At a Fourth of July party at my house, a bunch of left-leaning academic sorts got into a bit of row when someone insisted Neoliberalism was dead. This one brave soul argued, despite hoots and howls from the rest of us, that Neoliberalism, particularly the economic policies associated with it like deregulation and giving money to the richest among us, had lost all credibility and was only around still because it didn’t know it was dead yet. It was, the friend insisted, a form of Zombie Neoliberalism that would eventually die of its own internal rottenness.
None of us really agreed with our friend’s theory, although we all liked the image of a Zombie Neoliberalism, trying to eat our brains out even as its flesh fell from its corpse.
Now, six months later, it is clear that my friend was right ... and wrong. Paul Krugman, bemoaning President Obama’s tax compromise that extended tax cuts to the richest Americans, uses the zombie analogy to point out that it might be too late to stop the zombie of Neoliberal economic policy, despite the fact that they have been proven absolutely WRONG by the history of the past few decades, from eating our brains.
It’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain—and quite possibly your economy too.
But here’s the really scary part of Zombie Neoliberalism: A large swath of America cannot see that it is dead. Indeed, despite the fact that it was the deregulation of banks that brought the economy to its knees, a huge number of Americans are opposed to regulation. Despite the fact that the U.S. has seen the wholesale transfer of wealth to the richest Americans, giving us the dishonor of being the most financially inequitable industrialized country in the world, many ordinary Americans believe we need fewer taxes for the rich.
And how is this possible? Because some billionaires have become so good at producing Neoliberal propaganda, like Fox “News,” that a sizable number of Americans believe Ron Paul and his son, newly elected Tea Party Senator Rand Paul, when they say we need to kill the Fed and set banks and the markets “free.”
As Wonkette announced this week, Fox “News” viewers are “the most uninformed people on earth.” According to a report released by World Public Opinon, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” Fox “News” was much more likely to misinform its viewers than other news organizations and as a result its regular viewers were much more likely to believe things that are not true, like global warming is just a theory or Obama wasn’t born in this country. We now know that this misinformation was policy, since D.C. Bureau Chief Bill Sammon told his employees to shed doubt on climate change as well as mimic the GOP on health care proposals.
So it is that Fox “News” and other cheerleaders for Neoliberal economic policy, like most Republican politicians and more than a few Democrats, run behind the rotting corpse of “trickle down economics” and deregulation and spray the perfume of “free market” and “a rising tide floats all boats” to cover the stench of decades of failed policy, an economy brought to its knees, and an economic redistribution that makes the U.S. more like Singapore and far less like Sweden.
And until we can smell the rotting flesh that is Neoliberal economic policy, it will continue to roam among us, getting President Obama and other politicians who appear to still have a brain, to continually do its bidding. Or perhaps Neoliberalism has already eaten their brains too? Scary.