It's great to welcome to the program today, Wendy Brown, who's a professor of political
science at UC Berkeley
and also author most recently of in the ruins of neoliberalism, the rise of anti-democratic
politics in the West.
Uh, Wendy, so great to have you on.
Thanks for having me.
So first, just so we're all hopefully working with, with the sort of same definition of
neoliberalism, I think it's a much understood and, and, uh, much understood and debated
term in the context that you write about it.
How, what are the, the important tenants that define neo-liberalism?
So, just to be clear to start with, because I do think it's confusing to many Americans
by neo-liberalism.
The original neo-liberals Milton Friedman, Friedrich kayak and others were referring
to a modification of economic liberalism.
And I only want to make that clear because still so many Americans, uh, imagine that
it has something to do with our notion of political liberalism where it has to do with
more equality, more social spending, more state and so forth.
And it's just the opposite.
Neoliberalism as the founding fathers of it, uh, thought about neoliberalism meant taking
the basic principles of economic liberalism that is, uh, unregulated markets maximized
competition and, and, and modifying those and the modifications that they imagined and
that actually have come to be involved.
Two things.
One, understanding that markets are not necessarily natural, even if they're good.
So they need a lot of state support.
They don't need state intervention, but they need state support.
They need the state oriented to the issue of making markets work and making markets
thrive.
And the other thing that they did to modify the original Adam Smith notions of, of liberalism
had to do with um, bringing traditional morality into the picture.
Understanding that not just markets but also morals were what ought to be organizing social
life, cultural life, familial life and so forth.
And the reason I emphasize that is that so many of us talk about neoliberalism just as
a set of economic policies, but we need to understand that it also has this other dimension,
a dimension that of course has really come to the fore as we think about contemporary
political life.
Yeah, I mean w what was the trajectory of that in history?
Because it's not necessarily obvious that what starts as a set of economic principles
would eventually come to encompass a particular view about so-called, you know, traditional
family values or that it would dictate certain foreign policy as often is a part of discussions
about neoliberal versus other points of view.
What was the trajectory through which those elements became wrapped up in this sort of
bigger understanding of neoliberalism in the last 20 or 30 years?
The fundamental attack that neo-liberalism mates on the social state on Keynesianism,
on practices of social justice that have to do with legislation of the good, the fundamental
attack that neo-liberalism makes is this.
It says better that what we have is just organically developed morality and markets organizing
society and that means less democratic legislation.
In fact, the neo-liberals were extremely suspicious of and really tried to modify and, and, and
diminish the extent to which legislatures in electoral democracies should do anything
other than just set general laws for people.
So they really wanted legislators out of the social justice business, out of the market
regulation business.
And certainly out of the taxation business.
So those two things come together.
Morality and market in the attack that neo-liberals make on democratic ways of deciding how we
should live together, how much equality we should have, how much inclusion we should
have, how we ought to deal with things like gender power, racial power, class power and
so forth.
All of those, the neo-liberals wanted left alone so that traditional morality and uh,
markets could govern our lives and they believed that that would maximize freedom and uh, maximize
the good, maximize a good society.
Yeah.
One of the things that, that is interesting to me as I understand that, and I'm curious
if you believe that the same kind of inherent contradiction exists is that in a lot of the
ideology that's espoused about neoliberalism and these free market, less regulation, letting,
increasing freedom, the language is very much about getting out of the way to allow more
Liberty to exist.
But in practice that getting out of the way to the extent that it exists, and of course
it's much more complicated than that can actually allow a lot of different types of authoritarianism
to take hold in different ways.
Is that a contradiction that, that you agree exists there?
Well, for them it's not a contradiction for the following season.
Uh, for us it seems that way.
How, how come, what starts as a project or a program of freedom ends up in the kind of
authoritarianism that we see in the bull scenario regime.
Many of us argue is taking shape under Trump and uh, err Dwan and so forth.
Yes.
But for, for, for insight and neoliberal frame, the thinking goes like this.
It's okay to have strong States as long as you maximize individual Liberty.
Strong States are, are the way that you will ensure that individuals can engage in market
conduct and have the moral life, the social life that they choose.
But what a state must not do is intervene in individual freedoms.
So to put this in, in in fairly simple language, what Neil liberals thought was all right was
a form of what we might call authoritarian liberalism.
That is a strong state, making decisions, indifferent to what we'd call the checks and
balances and three branches of government and all of that.
A strong state making decisions, but leaving alone private life, leaving alone individual
life.
And that's what really distinguishes the authoritarian liberalism taking shape today and that many
on the right support from classic fascism.
Yeah, and well, the other thing that's interesting to me there is there's a lot of overlap between
that ideology and sort of what we might consider traditional, right?
Libertarianism, not social libertarianism, but right libertarianism, except when it comes
to foreign policy, neoliberalism has been much more interventionist then the right libertarians
at least claim that they would be the, I don't know that they've ever really gotten a shot
to show us how non-interventionist they would be, but that in practice seems to be a very
big distinguishing factor.
