Chapter 2

Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?

Western Civilization, the Longue Durée, and the Culture of Neoliberalism

How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, and Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.

—F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

So much for the present. What about the past? The closest approach to free enterprise we have ever had in the United States was in the 19th century. Yet your children will hear over and over again in their schools and in their classes the myth that that was a terrible period when the robber barons were grinding the poor miserable people under their heels. That’s a myth constructed out of whole cloth. The plain fact is that at no other time in human history has the ordinary man improved his condition and benefited his life as much as he did during that period of the 19th century when we were the closest to free enterprise.

—Milton Friedman, “Which Way for Capitalism” (1978)

We must reassert and renew American civilization. From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles. From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, up to Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American. Our civilization is based on a spiritual and moral dimension. It emphasizes personal responsibility as much as individual rights. Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them. Our first task is to return to teaching Americans about America and teaching immigrants how to become Americans. Until we re-establish a legitimate moral-cultural standard, our civilization is at risk.

—Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (1995)

The James Baldwin–William Buckley debate in 1965 embodied a momentary longue durée skirmish: a collision of inherited cultural and economic assumptions guided by two related scales of world-historical geography. Zoomed into a local-national level, the first scale involved the articulation of the post–World War II American dream. Imagined as a secure standard of living for white Americans (defined as a male, family wage-earning person), this scale historically found implementation through federally subsidized westward expansion, the racial-gendered hierarchy achieved through settler colonialism, slavery, and the Jim Crow aftermath, and after World War II, the federally subsidized suburbs (including infrastructure development and defense spending). The other, more global scale was the struggle over the meanings of the centuries-old project of “Western civilization,” the world-historical commanding term embodying the ideas, policies, and material outcomes of modernity since the 1400s (including the processes of colonialism, settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave system, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the nation-state, and imperialism). Embodying Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s North Atlantic universals, this term blanketed the processes of modernity with a benevolence—an innocence—that articulated the brutality of colonialism and slavery as progress, providing a righteous confidence to European and American power projection.¹ This confidence, moreover, was compounded by indifference and often celebration of the consequences of violence toward colonized or enslaved peoples. Viewed through the longue durée of modernity, we may situate Western civilization as an ideological and cultural agent of transnational white superiority, all of which justified Europe and people of European descent to essentially control the world through economic, cultural, or political means up through the 1900s.²

The performances and language of the Baldwin and Buckley debate reflected the different interpretations of the grand history of Western civilization. At the national, post–World War II scale, the contextual boundaries of the 1960s culture war drew from the tensions over the inherited racial hierarchy of whiteness and Blackness and its unequal distribution of freedom and economic opportunity in the United States. Those who embodied the imagined benefactors of the American dream confronted both civil rights and decolonization movements in the 1950s and 1960s, which troubled their entrenched norms of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or xenophobia rooted in conceptions of Western civilization. What was once an assumed hierarchy paternalistically based off the natural superiority of people of European descent had suddenly become a relationship defined as oppression secured through brutal violence. Baldwin’s notion of the “possession of history” highlights the stakes of the mid-1960s culture war: is there a glorious American past made up of heroes like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Teddy Roosevelt, or are these heroes willing participants in crimes against humanity as sadistic slave owners, ethnic cleansers, and Anglo-Saxon supremacists? If these men are heroes of Western civilization, how did they extend and distribute the rewards of liberty and equality embedded in the constitution? At the dawn of liberation, many Americans were not ready to relinquish the honorable past shaping Western civilization, especially as the struggle—often referred to as a backlash—against social equality surfaced across the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Amid this uncertainty against the extension of civil rights, many desperately continued to justify their ideas and policies through the celebration of Western civilization, a grand history of European accomplishment cleansed of its sins and brought—again—into the light of innocence for the heavy ideological lifting required to dismantle the vastly popular Jim Crow welfare state.

Civil rights activist’s and global liberation movements challenged the norms of white male supremacy, unsettling the righteousness of Western civilization. Suddenly, the confidence of the narrative faced serious questions: were the heroes of “the West”—whether a cowboy or overseas “adventurer”—tyrannical oppressors or rugged individualists building civilization? A paradox confronted the conservative mind: how does one celebrate Western or American civilization when it is conjoined with the brutal processes of colonialism and slavery; or, to use Newt Gingrich’s words, how does the longue durée “spiritual and moral dimension” of American society come to terms with the crimes committed to create the quaint postwar banality of Norman Rockwell images comforting Americans across the twentieth century?³ These were significant questions as the formerly colonized or segregated tore away the cloak of normalcy tied to racial and sexual domination, and charging those of European descent with securing their power through arbitrary, vindictive—savage—acts of greed and wanton violence while using the myth of biological supremacy and Western civilization as a protective façade to hide their crimes. Poet Gil Scott-Heron noted this post–civil rights, postcolonial change in outlook in 1970: despite the filmic majesty of content and loyal enslaved people—Sambos—depicted in Gone with the Wind (1939), Scott-Heron asserted that “slavery was no smiling happy-fizzy party; your ancestors raped my foremothers and I will not forget.”⁴ Those seeking to retain the privileges promised by racial discrimination (or sexual and gendered discrimination) quickly abandoned overt mentions of biological race for the color-blind concept of culture, while obstructing reforms to the status quo by wielding the ideological shield of Western civilization. Secure in their possession of history, the epigraphs above highlight just how important the concept of Western civilization—let alone conservatism’s own use of the longue durée—was in pressing forward neoliberalism and conservatism by blanketing the history of their ideas with the comforting weight of order, tradition, and security connected to the long-celebrated idea of Western civilization.

Providing a key lubricant for structural adjustment, the grand vision of Western civilization established a bridge easing the transition from overt notions of racial supremacy defining the pre–World War II era to ideas of cultural difference after the war. We may situate this transition as an intimate partner in what William Davies notes is a salient feature of neoliberalism: the conceptual shift from policies based on “ ‘fairness’ of law” (which translated into a welfare state based on overtly white supremacist laws normalizing inequality out of fairness to the white “race’s” superiority over people of color—and hence, a “fair” hierarchy) to a color-blind “quantitative analysis” measuring and justifying economic opportunity in an age where overt racism was censured.⁵ This transition, of course, arose through the changing global context. As Quinn Slobodian suggests, the period of decolonization between the 1930s and 1970s shaped the evolution of neoliberalism just as much as the welfare state, including the construction of institutions aimed toward managing the expansion of democracy in the United States and newly independent, formerly colonized nations.⁶ Now that blunt power based on coercion and the language of white superiority fell out of fashion, the simple enforcement of “the rule of law”—defined and constructed through the processes of modernity (i.e., colonial law)—found renewal as policies of the past synced with the abstract notion of “quantitative analysis.” The outcome for neoliberals: the renewal of classical liberal language “separating politics from economics,” and the removal of political notions of “fairness” from the visible equation of economic policy.⁷ These rhetorical maneuvers, however, needed the conscription of the concept of Western civilization to provide a shield of justification for neoliberalism and its conservative allies.

