Abstract
In Chap. 4 we looked at structural explanations for the Neoliberal Turn. In this chapter we discuss theories that emphasise the roles of institutions, actors and cultures. We use the following headings: the politics of decline, the rise and fall of democratic globalism, pivotal decade, winner-take-all politics, pathways of development, a superpower transformed, the rise of the right and false consciousness.
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Notes
- 1.
The latter is a reference to the international role of the dollar. In a letter published in The Guardian on 12 August 2017 (p. 30), D.B.C. Reed quoted Enoch Powell as telling an audience in Cheltenham in 1968 that establishment moves were already afoot to convince the public (and the unions) that ‘trade unions are responsible, wholly or partly, for rising prices and the falling value of money. It is really an astounding spectacle: the trade unions have clapped the handcuffs on to their own wrists, gone into the dock, and pleaded guilty to causing inflation’. Reed sees Nixon’s August 1971 decision to let the dollar float (see below, A Superpower Transformed) as the main cause of the worldwide inflation and disruption that characterised most of the next decade (see also Conway, 2018 and Note 9). I have unfortunately been unable to contact Reed.
- 2.
- 3.
In a 2019 article, Aditya Chakrabortty argued that the ‘Thatcher experiment’ had ‘pretty well failed’:
Four decades after she took power, 38% of working-age households now take more from the state in benefits, health and education than they pay back in taxes. Wealth in Britain is now so concentrated that the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies believes “inheritance is probably the most important factor in determining a person’s overall wealth since Victorian times”.
As noted in Chap. 1, the Johnson Government’s ‘levelling up’ policy (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2022) is essentially an attempt to reduce these regional disparities (see Chap. 7).
- 4.
Mike Conczal’s Freedom from the Market (2018) is a very useful review of the ways in which the US has historically managed to balance the needs of society with the market.
- 5.
Prasad makes an interesting observation about the ability of politicians in adversarial systems to exploit secondary issues, often falsely. Political ‘demagoguery’ arises where a politician mobilises opinion on what most people would see as a secondary issue, and where the claims made are demonstrably false. Political entrepreneurship arises where only the first condition applies (Prasad, 2006: 36). The emphasis placed on immigration in the Brexit Leave (and Trump) campaigns would appear to be excellent examples of such demagoguery, and even Brexit itself: Simon Kuper noted in the Financial Times in 2019 that according to polling by Ipsos Mori, in the decade to 2015, typically fewer than 10 per cent of Britons had named the EU as ‘one of the most important issues facing the country’. Even in the 2015 election, with the conservatives pledging a referendum if they won, only 6 per cent said the EU was the main issue.
- 6.
According to current OECD statistics, of the Organisation’s 38 members and associates in 2020, only South Africa and Costa Rica had a higher proportion than the US of people whose income fell below the poverty line (with the poverty line defined as half the median income of the total population). (Retrieved 13 January 2022 from https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm). Of course, consumption is the main driver of both the American and British economies.
- 7.
As a sometime union official, Reagan could see that tax cuts could appeal to working-class voters:
Those who belong to unions … are preoccupied with what used to be called middle class problems: property taxes, interest rates on loans, the price of a car or recreational vehicle. The no longer identify with the aging New Deal agenda of social activism. (Sam Hurst, The New Democratic Coalition Los Angeles Times 22 February 1981, quoted in Prasad, 2018: 90)
- 8.
According to an analysis of IMF data by Mark Dixon and Patrick Clark of Solent University, every major OECD country increased the share of government expenditure in GDP between 1950 and the mid-1970s. There were further increases subsequently. However, certain countries remained bigger public spenders than others: levels of government expenditure have been highest in France and Sweden (although the latter has fallen spectacularly since the early 1990s); low in Japan and the US; and middling in the UK and Germany. The data source is https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/DEU.
- 9.
In an article in The Guardian in August 2021 Larry Elliott argued that Nixon’s decision to break the dollar-gold link (which was welcomed as a liberalising decision by Milton Friedman and other Neoliberal economists) opened the Pandora’s Box of ‘volatile financial markets, geopolitical tension, inflated asset prices underwritten by low interest rates and QE, and where trust in central banks is starting to wear a bit thin’.
- 10.
A more recent book by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola (2021) describes how the Koch network is trying to foment ‘campus wars’ around alleged threats to ‘free speech’.
- 11.
There does not appear to be a comparable study of the rise of the Right in Britain, but Richard Cockett’s (1994) book Thinking the Unthinkable remains essential reading for the development of conservative thought up to the 1980s (see also Dorey, 2011). There are clear parallels in the lowering of trust in politicians in Britain which arguably began with the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009 and has culminated for the moment in Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’.
- 12.
A widely accepted analysis by the independent Tax Policy Center (2018) found that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would reduce taxes on average for all income groups in both 2018 and 2025. But in general, higher-income households would receive larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income, with the largest cuts as a share of income going to taxpayers in the 95th–99th percentiles of the income distribution. On average, in 2027 taxes would change little for lower- and middle-income groups but would decrease for higher-income groups. Robert Kuttner’s (2018: 312) verdict seems just:
As the details of his actual policies sank in, he was increasingly revealed (and reviled) as an ordinary Republican plutocrat trying to disguise his corporate agenda with faux-populist rantings, scapegoating foreigners, and embracing racists.
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Brown, R. (2022). Explaining the Neoliberal Turn Institutional Theories. In: The Conservative Counter-Revolution in Britain and America 1980-2020. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09142-1_5
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