Wendy Brown, "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West" (Columbia UP, 2019)

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I have to confess I am a bit worried about democracy. That's why I listen to a wonderful podcast called Democracy Works. It's run by the fabulous people at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. The podcast aims to rise above partisan politics and the daily news grind to take a broader look at issues impacting democracy. These are things we cannot ignore. You can go to www.democracyworkspodcast.com and subscribe in all kinds of ways. Or you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and many other places. We really love this podcast at the NBN and so much so that we are going to provide you with a little taste of what you can get at Democracy Works. I hope you enjoy the following episode. From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the studios of WPSU on the campus of Penn State University, I'm Michael Berkman. I'm Chris Beam and this is Democracy Works. Chris, we're going to talk today about neoliberalism. With us is a noted authority on the subject. I'd probably say the noted. As far as political theory goes, she's been mining this for a long time and in terms of practitioners of neoliberalism. Wendy Brown is the class of 1936 first professor of political science at University of California Berkeley and universally well regarded political theorist. Clearly represents the left of the philosophical and political spectrum and is critiquing what we call neoliberalism. So why don't we start there and say what it is that how you understand that? Because I think these terms neoliberalism, neol conservatism, liberalism, conservatism can be awfully confusing to people. The way I would frame it is that you had a group of theorists who were responding to what they saw as a government that was taking on too many social responsibilities, a politics that was messing with the market. And so neoliberalism said, listen, the job of the state is to make markets work better. And markets are rational and they produce wealth. And let's just let people free enough to take them and do what they will with them. So that's why I think it's actually useful to contrast it with classical laissez-faire. Because laissez-faire also, of course, prioritizes to market and talks about how well markets work and the good consequences that come from free markets. But the difference here is it's, as I understand it, is that neoliberalism is not so much an effort to limit state power. So in other words, to have it do less that regulates the market, although it does want it to do that, but rather to mobilize state power on behalf of the market. Yeah. And indeed, even to reconfigure the state as a site of market activity or quasi-market activity. I think both of them are true. On the one hand, you do want to get the government out of anything that makes the government less efficient. Right. So regulation, what have you? You know, I often think about the privatization of prisons as a very neoliberal idea. Because here you're taking something that was traditionally a function of government. And you are handing it over to the market in effect. I mean, it's still only the state has the power to incarcerate you. Private actors can't throw you into jail. But this is basically saying once we throw you into jail, then we're going to leave it to the market to determine the best way to run the jail. And that means that you're bringing different values. Well, and so the argument for doing that is what? Well, the market is doing it for doing it is that the market is efficient. Right. And government is not necessarily aiming for my schools or the ideals like equality and democracy. And justice. And that is the point that Wendy Brown focuses on with respect to what neoliberalism has wrought in our society and around the world. Right. It's not just a matter of privatization or thinking of things in terms of efficiency and profit. But it has fundamentally undermined the idea of a democratic society, a society that's equal, a society where there is this kind of common enterprise. And so what Wendy Brown is arguing is that we are all neoliberals now. And we are all thinking in this very truncated way about what's valuable, what's important. And as a result, we don't have any other ways to talk about these things, about values. So anyway, I feel like we've, you know, we could go on forever. Yeah, it is very interesting. It's and it should be very interesting. It's yeah, absolutely great. So let's do that. And then we'll come back and and spout some more. Okay. Jenna. This is Jenna's Benelli here today with Wendy Brown. Wendy, thanks for joining us on Democracy Works. