The unfortunate posterity of neoliberalism
A rhyme of history that spells a momentous near future.
The other day my husband and I were discussing world leaders in modern history, debating which ones we thought were the most unusual and unique. I was reading a lot about Mao and found myself fascinated with the contrast he seemed to create in photos with other leaders, especially Chiang Kai-Shek. For his part in the discussion, he brought up Thatcher, and I became stuck on a thread of thought contrasting her with Reagan, her policy counterpart in America. I was telling him about my thinking that Thatcher was part of a larger ensemble in world politics at the time that was really just marching to the American beat, and after a while of that I started to rethink why I thought Reagan was such a bad president.
To better do my judgement justice, I decided I needed to pore back into the archives of history and find a reference for comparison of him that we have seen before. Fortunately, America is not so young that we have not seen a role like his played already, and that is when I found a great many parallels between him and Andrew Jackson. I have often said that history is going to frown upon Reagan especially poorly, and this comparison gives us a much more grounded and credible way to see that.
Jackson was an officer of wars that have generally been embarrassing in retrospect. In his time, there was no radio, let alone television or movies, and his role as a ‘war hero’ was comprehensively the analogue to that of the movie star since the 20th century. It was for these reasons that Jackson and Reagan were popularly thought of as ‘men of the people’.
Jackson was conspicuously middling about public policy issues of his day that did just as well in maintaining his political position indefinitely as they did in setting the stage for long-term chaos and suffering in the decades following his death. In much the same way, Reagan adapted quickly to the climate of governance that since JFK and Nixon had become increasingly subverted by domestic intelligence, shaking off conspicuous investigations without explanation so that he could see to the policies he believed in. He brokered alliances with far darker and more overtly evil people—much as Jackson did with future Confederates—to avail himself of persecution. (Interestingly, this makes H.W. Bush a soft analogue to Calhoun.) He claimed to value the conditions that held things together, but his actions overwhelmingly destabilised them in ways just diffuse enough to outpace his mortal term. It’s more honest to say he valued the comfort of false consensus, irresponsibly wistful for the ‘good old days of today’.
Jackson’s policies with American Indians turned into his biggest historical blemishes by a large margin, and Reagan’s analogue to this is his relationship with labour. His betrayal of the air travel industry was not just momentous for setting a new standard against organised labour, but was a total shock to a lay public that were utterly blindsided by the decision, having voted for him with such enthusiasm. So much for the populism of war heroes and movie stars when the rubber his the road… or in this case, the tarmac.
Reagan’s breaking of labour will haunt his legacy more than Iran–Contra or any other scandal, as it is emblematic of his greatest sin: the economic policy of neoliberalism. Privatising and deregulating industry set us up for the hyperinflation we live in today, and in the future will require more hard progressive anodynes like that we saw from the Roosevelts.
Jackson, for his part, nurtured the status quo of slavery while going on a crusade against the banking system, setting America up for half a century of robber-baronism and what we now call the Gilded Age. This was the product of policy he normalised, but the connection was not direct as these developments were cleanly interrupted by the deeper conflict of the Civil War. Today, we are on a direct collision course with the effects of irresponsible idealism like this.
The reason these things work at all to begin with is the same reason the Roman Empire functioned and why the Nazi state was able to prop itself up: it is a Ponzi in some form supplicated by legalised robbery of others. Romans dined on the blood of barbarians, Nazis sold bonds paid for with Jewish possessions stolen, and the nascent Jacksonian ‘democracy’ expropriated land and natural riches from Indians without a second thought. The modern instance of neoliberalism is nothing more than an invention of conniving the public to steal from their future selves through financial instrumentation – for example, nobody has retired on those 401(k)s that we were all conditioned to sub in for the pensions nobody gets anymore. Does anyone seriously question if we ever will? I know people who make good money in the market ask themselves this question. What about the public?
If you have to ask yourself if the money you let someone else hold is really safe in their hands, and you don’t already have an immediate and hefty threat of pain to hold over their heads as recourse, it’s safe to say you might have been screwed. How many people are still in denial about this? For chrissakes, they were inventing billionaires out of pure fiat in the 90s. I wasn’t even born and Jeffrey Epstein already had a private plane and all this enterprising going on like that’s just something people do on layaway. Everybody bought it back then, too. How many still do? How much of the economy now is just doom-spending because people realise that saving back is structurally pointless? What happens next? Do people even want to know?
To bring it back full circle, part of me wants to give Thatcher a break even though her policies were overwhelmingly bad for Britain and the world. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something unshakeable within me that sees the power in her personality as my husband did—and as much as I saw in Mao—that I think if she were in a different time, she would have soared to much greater heights and did much better things for the people. Perhaps she had the misfortune of being born into a time that was the beginning of the end of what was good. Regardless of the details, there is something really admirable to me about being an uncompromising, cold bitch in politics. I can be like that sometimes myself.
Jokes and musings aside, we are gamboling into a future of chaos much more quickly than anyone in charge right now cares to realise. The bulk of the civil servant sector is still fed by middle class survivors from the old, rusted university pipelines, and this is absolutely not cutting it when the opposition are neo-fascist mobsters who murder their exposed opponents in front of God and everybody. Something has to give and in a big way, like yesterday. There’s negative time on the clock for late 20th century electoral angling.