looked like vaporware during 2020. Wikler has the proven credentials.
Several of the Party’s head-honchos backing Wikler — Pelosi, Schumer, and Durbin — don’t inspire confidence in me. These are the Party “leaders” that couldn’t even bring themselves to curtail Congressional stock trading, for cristsake. And by “couldn’t even bring themselves” I mean “weren’t the slightest bit really interested” in stopping that form of insider trading in their own ranks at a time when money was visibly poisoning our liberal polity. So when folks like that endorse somebody, I do wonder whether it comes with any directional urging on their part.
But yes, he does have party building credentials, and as I noted in a post in an thread above this one, he’s “got a pretty good grassroots pedigree” (which is the Wikler strength Pelosi touted in her own endorsement of him), as does Martin who also has party building chops (also noted in my post above).
If you take my absence of offering a full Wikler bio as a diss, you’re putting words in my post that aren’t there. I don’t expect the worst from either of them but I’m gonna wait and see before I throw any of my own money the DNC’s way, because my bank account it small and the needs out there are mind boggling — and because I’ve seen too many promising pols morph into institutional shills.
If whoever gets that position pulls the Party brand out of the gutter and into an aggressive fighting stance, I’ll support them wholeheartedly. I am desperately willing to be surprised.
“That’s exactly what neoliberalism is”- utterly false.
Neoliberalism isn’t a “flavour of liberalism”, it’s an economic ideology that is neither purely left or right wing. Variants of neoliberalism have been the official economic policy of every presidential administration since Reagan through Obama. Trump practiced Moronic Protectionism, and Biden was the first to return to Keynesian policies in nearly 50 years.
Yes, there are still plenty of Democrats in congress who support free market neoliberal economic policies, often as a form of performative centrism as a more palatable compromise to Trump’s extremist nonsense.
But neoliberalism has nothing to do with campaign finance.
There are those who would disagree about your last sentence:
https://timkuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/neoliberal-jurisprudence-uva-piece-nice-pdf-version.pdf
This is the guy who wrote that:
https://profiles.auckland.ac.nz/timothy-kuhner
That’s a pretty thorough analysis and his upshot, that you are exactly wrong, is backed up persuasively by our current reality, CU’s bastard child.
Your definition of neoliberalism is very narrow. Whatever its origins, it quickly became a political movement more than an economic one. Philip Mirowski calls it the neoliberal thought collective. But, yes, its success means that it’s the dominant theory of how society should arrange itself. It’s the water in which many fish swim: they don’t know it’s water.
“He who dies with the most toys wins” – Malcolm Forbes (maybe)
“He (or she) who raises the most money to get elected wins (usually)” – Me
Did or did not Harris raise more money than Trump? Oh yeah that probably does not account for Elon’s “in kind” contributions, Bezos, Thiel, Zuck, etc, etc, etc. Never mind. Campaign finance reform is a stickier wicket than it might seem.
“He (or she) who has the most billionaires wins.” – Me again
Campaign finance in America post-CU isn’t a wicket, sticky or otherwise; it’s a cesspool/minefield.
Ed, you define a class called “professional democrats.” Name names. Elizabeth Warren?
Nancy Pelosi? Even Rahm Emanuel, the quintessential professional democrat? You state, “The Democratic Party is just as bad, but in a different way.” I resist false equivalencies, especially after you just lauded the “success of Biden’s Keynesian economic policies.” Isn’t President Biden a professional democrat?
I shared what Marcy wrote today with my staff, who were encouraged by it. “In those moments you’re feeling particularly helpless, you might focus your energy on shoring up the strength of civil society within your own local community, even if it’s no more than the knitting club.” Almost every single day, with conservatives and liberals, I push back against the widespread impulse to condemn all politics and politicians as corrupt or meaningless to our lives, to see the government as some cabal living inside the beltway. It is often the last refuge of a disillusioned Republican or the 36% of eligible voters who did not vote. Ironically, it is a core tenet of the MAGA message. I don’t want that cynicism to infect the 31% of us who voted for Harris. We must fight and build, collectively, together.
A man in a wheelchair with little charisma won 523 electoral votes in 1936 in the U.S. at the same time that Hitler came to power in Germany. Roosevelt’s power endures today (social security), even if under dire threat. I believe we are saying many of the same things, but I refuse to let “tyrants crush their competitors.”
Biden’s Keynesian policies were part of the Build Back Better iniative, which was drive in large part by the Bernie Sanders wing of th party. To the extent they passed, they worked. But they passed only after being cut in thirds by the centrists and right-leaning part of the party. Wikipedia explains(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act_)
The Keynesian part is the first part and some of the second. The rest was murdered by the professional Democrats. This is the group dominated by the thinking of the 1990s, when the party was frightened that the shit party would call them names and the rubes would buy into it. They run for cover, they punch left. This is the group that put the ancient sickly Gerry Connally into a leadership position instead of AOC, who has paid her dues to the old farts in time and money, but lacks their vision of a long-dead political environment.
The shit party is not a willing partner in making this a better place for all of us. The geriatric Ds are afraid of them and unwilling to stand up for their constituents. They have no conception of political power, and they run from exercising it.
And to answer your question: the professional democrats are the people who made these decisions, who let Biden hang on too long, who whined and whimpered about doing the things we needed to have done, who beg for money and get beaten by a criminal.
Thank you. Excellent synopsis.
There was plenty of unwillingness here, to be forthright, to advocate for Joe to bail. And that’s here, where Hunter’s legal troubles got a great airing, where the VP and then POTUS was exposed to totally self-made jeopardies, which would never have qualified as anything more than a Steve Bannon wet dream if Joe had just said:
“Are you crazy Hunter? I’m the fucking Vice President of the United States, with a specifically Eastern European remit, and you want to work for a UKN petro giant with Russian entanglements? Are you crazy? Get a real fucking job, son.”
