This post is part of a symposium on Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Read the rest of the symposium here.
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“Could things have turned out differently?” That is the question driving Melinda Cooper’s brilliant account of the people and policies that built the neoliberal state. It is an important one and one too rarely asked by scholars of the period who sometimes treat neoliberalism’s rise from its 1940s birth in Mont Pelerin to its reign as dominant world order in the 1980s as either a historic inevitability or at least as a path of linear progress. Indeed, neoliberalism is so ubiquitous today that it is hard to fathom that it began as a radical proposition from the fringes of society. Cooper, however, makes the convincing case that to even its staunchest proponents, the neoliberal counterrevolution was Hail Mary of sorts, a desperate last-ditch effort to restore the certainties of the past against the inevitability of social progress. That is one reason why they fought so hard.
I could not agree more with Cooper’s thesis. In fact, my recent book, The Quiet Coup, shares this general vision: that we should see the intellectuals of the neoliberal movement as the losers of societal change, the rearguard protectionists seeking urgently to restore a vision of social, racial, gender, and global hierarchy that had already been lost to the march of time and the moral arc of progress. This counterrevolution to the global equal rights movements of the 1960s sought, and largely succeeded, in nipping the buds of those revolutions before they could bloom into social change. Perhaps it was inevitable that elite retrenchment would follow directly after such dramatic social changes in race and gender hierarchies, but it is surprising that so many scholars who write about neoliberalism have forgotten its motive and bought its alibi. Cooper’s new book is an essential corrective.
The radicals of the neoliberal counter-revolution—Cooper focuses on James Buchanan, Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski, and assorted rightwing politicians—were fighting upstream against the tides of history and popular democracy. Their cause, blatantly, was to fight the expansion of democratic rights to people they deemed unworthy of an equal share of the franchise. But as Lee Atwater famously said of the new rules of play, they could no longer oppose equal rights by blatant racism. Their new playbook, instead, involved taking aim at the less visible levers of state power: monetary policy, taxes, and the courts.
So how and why did they triumph? These are among the questions that Cooper’s thorough and characteristically insightful book seeks to answer.
On the “how,” Cooper examines several key battles centered on fiscal and monetary austerity, which coopted the demands for economic justice by racial minorities and women on behalf of the “real victims” of the government, taxpayers and small business owners. The creation of the latter political identity by right-wing donors and the political entrepreneurs was especially useful in justifying a broad slate of tax cuts for holders of financial assets. As Quinn Slobodian remarked in his recent post in this symposium, these transformations of the tax code turned the fiscal state on its head, redistributing wealth to those who already had assets, while gutting the middle class and reducing social services across the board.
All the while, the varied organs of the right blamed growing deficits on moral laxity—in particular, the excesses of women having “state-funded” abortions and receiving aid for their children, charges that were often racialized. According to the right, these people were moochers, taking advantage of “real” “hardworking” businessmen with their “real” and “natural” (white) family structures. Virginia School economist James Buchanan, for instance, feared that federal taxation was forcing productive citizens to pay for public services that benefitted “unproductive and essentially parasitic members of society.” Instead of accepting the compromises inherent in living in a multi-racial democracy, however, he strove to shrink the polity that mattered away from “we the people” to “we the wealthy taxpayers,” through constitutional amendments that restricted the public’s power to tax and spend. This was emblematic of the central neoliberal battles of the era: rather than conceding to democracy, the losers delegitimatized it.
The “why” of the neoliberal counter-revolution is more difficult. It’s easy to understand the motivations of the donors and their chosen academics, but harder to understand why so much of the American public went along with fiscal austerity, given that it was unpopular, undemocratic, and economically destructive for the vast majority of the population.
So why did so many people vote for it? I think it’s the most important question that often goes unaddressed by scholars of the right. Why did so many in the middle class choose the path of punitive politics rather than shared prosperity? Why did so many Christians choose a politics of doing ill unto their neighbors rather than good? It is too simplistic to point to ignorance, hatred, or resentment as a full explanation of the politics of so many Americans for so many years. The way the counter-revolution worked was through a skillful act of psychological projection, a flipping of morality such that what was good was bad and what was bad was good. Finding themselves on the losing side of moral progress, rightwing intellectuals and politicians had to turn the tables. Neoliberalism’s core is hypocrisy. In fact, they succeeded often by coopting the moral arguments of the equality movements, which they used in service of protecting the existing hierarchy.
