by
Jason Hirthler
Part
2 - Inception 1971
In a
short span of time in the 1970s, dozens of think tanks were
established across the western world and billions of dollars were
spent proselytizing the tenets of the Powell Memo in 1971, which
galvanized a counter-revolution to the liberal upswing of the
Sixties.
The
neoliberal economic model of deregulation, downsizing, and
privatization was preached by the Reagan-Thatcher junta, liberalized
by the Clinton regime, temporarily given a bad name by the unhinged
Bush administration, and saved by telegenic restoration of the Obama
years.
The
ideology that underlay the model saturated academia, notably at the
University of Chicago, and the mainstream media, principally at The
New York Times. Since then it has trickled down to the general
populace, to whom it now feels second nature.
Today
think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institute,
Stratfor, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Council on
Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, the Open Society Foundation,
and the Atlantic Council, among many others, funnel millions of
dollars in donations into cementing neoliberal attitudes in the
American mind.
The
ideological assumptions, which serve to justify what you could call
neocolonial tactics, are relatively clear: the rights of the
individual to be free of overreach from monolithic institutions like
the state. Activist governments are inherently inefficient and lead
directly to totalitarianism. Markets must be free and individuals
must be free to act in those markets. People must be free to choose,
both politically and commercially, in the voting booth and at the
cash register.
This
conception of markets and individuals is most often formulated as
“free-market democracy,” a misleading conceit that conflates
individual freedom with the economic freedom of capital to exploit
labor. So when it comes to foreign relations, American and western
aid would only be given on the condition that the borrowers accepted
the tenets of an (highly manipulable) electoral system and vowed to
establish the institutions and legal structures required to fully
realize a western market economy.
These
demands were supplemented with notions of the individual right to be
free of oppression, some fine rhetoric about women and minorities,
and somewhat more quietly, a judicial understanding that corporations
were people, too. Together, an unshackled economy and an unfettered
populace, newly equipped with individual rights, would produce the
same flourishing and nourishing demos of mid-century America that had
been the envy of humanity.
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