The very need for a this longue durée defense lay in the fact that the road to neoliberalism could only be paved through the labor and support of the very demographic benefiting from the “fairness” of the welfare state. Thus, neoliberals looked to establish “cultural and social bonds” coated with a sense of lost traditions and a perceived collapse in the “rule of law” during the particularly anxious and turbulent period of the civil rights era.⁸ Drawing on the epochal language of Western civilization, neoliberals and postwar conservatives reconceptualized the deep racial loyalties undergirding the institutions of the Jim Crow welfare state. A curious paradox characterized this transaction: the very white nationalism cultivated through the history of “Western civilization” both constructed the Jim Crow welfare state (and the creation of the prosperous white middle class) as well as dismantled the welfare state (at the expense of its primary beneficiaries). When this cultural bond combined with the abstract “rule of law” (a concept neoliberals deployed to protect capital from democratic passions), a smooth road redirected economic loyalties away from a politics connected to economics toward a politics separated from economics. Accordingly, the transition to neoliberalism also signaled a defense of Western civilization, which was visibly under attack by the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and Vietnamese peasants seeking independence. To defend Western civilization—as Friedrich August von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Gingrich attempt in the epigraphs—meant voting for ideas and policies that not only liberated markets, but also, as Slobodian notes, encased and inoculated “capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.”⁹

Placing the evolution of neoliberalism within the language of Western civilization and the legacies of modernity provides a window into understanding how white Americans prospering under the Keynesian-inspired, federal interventionist welfare state shifted voting patterns toward politicians whose policies sought to dismantle the very welfare state shaping their postwar American dream. This chapter examines how neoliberals in the 1940s through the 1970s, particularly Hayek and Friedman, anchored their economic ideas to the celebrated concept of Western civilization. Although others have mapped out more detailed histories of the evolution of neoliberalism, this chapter offers a brief summary of its development as an ideological movement with an eye on contextualizing the language and knowledge within the longue durée cultural contours of modernity, including the dismissal of criticism toward capital concentration and monopolies. Finally, the chapter establishes the ideological links between the neoliberal thought collective and conservatism in the postwar years, particularly its cultural affiliation with the emerging conservative culture wars of the 1960s.

“Equality Is a Disorganizing Concept”: Sentiments, Hierarchies, and the Longue Durée

Although unsuccessful at Cambridge, Buckley’s efforts would eventually pay off. The United States moved to the right of the political spectrum between the 1960s and 1980s amid an uncertainty linked to the unsettling of traditional social and economic hierarchies. Between a white American anxiety over social equality with those previously deemed second-class citizens and a New Right conservative movement seeking the dismantling of the welfare state, a culture war proved an efficient path for this economic transition. Republican standard bearers like Gingrich would continue to gain traction from this longue durée possession of history in service to the culture war well into the 1990s and twenty-first century.¹⁰ At the precipice of formal equality between Black and white in the United States, color-blind language displaced overtly racist language (at least within “respectable” political debate) with coded phrases long familiar to white Americans. This color-blind language found root in the concepts of the “rule of law,” “rights of property,” “deviant culture,” and the relationships between the nation-state and its citizenry woven through the idea of Western civilization. The abstract legal framework of the American founding fathers—the sons of the Enlightenment—were summoned in the 1960s through the language of “law and order” to frame the debate about the proper roles of protest, dissent, and the validation of grievances.¹¹ The unconstitutional nature of systemic discrimination and unchecked violence across centuries would be redacted from the record and disavowed. A cynical year-zero arose at the end of the 1960s, imagining a world where equality between all people had always existed and where affirmative action programs or reparations appeared as unfair for whites who’d grown used to the Jim Crow welfare state.

The struggle over the possession of history and its mobilization in the present shaped the essence of this 1960s culture war. In his dialogue with Nikki Giovanni, Baldwin suggested that these were the deeper meanings underlining the vast shifts affecting the United States: “What I’m trying to get at is my apprehension of the crisis of this age. The crisis has something to do with identity, and that has something to do with buried history.”¹² Unintentionally agreeing with Baldwin about the struggle over the possession of history, Gingrich—with his PhD in history—described the ongoing stakes in retaining the type of understanding of history embraced by the United States prior to the civil rights era: “From the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims, through de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, up to Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American. Our civilization is based on a spiritual and moral dimension. It emphasizes personal responsibility as much as individual rights. Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit this civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them.”¹³ For Baldwin, and inversely with Gingrich, the intersection between identity and buried history formed the root of the American racial dilemma—whether one is condemning the identities constructed through settler colonialism, slavery, and the afterlife of slavery, or celebrating them as the essence of civilization and freedom. An important aspect of the culture war delicately rested on this vital possession of history: the conservation of a social order based on the disavowal of the wanton violence sculpting American identity from the experience of invasion, the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, and the degradation and terrorism targeting enslaved and free people of African descent. Justified through the “rule of law” enforced by the nation-state and religiously sanctioned through a culture of white supremacy, American identity—American civilization—existed within the paradox of unbridled freedom and liberty within a racial dictatorship. Describing liberty, Dorothy Roberts notes the underlying liberal logic of its idealization: “The dominant view of liberty reserves most of its protections only for the most privileged members of society. This approach superimposes liberty on an already unjust social structure, which it seeks to preserve against unwarranted government interference. Liberty protects all citizens’ choices from the most direct and egregious abuses of government power, but it does nothing to dismantle social arrangements that make it impossible for some people to make a choice in the first place. Liberty guards against government intrusion; it does not guarantee social justice.”¹⁴ When the victims of American liberty began articulating “the situation of the victim,” they “ceased to be a victim” and instead became “a threat”—leading to liberty’s calling for decisive action in altering the “victim’s testimony” and conditions of inclusion into the liberal realm of liberty.¹⁵ To confront this catalog of crimes against humanity voiced by the victims of the American dream, conservatives and neoliberals doubled down on the founder’s rhetorical belief in individual rights and the embrace of the color-blind phrase, “all men are created equal,” as the cliff of legislated social equality loomed ahead. In short, the dominant idea of liberty—the guarding against government intrusion—would be more than adequate to handle civil rights reforms.

Undermining the arguments of social justice activists was vital for conserving status quo white power and its possession of history. For conservatives, accepting Baldwin’s critique would, as Buckley argued, entail “the necessity for us to jettison our entire civilization”; a zero-sum sentiment driven by the assumption that any deviation from the status quo meant the end of Western civilization and the end of relationships of order long treasured and revered by conservatives. Buckley’s rhetorical power lay in the weight of traditional memories of American history learned in the classroom during the height of legislated white nationalism before the 1960s, a familiar space aiding his denial of Baldwin’s outline of inequality regarding African Americans and an American dream enjoyed by white Americans.¹⁶ Buckley’s argument aligned with a past most Americans continued to—needed to—believe. For conservatives, this possession of history long justified denying a past built on violence and a defense of American social and economic inequality.¹⁷

Rooted in Auguste Comte’s ideas of “order” and the “social subordination” of social classes, those basking in the pinnacle of Western civilization and enjoying the inherited legacies of European expansion found the reality of social equality with long-deemed racially inferior people as an unfathomable change, an antithesis to the very logics of a Western civilization constructed atop colonialism and slavery.¹⁸ This concept of order and subordination filtered through the language of race and the restriction of social equality in the United States.¹⁹ For example, during a weeklong filibuster against federal legislation prohibiting anti-lynching in 1938, Louisiana senator Allen J. Ellender prophesized that passage of the law would spell the end of civilization itself.²⁰ In his defense of the historical right of whites—their liberty—to freely and publicly engage in the murder of Black people outside the official justice system, Ellender asserted, “We draw the line with respect to legislation that will make it possible for the white and the colored to rub elbows together; because, I repeat, and I hope it will sink in, political equality leads to social equality, and social equality will eventually spell the decay and downfall of our American civilization.”²¹ As a salient anchor of American racism, the roots of this “white right” of gratuitous violence—what two scholars call “the endless ambushes of white populism”—toward people of African descent derived from the sexual language of miscegenation, long circulated through American literature and popular culture—including the iconic film celebrating this white nationalist vision: Birth of a Nation (1915).²² Less than thirty years after Ellender’s defense of anti-Black violence, and a year before the Baldwin-Buckley debate, William J. Simmons addressed the Greater Los Angeles Citizens’ Council, on June 30, 1964, asserting, “We know that these two cornerstones—liberty and racial integrity or social separation of the races—provide the foundation upon which our system of social, political and economic values is built.”²³ Again, liberty and racial antagonism become synonymous with the larger social system (or civilization).

