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This is an argument taken up in the most recent edition (number 40) of Dissent magazine.
In Dr. Tony Lynch's piece titled 'The moral narrative of social democracy', he explores why Neo-liberalism has been so successful over the past 30 years, and what that means in relation to resurrecting social democratic values which were usurped in the rise of Neo-Liberal ideals.
An excerpt from his piece is reproduced below.
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if doing this meant embracing barbarism and the impoverishment of the many, it might appeal to John Wayne types, especially the already enriched, but it could hardly be expected to fire up the many.
Yet this is what it had to do and, to a remarkable degree, it did.
How did it do this?
It's wrapped its Robinson Crusoe story in a morally and politically attractive package. We were, all of us, to be better off! Unleashing the invisible hand of the market on a level playing field would grow the pie; the tide would rise, raising all boats; wealth would trickle down; and taxes would be reduced to the Laffer curve minimum.
It was a utopian packaging of generalised benevolence.
We know now, for many of us through brutal experience, that the claim of universal betterment is false. Neoliberalism in practice is not even an engine for growth, it is a redistributive pump drawing forever upwards. Neoliberals redistribute (don't let them tell you otherwise) from the have-nots and have ever less to those who have more and ever more.
This means that the language of neoliberalism is increasingly threadbare.
You can defend the value of individual choice as much as you want, but if the choices are ones no one should ever have to make - to go hungry to feed one's children – the defence is odious, though not an odiousness that will easily go away. Like Budha's shadow, the language of neoliberalism remains even as its claim to be a moral language fades before our eyes.
What made the narcissistic individualism of neoliberalism into something moral, rather than a defence of Hobbes' war in which all that really matters are me and (perhaps) my own, and bugger the rest of you, was that it presents itself as a collective when, so a win for us all. We would all be better off if only we would cast off social democracy in the name of individual freedom and choice.
The trouble is not that this is false – but that the neoliberal story undermines the idea od generalised benevolence. You can't expect to go round telling people that personal greed is good and expect those same people to have any concern for the common good or public good. You are insisting on the pursuit of individualistic ends, and trying to justify this as a morality which informs the politics, by appealing to a social end your radical individualism makes no room for, or sense of.
If the material success of social democracy is undermined, so too is the political and rhetorical success of neoliberalism.
For social democracy, the problem of success was memory loss; a generational forgetting. For neoliberalism, the problem isn't losing this or that memory or set of memories, it is far more serious. It is in Kant's sense, transcendental. We have not just lost memories, we have lost a sense of anyone else, so a sense of what is good for us, good for us all.
We will see that their vision for the future is more of the same old failed ideas which have produced the problems we are currently facing. But what will make the lie more believable is the enormity of it.
Now is the time to stop and think about where we are, where we want to be heading, and what that means in the precarious global economic climate we are currently in.
The new positive Tony and his election campaign will be about taking the same old conservative political turd, shining it up, and placing it up on a pedestal. That will allow it to cast a shadow over what we once believed made us Australians - ideas of egalitarianism, fairness, and looking out for your mates. Ideas that conservatives like to pay lip service to, but in practice seek to trash. The GFC was caused by the implementation of neo-liberal policy (deregulation, unfettered competition, corporate greed, small government) across numerous international markets and administrations. At a time in which we are still struggling to steer clear of the brink, taking us back to the political past hardly seems a wise move. But it is what the Abbott led opposition is calling for.
You can access the full article by Dr Tony Lynch by purchasing issue 40 from Dissent magazine.
If you are interested in taking out a subscription, the magazine has no moved from a hardcopy to an on-line edition. Subscriptions can be purchased by following this link.