The neoliberal status quo is indefensible—yet the public silently accepts its supposed legitimacy.
Future historians will be
hard-pressed to know what to make of the giddy reveries of the 1990s. It was
not merely the age when sage interpreters of the world system declared the end
of history, ideology and other assorted curdled leavings of the modern age; it
was also the moment when the global economic order was supposed to be reaching
its own great moment of singularity under the placid technocratic rubric of
“neoliberalism.”
The neoliberal dream was
basically the economic version of what utopian-minded tech prophets call the
singularity: the coming near-mystical convergence of forces that would sort out
the channels of information and production and knowledge work into a seamless,
world-conquering whole.
As social paradigms go, that
is plenty ambitious. But as Marxist theorist David Harvey notes, the neoliberal
market consensus was also devised to shore up the far more brutish goal of
restoring “power to economic elites”—a project that ultimately entails punitive
top-down measures that tend to give the lie to the “liberal” side of this
market-utopian formulation. Neoliberal societies are marked, he writes, by “a
strong preference for government by executive order and by judicial decision
rather than by democratic … decision-making.”
When we see the squeeze put
on the institutions that shore up neoliberal economies, the results can look
like a parody of the sort of popular sovereignty that defines plain-old liberal
polities. Witness the disastrous agon that Washington conducted this past
summer over the elevation of the debt ceiling: The leaders of our most popular
branch of government, the House of Representatives, spun well beyond reach of
anything like sane deliberation, hewing instead to a brand of market fundamentalism
so extreme that it sent the markets themselves shuddering, once Standard and
Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating to AA+.
The S&P report on the
downgrade insisted on the need to contain the country’s debt by raising taxes—a
measure that the report’s authors rightly divined was a third rail in the
present American neoliberal consensus. This point, of course, received
virtually no serious attention from the major-domos of economic policy.
Meanwhile, in the
eurozone—the sprawling economic bloc lovingly fashioned by the free-trade
planners of continental neoliberalism—the specter of unstable debt produced a
series of legitimation crises. Greek citizens rose up to protest government
cuts that shred the social safety net to bolster the bottom lines of global
banks. As the conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy
In England
Roubini stopped short of
calling for the workers of the world to throw off their chains—but just barely.
He raised an urgent cry for tighter regulation of “a financial system run amok”
and even raised the specter of true neoliberal blasphemy: “more progressive
taxation.”
When market-seers such as
Roubini sound faintly like the reincarnation of Joe Hill, it seems a cause for
real hope. But neoliberalism is adept at depoliticizing public discussion of
economic policy. So his cri de coeur is likely to meet the
same fate that has greeted neoliberalism’s critics on the left for the past
three decades: deafening public silence.
Chris Lehmann, a former managing editor of In These Times, is co-editor of BookForum and senior editor of CQ Weekly magazine. He has
written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Baffler, Slate.com and the Washington
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