It is useful to connect this twentieth-century language and knowledge against the backdrop of conservative thought from a century before. As asserted in James Henry Hammond’s infamous 1858 “Cotton Is King” speech before the U.S. Senate:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law.

Hammond offers a clear assessment of the ideas, policies, and material outcomes associated with slavery. What is revealed is an honest longue durée assessment of social conservatism based on a rigid social and class order justified through concepts such as “progress” and “civilization,” the ontological gears of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “North Atlantic universals.”²⁴ Western civilization operates as a conceptual pivot offering cultural authority for conservatives such as Ellender and Simmons to base their claims: a possession of history aimed toward forestalling social equality toward African Americans in the twentieth century out of deference to a glorious past. For those anxious over the disruption of embedded hierarchies, the mobilization of Western civilization to attack the charges of social justice activists operated as an abstract, color-blind concept denoting and celebrating a white transnationalist vision of society under the cover of a longue durée embrace of modern and pre-modern thinkers who shaped the rhetorical foundations of Western thought.

The conservatism born out of the unstable racial and gendered constructs in the post–World War II era used the rhetorical weight of Western civilization—cleansed of its antagonisms—to reassert a defense of the status quo. Hierarchy within the existing social structure needed maintenance (as all social constructions do). In his 1948 book about the “dissolution of the West,” conservative writer Richard M. Weaver offered an early postwar assessment of the clamor rippling through a world of decolonization and civil rights, where the normalcy of white supremacy increasingly became openly questioned after the defeat of the Nazis.²⁵ In his defense of “distinction and hierarchy,” Weaver asserts:

The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society. Rational society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension. The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the recovery of true knowledge.… If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.… Equality is a disorganizing concept in so far as human relationships mean order. It is order without a design; it attempts a meaningless and profitless regimentation of what has been ordered from time immemorial by the scheme of things.²⁶

Equality, then, was a dangerous addition to the liberty and freedoms espoused by defenders of Western civilization—an irony still in motion in the twenty-first century. Of course, through their protest against creeping equality, conservatives implied that the very success of Western civilization rested on inequality and hierarchy—despite the rhetoric of “rights of man” and “all men are created equal.” As such, one’s position in the maelstrom of Western civilization determined one’s possession of history. If one was near the top of the hierarchy, then one was able to deny the past centuries of human rights violations and systemic violence required to shape the present state of inequality one benefited from. From this position of authority, one could innocently assert truisms such as those espoused by one of Weaver’s contemporary conservatives, Russell Kirk, whose Program for Conservatives (1954) stated the following:

That some men are richer than others, and that some have more leisure than others, and that some travel more than others, and that some inherit more than others, and that some are educated more than others, is no more unjust, in the great scheme of things, than that some undeniably are handsomer or stronger or quicker or healthier than others. This complex variety is the breath of life to society, not the triumph of injustice. Poverty, even absolute poverty, is not an evil; it is not evil to be a beggar; it is not evil to be ignorant; it is not evil to be stupid. All these things are either indifferent, or else are occasions for positive virtue, if accepted with a contrite heart. What really matters is that we should accept the station to which “a divine tactic” has appointed us with humility and a sense of consecration.²⁷

Kirk’s possession of history and his power to summon this particular vision of the past allowed those seeking to halt the dismantling of historically unequal social or economic relationships to utilize the truisms of Western civilization—with a sprinkling of “divine” sanction—in their arguments to conserve the status quo. There would be no accounting for crimes against humanity, as the atrocities of settler colonialism and slavery disappear from discussion, allowing an untarnished Western civilization to set the terms of debate at the dawn of neoliberalism. More importantly, the possession of history would continue to pay its dividends.

The majority of Americans understood ideas of Western civilization and its American context through schooling, popular media, social interactions, holidays, nationalistic reverence, and, perhaps, the readings of Weaver and Kirk—or even from the apologetics of those defending the white mob murder of Black Americans. Examining the language of neoliberalism connects the conservatism of segregationists, Buckley, Weaver, and Kirk with the ideas of neoliberal economists. Culturally, this meeting facilitated a curious dialogue. The gaze back toward the era of free trade liberalism in the late 1800s and early 1900s simultaneously shines a light on the material outcomes of this era of industrial capitalism: Europe controlled 90 percent of the world through imperialism, and the United States was both constructing a Jim Crow apartheid state and wrapping up its 300-year ethnic-cleansing war against Native Americans. Postwar conservatism—reformed after the Great Depression shredded its economic credibility—continued to be skeptical of dismantling the hierarchies constructed through the longue durée of American history and were militantly intent on retaining this “traditional” order founded through settler colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy. A vital demographic needed to successfully implement conservative and neoliberal policies included the white middle- and working-class which prospered from the very set of welfare state policies condemned by neoliberals, conservatives, and anti–New Deal businessmen.²⁸ If middle- and working-class Americans could see their relationship with the federal government not as a beneficial one but an antagonistic one, then a new consensus could be built around dismantling the welfare state. Moreover, this dismantling did not necessarily remove government from the equation of economics. A crucial part of the neoliberal project included the construction of a protective, anti-democratic shell around economics: the welfare state would be reformed to suit the needs of business rather than providing a social safety net for the working- and middle class. Since most white working- and middle-class Americans grew up in a socially conservative society embracing laws, customs, and popular media portraying people of color as naturally inferior, legislated social equality was viewed with extreme unease. As 1950s and 1960s televised images recorded the brutalization of Black men, women, and children by white people seeking to halt the extension of social equality and broadcast these images into homes across the nation, the American white middle class confronted the very crisis haunting the Baldwin-Buckley debate: “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense of the American Negro?” The innocence of the postwar suburban paradise appeared to shatter, while, by the 1970s, the popular images of the 1950s had become camp.

Compounding the crisis was the Vietnam War, the rise of second-wave feminism, and the passage of civil rights legislation, pressing many white Americans into viewing the U.S. government through the prism of ideas espoused by conservatives and neoliberals: the welfare state unjustly interfered in the lives—the liberty—of Americans (and it unjustly interfered with the prosecution of the Vietnam War). More than this, once social equality became law through the series of civil rights legislation, the federal government was portrayed as unfairly aiding African Americans at the expense of white Americans.²⁹ In short, the anti–federal government language advocated by conservatives and neoliberals, which sought to reverse the New Deal redistribution of wealth downward, suddenly made sense to Americans whose lives—despite benefiting from the redistributionist policies of the welfare state—now appeared to be under siege from federal intervention they deemed unfair to hardworking white Americans. A new possession of history accompanied this revelation: federal intervention on behalf of white Americans melted away, a disavowed inconvenient history that planted the seeds of future ironies: as the conservative white children of the Jim Crow welfare state grew into retirement and demanded an end to “big government,” this possession of history, the 1940s–1960s era of federal intervention, was labeled “when America was great.”