But the Force was strong here for Joe…not that Vader had anything to do with it.~
I would never describe Joe Manchin as a “professional Democrat.” If anything, he might have cosplayed as one, but he was in fact more GOP than Pro Dem. And Kyrsten Sinema? Nothing professional about her single term of self-dealing narcissism and too-cute kissy-facing with whoever would buy her old shoes.
When your “majority” consists of the VP’s tie-breaking vote, you don’t exactly have the latitude to display your neoliberal bona fides. And the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans? I will take Biden’s term over any of Trump’s. Any time.
The point of this post, and a lot of what I write here, is to look at the ideology of the Democratic party. As far as I can tell, it’s purely transactional. There is no underlying set of ideas that drives policy. That’s what was so great about the Build Back Better plan. It was motivated by an understanding of the deterioration of life in this country, and set about trying to make things better.
Marcy is right that we have to work from the ground up. That’s because we have no other public spaces. We certainly don’t have access to the legislative process, or to the policy formulation process, if there is one.
I hope my theoretical posts will help people see why Marcy is right, and give us a framework for talking about things beyond just single policies.
Ed, I think you go too far when you label the Democrats as a party “purely transactional.” That description does apply to the contemporary (MAGA) GOP, a party whose success has depended on fanning cultural flames (demonizing immigrants and trans people, flogging abortion, etc.) to attract folks into voting against their own best interests, for the ultimate purpose of rigging the economy for the benefit of those at the very top.
Democrats, who adopt that party affiliation typically for idealistic and altruistic reasons, have been forced–in particular since Citizens United–to compete on the same playing field. Here at EW we all know about the depressing percentage of their time that MOCs, especially those with two-year terms, spend raising money just to be elected again. “Transactional”? Yes, but not in the Trumpian, in-it-for-myself way.
Of course I will concede that some of the older, more established figures might have *come to* this view, having perceived the largesse available to their peers. I’m from Chicago! I grew up associating the Democratic machine with corruption. Nowadays, however, who on earth would choose the (D) after their name if their end goal was self- and mutual-dealing?
Human beings suffer from human nature. No political party will ever be ideologically pure–at least not for long, and certainly not once it admits other humans into its membership. We have to work with the world we have. For me, that means the Democrats.
So, what do you think of Pritzker?
When I was diagnosed in my 40s as being on the autism spectrum, the main thing that it meant was that I as no longer able to pretend that I had the slightest idea how anyone else’s mind worked.
I don’t understand how most people think. Their irrationality gobsmacks me every time. I’m not saying I am “better” by the way — I can be just as irrational. But my irrationality crops up in different ways and different circumstances that I *do* understand.
The fundamental flaw we all make is thinking we can use our own thought process to model other people. The fundamental danger once we realize we can’t, is that we other and devalue the people whose thinking we can’t model.
A lot of social stuff goes right over my head…and I didn’t realize why until about a year ago, though everyone in my immediate family knew I was different.
Enforced othering is how Trumpism works.
I’d say that the professional Democrats, like the professional Republicans, are more interested in protecting their own power than doing *anything* that will actually help the country.
Speaking of professional democrats, I find it impossible to understand how Chuck Schumer, he of the smirking sellout, continues to be reelected senate majority/minority leader.
This is the critical question going forward, and it’s the question raised by @Ginerva Debenci above: why these people? Why was the Dem majority dependent on the likes of Sinema and the odious Joe Manchin?
Maybe the problem is that when they killed the “50 State Project”, they killed all the prosepcts of new people coming up through the party structure. And some states have no grass-roots Dem party structure, if you aren’t wealthy and white.
Agree that the Howard Dean party was more forward looking and open to discussion spaces. So dismaying to see it followed by Organizing for America, a logo with domineering undertones. I fled to Occupy, and started to self-reeducate. I now scout the post-Hurricane Helene regional scene for traction to keep and expand inclusive and protective work. Democrats do help, but we need to face outward as good social practice whenever our lives allow.
You reminded me of the night in January 2004 when Dr. Dean disqualified himself from candidacy for president in a single moment, the lapse of impulse control that would be converted by the political media of the time into “The Scream.”
The pile-on by reporters and pundits (few if any of whom could have completed even undergraduate pre-med requirements, let alone med school) came with such swiftness and glee that it seemed Dean’s “slip”–and more to the point, their catching and labeling it–intoxicated them. They reminded me of soccer hooligans, except pretentious and better dressed.
The next morning, Dean was basically done. Clearly, they intoned, he lacked “the temperament” to be president. At least he wasn’t too “old.”
Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It by Benjamin I Page and Martin Gilens (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 2017 ISBN 978-0-226-50896-2) is based upon a study of 1791 proposed policy changes from 1981 to 2002:
Proposals with 61-80% approval have a less than 40% chance of passing, up to 90% approval passes a little more often than 40% of the time, and even a proposal with 91-100% approval has less than 60% chance of passing. Public opinion seems not to affect the passing of policy changes. Interest groups can move policy changes with their support, opposition not so much.
This book convinced me, with finality, that we need something more than electoral politics. Watching friends lobby for new proposals for over a decade to produce a report that stays on a shelf or legislation that is vitiated in the regulatory process or never enforced I had already experienced.
Vote, yes, vote. Find good candidates and support them. Draft good legislation and get it passed. But don’t rely on it to make the changes we need. There has to be an inside effort like these but outside efforts as well like direct action mutual aid, building the alternatives, joining together to do practical things that can make a change in daily life whether or not your candidate is in office or your legislation gets passed.