Neoliberal Dominance
But how did pro-business activists manage to deploy the levers of government at the seat of postimperial power, in Washington, DC? How have global politics proceeded, out of range of democratic accountability in the United States as well as in the rest of the world? This has occurred through
(A) the presentation of neoliberal policies as neutral, managerial precepts for good government and efficient business operations, with the underlying capitalist power politics and cultural values obscured;
(B) the opposition between U.S. domestic conservative versus liberal politics, or Republican versus Democratic policies, with the overarching salience of global neoliberalism across this entire spectrum effectively ignored;
(C) the shape-shifting array of alliances and issues through which a neoliberal policy agenda has been promoted in the United States and abroad.
(A) The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture and therefore not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as “class warfare” while race, gender, or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upward redistribution goals of neoliberalism, its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as the result of performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.
But despite their overt rhetoric of separation between economic policy on the one hand and political and cultural life on the other, neoliberal politicians and policymakers have never actually separated these domains in practice. In the real world, class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, and religious and ethnic boundaries are the channels through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow. The economy cannot be transparently abstracted from the state or the family, from practices of racial apartheid, gender segmentation, or sexual regulation. The illusion that such categories of social life can be practically as well as analytically abstracted one from another descends from the conceptual universe of Anglo-European Liberalism, altered and adapted to the U.S. context during the early nineteenth century. While reasserting this ideology of discrete spheres of social life, in practice, contemporary neoliberal policies have been implemented in and through culture and politics, reinforcing or contesting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. The specific issues, alliances, and policies have shifted over time and across differing locales, but their overall impact has been the upward redistribution of resources and the reproduction of stark patterns of social inequality.
(B) In the United States, specifically, the neoliberal agenda of shrinking public institutions, expanding private profit-making prerogatives, and undercutting democratic practices and noncommercial cultures has changed hands from Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s to New Democrats in the 1990s and back to Compassionate Conservative Republicans in the new millennium. The domestic political language of two party electoral politics, a language that labels figures and initiatives as conservative, moderate, or liberal, has effectively obscured the stakes in policy disputes. If Ronald Reagan was a conservative president, with substantial support from the religious right, and Bill Clinton was a liberal president excoriated by conservatives and the right, then why do their policy initiatives look so much alike? It was Bill Clinton who pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through against organized labor’s opposition and who presided over “the end of welfare as we know it.” The continuities from Presidents Reagan to Bush I, Clinton to Bush II – the continuities of neoliberal policy promotion – are rendered relatively invisible by the dominant political system and language. Global neoliberalism, based in but not reducible to U.S. corporate dominance, embraces a broad spectrum of U.S. domestic politics. Conflicts between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats have been shaped largely within the terms of neoliberalism even as nonliberal and even antiliberal forces (from the protofascist nationalism of Pat Buchanan to the socialist radicalism of Cornel West) have been engaged or appropriated through alliance politics as well.
(C) If neoliberalism has been the continuing foundation for pro-business activism in the United States since the 1970s, that activism has also engaged a shifting array of political/cultural issues and constituencies in order to gain power and legitimacy. Because (as I have argued) the economy and the interests of business can be abstracted neither from race and gender relations nor from sexuality or other cleavages in the body politic, neoliberalism has assembled its projects and interests from the field of issues saturated with race, with gender, with sex, with religion, with ethnicity and nationality. The alliances and issues have changed over time and have differed from place to place both within the United States and abroad. In order to facilitate the flow of money up the economic hierarchy, neoliberal politicians have constructed complex and shifting alliances, issue by issue and location by location, always in contexts shaped by the meanings and effects of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of difference. These alliances are not simply opportunistic nor are the issues merely epiphenomenal or secondary to the underlying reality of the more solid and real economic goals. Rather, the economic goals have been (must be) formulated in terms of the range of political and cultural meanings that shape the social body in a particular time and place.