The abstract, universal language and knowledge of Western civilization provided a key entry point as a way to tap into the sentiments of a white majority unsure about upsetting the longue durée American patriarchal, racial hierarchies. Indeed, as the public and private spheres increasingly found emancipation through civil rights and feminism, a rush to defend a concept of order—sometimes framed as “law and order,” economic rights, anti-federal intervention, and by the 1980s, “family values”—became paramount.³⁰ Although measurement of this anxious white American sentiment is hardly an exact science, polls provide some insight into the various ways the postwar years reflected the longue durée legacies of settler colonialism and slavery and their accumulated habits of mind. When asked between the 1940s and 1950s if “Negroes are as intelligent as white people,” the responses from whites and Blacks differed remarkably:

Table 2.1  “In general, do you think Negroes are as intelligent as white people—that is, can they learn just as well if they are given the same education (and training)?” (NORC, June 20, 1942; September 22, 1946; January 26 and April 20, 1956). From Hazel Gaudet Erskine, “The Polls: Race Relations,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Spring 1962): 138.
		Yes		No		Don’t Know
National Total		57%		37%		6%
Whites only
June 1942		42%		48%		10%
May 1946		53%		40%		7%
January 1956		78%		19%		3%
Negroes only
May 1946		92%		5%		3%

Although whites appeared to have less investment in the biological belief in Black inferiority, Cold War concerns within the long shadow of genocide connected to Nazi Germany might have helped dampen the respectability of overt racism—at least within the public sphere or in answers to pollsters. The national mood measured in these polls might also reflect the growing trend to not appear racist in the 1950s. Despite these shifts, racism still filtered through American society—from housing policies to popular culture to employment practices.³¹ When asked if “most Negroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly,” answers from whites appeared to naturalize racial inequality by failing to recognize institutional racism at the same percentage Black Americans recognized it:

Table 2.2  “Do you think most Negroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly?” (NORC, May 1944; May 1946; January 26, 1956). From Hazel Gaudet Erskine, “The Polls: Race Relations,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Spring 1962): 139.
		Fairly		Unfairly		Don’t Know
Whites only
May 1946		66%		25%		9%
Negroes only
May 1946		28%		66%		6%

In the 1950s, half of white adults did not believe “white students and Negro students should go to the same schools.”³² When asked if “a Negro family moved in next door to you,” would you move?, 69 percent of white adults responded “yes.”³³ This last question exemplified one of the critical elements of the culture war: the elimination of restricted housing measures across the entire nation. In California, Proposition 14 (1964)—which sought to nullify the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 and legalize racial discrimination—united both white Democrats and Republicans, with polls showing a 58 percent bipartisan support.³⁴ It also provided Ronald Reagan with an early opportunity to color-blind his racial antagonistic appeals to white voters: “This has nothing to do with discrimination. It has to do with our freedom, our basic freedom.”³⁵ White privilege in housing appeared to be the deal breaker for non-Southern whites extending civil rights to Black Americans—even for liberals. When asked, “Would you move if colored people came to live in great numbers in your neighborhood?,” Gallup took note of white respondents’ answers:

Table 2.3  “Would you move if colored people came to live in great numbers in your neighborhood?” (Gallup Poll). From Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Negro Housing,” Public Opinion Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1967): 493.
		Yes, Definitely Move		Yes, Might Move		No, Would Not Move
1958
North		45%		32%		23%
South		67%		21%		12%
National Total
1963		49%		29%		22%
1965		40%		29%		31%
1966		39%		31%		30%
1967		40%		31%		29%

Between 1958 and 1963, the polls show a decline in “definitely” but a sustained 30 percent in the “might move” answer. If we understand the postwar trend of censuring overt displays of racism, we might contextualize the two columns of “yes” as a single answer, leading to an average of 70 percent “yes” answers through the mid-1960s as social equality legislation unfolded. As the authors of an article in 1981 noted, whites often faked not being prejudiced in polls, especially if the questions posed were readily seen as “old-fashioned racism” (school desegregation; having Black people come over to their home; keeping Black people out of white neighborhoods, and anti-miscegenation laws) versus the newer racism steeped in color-blind-coded racism surrounding housing and desegregation.³⁶ For conservatives, this was a godsend as they could frame issues for anxious Northern and Southern whites as a nonracist defense of property rights, states’ rights, or discrimination against whites (especially regarding affirmative action or busing). Thus, the new color-blind racism allowed “any of their other opinions, beliefs, or actions that work to the detriment of blacks” as “not seen as prejudice; and since most white Americans either do not hold old-fashioned racist beliefs or they feel guilty about the ones they do hold, whites tend to think racism is a thing of the past. Hence, whites perceive the continuing efforts and demands of blacks as unjustified, while blacks see whites’ resistance to these efforts as tangible proof of racism and hypocrisy, and the cycle of conflict continues.”³⁷

As a defense against contemporary intrusions into the postwar prosperity of the Jim Crow–era United States, conservatives like Buckley reformed the knowledge of the past by insulating it from post-1950s criticism. Most often, this took the form of discounting or disavowing assertions from spokesmen such as Baldwin that the legacy of the Atlantic slave system accounted for this ongoing antagonism in the present—including the still-used refrain, “my grandparents did not own slaves.” At the same time, Buckley regenerated anti-Black antagonisms by infusing a new language cleansed of explicit racial designations with a less vulgar tone and rooted in the idea of different “cultures”—hence the use of the term Western civilization. A “ ‘color-blind’ strategy” summoned ideas of “cultural pathology” and “a lack of ethos”—what an earlier era simply called lazy, thieving, violent, and in need of direction or control—to account for the situation facing most African Americans in the 1960s.³⁸ For many white Americans, the old wine in new bottles underscored a continued sense that Black Americans were still not worthy of social equality. Or, as a leader of the Young Republicans declared in support for California Proposition 14, “Blacks ‘haven’t made themselves acceptable’ for white neighborhoods” yet.³⁹

In defending criticisms against Western civilization and the processes of modernity, performances such as Buckley’s deployed longue durée historical projections to rhetorically justify structural inequalities between whites and Blacks in the present. Much like apologists of segregation, imperialism, genocide, colonialism, and slavery, those justifying a starkly unequal present rested their arguments on the possession of history rooted in the conceptual authority of Western civilization upon the common knowledge of American society. Highlighting how these sentiments wove through the ideas, and later policies, of neoliberals and their conservative allies presents a clearer picture of how our neoliberal era unfolded.

