Here’s proof that people love neoliberalism and wouldn’t let it go. The recent race for Mayor of Chicago was won by an ultra neoliberal BLMster, a fanatical proponent of de-funding public services, supported by the pro-lockdown teacher union that is in favor of dramatically downsizing public education.

After the Chicago riots of 2020, after the terrible increases in violent crime, after the worst lockdowns in the nation, after thousands of black kids in Chicago were thrown out of locked schools and into illiteracy / depression / gang life… people go and vote for more of the same.

Voter turnout was something like 35%, so most people couldn’t get assed to care either way.

As I said before, Gary Gerstle’s book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is the best I’ve read on neoliberalism. Ever. And I’ve read obsessively on the topic starting in the late 1990s. (For obvious reasons, given that I lived in Ukraine back then).

The book is amazingly well-written. It simply is never boring. The writing is very accessible and never gets bogged down in unnecessary details. Gerstle has a rare talent to explain very complicated things clearly. The book is non-partisan, measured, and calm.

But.

There is one subject that invariably turns Gerstle into a bleating lunatic, warping his judgment and making him erupt in strings of boring, overly excited slogans. He’s American, so we can all figure out what that subject is. But if you skip those parts, it’s a brilliant book.

Gary Gerstle believes that the degree to which the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump resonated with the masses is proof that the neoliberal order has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

I think he’s wrong.

Neoliberalism, by its nature, glamorizes dissent. And by doing so renders it impotent.

Think about the commercialization of Che Guevara portraits. That’s a perfect example. Or armchair Communists at Berkeley. This is another example. Nobody calls themselves “a neoliberal.” It’s not prestigious or cool. Being a revolutionary is. Drain the swamp! Down with the 1%! You feel edgy and important, even though absolutely nothing whatsoever is actually achieved.

Ranting and raving against “the system” while doing absolutely everything to keep it in place is the favorite neoliberal pastime. Yes, Trump and Sanders loudly denounced neoliberalism. But what has either of them actually done against it? Absolutely nothing.

To the contrary, they have created an illusion that attending the BLM / Trump rallies (which are the exact same thing) means actually doing something to thwart the system. But it’s the opposite. These carnavalesque events help both the participants and the outraged spectators who watch them on TV to let off steam and reconcile themselves to reality.

In a less cartoonish way, my posts about neoliberalism serve the same purpose for me. But at least I’m honest in that I’m not ready to let neoliberalism go. It simply won’t go until we want it to, and I think we don’t. It’s too much fun.

I chair a department that offers 8 languages.

I’m developing three new courses for the next academic year.

I work as a translator and interpreter.

I’m writing a book in Ukrainian.

I’m writing an article in Spanish.

I’m writing a book chapter in English.

I serve on the executive board of two scholarly associations.

I do a lot of public speaking.

I read voraciously in 4 languages.

I take online classes in Spain and Ukraine.

I paint.

I cook.

I have an intense relationship with my husband.

And with all this, I’m still struggling with letting Klara go as she enters the first major stage of separation. I’m aware that I struggle, which by itself guarantees that I won’t torture her too much with my resistance. The scary situations are when the mother doesn’t struggle because she internally forbade the separation.

We hear a lot of talk about young people’s failure to launch but it’s not their failure. Nor is it the fault of the “bad economy” because nobody heard of this issue in, say, Dickensian England with its much harsher economic circumstances. It’s the failure of parents to let go. I’m saying honestly that it’s very hard. I have a very full life, yet I still feel the loss.

A colleague who recently retired was called in for jury duty in an attempted murder case. She wasn’t chosen or even questioned because the jury had gotten selected long before it was her turn.

“That’s such a shame!” she says. “I should have been on that jury. I’m completely sure the guy isn’t guilty.”

I let friends persuade me to try out a new café in town. I ended up paying $46 for me and Klara, and we both left hungry because the food was fussy, pretentious, and quite disgusting.

Come to think of it, I’m glad my university is broke.

Here’s the problem with magical thinking: it makes you careless.

Examples:

Bush’s carelessness in handling the debt implications of his homeownership initiative shared a great deal with Bremer’s carelessness in superintending the reconstruction of Iraq.

Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

I’m seeing this with my university’s administrators, too. They make really big decisions in very sloppy ways. “Here, we are rolling out this gigantic new initiative,” they say, “and we are scrapping everything that was normally done before.” Then they send out a link, and it’s pathetic. It looks like it was slapped up by two sixth-graders overnight. It crashes, there are primitive spelling mistakes and unfinished sentences. But the old system that worked is already scrapped, so we are stuck with nothing whatsoever and no plan B.

The Marshall Plan was a huge success, right? The rebuilding of the Spanish economy in the late 1950s – early 1960s, engineered by the US, was an astounding success, too.

But the rebuilding of Iraq in the 2000s was an abject failure. Why?

Gary Gerstle explains that while the Marshall Plan was the Old Capitalist project, the rebuilding of Iraq was done the neoliberal way. There was no planning, no oversight. Vast sums of money were thrown haphazardly at a few monopolists like Halliburton, in hopes that Halliburton’s freedom to be a market onto itself would somehow magically sort things out. According to this logic, as long as the government is removed, everything is going to be great. It’s the “defund the police” mentality that we all know so well.

So what does George W Bush have in common with the BLM? They think in the exact same way, and that’s why they end up failing so badly. Theirs is the magical thinking of pouty children who want one simple recipe that would work for every occasion.

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).