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Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate
people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold
them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy
theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid
addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the
inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of
worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.
Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It
dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It
neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal
apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice,
retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and
political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed
globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs,
understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their
neoliberal masters.
Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump,
who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional
neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the
political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the
betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.
Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking.
Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make
America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did
previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump
embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic
predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed.
He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump
is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.
Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic
elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world —
is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the
antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism
and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions.
Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”
As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant
success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were
marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial
organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs
such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given
prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the
official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by
Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.
Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates
of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on
the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once
unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to
sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be
happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the
rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the
moral and political morass.
The media bears much of the blame. In the name of
objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class
war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or
its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of
neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of
the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too
became despised.
Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the
highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice,
Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires
social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and
desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality
and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off
libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually
narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social
justice through the conquest of state power.”
Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From
Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the
private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of
religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly
‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal
and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to
commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is
absent?”
“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and
living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of
values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack
of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since
humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount
of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in
dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient
themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of
neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and
desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention
of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”
Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad
freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism.
They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until
exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example,
jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The
fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.
Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech,
freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are
snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the
freedom of the few. The result is fascism.
Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation
and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring
factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared
values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are
branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of
national security.
The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who
were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A
ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest,
but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of
concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other
materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case
were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements
received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines
Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.
The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is
routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented
into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place
in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as
terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they
were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.
It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappears. The tens in of
millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will
still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes.
“And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even
if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will
find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values
and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”
Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was
methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal
protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who
champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the
“radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose.
This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized
or driven into exile.
Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires
such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of
gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to
pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation
where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.
We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.
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