[marginalium]
Slouching toward Utopia
2 Nov 2022
Slouching toward Utopia. An adaption from his book that quickly details the ‘Neoliberal Turn’ and the worrying trends that face us as it slides away from its political hegemony.
this New Deal Order failed its sustainability test in the 1970s. The world made the Neoliberal Turn … a Neoliberal Order that was hegemonic … It may no longer be hegemonic in the sense of forcing oppositional movements into dialogue and contention with it on its own terms … [but] it persists
And his tentative diagnosis—it is not “‘cultural leftists’, especially high-tech ones, who welcomed de-bureaucratization; Ralph Nader, who welcomed deregulation; Bill Clinton, who was opportunistic; Barack Obama, who was inexperienced and cautious. Those do not seem sufficient causes to me”. Perhaps it is instead that:
potential voters are, today: (a) profoundly unhappy with a neoliberal world in which the only rights that people have that are worth anything are their property-ownership rights and they are thus the playthings of economic forces that value and devalue their property; but (b) are anxiously unsatisfied with social democracy that gives equal shares of access to valuable things to those whom they regard as “undeserving”; and (c) while that economic anxiety can be assuaged by rapid and broad-based growth, it is also (d) stoked by those who like the current highly unequal distribution of wealth and thus seek to make politics about the discovery of (external and internal) enemies rather than about equitable prosperity.
Anthologies: Connection, Wealth Architecture, Absit Omnia, Accidental Civilisation, On Leadership, On Politics and Power