Market Freedoms and the Road (Back) to Laissez-Faire Economics

The origins and networks of neoliberalism stretch back to the transnational philosophical and economic circles of the 1920s and 1930s.⁴⁰ Dieter Plehwe characterizes neoliberalism as an evolving set of ideas, the product of a transnational historical “thought collective.”⁴¹ The concepts of neoliberalism surfaced in the work of Swedish economist Eli F. Heckscher—Old and New Economic Liberalism (1921)—while the first modern usage of the term neoliberalism appeared in 1925 in Swiss economist Hans Honegger’s Trends of Economic Ideas.⁴² An important seed included the Austrian school of economics, out of which Hayek arose from the tutelage of economist Ludwig von Mises.⁴³ Informed by the economic turmoil following World War I (especially regarding inflation), the Austrian school emphasized the role of money in the economy. Their conclusion: government intervention led to altering the “price mechanism,” resulting in an unbalanced economy.⁴⁴ The Geneva school, on the other hand, sought to understand the business cycle through a project of economic data exchange.⁴⁵ A foundational premise for this project included: the “global economy was unknowable” and thus needed a type of structure allowing for the agency of global economics to be free from constraints—government intervention—and be allowed to naturally gravitate toward a rational equilibrium.⁴⁶ With the belief in an unknowable economy came another shift for neoliberal economists: an end to “a working faith in numbers,” as “the use of numbers had become associated with those who believed in state action” in the 1930s.⁴⁷ Ironically, the neoliberal solution demanded an interventionist state guaranteeing no outside intervention in the economy.

Amid the European turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, Hayek’s neoliberal approach to economics clashed against the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes, particularly the latter’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).⁴⁸ Hayek and Keynes would go on to frame the major economic debates defining twentieth-century economics. Nicholas Wapshott notes the basic logics of their theories: “Keynes believed that man had been placed in charge of his own destiny, while Hayek, with some reluctance, believed that man was destined to live by the natural laws of economics as he was obliged to live by all other natural laws.”⁴⁹ In some ways, the debate suggested two realms of reality. From the Keynesian perspective, order arose from the balancing of social and economic worlds through human agency, with the unstable economic world regulated by the social-political world.⁵⁰ From Hayek’s perspective, these realms operated outside the control of humans, existing as a state of nature where human interference—that is, regulation—within these quasi-spiritual realms would induce a level of disorder. Both lines of thought drew from the Enlightenment’s rationalist thought and the economic science of the nineteenth century.⁵¹ The policies of laissez-faire—meaning “allow to do”—economics informing neoliberalism, however, collided with the historical context of the 1930s.

In the wake of the Great Depression, public opinion veered away from a belief in laissez-faire economics as free market advocates struggled to convince a skeptical public that any policy leading the nation-state to interfere in the economy on behalf of working- and middle-class people was inimical to helping fix the economy. This argument proved difficult when a quarter of the population faced unemployment. The “free market” argument, moreover, trampled across the democratic voices of those who felt betrayed by the promises of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s proto-supply-side economics, as well as the hesitancy of the Hoover administration to support “deficit-financed expenditures and easy monetary policies.”⁵² Troubled by the inability of the market to naturally rebuild itself, in late 1929 Herbert Hoover hesitantly called for public works money, a “no strike” pledge from organized labor, a loosened monetary policy from the Federal Reserve Board, and tariffs protecting agriculture.⁵³ Further inroads to federal intervention, such as expanding welfare, were deemed too extreme. As Ellis W. Hawley notes, conservative philosophy imagined too much federal intervention as undermining “the institutions essential to American freedom and progress.”⁵⁴ For some, this logic led to both blaming the crash on too much government interference in the 1920s while simultaneously celebrating the “roaring” aspect of the 1920s as an example of what happens when capitalism is unfettered from the constraints of government.⁵⁵ These arguments about prosperity or federal overreach fail to account for the overall spread of growth in the 1920s, which hardly adhered to the laissez-faire promise: “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The decade saw a 32 percent increase in productivity though only an 8 percent increase in wages.⁵⁶ Inequality rose substantially in the 1920s, with the top 10 percent drawing “45–50 percent of national income in the 1910s–1920s.”⁵⁷ Hoover held fast to the conservative argument about self-help and adherence toward private charities over public relief and federal intervention, suggesting such actions would make government “master of [American] souls and thoughts.”⁵⁸ At the same time, he did approve bailouts for Arkansas farmers’ livestock ($45 million) while opposing “an additional $25 million to feed the starving farmers and their families.”⁵⁹ For free market advocates, the aura of the market assumed its own agency as its “invisible hand” provided for the manipulation of goods and services—excepting livestock—outside the corrupting influences of bureaucrats. Viewed through the longue durée, the investment in the idea of the “invisible hand” regenerated a pre-Enlightenment view of “God’s will” driving history, although this sentiment embraced the rational language of the Enlightenment. Whether it was “God’s will” or the secular “invisible hand,” it seemed both ideas operated more to buttress wealth and power than solve the instabilities of a market society. From this crucible of debate—along with the post-1932 U.S. government’s response to the Depression—American neoliberalism took root.

Although one could theorize about the ideal state of the economy, the real world presented some complicated challenges. As a product of its time, neoliberalism blended the ideas of free markets with the changing needs of twentieth-century capitalism and, thus, was not just an update of classical liberalism.⁶⁰ Out of the momentum spurred by the work of Mises and Hayek, the term, neoliberalism, gained more frequent use in the 1930s—including the publication of Walter Lippmann’s (An Inquiry into the Principle of) The Good Society in 1937. Echoing 1920s conservatism, “Lippmann’s core message was the superiority of the market economy over state intervention,” in obvious contrast to the Soviet Union and the prevailing logics developing out of the New Deal and the increasingly popularized economics developed by Keynes.⁶¹ Although his work was celebrated by neoliberals, Lippmann was not blind to an ideology free from “the working faith in numbers.”⁶² Addressing the historical context of early twentieth-century industrial capitalism, Lippmann noted the oversight of conservatives and neoliberals: the lack of critique toward the “concentration of industrial power,” and the collusion between industrialists and the nation-state to allow corporate concentration or monopolies.

The concentration of control does not come from the mechanization of industry. It comes from the state, which began about a hundred years ago to grant to anyone who paid a nominal fee what had hitherto been a very special privilege. That was the privilege of incorporation with limited liability and perpetual succession.… For, without the privileges and immunities of the corporate form of economic organization and property tenure, the industrial system as we know it could not have developed and could not exist. So fundamentally true is this that we should do well to follow the suggestion of Messrs. Berle and Means and speak not of the capitalist system but of the corporate system. If that system exhibits a high degree of concentrated control, the cause is to be found not in the technic of production, but in the law.⁶³

Lippmann’s warning was dismissed, though his work was celebrated via the Colloque Walter Lippmann, an event held in Paris in 1938, out of which many of the attendees formed the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society almost ten years later.⁶⁴ Lippmann’s ideas anticipated many of Hayek’s, including a demand for serious revision of liberal theory using scientific methods.⁶⁵ For Hayek, the road to neoliberalism was a long-term project, aimed toward altering the fundamental way people viewed economics and its relationship to society and the state. It was a “battle of ideas,” with the elite and “the active intelligentsia” being key points of struggle.⁶⁶ Slobodian describes Hayek’s approach to the “long struggle” as mimicking the “example of socialists,” who had “succeeded in shifting debates over time, thus capturing both public opinion and public power and making their vision reality.”⁶⁷ This transnational conversation orbiting the evolving idea of neoliberalism included the coalescing of different theoretical approaches from different countries confronting both planned socialist philosophies as well as the welfare state.⁶⁸

Within the United States, the rise of neoliberalism can be traced back to one institution: the Chicago school of economics.⁶⁹ “Joined at the hip from birth,” the Chicago school and the Mont Pèlerin Society fostered a space in the United States for the development of a counterphilosophy against the Keynesian-inspired welfare state.⁷⁰ Here, American neoliberalism cast aside classical liberalism’s critique of monopolies and large “concentrations” as stifling competition.⁷¹ At the dawn of classical liberalism in the 1770s, Adam Smith sensed the volatility emerging with the growing concentration of capital and the growing pool of labor as cities filled with workers. He lamented the hypocrisy of “masters”—corporations, businessmen, monopolists, and so forth—whose charges of “labor combining” (i.e., workers organizing themselves against capital) reflected the very nature of the capitalist’s own hidden activity:

