How Neoliberalism Created Kleptofascism, and Kleptofascism Imploded (Real) Liberalism

umair haque

It’s not exactly news that liberalism’s failing — and failing badly. But the failure I see beginning to emerge isn’t just the old story about abandoned working classes, imploding middle classes, and technocrats who somehow couldn’t see them.

It’s Trump kissing up to Putin, declaring Europe a “foe”. It’s white supremacy used as a kind of cynical tool to prop up the super rich. It’s Brexit, revealed to be a shady con. It’s fascism, nationalism, extremism, and supremacism — not as ends in themselves, but as means. As tools kleptocracy used to shatter a peaceful, stable world. But — and here’s the irony — that very kleptocracy was created by neoliberalism in the first place. Bang! Implosion.

The failure of liberalism is much weirder, stranger, and more gruesome than we really understand. I think it goes more like this: neoliberalism created a class of global kleptocrats — who bankrolled a wave of extremists, nationalist, and neofascist movements, to shatter apart what was left of an open, cooperative, liberal world, and replace it with a global rule of mafia. Global kleptocracy — by using protofascism, ultranationalism, authoritarianism, as instruments. The kleptocrats hired faux, grinning, men of the people to be demagogues, who convinced people that it was in their best interest to shut everything — democracy, society, investment — but kleptocracy down.

I’d call it kleptofascism. It goes like this.

The story we tell today about the failure of liberalism — which is really that of neoliberalism, but I digress — goes something like this. “Capital mobility” outweighed “labour mobility”. That is, because investors and corporations were free to move factories and ownership around, but people weren’t as free to move, entire segments of society quickly lost their jobs, livelihoods, and careers, to people in poorer countries, who didn’t enjoy labour protections, unions, pensions, rights, benefits, and so on. And then, without a stable middle class, soon enough, nations began chipping away at basic social services, as tax bases shrunk — the age of austerity had arrived, by way of globalization.

Now, this story has one major flaw in it. All this wasn’t destiny — but choice. It was a political choice to abandon working classes, middle classes, and the poor. The gains from globalization could just as easily have been invested right back in them, with income guarantees, stronger safety nets, education, training, jobs programs. Instead, they were handed over to hedge funds and used to bail out banks. Bang! The spark of rage against elites was lit. But this wasn’t a system failure — as in it had to happen, no way out, inescapable. It was an institutional failure — it was chosen. So this story doesn’t get us very far.

https://eand.co/why-the-failure-of-liberalism-is-weirder-and-more-twisted-than-we-think-1a66a39939bc