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. So we are going to talk all about neoliberalism today. And it's the subject of your two most recent books. And I thought it would be good to start as we sometimes do on this show with with a definition. So how do you define neoliberalism and and what do you see as its relationship to democracy? It should be an easy question. If we were in Latin America, Africa, most parts of Europe and South Asia, it would be an easy question. And they're very familiar with neoliberalism as an undoing of social democracies and stripping out of welfare states, unleashing free trade, free markets, and so forth. North Americans are a little more bewildered by the term. And we don't have it as part of our everyday lexicon, although I think it's finally beginning to see pin. But having said that, I also want to suggest that we understand it at a social and political level and not just an economic level. It certainly is all the things I just listed. We recognize it as the undoing of the Keynesian welfare state and the substitution of free market policies, low taxes, everyone's responsible for themselves and getting rid of all the social supports except for a bare minimum safety net. But I want to add that it's also a whole form of governing reason by which I mean it's a way of understanding society, states, and individuals on an economic plane and only an economic plane or at least that was my argument at the end of the first book. And you talk in your forthcoming book about how some of your thinking has changed since then. So one of the things I felt compelled to understand with our hard right turn in the West over the last several years, not just Trump and Bolsonaro and Brexit and so forth, but also the more general uprising of an ethno nationalist and very patriarchal right political formation. And one of the things I wanted to understand was what was the connection of that to neoliberalism. Well, one thing you can say is rising inequality and open borders produces rage about being at the bottom end of that inequality and also about immigrants. But there was something else on the horizon that I had never noticed which is that the neoliberalism. neoliberal scheme was not just a substitute markets for social policy. It was also to substitute traditional moral values for understandings of social justice and institutions of social justice. And so part of what we're experiencing now is what I call the kind of scorpion tail of neoliberalism. The lashing out against the inequality, yes, but also the continued insistence that traditional morality, moral values, and traditions more generally from white supremacy to patriarchal families, religion in the public sphere, that those are more appropriate governors of human conduct than any state-mandered practices of equality or inclusion. Yeah, it is interesting. The way is that the economic and the moral aspects kind of get tangled together. Have they been one in the same since the foundations of these types of theories or did one kind of forget the other? So in the original neoliberal theories, most of your listeners will know names like Friedman, Hayak, Lesoth and Do We Know, some of the others who go under school called the Order of Liberals, but Europeans really are familiar with them. Those folks did argue for traditional morality as the necessary twin of free markets. They did not just believe you unleash markets. They also believe you unleash tradition more generally and let it substitute for state, what they considered, stateism and state despotism of human conduct. But I think we all tended to see neo-conservatism and traditionalism as a separate road from neoliberalism. And part of what I'm trying to do now is figure out whether those really were separate roads or as I suggest from the original architects always intended to be of a piece. The place you see this so clearly as in thaturism, Margaret Thatcher was just absolutely clear that you needed a strong traditional moral values, especially a strong family. But so was Reagan, very clear about that. And even a strong state and strong notions of authority and hierarchy to be a part of the neo-lobral program. And then of course, phenomena like Bolsonaro in Brazil where you see those things absolutely threaded together. He speaks of himself as a eradicating socialism by which he means both social justice and social welfare. Right. So thinking about Reagan and Thatcher, so you mentioned before, you know, Hayek and Friedman and some of these thinkers, how do these ideas make their way from kind of the annals of the academy into the highest realms of public policy in the US and the UK and the world? That's such a good question. And I'll give one answer here, but it's one of the things that academics concerned with neo-lobralism spend a lot of time arguing about. Look, I think the easiest way to understand it is that first there was a very serious economic crisis, often called a crisis of profitability in the 70s, that was also often seen as a crisis of the welfare state. Too much taxation, unions too strong, corporations too large and lazy and not really lean in mean and a real problem of stagflation. And at that moment, it was kind of, how should we say, it was a moment you could strike with a new set of ideas. And it's Milton Friedman himself who says, you know, what really matters in a crisis is what ideas are lying around. And boy, was he right because things could have gone another way. There would have been other way, there was no inevitability to neo-lobralism, but it had already been experimented with extensively in Latin America, the most famous experiment, of course, is overthrowing a socialist regime in Chile and replacing it with a neo-liberal one, literally architected by Milton Friedman and his students. But also, the experiments had taken place in lots of other places in the third world. The IMF was already solidly neo-liberal. So bringing it up to the north wasn't so difficult