Here’s an interesting idea from Gary Gerstle’s book (which is the best book I have read on neoliberalism, and I have read a couple of library aisles of them).
He says that almost all Democrats and Republicans embraced neoliberalism by mid-1990s. Their differences (known as culture wars) were these:
1. Democrats embraced cosmopolitanism and the belief in malleable identities because both make people more marketable. You can both sell them better on the market as goods (to Big Pharma, for instance) and help them sell themselves (as transportable labor).
2. Republicans embraced “new Victorianism” that made people more resilient, disciplined, contained, and in that way better able to handle the cruelty of the markets.
So ultimately, a rainbow-haired genderfluid “zie” snowflake on TikTok and a trad Paleo fitness dude on Twitter are reacting to the same thing. They are brothers in arms. Or, rather, a brother and a genderless sibling.
Gerstle thinks that the neoliberal order will one day fall apart because the pronoun snowflake and the trad dude would walk too far away from each other and rip it.
(The Paleo Dude and the Pronoun Snowflake are my invention. Please don’t go looking for them in Gary Gerstle’s book).
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