Neoliberalism, America’s Biggest Export?

Neoliberalism, America’s Biggest Export?

Title Image: Black Lives Matter Protest in DC, 6/1/2020. (Instagram: @koshuphotography)

One of the most dangerous mistakes we can make right now is believing that the answer to Trump is simply another Obama (or Biden, or Harris), or, even worse, a California Reagan Democrat-to-Republican like Newsom.

Those who understand the political underpinnings of this already understand the content of this post.

For those of you not in political science, or who aren't marginalized enough to live the current reality in hard mode, this is designed to be an introduction to:

1. The economic underpinnings of the depressed Japanese and American economies. (Hint: it’s not “immigrants.”)
2. Why choosing centrist candidates in American elections objectively leads directly toward a fascist state.

So this goes out to Democrats who are centrists, VBNMW (vote blue no matter who), to people with nostalgia “for when the American president had dignity,” and anyone Japanese interested in a very basic reader on what our current style of political economics is, and the common thread between the Republican and Democratic parties of today.

To understand why Obama and DNC politics helped get us where we are today with Trump, understanding something called neoliberalism is key.

This isn't a slur or lefty-speak. It's an actual definition I'll go into more.

Here’s some background on what neoliberalism actually is, why the post-Reagan-era Democratic Party's love of it matters, and why this isn't just an American problem.

I'm going to use Japanese examples of how, when the U.S. exports this form of economic politics, countries take nosedives for the worse.

The United States is currently experiencing a frightening erosion of democratic institutions and normalization of authoritarian politics that looks a lot like Germany in the 1930s, but in actuality, it has always been in our DNA as a nation built on slavery, genocide, and eugenics.

Remembering that the Gestapo took notes from our Jim Crow policies is real history.

(Read more on this: https://www.history.com/articles/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-jim-crow)

So the question for Americans, and anyone else making Trump poopy-pants memes online but who’d go to brunch if Hillary were in power, is: Is it enough to be a “Good German”?

You know, the people who got on with their lives as their neighbors from ghettos and daily life were turned into soap because it wasn't them? Because history won't be kinder to us than is was to them. And for the same reasons.

I'm currently watching Japan fail to recognize some of these warning signs from its own history as well: economic insecurity, widening inequality, collapsing faith in establishment politics, and the appeal of nationalism, authoritarianism, and military strength as immediate solutions, not unlike Japan in the late 1920s or early ’30s.

Living here as an immigrant is uncertain and tense, and even white Western residents are starting to worry about anti-immigrant sentiment here, mostly because we're not used to being treated like immigrants, but that's a different article.

To have any hope at all, we need to pay very close attention to the conditions that make authoritarian politics possible, and it's not a simple “TRUMP.”

And that's where neoliberalism matters, and why even an Obama would do nothing but keep us in a downward spiral toward fascism.

So What Is Neoliberalism?

In a grand simplification, since roughly the Reagan era, both major American parties have accepted the same basic economic policy: deregulation, privatization, weakened labor power, market-based “solutions” to public problems, corporate-friendly trade policy, and allowing wealth and political power to stay concentrated at the top.

This isn't some obscure definition I've invented. Here’s a slightly old resource:

David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism is published in Japanese as 『ネオリベラリズムとは何か』.

Its Japanese publisher describes neoliberalism as intensifying both international and class inequality:

https://www.seidosha.co.jp/book/index.php?id=1549

And Japanese researchers have studied the same process here.

This J-STAGE paper begins from the observation that neoliberal policies have been continuously implemented in Japan, particularly since the Koizumi administration (the selling out of Japanese farmers, etc.), with widening inequality among their identified consequences:

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ppseb/5/2/5_159/_article/-char/ja

Democrats, Republicans, and the Neoliberal Consensus

This matters when Americans talk about the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans worship this economic project openly and increasingly combine it with authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ people, reproductive control, and explicit assaults on democratic institutions.

Corporate, centrist, and party-platform Democrats are not identical to Republicans, and they come off MUCH better largely because of their hijacking of something called “idpol.”

Identity Politics, Representation, and Gatekeeping

What is "IdPol"?

Idpol = “identity politics.”

It is politics centered on representation and the rights and experiences of groups defined by race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, etc., and something which, in its true form, is absolutely imperative for the safety of the marginalized.

Unfortunately, as we're shown over and over, at a national level, DNC Democrats use this as a whitewashing strategy to hide how unfriendly their policies are.