once Reagan and that were in power. How do Donald Trump and these other kind of populous leaders, you've mentioned fit into this picture? Yeah, I mean, there are two ways of reading it. What many people have argued is what you get with the rise of this F-no-nationalist right is the end of neo-liberalism. And it's Cornell West who says right after the election of Trump, the neo-liberal decades just ended with a neo-fascist bang. His beautiful way with words. And I think he's right in some ways. In other ways, I want to suggest we are seeing the continued unfurling of neo-liberal policies both in traditional morality and in the predominance of concern with economic over other kinds of values when it comes to justice. So yes, there's some new elements that have been thrown into the scene and I've also suggested in the second book I wrote on the subject that none of this is what the original neo-liberals wanted. They wanted a smooth, pacified citizenry, basically divested of any democratic voice with a state-tended free market economy where there was not plutocracy, where there was not oligarchy and we're above all, there was not a mobilized mass. So some of this is a neo-liberal effect that the neo-liberals hadn't planned on. But some of it I want to suggest is also still neo-liberalism in play. I'm a millennial. This has kind of always been the way the world has been ever since I've grown up. So how do you think that younger generations, millennials and generation Z still to come? What are they going to make of us? On the one hand it is kind of the only thing they've ever known, but I think that there might be some sentiments that they are leaning, they're embracing people like Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez and people of very different ideas about how the world should operate. So one of the things I'm struck by in your generation, the sentient political lefty leaning part of your generation is that you all are faced with two things simultaneously. One, a lack of certainty that the earth is going to last as long as your lifetime would require it to last to sustain you. And on the other hand, incredible precarity at every level. None of the guarantees of my generation, even at the working class level of stable jobs, ability to educate and raise your children, and ability to imagine a comfortable retirement and possibly decent home ownership. That's just gone. So what a world in which I mean it's a kind of schizophrenic subjectivity you're nodding. I think that most of you have, but I think it's precisely the one from which rejection of capitalism, not even just the neoliberal term, but a rejection of capitalism and of the sluggish dinosaur like pace of parliamentary or constitutional democracy that is now so deeply corrupted by neoliberal money and corporate power. One of the things I see coming from your generation is the rejection of those two things as the necessary coordinates of the political and economic future. And I think all the hope rests there. I'm sorry that we bequeathed you this world. I think it's, I mean, it's an unforgivable thing for the boomer generation so-called that had all the sort of political latitude and social room in the world to make a better future, got lazy or stupid at the moment of the neoliberal revolution and didn't stop it. But here it is. And I do see both in the response to Okasio Cortez and obviously Bernie Sanders, but also the utter lack of, what do I want to call it, worry about the term socialism and interest in working in kind of extra working politically, but not necessarily through the conventional institutions. Seems to me to suggest something promising, if not absolutely hopeful. So I have to say, I thought a lot about David Frum when I was reading your book, we've had him on campus. He was actually been on this show before and he articulates a vision of democracy where it's about joining something. It's about kind of getting involved at the at the local level and you're letting the markets play out kind of how they play out and democracy really is more on this much smaller scale. Yeah, what do you make of that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's nothing wrong with it in itself. Why I'm impatient with it as a way to redress either the gross inequality or the serious existential dangers that we face now is that it's basically saying go join something, go feel like you're part of something, but let the major powers that shape our lives run through markets, which presumably run through no hands at all. We rather desperately need to get our hands on those powers. And it's not just that I want a higher level of democratized political and social power. I do than he does, but I also think it's a kind of so horrific. It's a kind of, you know, go ahead and take this, let this be your democratic play pen. Well, markets recall, I'm not even just going to say havoc, but recall on some of our most precious and precarious and vulnerable species and domains and problems. And it won't do. I do want to say, of course, there are many democratic candidates today who say what we need to do is get control of markets again. It's not that we need to eliminate capitalism. We're not going all the way over with Bernie and with AOC to democratic socialism, but we're trying to, you know, get some fairness back into the system and some control back