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Consortium News
February 18, 2011
Editor’s Note: For a third day, protesters rallied in Wisconsin’s capital to protest a plan by the state’s new Republican governor to reduce the budget, in part, by stripping public employee unions of many collective bargaining rights.
These Wisconsin demonstrations are the first major challenge to the newly empowered Republicans and their "neoliberal" goal to slash government and to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, as Marquette Professor Daniel C. Maguire notes in this guest essay:
It has been well noted that the protest in Madison, Wisconsin, is not about the budget but about union-busting, but that is a symptom, not the root of the problem.
Gov. Scott Walker’s project is to impose the neoliberal (neoconservative) political economy on a state that pioneered many progressive traditions and reforms.
Neoliberalism (or neoconservatism) has been the operating system of the Right since the 1980s, though its roots go back further. It has these four characteristics:
---Neoliberalism has been called a philosophy of “possessive individualism.” Historian Richard Hofstadter called it “beneficent cupidity” or the notion that “greed is good,” in more modern parlance. It embodies Social Darwinism — survival of the fittest — which sees society, as C.B. MacPherson said, as a mass of competing “dissociated individuals.”
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister in the 1980s, even asserted there is no such thing as “society,” only individuals and families. If there is no “society,” we owe society nothing – and there is no such thing as social justice.
And thus Fox News’ Glenn Beck, the clown prince of neoliberalism, can urge his faithful to walk out of church if their pastor so much a mentions social justice.
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