They use symbolic diversity and representation as a substitute for changing material conditions or economic power, vote for the same economic and military policies as their Republican counterparts, and gatekeep actual change because they too represent money, not the people.

In turn, non-marginalized Americans who vote for Democrats get to feel like they’re marching on the frontlines with MLK, cosplay fighting the baddies, while simultaneously supporting a political system that protects the existing distribution of economic and political power.

That contradiction is not new.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously addressed the danger of people who consider themselves allies of civil rights while placing stability, moderation, and the preservation of the existing order ahead of the structural changes justice requires. In Letter from Birmingham Jail, he wrote:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

Historically, and very evidently now, being an American who is slightly better on representation and civil rights doesn’t come close to making an economic system progressive, or make a Democrat actually progressive, it just makes them Liberal, liberal not in the sense of what conservatives use it to mean, but in the real meaning which is basically a rainbow conservative. 

Representation Is Not the Same as Material Power

What does this mean in our daily lives?

As an example, putting a woman in a job that was dominated by men is seen as huge progress under liberalism.

Oh yay, equality!

However, if that woman works full-time and still can't afford housing, healthcare, childcare, or raising a child, putting her face in an advertisement about “empowerment” doesn't solve the underlying problem; she's not empowered; she's cheaper labor than men for the same, if not more, output.

Or she's just another person who abuses a workforce with no safety nets.

In the words of Simone de Beauvoir:

"The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."

Representation without redistribution is used as Democratic Party set-dressing for increasing inequality. That's what neoliberalism is.

• A Black president is historically significant.
• Women running corporations and government departments is also significant.
• LGBTQ representation in media and public spaces is significant.

But none of those things inherently transfers economic or political power from corporations, the oligarchy, and billionaires to working people or regular residents of a country.

They aren't inherently progress, just a change in visibility.

This distinction matters.

Feel-good, TV-special representation, where we can feel sorry for some poor marginalized person and be the benevolent heroes to their touching trauma and tragedy, is still about us being in power and “saving” someone from a system that we maintain because it is to our benefit, instead of creating a system where they won't rely on our charity for survival and is actually safer and more egalitarian.

Understanding how power and resources are held and distributed, and the actual material redistribution of power, is crucial to understanding the failure of American liberalism.

Because it’s a feature of it, not a bug, that it enables where we are in history today.

• Civil rights matter.
• Reproductive freedom matters.
• LGBTQ rights matter.
• Racial justice matters.
• Representation matters.

But representation without actual, real, material security or political and economic power is not enough to protect marginalized people or a population under control of a dictatorship whether feudal, oligarchic, or financial.

Material protection also means REAL, not performative, labor rights, healthcare, housing, economic security, public institutions, redistribution, and meaningful limits on corporate power.

Obama and the Limits of Liberal Restoration

And it's why uncritical nostalgia for Obama, or for an America that never existed for many, or for the "dignity of the office of president of the United States" is dangerous and not a way out of this.

Obama was vastly different from Trump in temperament, democratic norms, superficial civil rights, and some domestic policies. He was likable too. Charming even as we shifted from boots in the Middle East to drone assassinations abroad. Obama let us like ourselves and feel like we were Good Americans, something hard to feel under a Trump-type reign.

But economically, he governed largely within the neoliberal order rather than dismantling it.

His post-tenure term habit of chastising protests and his  respectability politics firms his place in centrist history regardless of how pure his intentions were.

Treating another Obama as the antidote to Trump risks trying to cure the disease by restoring the conditions under which it grew.

Japan Is Part of This Story

It is tempting, particularly from Japan, or if you vote blue no matter who, to imagine that America under Trump is a terrible aberration and that America under Obama represented the fundamentally benevolent United States.

Actual history is considerably more uncomfortable.

Postwar American Political Influence

After World War II, the United States occupied Japan and has maintained an extraordinary military, political, and economic position here.

And we now know that American involvement in postwar Japanese politics went considerably further than military bases.

Declassified U.S. diplomatic records document secret CIA financial support for pro-American conservative Japanese politicians, including LDP politicians, as well as American efforts to weaken and divide the Japanese left. This isn't woo conspiracy theory, this is documented historical fact.

Through various methods, this has gotten to the point where Japan slurps up our American military propaganda films and entertainment without much, if any, analysis of what they're paying to consume.