The masters … never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders.⁷²

For Smith, the relationship between capitalism and the nation-state was vital. Bound by the “rule of law,” government protects private property and contracts, with the threat of state violence forcing workers to settle out of the necessity to subsist, with the leaders of workers submitting to the collective punishment of the nation-state protecting private property. Thus, different historical contexts insulated the concepts of classical liberalism. While the ideas of late 1800s classical liberals arose out of the environment of free trade imperialism (nestled in the coercive and racist structures of modernity’s processes), neoliberals emerged through the material outcome of the internationalism and imperialism of industrial capitalism, including increased capital concentration, monopolies, and oligopolies in the 1920s and 1930s.⁷³ This moment of normalized concentration allowed the ethereal concept of the “invisible hand” to disavow the role of the state—and ignore the nuances of Smith’s and Lippmann’s distrust of concentration—as American neoliberalism conveniently shrugged off these warnings.

Funded largely by the conservative Volker Fund and the Olin Foundation, early American neoliberalism stressed the notion of a “freedom” that liberated corporations from the sets of regulations established during the New Deal and the welfare state after World War II.⁷⁴ Just as classical liberalism needed the nation-state to create the conditions for free trade—from imperialism to gunboat diplomacy—neoliberalism as outlined by the Chicago school admitted that its political program would only be successful if it was constructed via the state.⁷⁵ As Jamie Peck notes, “Neoliberalism, in its various guises, has always been about the capture and reuse of the state, in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freer-trading ‘market order.’ ”⁷⁶ Neoliberals would redesign the laws of the state “and other institutions to protect the market.”⁷⁷ Thus, rather than the “minimalist night-watchman state of the classical liberal tradition,” neoliberalism’s restructuring of the state acted to “impose the ideal form of society, which they conceive to be in pursuit of their very curious icon of pure freedom.”⁷⁸ In his 1951 paper, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects,” Milton Friedman highlighted this crucial role of the state in constructing the system.⁷⁹ Friedman notes, “The state would police the system, establish conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress.”⁸⁰

Despite Friedman’s assertion of preventing monopoly to protect free market competition, a salient aspect of American neoliberalism was its very indifference to the scale of market power between multinational big businesses and small businesses. The trend toward accepting the expansive role of multinationals bloated from the wartime government-interventionist economy and postwar rebuilding became a norm for both neoliberals as well as those defending the regulatory welfare state.⁸¹ This indifferent relationship to capital concentration helped establish a new moral code for measuring the scale of business. Rather than asserting an unfairness or unjustness toward large companies that dominate an industry, one used the rubric of efficiency or inefficiency as a measurement of whether a company was too large.⁸² Abstracted as such, one could now condemn the policies of the welfare state as restraining economic liberty—and thus personal freedom—regardless of the size of organizations or their ability to dominate markets. This new frame of debate spanned the spectrum of liberal to conservative, shaping American policy through the twentieth century. As neoliberals dismissed the criticisms of classical liberals regarding the ability of large companies to dominate markets, the articulation of their philosophy assumed that monopolies and the postwar conglomerate movement exemplified a natural state of capitalism and should be free from government interference. Discounting Lippmann’s assertion of the nation-state’s role in fomenting a culture of incorporation leading to concentration, a cursory history of the corporation in American life quickly outlines how these large organizations gravitated toward mergers, trusts, and monopolies to negotiate economic turbulence and secure markets in the late 1800s and early 1900s.⁸³ When one adds the era’s rhetoric of social Darwinism, large concentrations appeared to naturally evolve into even larger concentrations.

The neoliberal break from classical liberalism largely stemmed from the reactionary nature of neoliberalism and its funding connection to businessmen and organizations struggling against the growing welfare state.⁸⁴ The influence of the Volker Fund, asserts Rob Van Horn, cannot be underlined enough in this reformulation of classical liberalism’s hostility toward monopolies: “The Volker Fund went so far as to threaten to eject [Aaron] Director from his leadership role in the FMS [Free Market Study, a University of Chicago initiative] because the Volker Fund refused to accept certain tenets of classical liberalism.”⁸⁵ In short, the Volker Fund—an early right-wing charitable foundation formed in the 1930s—dismissed the inconvenient elements of classical liberalism infringing on the rights of the corporate community to expand and dominate markets. William Davies asserts, “In many ways, the story of post-1945 neoliberal critiques is of its mutation from a justification for markets to a justification for business, where the former represents a check on public economic planning, but the latter produces freedoms for private economic planning.”⁸⁶ Although initially critical of monopolies and large corporations in 1947, Friedman, too, had changed course by the early 1950s, despite his concerns in “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects.”⁸⁷ For Friedman, private monopolies were more favorable than public monopolies, and suggested that deregulated free trade competition would stifle a monopoly’s power.⁸⁸

In 1947, Hayek, with a young Friedman and other like-minded academics, formed the Mont Pèlerin Society, representing “the inception of what is now commonly referred to as neoliberalism.”⁸⁹ The organization’s founding statement’s pro–classical liberalism and anti-state views toward the market economy was aimed at communist countries as well as welfare states like the New Deal United States. The group, a prototype of the conservative think tank, also hinted at what neoliberalism would become after the 1960s. Their economic worldview drew justification from the weight of the grand authority attached to Western civilization and its attending processes of modernity. Using this possession of history, their assertions challenged the array of post–World War II issues, such as multiculturalism, decolonization, and the social equality of historically marginalized peoples. The 1947 statement read:

Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.… The group [the Mont Pèlerin Society] holds that that these developments have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and by the growth of theories which question the desirability of the rule of law. It holds further that they have been fostered by a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market; for without the diffused power and initiative associated with these institutions it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preserved.⁹⁰

The authors assert their claim of a timeless order driven by Western Man—the white agent of Western civilization—that has progressed through the centuries by adhering to freedom of thought and expression, superior moral standards, and adherence to the rule of law and the rights of property. In imagining this genealogy, we see the disavowal of the policies and material outcomes of the processes of modernity bestowed on “Western Man” at the expense of non-Europeans and women. Untroubled by the colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and the often-genocidal acts shaping the very meanings and material wealth of those nations within the Western civilization fold, the statement helps us understand the anchoring logic that silences the crimes of the West as it became the West, while simultaneously establishing a field of common sense in which nonelites—ordinary people—could identify with universal-sounding words such as freedom of thought and expression, moral standards, and the rule of law. Echoing Buckley’s concerns, the statement also underlines a reactionary conservative view toward the unsettling of the social order amid the Great Depression and World War II and the rise of social democratic welfare states: (1) the so-called end-of-civilization fears (noted in various contexts above) connect neoliberalism to the fear of upsetting particular entrenched hierarchies (Western, white, male, property owning); (2) the “end of civilization” trope is also set against the very policies of redistribution that the Mont Pèlerin Society critiques, ironically resulting in the loss of the economic freedom gained by white working- and middle-class people who actually benefited from the redistributionist policies of the welfare state.