into the system. I am not against that. I'm actually for anything other than our current conjuncture, but I think it's a little naive, given globalization, that the danger we face today is that trying to control markets at the state level is just about impossible. You need to do something a little more than just imagine governing them because they're finance in particular, but also most forms of production are dispersed around the globe. Sure. Yeah. I mean, we can think of examples like higher education. You know, that's very, very much consumer driven or thinking of students as consumers to, you know, privatizing prisons. And I'm just wondering like, are these things because there's been a generation or so of this thought? Is it almost past the point of no return where these systems are so ingrained that we're not going to be able to bring them back to what might be a more democratic model? I have two thoughts about that. One is it's really important to remember just what you said. It's just one generation. Painsianism lasted for 50 years. No one thought it could be taken apart. It was here to stay. The question for the neoliberalist was always to try to figure out how to keep it from getting worse, how to prevent the straight on drive toward complete socialism and keep some markets in the picture. So one generation, it's not a lot. The second thing I want to say is that we are obviously in a very serious political crisis. We've already talked about the crisis of climate change, but we're in an extreme political crisis where not just the left and right edges, but left and right mainstreams now, the impatience with the current system and the belief that it's not serving people or the planet is very strong. And so it doesn't seem to me this is the moment to say, well, it's just so insettimented. Now I don't see how we can turn it back. Look so many privatizing fit endeavors have also failed. Look at the, for example, the whole world of privatized higher education. People know that it actually has been largely a disaster both for learning and for generating job ready, so-called outcomes for research. And then of course the proprietary, the absolute for-profit schools are nothing but a scandal. So, and we're some of the same stuff as now known about privatizing prisons. The level of waste, but also the level of abuse and scandalous. What can individuals do to help shape a more democratic future, whatever the next generation holds? So I think there's lots of different things people can do. Many of them are local. I think a lot of the local experiments in everything from addressing housing crises, for example, where I live in the Bay Area, in forms other than through just turning to the markets, which brought us to the past where, you know, we no longer are a place where young people can afford to live and work. 90% of our school teachers cannot live in the Bay Area towns where they teach. So we're in that kind of a crisis and that means that there are ways of addressing things through political councils, boards of supervisors, and what's really exciting, forms of low income housing trusts and affordability, housing affordability trusts that are trying to build and develop and maintain housing stock that is not simply submitted to speculation. That's important in itself, but it's also important as a model. We can do this another way. We can take care of ourselves. We don't have to pile up the homeless so that we look increasingly like third-world nations with tent cities at the edges of our freeways. But at the same time, I think that what I'm struck by, and for example, teaching undergraduates, whenever I talk to undergraduates about being little bits of human capital, self-investing, and on a kind of hamster wheel to nowhere, as soon as we get the basic picture out and they get what you described as a little distance on what otherwise is the water they swim in, the response is usually. I don't want to be human capital. I don't want to be a self-investing, neurotic, anxiety-driven, performance-enhancing drug-taking, little creature, endlessly trying to just stay afloat here. There's got to be another way. So I think there's possibilities to do things locally in education and thinking, in addressing our political problems as individual citizens, letters to the editor, old-fashioned things, fallen shows, blogs, responses that begin to break with the idea that everything must be dealt with through markets. So is the idea that all those local changes would scale up to the state or to the national level? So rather than thinking of them as only scaling up or not, I think it's important to see them as models. Because when you see a model of something, you think, "Oh, that's how. So, environmentally sustainable farming happened." It's not that it's scaled up to agribusiness levels. It's that the idea that you could grow a good strawberry without pesticides, without heavy labor exploitation, and without costing $6 per strawberry at the farmer's market, that model then began to be imitated not just all over the country, but all over the world. And so I think it's more important to think about modeling alternatives than just scaling them up. Because at some point, a big shift in the economy is required that these models produce the possibility of accepting or reckoning with rather than resisting as terrifying. We were