The success of neoliberalism is owed, like much else in American history, to race and inflation. The civil rights movement's heroic victories triggered a white backlash that, stirred up by the stagflation of the 70s, designated welfare as its whipping boy. While the left fell apart under the strain of its own failures and the pressure of the New Right, the Dems' axis of opportunism closed ranks with dyed-in-the-wool backlashers to excise the term “underclass” from the political discourse and replace it with the racial codeword “responsibility.” The collective benefit of pulling people out of poverty (more on this later) gave way to the moral hazard of unearned assistance to the poor. By this brilliant maneuver, the state was off the hook.

Thus shorn of social purpose, the sole objective of the economy was now to create the conditions for a bigger economy. This self-referential absurdity worked out well for some. At their prodding, politicians on both sides of the aisle wrapped the neolib agenda in cotton candy (“I feel your pain”) and sold it to the public as an inclusive doctrine (“rising tides lift all boats”). While the media peddled ad nauseum the seductive narrative that unfettered growth will cure all ills, the public intellectuals played their customary herding role as guardians of the norm. Lobby-driven campaign financing did the rest. Neoliberalism became the new dogma, the pensée unique.

The dogma tolerates social conflicts insofar as they remain orthogonal to the economic fault lines. Multiculturalism and identity politics are tolerable but class concerns are ruled out of order. Affirmative action and Roe v. Wade are fine but prenatal care and maternity leaves are “fiscally imprudent.” While globalized trade has benefited many countries, the ultra-rigid neoliberal policies pushed by the United States and the international institutions it controls have had nasty consequences: per-capita income for nearly half of the world's countries was lower in 2000 than it was a decade earlier.⁽¹⁸⁾  Yet even a reasoned critique of the current economic order is seldom allowed into the dominant discourse. It's not censorship; it's gatekeeping. And it works. The withering scorn heaped upon a fine “European” centrist like Kucinich is indicative of the intolerance for any deviation from the orthodoxy.

Marxism died for all the right reasons, but regrettably so did with it the only systematic attempt in the history of political philosophy to put the underdog at the heart of the reflection. Sensing a vulnerability, opponents pounced with glee and festooned any leftish idea with the blood and tears of every Gulag victim. Soon sedated by the illusory success and soothing materialism of the Clinton years, progressives lost the means and the will to fight back.

The Great Sellout came at a price: electoral disaster. Yet, while busy mastering the fine art of the concession speech, Democrats swatted away all attempts at rebuilding a movement. To this day, their triangulating appetite for compromise remains voracious and they rarely flinch from flinching. Unless, that is, the cause is sensible but symbolic, like protesting the display of the Ten Commandments in a court of justice. Progressives need not prioritize because their moral world is flat. Why obsess over war and poverty when, instead, you can ventilate about courthouse furniture? Their creed, such as it is, is a recitation of platitudes: feel-good drivel about vibrant communities, boundless opportunities, growing prosperity, and other such controversial matters. They engage in vigorous policy debates but none of them is germane to the creed—would you expect a discussion of the Clear Skies bill to be informed by a belief in breathing?

Just as science should be falsifiable, ideologies should be disbelievable. A creed that can be rejected only by the enemies of motherhood and apple pie is useless because it denies one the means to make tough choices. But can such a thing ever be useful, let alone necessary?

Yes and yes. A creed serves two functions: to feed the soul and to guide hard decisions. Neoliberalism takes care of the decisions and the little that's left is fast food for the soul. To see why, consider the Revolutionary motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” A good measure of a left-wing belief system is how tightly it keeps the three threads together. Take away the last one and your creed is soulless; remove the first two and it is toothless. Fraternity (for lack of a less sexist term) arbitrates between liberty and equality: it speaks to the why and the how; they speak to the what. Neoliberalism gutted the motto and left progressives with the monumental task of turning ethics into policy without the normative mediation of a conceptual framework.

True, as a drive for free markets, globalization, deregulation, privatization, elimination of economic distortions, deunionization, and market-driven policymaking, neoliberalism is no more a theory of social justice than greed is a theory of property rights. It did not supplant the progressive creed so much as let it shrivel into a mere quest for decency—a noble pursuit to be sure, but one that is doomed without a set of principles to guide it. It's not enough to have your heart in the right place: your brain, and especially your will, must be there, too.

For what does it mean to seek a decent society if we won't say what we're willing to trade off for it? Let's take an example. Why should long prison sentences for violent offenders be shortened if, hypothetically, they could be shown to reduce crime? Excessive imprisonment and snatching old ladies' purses are both violations of common decency. Does one trump the other? Sentiment alone cannot answer that: only a higher set of beliefs can. Note that hard choices are nothing new. We tolerate obscene numbers of wife beatings and drunk-driving deaths just to make it legal to wash down our osso buco with Chianti. The Prohibition era made a different choice. Today's liberals assure us that such tradeoffs are passé. Surely one can eliminate poverty and maximize economic growth. The evidence suggests one cannot. A good society requires tough choices. The cost of denial is a chronically reactive stance toward social ills: a preference for remediation over prevention, incarceration over job training, charity over antipoverty programs, etc.

Fukuyama got it all wrong. It's not the End of History we're witnessing. It's the End of the Political: the denial of human agency in the regulation of economic forces. Thomas L. Friedman calls it the Golden Straitjacket. He explains its benefits: “Once your country puts it on, its political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke.” ⁽¹⁹⁾  And if you try root beer, Somalia is next. Neoliberalism is just another word for nothing left to decide. The fall of the Berlin Wall buried Marxism but historical determinism lives on in Washington.

TINA, Thatcher shouted from the rooftops—There Is No Alternative. Let's test this claim. America is richer than Europe; yet, to quote Jared Diamond, “Western Europe's standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion [...]” ⁽²⁰⁾  France is slightly more productive than the United States and its Human Development Index is higher; yet its GDP per head is 25% smaller.^(21—23)  Why? Because Americans choose to work longer hours. This was not always so: in 1970, the French worked 10% more than Americans; now they work 28% less.⁽²⁴⁾  Apparently, There Is An Alternative. Free markets have rules and constraints, but so does piano composition, and the range from Chopin to Monk is hardly suggestive of a straitjacket. Western Europe is living proof that mixed-economy welfare states can be prosperous. The point here is not which system is better: it is that both are possible. It's all a matter of choice. TINA is a sham.