constructed top-down, from blueprints kindly supplied by Mont Pèlerin, nor bottom-up through the aimless evolution of the kosmos, but rather outward, in trial-and-error mutual adjustment of the politically fortified market and the everyday entrepreneurial self.
We take as our fugleman not Foucault but rather people such as Martijn Konings, Carolyn Sissoko, Yves Smith, and Christopher Payne, who insist that the crisis was not some aberration due to overenthusiastic deregulation, but instead the expression of intrinsic system pathologies. This chapter explores the way those pathologies were embedded in the very everyday neoliberalism that has become so prevalent since the 1980s. Foucault’s concentration on micropower had an unfortunate tendency to keep the noses of his followers too close to the ground, and hence to ignore how the entrepreneurial self was then recruited into all sorts of innovations that took place on the phenomenological level of markets. Exquisite discipline of the self was treated as hapless if it did not make money for someone even more entrepreneurial than you. The mechanisms that culminated in the crisis were built upon foundations of the entrepreneurial self, from exhortations to surrender to the risk of thrill-ride mortgages, capitulation to the financialization of everyday life, participation in virtual selves wending their way through the “weightless economy” on the Internet, day trading like the big boys, getting your information from Facebook and Fox and talk radio, to the indulgences of entertainment theology as Ponzi scheme, and recruitment into astroturfed politics to assist you in expressing your smoldering yet underappreciated individuality. Everyone strove to assume a persona that someone else would be willing to invest in, all in the name of personal improvement.
Found yourself in trouble? You could always sell a kidney or enroll in a drug trial . . . Maybe you could rent your body as surrogate mother, or maybe resort to just a little strategic intimacy, with discreet recompense on the side25 . . . Wait! Someone from India is already calling you on the phone to offer you an even more outrageously far-fetched baroque loan! And there’s an app for that . . . Just make the leap of faith . . . Make some money in your spare time! Unemployment is an unbidden golden opportunity to start anew with an entirely different life! Don’t let the moochers and complainers drag you down! Become your own boss, after you embrace the power of positive thinking . . . Didn’t you always want to start your own business, after working a quarter-century for corporations?
We will close with the ultimate in solipsism in promotion of everyday neoliberalism: Don’t like the way things are looking? Has the state of the world got you down? Then create your own personal solipsistic economy, a fit virtual abode for your own fragmented entrepreneurial identity.26 That’s the ultimate in self-reliance.
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Galt
Foucault refuses to allow that people may be mired in “false consciousness,” or to concede that there are means by which they may become instilled with systematically distorted beliefs about both themselves and their place in the social order, distractions that work in regular ways against their own interests and welfare. There have been a fair number of writers who assert the contrary; one worth considering because he has been specifically concerned with political developments in the last three decades in the United States is Thomas Frank. In his breakthrough book What’s the Matter with Kansas? he posed the question in a rather American idiom: Why had the blue-collar working class abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of voting for snake-oil neoliberal salesmen who had demonstrated open contempt for their welfare? Or as he himself put it:
All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues, without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years.27
Frank’s answer to his own question was, crudely, a version of “bait and switch” that subsequently gained a fair level of acceptance among circles of the U.S. left, at least before the crisis. He suggested that the working class had gotten distracted by a constant harping on a broad range of cultural and religious issues, fired up through talk-radio raving and local pulpits, and thus overlooked or displaced their more direct economic concerns: they were mesmerized by “cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” In this diagnosis, the median voter mistook the froth of “values” for denunciation of sharp dealing dedicated to stealing away their livelihoods.28
There are all manner of reasons to be skeptical of the bait-and-switch account of “false consciousness” when it comes to the triumph of neoliberalism. The least of these caveats came when economists were promptly scandalized by the very notion that Homo economicus could ever suspend his assiduous calculation of economic advantage under any circumstances whatsoever, and therefore proceeded to deny there was any phenomenological world of values outside of the political marketplace; some rather unimaginative souls consequently engaged in all manner of statistical wizardry to demonstrate that true-blue American agents had never once disregarded their legitimate “economic” interests.29 Another, more pertinent complaint against Frank would be that the simplistic dichotomy of Republican vs. Democratic parties did not begin to capture the phenomenon beating at the heart of the transformation; Frank had himself admitted elsewhere that party affiliation does not easily translate into what he calls “market populism,” which has infected both parties (One Market Under God). The obsession with Red/Blue scores inside the Beltway tends to diverts us from the real issue of the cultural framing of political consciousness. And then there was the onset of the crisis itself: here was an economic catastrophe so great that no one, no matter how beguiled and hornswoggled, could long avert their eyes. And yet, with their minds focused forcibly on economic matters, still the electorate was persuaded to respond to it in ways reminiscent of the earlier decade: great masses of voters under the sway of the putative Tea Party had in 2010 voted in the most neoliberal Congress of all time.
Probably the best indication that the crisis has deep-sixed most simple “bait and switch” accounts of the success of neoliberalism is that Tom Frank himself had to walk back his earlier thesis in his postcrisis book Pity the Billionaire. By that, I do not intend to suggest Frank openly admitted he was wrong in Kansas, but rather, he did rather concede that the Tea Party and other redoubts of revanchism were avoiding issues of social conservatism in favor of defending “freedom” against creeping socialism. Frank in effect had to face up to the fact that his earlier book was incapable of addressing the nagging question that is also the topic of the current chapter: “What kind of misapprehension permits the newest Right to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly?”30
The problem with bait-and-switch accounts is that they compartmentalize everyday experience in a way that utterly misconstrues how neoliberalism works. Tom Frank in an earlier incarnation had seemingly understood this: “Making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural and political operation as an economic one”; it was only when he artificially set them at odds that he attained best-sellerdom with Kansas, but at the price of losing his way. The core insight of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was that the cultural and the economic should not be treated as substitutes, much less discrete spheres of experience, but rather, as integrated into a virtuous whole: surrender your selfish arrogance and humbly prostrate yourself before the Wisdom of the Universe, as nurtured and conveyed by the market. “Be all you can be” had jettisoned the injunction to “know yourself” and replaced it with “Start your own business!” even if it only meant homeschooling your children. As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and “values” assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solid “interests” melted into thin air. After all, neoliberals deny that you are the unimpeachable judge of your own welfare, however much they worship at the altar of Freedom. The more the line between “The Sphere Previously Known as the Economic” and culture or religion was progressively obscured and erased, the more irreversible the neoliberal