Here is a Japanese account of those U.S. government documents:

https://www.jcp.or.jp/.../2006-07-20/2006072002_03_0.html

U.S.-Japan Economic Reform and Deregulation

Decades later, American influence over Japanese economic policy wasn't secret either.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry itself documents the 日米規制改革及び競争政策イニシアティブ, under which the Japanese and American governments formally exchanged demands for changes to each other's regulations and institutions:

https://www.mofa.go.jp/.../area/usa/keizai/kisei_k0410.html

The resulting reports document reforms in areas including telecommunications, energy-market liberalization, competition policy, regulatory reform, and discussion of postal privatization:

https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/area/usa/keizai/ini_g.html

America, under Trump or Obama, is fine with creating exactly the same societal ills in Japan that it keeps alive in the U.S. because they benefit the oligarchy/billionaire class. Keep the working poor so poor they can't feed their children during summer breaks; it "works" for the U.S., let's export that economic system to Japan!

It makes the comforting story that Japan independently chose its economic system, while the United States simply stood nearby as a benevolent democratic ally, very difficult to believe, even though a bulk of Japanese politicians pretend an autonomy they're not showing.

There is a good Japanese discussion specifically tracing the relationship between American neoliberalism, U.S.-Japan economic negotiations, and Japanese reform here: https://youtu.be/5ALq4_Od3Mc

The Transformation of Japan’s Class Structure

When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, something like 85 to 90% of Japanese identified themselves as "middle class".

In the past two or so decades of neoliberal policy adoption pressure by the U.S., we now see a significant increase in the poverty class. And with poverty comes crime. And with poverty-based crime comes scapegoats.

For the resulting transformation of Japanese class structure, sociologist Kenji Hashimoto's 『新・日本の階級社会』 is an excellent place to start.

His argument concerns precisely the entrenchment of inequality and the emergence of a large precarious class under neoliberalism: https://www.kodansha.co.jp/book/products/0000210947

Inequality Creates Political Vulnerability

That history matters because economic inequality and authoritarianism are not separate political problems.

Widening inequality isn't simply that rich people have more money than poor people.

It means income, assets, institutional influence, bargaining power, economic security, and access to political power become increasingly unevenly distributed. Some groups gain greater control over the conditions under which everyone else has to live, while more people experience increasingly precarious work, housing, healthcare, and futures.

When establishment politics repeatedly protects concentrated wealth while ordinary people's lives become less secure, it creates an enormous reservoir of anger, which nationalism and fascism use in horrific ways.

If the left doesn't provide a material answer to that anger, the far right always provides a dangerous fascist one.

It tells struggling people that their enemy isn't concentrated wealth or corporate power:

• It's immigrants.
• It's minorities.
• It's queer people.
• It's women.
• It's foreigners.

It's whoever can be made frightening enough to blame.

Why “Not Trump” Is Not a Political Program

And that is why “not Trump” is necessary, but nowhere near a solution to even the current causes of issues worldwide.

And while under a Trump every marginalized person gets demolished cruelly, at least under a Trump, centrist Democrats can finally see and understand the horrible things that also exist under Biden or Harris. That are built into the system.

When a Democrat is in power, there’s plausible deniability that the very system they support is actually horrific for anyone excluded from it.

We, being able to think of ourselves as “the good guys,” can create enough emotional distance from the horror to avoid feeling like the blood is on our hands too, while failing to understand that the underlying system itself is worthy of protest.

When the party next to the incumbent is a D again, we can be smug and feel that a nonexistent pendulum has swung back left.

It hasn't, we're just comfortable ignoring it now.

Sure, we're not the parent who beats the kids black and blue and breaks their bones, but we're most certainly the parent who won't leave the abuser and just tells the kids not to make them mad.

Until they're both gone, nobody’s ever safe.

What Material Protection Actually Requires

The alternative to actual public kidnappings and masked paramilitary forces executing civilians on the street can't simply be neoliberalism with better manners, diverse faces, rainbow logos, and sappy movies and TV about struggling Black people, women, immigrants, or the queer.

• Civil rights matter.
• Reproductive freedom matters.
• LGBTQ rights matter.
• Racial justice matters.
• Immigrant rights matter

But those struggles have to be joined to material economic power:

labor rights, healthcare, housing, economic security, public institutions, redistribution, meaningful limits on corporate power, and a foreign policy that stops treating other countries primarily as instruments of American economic and strategic interests to invade and gut for financial resources or utilize as outsourced slaves.

And those movements are NEVER going to be led by people heavily invested in that system for their lives and livelihoods.

Neoliberalism is asking people to celebrate symbolic progress while wealth and power continue moving in the opposite direction.