Yeah. And even short of crises, you’re going to look for ways of making the policies work smoothly. And you’re going to look for ways of coming up with the correct balance of instruments and policies within them. So you bring in Milton Friedman or you bring in somebody else.
Surface level, it looks like what’s driving the whole thing is these ideas. But I said to you that the ideas actually have no role to play in the turn itself. So that brings up the question, what does? Why did they do it then?
I just said a second ago that what drove it was political priorities, not intellectual feasibility. Well, what were the political priorities? Who were the politicians actually listening to?
Ideas can matter, but they have to be made to matter.
There are only two key players when it comes to policy changes of this kind. The key players are the politicians, because they’re the ones who are pulling the levers. But then, it’s the key constituency that actually has influence over the politicians.
The least important part is intellectuals. You might say voters have some degree of influence, but really, in a money-driven system like the United States, it’s investors, it’s capitalists — it’s big capital. They’re the ones who are pushing for these changes.
That means that if you want to understand where neoliberalism comes from, or rather if you want to understand why it came about, the answer is, it came about because capitalists ceased to tolerate the welfare state.
Now, why did they tolerate the welfare state at all? Most people on the Left understand the welfare state was brought about through massive trade union mobilization and labor mobilizations and was kept in place as long as the trade union movement had some kind of presence within the Democratic Party, within the economy more generally, because those unions were powerful enough, employers had to figure out a way of living with them. Part of what they did to live with the trade unions…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