Despite the talk of freedom and the individual Liberty being the most important form of it.
Neoliberalism has been extraordinarily interventionist in terms of foreign policy.
Correct.
Now, here again, just if I'm to try to explain what neo-liberals think they're doing, what
they're trying, what they imagine they're trying to do is create a world of global free
trade.
Now what's happening right now is another story with the trade Wars and so forth.
But with the classic Neil liberal, uh, foreign policy advocates thought they were doing,
for example, in Iraq regime change in Iraq.
And then Neil liberalize the society, make it into part of the global order of, among
other things, debt financing and free trade and so forth.
So you're absolutely right that they understand, uh, a highly interventionist foreign policy
as part of what is bringing about the Neo liberal order.
But there's one other area that I would emphasize where Neo, uh, the, the kind of markets and
morals program of the neo-liberals seems to really intervene in individual Liberty.
And that's of course, um, reproductive freedom and LGBT rights.
And again, the official thinking here is, well, that has to do with the moral order.
These things go against traditional morality, which is tried and true and belongs part and
parcel with a free market society.
So it's slippery there, but there you really do have a contradiction, lots of intervention
in the freedom of um, uh, women and uh, non-normative uh, sexualities saying no, you can't do that.
There is the, I guess we could call it the hope among many on the American left that
socially democratic ideas that are similar to those of the Scandinavian economies, Northern
Europe, et cetera, are experiencing, um, maybe a resurgence or Renaissance of sorts or, or
maybe approaching something new that maybe we've not even seen before in the United States
and that the rise of those ideas will necessarily push out some of the neoliberal framework
that has been the status quo for a long time.
Is it as clear as if one goes up, the other goes down?
Is it more complicated than that?
Do you even agree that that's actually a trend that we're now seeing?
I do think that there has been a fairly robust challenge to Neo liberal ideas really since
the 2008 finance capital meltdown.
I mean that was the beginning of the end of a broad endorsement of free markets privatization,
uh, minimal social state depression of progressive taxation that post 2008 rethink went beyond
occupy, although occupy really embodied it that, uh, you know, and what we need to remember
is that however limited the actual timeframe of occupy wall street, what it did was begin
to change the conversation about inequality, about access to public education, higher education,
uh, about banks being given free reign to do whatever they wanted, bailing out the banks
but not the foreclosed homeowners and so forth.
So with that conversation now changed, uh, you get the rise of Bernie Sanders and in
turn AOC and Elizabeth Warren and so forth such that I, I would actually agree that what
you have is a fairly robust challenge now to Neil the economic ideas.
But, uh, I would say a little bit less savvy on the part of the left about the extent to
which neoliberalism is also bound up with this idea that the state should stay out of
the moral realm by which is meant the social justice realm.
Again, the left has certainly been robust on the subject of arguing for gender rights,
LGBT rights, black civil rights, um, endorsing all kinds of social movement.
But I, but I do think it's the part of the story that's more complicated is taking apart
that broad belief that neo-liberalism set into our, the bones of society, that it's
best for the state to be out of the business of social justice redistribution, social spending
and all the rest.
And to just let those things be handled individually.
So to put a fine, to compress the point.
I do think that we have a pretty major challenge now to neoliberal economic thinking, but maybe
not a full grasp of the way that what I call neoliberal reason has, has really come to
organize a lot of our understanding of society and what's appropriate for democratic legislation.
Yeah.
I've also found the challenge to be less robust when it comes to foreign policy.
I mean, you do hear, Hey, we, we shouldn't be getting it.
We're not the world's policemen.
We should be getting out of here.
They're the other place.
But it's been a less sort of nuanced and well thought out challenge.
I don't know if you would agree.
I totally agree.
And I think that in many ways in the United States, Trump has really confused the left
in its own rethinking its own thinking about foreign policy because he's, Dan's now for
what the anti Imperial left used to stand for, which is get out of the endless Wars,
don't be the world's policemen.
Of course he's trying to do all kinds of things at the level of, of trade and still engaged
in, in um, massive, what we could call neo-colonial condemnation of all kinds of nations and practices.
But the, the withdrawal that has typically been the stance of many on the left has, has
really, I think not been fully come to terms with by the left to think about, okay, where,
where does the lift stand on the question of joining together with others in the world,
not just to solve climate change, not just to get institutions of political economy,
right, but also to right wrongs, where are we with human rights diff courts, where are
we with humanitarian intervention?
And the left has gone super quiet on those subjects.
Absolutely fascinating.
We've been talking with Wendy Brown, who's professor of political science at UC Berkeley,
most recently, author of [inaudible]
in the ruins of neoliberalism, the rise of anti-democratic politics in the West.
Wendy's such a pleasure having you on.
I appreciate your time, David.
It was good to talk to you.
Thank you.