There have been four other diaries in this series. They are here: One Two Three Four
For someone who is going to read only one serious book about neoliberalism, I would strongly recommend this one.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
It is by Philip Mirowski.
It is an intellectually dense book that covers a great deal of information. There are many points where he makes suggestions and connections that suddenly turned on a light bulb in my head. They gave me a craving to see the ideas more fully developed. Like a truly useful book it sent me off to do more reading and research.
As an economist, one of Mirowski's main points of focus in building a case of how most of the establishment of that profession have become full time shills for the neoliberal elite. I am not going to tackle that directly here. It is a topic that could take up several diaries. That is just one example of the ways that the neoliberal elite have been able to use sophisticated approaches to ceasing the levers of power and conditioning the thoughts of the American public like Pavlov's dog.
The dramatic financial crash and ensuing great recession that occurred in 2008 was supposed to have been a crisis comparable to the great depression. There was broad expectation that it would lead to some kind of major sea change. People on the left were singing Happy Days Are Here Again. That did not happen. Instead the US government spent 100s of billions of dollars bailing out the Wall St. banks who had been shooting craps. They hardly even got a slap on the wrist and over loud public protest they were allowed to pay all the performances bonuses as usual. The spin machine went into high gear and five years later it has all blown over. The Dodd-Frank Act to provide new financial regulations is essentially cosmetic in nature.
Mirowski is a strong critic of neoliberalism, but he argues that these developments are strong evidence that as a regime having survived this crisis it is even more firmly entrenched than ever and is likely to be in the saddle for a long time to come. He then sets about trying to explain how it all came to pass.
He coins the term neoliberal thought collective NTC as an umbrella for elites in business, government and academia who are using similar approaches to further a clearly related political and economic agenda. Though neoliberalism got its first firm hold on power in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, it is now thoroughly bipartisan. It is much broader and more diffuse than a specific party or organization. That is the reason for terming it a thought collective.
Neoliberals have stopped calling themselves neoliberals. The terms is now left to their opponents and the spin is that it is all just common sense and free enterprise. Painting it otherwise is just a radical left wing conspiracy. One really useful notion that Mirowski develops is that the NTC operates under what he calls the double truth doctrine. There is one set of notions packaged for general public consumption. There is a different set that is used by the elite in developing policy behind the scenes. One example of this is the ideology of free markets that should be unencumbered by any government interference. That is what goes out to the general public through the think tanks and the corporate controlled media. If that had been taken literally then the floundering Wall St. banks should have been left to the fate of being crushed by the invisible hand of the market. That isn't what happened. The TNC that operates behind the curtain wants an active well funded government as long as it operates under its control and serves the political and financial interests for the corporate elite. He gives other examples of how this operates in practice. The main point to grasp is that the public has long been manipulated by a very insidious process that has been developed by people using highly sophisticated techniques of social psychology and marketing strategy.
He has another section called neoliberalism in everyday life. He offers several examples of how neoliberal doctrine has permeated out thinking and discourse. One that struck me was what has happened to the notion of social class. It is now considered passe and/or rude to talk about something called the working class. That suggest visions of Marxist class warfare. All Americans are really middle class no matter what their income. We all can share in the benefits of the free market and each of us can choose to turn ourselves into an entrepreneur. Horatio Alger rides again.
I can't begin to do full justice to this book in a single diary. What I find most convincing about it is how deeply entrenched the NTC and its control has become. What I have tried to trace in this series is what a fundamental change there has been in American society over the past 80 years. We have some legacies of the new deal in terms of the remaining social benefit programs. Even they are under threat. As a force shaping policy in government and industry the new deal is long gone. I'm sorry that it is and I am not in any way a supporter of the present regime, but I think that it is necessary to deal in reality. I don't have a program of how we are going to change this reality. If I had to put a political label on myself it would some form of generic socialist. I think that fundamentally new forms of organizing society and social relationships are going to be necessary. We live in a much more closely globalized world than we did 80 years ago. We are not going to be able to undo that. The forces of technology are moving faster to change our world than we are capable of fully grasping. Their is an international corporate elite that is taking control of this world. I really don't know what is going to happen.
I would like to express my great appreciation to everybody who has supported and commented on this series. This has been my best experience ever of trying to write about something on Daily Kos that isn't pie du jour. Thank you.