The Neoliberal Mystique
Purgatory is better than Hell's Ninth Circle, but it is still bad
Rapper and one-note actor Ice Cube made waves in social media last week through the conservative Full Send podcast when he said, “I mean like black people have supported Democrats, you know, overwhelmingly for 50, 60 years, and nothing has changed. So, something's got to change.” O'Shea Jackson, Sr. was attempting to explain his entanglement with former President Donald J. Trump during the 2020 election cycle, one in which he reached out to both the GOP and Democrats to get them on board with his “Contract With Black America.” I for one do not seek policy prescriptives from any music artist, Beyoncé included. Especially from a one-percenter who has complained about their taxes being too high while rappin’ “she got ass for days!” over the years.
But like it or not, Jackson has a bit of a point. About nine out of every 10 Black voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates for every office from school board member to the presidency. Over the decades, though roughly 40 percent of African Americans can count themselves as part of the US’ struggle-to-solid middle class — and one in six are part of the Black affluent class — millions of Black folk still find themselves living with and working with poverty. Regardless of socioeconomic standing or mobility, the late Marvin Gaye’s lyrics from his 1971 hit “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” still ring true in my neurons.“Inflation/no chance/To increase finance” and “Trigger happy policing” are just as true for African Americans in 2023 as it was for millions of Black folk when I was making baby-coo noises.
So, too, are Stevie Wonder’s lyrics about Black migration, the drug war on Black communities, and environmental racism in his 1973 smash “Living For The City,” with lines like
His hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty
He spends the life walking the streets of New York City
He's almost dead from breathing in air pollution
He tried and fought, but to him there's no solution
These lines could easily describe how I grew up and what I observed of my mom and dad and idiot stepfather in and mostly around New York in the late-1970s and into the 1980s. Despite Democratic mayors in Mount Vernon and in New York, despite Democratic Assemblymen and women representing in Albany, despite even a Democratic president in one Jimmy Carter until 1981, life didn’t get better, and in fact got worse.
What no one explained to me growing up was the Democratic Party’s conservative shift, that the party’s leaders had begun to abandon many of its lofty ideas and ideals. Ideas like Keynesian economics, the social welfare contract with ordinary Americans developed under the Second New Deal, the idea that the government could wage a war on poverty and create a universal system of healthcare. Ideals like creating an opportunity onramp for African Americans and for people of all races living with poverty in K-12, in higher education, in employment, and in housing. Even in the Carter years, commitments to this relatively progressive agenda had started to wane.
With the Reagan-Bush 1980s and the Clinton 1990s came the rise of the neoconservatives, my teachers, my professors, and my elders would say. The commitment of the GOP to smaller government (really, a smaller social welfare state), lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and frequent racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic messaging was a common conversation among my circles.
But the GOP neoconservative commitment was hardly a partisan one. Many Democrats, including one Joe Biden, supported many or even most of such efforts in the name of “compromise” or “bipartisanship.” Former President Bill Clinton took it a step further, with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the 1994 Crime Bill, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the remaking of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) into the state block-grant, work-requirement Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1997, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Except for in my graduate seminars on US politics or US working-class history, no one I knew discussed the ascendancy of neoliberal politics in the Democratic Party, an uneasy complement to the neoconservative movement among Republicans.
Neoliberals actually share some things in common with neoconservatives to the point of overlapping, this despite party affiliation. Both distrust big government, especially the social welfare state. Neoliberalism is fundamentally a champion of the market and the need for competition to sort out the best people and the most profitable corporations on the one hand, and all the big-L losers on the other. Politically, it means placing responsibility for any public goods on individuals. Water and sewage, public health, public schools, public welfare, infrastructure, all should be determined through a competitive battle over profitability and resources. Public need and a desire for a more equitable and just world never comes into play in the mind of the neoliberal.
In the politics of the US and in the Democratic Party, though, neoliberalism is more than just capitalists worshiping “the market” on Wall Street, K Street, and Capitol Hill. After all, the GOP has been doing precisely this since the 1870s. Neoliberalism is also about using the language of center-left progressives to promote personal responsibility for what otherwise ought to be a public good. The most recent examples of such include the expiration of the Department of Health and Human Services’ public health emergency declared for the COVID-19 pandemic. A Democratic president and a split Congress allowed the expiration to occur essentially because the expense for caring for ordinary Americans and their health had become too great. They are shifting the expense for a global pandemic to the individual American consumer, making it very expensive for anyone living with poverty who contracts COVID-19 and its potential long-term impacts. There’s also the recent debt ceiling compromise to potentially force millions of Americans 50-54 years in age to work for their food stamp benefits, to work in order to eat.
This is neoliberalism at work, in a Democratic Party that shifted from centrist to center-right at its ideological core by the time I began high school in 1983. The only thing left about the Democratic Party aside from Rep. Ilhan Omer (D-MN) is that it is left of a decidedly far-right GOP. Playing right-center field in baseball does not make one a left-fielder, anymore than being center-right makes a Democrat an actual leftist, progressive, or liberal. And just because President Joe Biden is better than Trump does not mean Americans who now live in Purgatory can’t feel the heat of the hellish molten lava below their feet. As I have already said, welcome to the American Devolution.