Of Neoliberalism's Contradictions--and the Democratic Party's

First encountering the Roosevelt Institute report titled "The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism" I was intrigued by its promise of a comprehensive treatment of the implications of neoliberalism at a cultural level--precisely because really rigorous work on neoliberalism is so scarce and so potentially valuable for those interested in the subject, with this going double for the realm of cultural studies (floopy postmodernism having had its deeply unhealthy effect on such work). And initially the report appeared quite interesting, with its discussion of neoliberalism's ultra-conformism and insecurity's encouragement of atomization, alienation, isolation, "self-commodification," and self-blame in those who have problems, and its categorization of responses by individuals to neoliberalism's stresses and failures in a quasi-Mertonian way (describing, alongside those who do seek the sense of community the system deprives them of in some fashion, not always with happy result, the rugged individualism of "strivers, self-help and wellness" culture, "dropouts," and "rebellion").

However, after the opening what I saw quickly became much less satisfactory. It seemed that the authors of the report bought uncritically into the moral panic about the manosphere turning a generation of young men into ultra-rightists. More troubling still was the report's authors insistence that the "left" (by which the authors unambiguously meant the Democratic Party, itself a troubling sign of where this was going) had, amid wide public backlash against neoliberalism, tried to compete with the right in the area of policy with progressive offerings, but been defeated by a right which outfought it successfully on the terrain of culture.

This turned reality on its head. The reality is that the Democratic Party NEVER OFFERED THE PUBLIC ANY ALTERNATIVE TO NEOLIBERALISM. Quite the contrary, it has been steadfastly loyal to the neoliberal model--while it was the Republicans who offered challenge to it, challenge from the right, challenge that a progressive would not be expected to find either sincere in intent or convincing in its policy proposals, but challenge nonetheless, as the party's presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went on singing neoliberalism in 2016 and her Republican rival Donald Trump promised economic nationalism, with the pattern broadly repeated in 2020 and 2024. (Underlining this is how those members of the Democratic Party who did run as progressives saw the party bosses fight them harder than ever they fought against the Republicans--per the norm for politicians who are not the "left," liberal or any other such thing, but conservative centrists for whom the left is the Main Enemy.) Meanwhile, far from neglecting culture the Democratic Party leaned very heavily into the culture wars, and above all identity politics, as they campaigned--forgetting, or simply refusing to remember, "That It's The Economy, Stupid," something Trump's campaign did not, consistently promising to do what the Democratic Party had not (again, whatever progressives may make of those promises).

In short, this was not a matter of leftists, in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash, running on a policy-minded platform of political change and being defeated by rightists running on cultural appeals, but rather the center in a time of anti-neoliberal backlash running on a platform of upholding that neoliberal status quo the public rejected against rightists running against that status quo on nationalistic grounds, all as the center tried and failed to leverage culture war in its favor with identity politics. And the folks from the Institute writing as if this were not the case in tones that no one can imagine the matter to have been any other way give the impression of describing events in an alternate universe--though of course they are speaking to this universe, the point of giving us a narrative Orwellian in its drop-it-down-the-Memory-Hole remoteness from reality their justifying what they argue as the answer, embrace of the "Politics is Downstream From Culture" view, providing cover for a party seeking to compete on that territory as it offers the public the warmed-over supply siderism of the "Abundance" Agenda as the solution to its material woes, and reminds everyone once again that it isn't looking to defeat the Republicans at the polls, just make sure the progressives in or out of the party don't get a chance to get into a game they win just by making sure the hippies lose.