Using Western civilization as a justification, these ideas buttressed a particular understanding of the “rule of law.” The rule of law, an ostensibly objective and neutral component of nature, allowed for the active construction of a free market society, where the rules of the game are outlined by the state through “legal procedures” designed to protect private property.⁹¹ Along with racial and gendered contradictions infecting the history of the “rule of law” in the United States—from laws against miscegenation to institutional gender discrimination to Jim Crow—this deep tradition failed to recognize the economic disparities related to the concentration of capital taking place as industrial capitalism’s monopoly and oligopoly tendencies foreclosed the existence of truly free markets in the wake of mergers.⁹² With concentrated capital, one could buy the “rule of law.” Echoing Lippmann’s critique, George Orwell also noted this silence toward the realities of concentration in his review of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) in the 1940s: “Professor Hayek … does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly.”⁹³ Finally, the 1947 Mont Pèlerin statement imagines an ideal world innocent of the malevolence unleashed by modernity’s policies and material outcomes guiding the rise of Western civilization. Through this disavowal, neoliberals could suggest capitalism was under siege, with those supporting the welfare state being labeled socialists.

For Friedman and Hayek, then, government should only intervene in civil society through the “rule of law.” Notes Hayek, “Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.”⁹⁴ As a golden rule for an appropriate relationship between government and the economy, the “rule of law” would deny government the ability to redistribute the wealth of a nation for purposes other than defense, policing, or fire prevention (all organizations directed to protect property). In a society premised on institutional social inequality such as Jim Crow America, the federal government could only intervene to enforce constitutional laws safeguarding white supremacy or patriarchal containment of women—both concepts conservatives believed to be natural. Hence, the federal government should not interfere with the right of states (particularly the South) to enact these laws of inequality.

In the aftermath of World War II, it appeared to conservatives that democracy needed to be reined in at the very moment it was slowly being extended to historically marginalized peoples. Even though the wealthy and big business may use their wealth to shape laws aiding their economic interests, as the history of wealth and politics makes clear, when working- and middle-class people attempted a similar feat in their support of the welfare state, the political act becomes a deviation from the norms of Western civilization and economic order.⁹⁵ For Hayek, the unspoken inevitability of economic concentration in industrial capitalism acted, not as a component of business-state interactions but as a part of nature: “It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality.”⁹⁶

Karl Polanyi foresaw this conception of freedom espoused by the trends leading to the Mont Pèlerin Society in his work The Great Transformation—published in 1944, the same year as The Road to Serfdom. Here, Polanyi pointed out what he considered the two types of freedoms in the twentieth-century market economy: (1) the freedom of speech, association, and choice of employment (among others) and (2) the freedom to exploit others under the veil of the market economy. Criticizing the nascent neoliberal model, he writes:

Planning and control [Keynesian economics] are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.… This means the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.⁹⁷

Conjuring the very set of projections Polanyi noted above, Hayek’s career-defining book, The Road to Serfdom, offered an economic theory counter to the ideas of Keynes and others he deemed “socialists” (those who advocated government intervention into market economies). In his possession of history, Hayek fashioned a grand narrative through the cultural authority of Western civilization. As this chapter’s epigraph suggests, Hayek’s need for justifying free markets utilized longue durée paths tying his positive vision for a free market social philosophy to the well-known minds shaping the genealogy of Western civilization. His construction of a morality in support of his economic vision of pursuing liberty through free markets attracted many supporters in the United States, particularly among those Americans fuming at the rise of the New Deal coalition and the redistributionist policies directly undermining older class hierarchies.⁹⁸ The Road to Serfdom contextualized American businessmen’s struggle against the New Deal as a struggle to uphold the longue durée legacies of Western civilization.⁹⁹ In short, businessmen could portray themselves as victims of state tyranny and heroic defenders of humanity.

Hayek framed the struggle over market virtues as an ontological struggle between Western civilization and the chaotic alternative of state intervention. This was the spiritual war Gingrich spoke of, ultimately leading to apocalypse if the neoliberal-conservative movement failed to dismantle the welfare state.¹⁰⁰ Hayek’s use of Western civilization and its zero-sum argument reflected the dilemma facing conservatives and budding neoliberals: they were struggling to negotiate the then-discredited culture and economics of turn-of-the-century laissez-faire capitalism into an ideology of freedom and liberty for an already economically stable postwar United States. This was obviously an uphill battle, as the discredited economic philosophy stumbled against its association with the Great Depression and the backdrop of the evolving mixed economy that, thanks to the success of World War II, legitimized government economic planning under the banner of the “good war.”

On the other hand, a set of unintended consequences were about to aid the struggle of conservatives and neoliberals. Although the backdrop of the Cold War pressed the nation to the right, effectively marginalizing left-wing voices in American society, the Cold War also surprisingly aided the civil rights movement. The Soviet Union cast a glaring light upon the hypocrisy of a free nation steeped in the traditions of Jim Crow segregation, pressing the federal government to intervene into states refusing to recognize social equality legislation.¹⁰¹ Foreign policy, then, helped open the door to the breakup of the postwar consensus by removing embarrassing domestic laws undermining relationships abroad, resulting in the social fractures caused by legislated social equality. The domestic unrest related to the Vietnam War provided yet another opening. This perfect storm bolstered the return of conservatism. Those critical of government intervention in social equality found common cause with neoliberals and conservatives who sold a more receptive package embodied by the color-blind rubric of free market capitalism: state’s rights and resistance to federal oversight—in business or personal preference—was liberty.¹⁰²

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek awkwardly walked another longue durée path: the white supremacist assumptions woven through the conception of Western civilization. The still-lingering scent of the eugenic and the distinctly northern European brand of white supremacy—the ideal of the Nordic, and the basis for the dominant “race” in American nationalism—permeated Hayek’s language in a similar manner as it had with turn-of-the-century apologists of ethnic cleansing, such as President Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁰³ Echoing his mentor Ludwig von Mises, Hayek suggested that a “change in moral values” supporting “collectivism” was rooted in the dismissal of the “virtues” of “Anglo-Saxons”:¹⁰⁴

The virtues these people possessed—in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch—were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions in which democratic moral genius has found its most characteristic expression, and which in turn have modeled the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America, are those which the progress of collectivism and its inherently centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying.¹⁰⁵

The “sharp break” away from Western civilization and Anglo-Saxon virtues by the rise of the mixed economy rhetorically operated as a symbol of spiritual warfare; a market advocacy jihad against government intervention. In this sanitized version of Western civilization’s linear path toward free markets and individualism across the millennia, Hayek revealed his possession of history: (1) his debates about contemporary economics continued to submit a supernatural quality to the operation of markets, absent the role of historical relationships between the nation-state and capitalism, capital concentration, and the overall intimate connection between economics, politics, and culture; (2) this spiritual support for noninterference from democratically controlled government institutions found rhetorical strength through the longue durée rhetoric of liberty emanating from the processes of modernity, despite the inherently unequal and undemocratic nature these processes embodied in relation to women and people of color since (at least) the 1500s; (3) the evoked qualities of self-reliance and individualism find themselves clearly quarantined from their material counterparts: European expansion, colonialism, settler colonialism, and the Atlantic slave system (similarly, the Atlantic slave system was quarantined from the history of celebratory discussions of the Enlightenment up through the twentieth century).¹⁰⁶

Hayek’s possession of history remained a key to his longue durée argument. In his chapter on “The Common Sense of Progress” in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), the previous centuries of coercion, subjection, and enslavement continue to be silenced in their role in the rise of the West: “Although the fact that the people of the West are today so far ahead of the others in wealth is in part the consequence of a greater accumulation of capital, it is mainly the result of their more effective utilization of knowledge. There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, “undeveloped” countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better than it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.”¹⁰⁷ Along with downplaying the global violence clearing the way for the rise of the West, the rhetorical use of the longue durée operated as a device marking any deviation from the cited logics of Western civilization as an inevitable venture to ruin.