talking about morality earlier, this notion of traditional morality. Where does the notion of morality come from and what makes it traditional? Whose traditions are they? So an important question. So from Hayak, you get this idea that any tradition that has lasted over time is a good tradition. And what he adds to that is the only traditions that last over time are those that center family, property, and freedom. So he both makes a kind of what we would call these days empirical and historical claim. And then one kind of to the side of that very ideological claim that tradition always will be centered in family property and freedom, personal freedom. And he leaving him now to one side for a second, what you get in this affirmation today of traditional morality, I think, is an expression or concern to hang on to what's left of the privilege of a largely deprived, de-throwned, derasinated, uprooted, largely white group of people in the Euro-Atlantic, and now some of them in Brazil and other parts of Latin America as well, who are hanging on to the idea of their supremacy or their anointing by God or their anointing by the nation, by their teeth. And I think what's important to see is the way tradition is serving a kind of supremacism, male supremacism, white supremacism, and nativism that has been eroded not just by social justice mandates, but by neoliberalism itself. It's what toppled unions. It's what toppled good jobs in the North. And the neoliberals knew that that that would happen. They knew if you set capital loose and you unburden trade from tariffs and other barriers, that capital would go chasing the cheapest labor on the planet, and that would not be in the North. They knew it was going to devastate the stability and the security of a white working and middle class. And lo and behold, it did. What they didn't count on is that that white working middle class would rise up, clinging to its traditional values, and scream politically, not just against social justice warriors, but also against the system that itself had to throne them. If, as you suggest, you know, democratic capitalism can't work because of globalization, doesn't that then necessitate a more global solution or global answer to this problem? So here's what we're in a kind of interregnum between the global and the national. And, you know, we feel it all the time, that interregnum, where we are looking for certain kinds of solutions to problems like to climate change or even to international transnational migration. We're looking to global institutions and global enforcement to solve those problems. We're therefore looking to extremely anti-democratic institutional solutions to dire problems. And I think we probably have to accept that that's what we're doing, even if we are relentlessly democratic in our souls and in other ways. On the other hand, we, when we think about what to do in relationship to a neoliberalized global political economy, nothing is scarier, I think, than the idea of masters of the universe taking that in hand, which is what we have to some degree already in the IMF and the World Bank. And if we were to kind of step it up, what scares me about it is, first of all, even if it tilted in what we might call social or social democratic directions, it's hard to see where the democracy would be. And other than, you know, democracy in the sense of more equality, but that's not all there is to democracy, but more worrisome to me is reiterating the very thing that happened in the 70s with the new international economic order coming from the South that was trying to say, wait, wait, you guys have stomped all over us for a couple of centuries with colonialism and imperialism. Now you're about to unleash a global economic order. We need some adjustments made in our favor and so that we can get on an equal plane field. If that happens, you're going to get global civil war. I don't have another way to put it. You're either going to get a responsiveness to that on the part of those masters of the universe. And then the north, you know, does what it's doing right now, which is raging against its dark brethren and sister in the in the south as it comes over its borders, or you're going to get the opposite. You throw the south under the bus. So I worry, I mean, on the one hand, international socialism is as long and marvelous dream. But on the other hand, what that dream never dealt with was the question of political power and political management. And that's the scariest stuff to me, at all. So Wendy, we're going to end as we always do with our fore mood of the nation poll questions. So thinking about politics and what's going on in the US or throughout the world today, what makes you angry? That some of the most important stories of promise and of of courage don't make it into the mainstream press and the front pages. What makes you proud? Those very stories, the people you least expect to be, to have time and space and room in their psyches or their lives to remake this world and to give it another chance that they do that kind of thing. Now what makes you worry? That we're running out of time. And then finally what gives you hope? Your generation. Wendy Brown, thank you so much for joining us today. Well, that was very interesting and terrific, Gast. I think she really does lay out, give you an idea at least of the complexity