Abandon Neoliberalism

              The American political theatre has been viewed as a tale of two sides. For the past 50 years or so, it’s looked something like this: the bleeding heart liberals of the Democratic party support big government, “government handouts,” and exporting democracy to countries that desperately need it (and maybe taking some oil too?) Meanwhile the Republican party are the rational conservatives that have strong morals, prefer small government (unless you count the military or the police) and American isolationism, not really meddling in international affairs (unless you count Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.)

                The reality of the situation is more like this: the biggest voices of the Republican party are insane, senile, or straight-up bought out by oil giants and industries with strong libertarian interests. The Democratic party currently is in the perfect position to set up a leftist revolution while the Republicans scramble to prop themselves up on the basis of a non-existent culture war. Unfortunately for the people, the Democratic Party is run by a cast of wishy-washy aging centrists because the DNC is a neoliberal garbage fire LARPing as a leftist organization.

                Since at least the Reagan era, the dominant political ideology in our country is Neoliberalism, which can present itself as socially left-wing, but ultimately, is still a form of liberalism, and is thus is more economically similar to a center-right ideology. The way they maintain this seemingly paradoxical balancing act is by warping social movements that oppose the discrimination and exploitation of the lower and minority class and scrubbing them clean of any relation to anti-capitalist movements, until the movement is effectively sedated into submission. As Professor Cornel West puts it in reference to Neoliberalism and varied black liberation movements,

“We lost sight of attacking issues of poverty, class––with the death of Martin [Luther King Jr.]—and moved into an obsession with having black faces in high places. As long as we had those black faces in high places, the poor could live symbolically through them, vicariously through them. Or those black faces themselves, middle class and upper middle class, could claim that somehow they were the index of progress. Whereas the real index of progress is ensuring that when you’re living in poverty, you have a quality education for everybody––not ensuring you have more kids at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”

For an example of the decay of a radical movement into one more docile, the 2020 George Floyd protests often had rallying cries for police abolition; this slowly became a movement towards police defunding, and ultimately, fell flat on it’s face, as overall police funding has increased.

Neoliberalism just doesn’t work. It will never achieve a true “free market” if you care about that sort of thing, and it will certainly never achieve any significant social equity that will trickle down to the working class, and while I can’t tell you exactly what to think and what to believe, I’m telling you to wake up and abandon neoliberalism. The system will never do anything for you, it will only pretend to do something for your cultural community, and ultimately, while support for equality and social issues are important and should not be abandoned, social equality and economic equality are two sides of the same coin and must be improved together. Neoliberalism only wants a veil of equal identity, where each identity is given the same value. However, it is my belief that what is important is that every person is equal, not just every identity.

Again, I cannot tell you what you should believe, but I can tell you what I believe. Class solidarity is a cause that can cut past the boundaries of identity, and the experience of being exploited by a capitalist system that undervalues your labor is the common ground that can be shared by someone of almost any identity. As Pr. West explained, “faces in high places” doesn’t get to the root of social inequality. The value obtained from for example, a transgender congressperson, or a biracial president, or a billionaire woman is nothing compared to the real benefit of solving the fundamental issues of wealth inequality that affect both the majority and especially minorities so heavily. The working class is unified not by biology or by culture, but by the experience of being exploited for surplus labor by the upper class, and the drive to create a better future.

                Neoliberalism and our modern societal system has failed us greatly, to the extent that no person of the working class majority could benefit from the status quo. It is imperative that we abandon the status quo in favor of a belief system that actually stands to benefit us; more importantly than that, it is time for the working class to abandon our obsession with the state making capitalism equal for us, instead of unifying to actually dismantle the system that is holding us all in chains. Even as time goes on, neoliberalism becomes increasingly more dangerous and susceptible to right-wing authoritarian populists preying on disaffected centrists, telling them that the root of the issue lies in some form of “social degeneracy” that must be cleansed, whether it comes in the form of some sort of straight pride parade or whether it’s purging school libraries of any books deemed wrongthink. Where the Democrats go wrong is that they waste their time trying to sway people away from the Republicans while still participating in a meaningless culture war so they can drag their feet on economic policy that would threaten the power of themselves and their biggest corporate sponsors.

And so, I leave you with this: Don’t you think there’s a better way? When you look at your life as it is, is it truly as fulfilling as it could be? Is the status quo really working the way it should? Is this what you deserve?