Some of the earliest legal challenges to abortion rights, for example, were frequently framed in terms of racial justice. Anti-abortion activists, Cooper writes, “appealed to the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of an unalienable right to life, and to the Fourteenth Amendment” to argue that the unborn deserved equal protection and due process like any other racial minority. In several instances, they cited as precedent the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation, hoping to convince the courts that fetuses, like African Americans under Jim Crow, were natural persons unjustly deprived of their full rights to life. This is the same instinct that led many people on the right to begin organizing marches opposing child trafficking after finding themselves on the wrong side of the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement. And though the Supreme Court initially rebuffed such arguments, by the time of Dobbs, the Federalist Society judges that now dominate the Court—one of the triumphant prizes of the neoliberal counter-revolution—embraced them. You care about the rights of Black people, Alito practically shouts into his Dobbs opinion, what about Black fetuses?
Neoliberalism was a top-down intellectual movement designed by a motivated minority of elites who stood to lose their status and power in the face of a changing society. They won by taking advantage of the moral dissonance that many Americans experienced during a time of rapid societal change and coopting it to suit their ends. Cutting poverty aid became a moral good because it came attached to protecting fetuses. Cooper’s essential insight, which shines in all her work, is her understanding that the right’s fight to restrict and control fiscal and monetary policy was the same as their fight to control women’s bodies:
The modern religious right’s obsession with abortion reflects the enduring assumption that female bodies are duty bound to bear the father’s name and biological essence across generations. For those committed to the defense of lineage, the sexual freedom of women will always be problematic since it endows them with the unique ability to undermine the proper ends of reproduction—or to refuse it altogether. Within the imaginary of the modern religious right, the unborn child is valued as a promissory note for the future of the race—where race is posited in its most indeterminate, not yet specified form; as life itself. This future can only be perfectly secured if women’s bodies are conscripted into the labor of reproduction, their legal personhood made subservient to the interests of the unborn child.
The problem with basing an entire social system on hypocrisy, however, is that the dissonance remains and can only grow. As a result, on the Millenarian Christian right — the end point of the libertarian-Christian fusion —there has been a recent turn toward nihilism, which Cooper discusses in some of the most fascinating sections of the book:
Only a complete reconstruction of society, extending from the prohibition of abortion to a “Bible-based monetary reform,” could avert the coming crisis [according to Gary North, an influential Christian Reconstructionist]. This reform “may have to come through economic collapse, which will involve the destruction of the present world monetary system. Then, out of the rubble … something else will arise.” There is in North’s work a kind of reckless fatalism in the face of economic collapse. If default is the prelude to moral reconstruction, he seems to be saying, then bring it on. This reflects the growing radicalism of American libertarians in general, who in recent years have become much more willing than their Austrian forefathers to recommend catastrophic depression and debt deflation as a useful catalyst to systemic reform. Convinced as they are that the United States is headed toward default, libertarians have come to believe that it might be better to hasten the event rather than see it deferred through another round of inflation….To force the United States to default on its obligations—and to do so on the specific issue of funding abortion—would perhaps bring terrible suffering to bear on the American people, but it would also act as a moral purgative and prelude to reconstruction.
Defending her neoliberal policies in an interview, Margaret Thatcher famously retorted “There is no alternative.” Perhaps by the time of the Reagan & Thatcher regimes, there was not. But few would have predicted such a field-clearing triumph during the dawn of the neoliberal counter-revolution in the 1960s. At that time, the radical thinkers of the neoliberal right were a counter-insurgency who refused to cede their firm grasp over the levers of power, even if they’d been outvoted and outnumbered.
The problem for neoliberalism, however, is that an ideology built on a projection cannot last. As Cooper states about the right’s politics of austerity, “Yet this dogma is becoming harder to maintain, if only because neoliberal monetary and fiscal authorities have so blatantly transgressed their own rules of self-restraint during the last decade or so of financial crisis.” This is true across neoliberal policies—they are imploding on their own terms. So it is with the entire neoliberal order, which as I learned myself, is more hypocritical than I had expected yet much more brittle. The counter-revolution’s rapid and unlikely triumph is, I believe, a foreshadowing of its unlikely yet inevitable fall.