of the idea of neoliberalism. Well, and it is a genuine contribution to something that I think we have tried to do with this podcast is just to give people a sense of what's going on. Why is what's happening happening? The idea that you have to have some sense of that before you can know what to do about it. I think it's in that sense irrespective of where you come down politically. It's a genuine contribution to our public debate. Yeah, and it's timely too because it's really striking how. Now a lot of this is coming from, well, it's coming from both sides actually. A lot of the campaign to date has been about debating these big ideologies, socialism, capitalism, nobody talks about neoliberalism because if they haven't listened to our podcast, they don't really understand what it is. But socialism certainly, you certainly have this idea and this is something that she reflected on was that young people are looking at the world right now and they're looking at their own futures in it and sensing a kind of precariousness that we didn't experience at their age. And they're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for this. It offers a way of thinking about the way younger voters flock to Bernie Sanders in 2016. Not, you know, and it puzzled people, really? They're all socialists. All these younger voters want socialism. And I don't know that that's really the case so much as they know that the status quo, which we're defining as neoliberalism, is not okay. Right. And not the way they want to live their life. It's not working out for them. That's exactly what that's exactly what she was saying. I don't want to be just human capital, right? I want to have something more to my time on this earth than just being, you know, a profit maximizer, right? And so they say that while recognizing the high degree of professionalization they require and all of that to succeed in today's. Well, and, you know, and, you know, it's also fair to say that she's at Berkeley, which is, you know, at public school, but as hard to get into as any school in the country. And so these students have experienced this already, right? In terms of the kind of competition that's required for them to get into Berkeley in the first place. Well, sure. I mean, isn't that part of the sort of backstory of this ridiculous yet really disturbing scandal having to do with college missions? Yes. Yes. Right. And, you know, when you think about people paying $500,000 to get into USC, or cheating, right? All these different forms of key kinds. So I think this idea that what Wendy Brown says in her book is that neoliberalism doesn't just put economic goals and values as the only values. It undermines and denigrates any other values. Right. So conscience declines. The idea of other kinds of morality, fairness. If this is a, a fight or a competition in which you know, winning is about making more money than the other person, then that's the way you evaluate your behavior. That's a way you evaluate your choices. You know, and really, you know, neoliberalism seems to be kind of trace back in the United States anyway to Ronald Reagan. It seems to be, and you know, one of Ronald Reagan's greatest phrases are both well-known phrases is that, you know, something about governments. What's the worst thing you can hear? Government will take care of that. Oh, no, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That's the worst thing you can hear. And then, you know, Bill Clinton just picks up on that later on when he basically says governments problem. Yeah, he said the Arab big government is over. The Arab big government is over. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, and, you know, and so you and I were around when this kind of came into being and really kind of took over When he Brown says, "We are all neoliberals in some sense," and that I think is persuasive because we're all talking about our own personal branding and how we position ourselves in the marketplace and why we do things. And again, not an illegitimate idea, not an illegitimate thought. The problem is when it becomes the only criteria, the only thought, and that's her argument, I think. Anyway, I need to mention her book. It's called, "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, the Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West." Which we had talked about a more with David Fromp. I do too. It would be interesting to get those two very smart people together. Anyway, that would be a good podcast. That would be a good podcast. It's better than the kind of dribble the UNI produces. So for the McCordney's to do for Democracy and the Studios of WPSU, this has been Democracy Works. I'm Chris Beam. I'm Michael Berkman. Thanks for listening. Democracy Works is produced by the McCordney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and WPSU Penn State. Your hosts are Michael Berkman, Chris Beam, and me, Jenna Spinelli. Andy Grant is our engineer and Mark Stitzer is our editor. Additional support comes from Emily Reddy, Sherein Stanford, Craig Johnson, and the rest of the team at WPSU. For detailed show notes and discussion questions for each episode, visit our website at democracyworkspodcast.com. And if you like what you heard today, please consider rating or reviewing us wherever you listen to podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]