Defenders of Hayek continue to redeem these concepts through a similar devotion to the idea that markets somehow operate through a knowledge transcending mere mortal appreciation, often denying or explaining away the violence complicating the celebration of capitalism. In his chapter on Hayek, historian Jerry Z. Muller writes, “The competitive market was not merely about exchanging information; it also served to create new knowledge about the potential use of resources. For discovering which goods are ‘valueable’ to the other members of society and how much value is actually placed on them is not something that can be known with certainty in advance.”¹⁰⁸ Despite an uncritical explanation of the radical inequality inherent via the human agency required to broker a relationship between information, knowledge, and the economy, this enchanted hand of the market is the spiritual lifeblood of the ideas of Hayek and others within the “neoliberal thought collective.”¹⁰⁹ In many ways, it is what humans thousands of years ago would call “magic,” the will of the gods, or, just simply, the will of God—there is human agency involved, but the outcomes are imagined to be directed by otherworldly forces. The seductiveness of these ideas leads to conclusions about capitalism clearly discredited by a glimpse at the history of modernity. When market optimism bleeds, it usually trickles down: “Though capitalism is sometimes blamed for racism, sexism, and chauvinism,” writes Muller, “the most sophisticated analysts (whether of the left or the right) have noted that the market tends to break down barriers between groups.”¹¹⁰ In the twenty-first century, many groups of people across the global marketplace, unfortunately, continue to find themselves still violently marginalized in a global capitalism conceptually imagined, in part, by the legacy of Hayek and Friedman.¹¹¹

Neoliberalism, the Individual, and Culture War

Informing Barry Goldwater’s message of the reinvigoration of free market conservatism during the 1964 election campaign, the publication of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) became the harbinger of post-1960s neoliberalism.¹¹² A series of lectures from the late 1950s connecting unfettered capitalism with individual freedom, Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski characterize Capitalism and Freedom as the “corporate neoliberal version of Road to Serfdom.”¹¹³ Much like Hayek, Friedman’s classic work deployed the ideal of Western civilization to imagine a relationship between the economy, the nation-state, and the ideas of Western civilization freed from the legacies of exploitation. Discounting the history of nineteenth-century American business and its influence on the political system (whether state or federal), Friedman asserts, “Economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.”¹¹⁴ Friedman’s assumption, of course, bears a normalized Eurocentric, white men–only characterization of historical reality.

Friedman’s possession of history is an ideal, imagining only the abstract relationships between markets and white men (Black men could not obtain “political freedom” through “competitive capitalism”), while also ignoring the brutal class conflict (from workers to farmers) characterizing American history, Jim Crow legislation’s effect on both white and Black employment, and patriarchy’s effect on men and women’s employment opportunities.¹¹⁵ Friedman’s rhetoric bolsters an American innocence toward racial and gendered antagonisms, and rescues American freedom and liberty and its connection to Western civilization from the harsh judgment of history. Much like Hayek in the epigraph, Friedman summons a longue durée characterization of the connection between nineteenth-century capitalism and freedom, asserting, “historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.”¹¹⁶ For this to be a statement of truth, the coercive features of settler colonialism, the afterlife of the Atlantic slave system, the concentration of capital spurring the labor movement and populism, and patriarchy need silencing—let alone the scientific racism driving the imperialist, free trade era of laissez-faire capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like a chessboard, one’s positionality in the realm of Western civilization determined the freedom of movement, with the unequal distribution of movement options dampening one’s ability to enjoy freedom or avoid oppression. To elude this visible history, neoliberals and their conservative allies emphasized the Enlightenment’s ideal of abstract individuality versus the material reality of collectives protected or targeted by racial designations. Moreover, abstract individuality silenced the systemic role of white male supremacy in guiding the freedom of movement across the chessboard.

As the welfare state subsidies toward white working and middle classes began dissolving in the 1970s, the decades-old neoliberal-conservative emphasis on individualism arrived as a crucial philosophical concept targeting both the dismantling of the Jim Crow welfare and the disavowal of its white nationalist collective nature. This reawakened sense of color-blind individualism found renewed meaning among white folks who, for the first time in the history of the nation, were legislatively forced into social equality with people of color and women: the nation’s promise of “all men are created equal” came due for the greatest generation, the silent generation, and the baby boomers. The polls cited above underline the level of anxiety related to the full deregulation of inequality. From a systemic, longue durée perspective, the gut-level reaction to social equality felt “wrong,” a deviation away from the tradition of liberty. For those living in white suburbs, individualism equated to keeping African Americans out of their community—a sentiment fueling the national swing right as these voters sought to “punish the liberals” for interfering with segregation (particularly on display during the Boston school busing crisis).¹¹⁷

Although its disavowed or unacknowledged in most discussions of economic history, the racial aspect of American pronouncements of “individualism” in defense of the privileged is not to be underestimated. Cheryl Harris notes how this deep American identity and position in society has always rested on “the valorization of whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste”:¹¹⁸

In ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who passed sought to attain.… Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privilege, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated.¹¹⁹

In short, individualism in the United States historically upheld male whiteness as its normative anchor, an invisible standard underscoring the universality of American or Western civilization. This ontological sense of the world operated in much the same manner as the gendered and racialized image of the benevolent “settler,” implying the right of white men to “discover” territory occupied by non-white groups and victoriously claim it in the name of progress or Western civilization. Indeed, the mythic “Promethean self-made man”—or the “autonomous selfhood”—in which individualism has been imagined throughout American history nestled neatly into the industrial capitalist age, including “its most forthright formulation in the economic theories spawned by classical liberalism.”¹²⁰ Thriving through the era of scientific racism up through the 1920s, individualism projected the very essence of the American success story. In its disavowing of the coercive structures protecting white male entitlement—especially the legislative protections toward white male liberty, including the Naturalization Act of 1790, The Dred Scott Decision of 1857, or Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896—the privileges and protections of individualized whiteness found insulation through the “rule of law” comprising civil society and the nation-state, all historically dominated by propertied white men.

Propelled by the delusion of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, an irony smothers the evolution of postwar individualism, the welfare state, and neoliberalism. The initial barrier for the arguments of neoliberals and conservatives between the 1930s and 1960s lay in the policies of the Jim Crow welfare state and its successful construction of a prosperous white working and middle class (despite some white people left behind by these policies).¹²¹ As individuals, the welfare state primarily allotted white people with economic opportunity, the “family wage,” housing, and access to the American dream.¹²² To sync with the historical legacy of American individualism, however, the collective aspects of the welfare state (its regulations and redistribution of wealth) were downplayed against the national security rhetoric of the Cold War: a struggle against the collectivism of the Soviet Union.¹²³ While subsidized by the welfare state, the notion of rugged individualism—scattered culturally through Western films, crime thrillers, and other forms of popular culture—framed the success of the white working and middle classes. Federal intervention on behalf of white men vanished, obscured by the giant shadow of Cold War individualism. Once African Americans and other people of color gained legislated social equality, conservatives discovered their successful rhetorical path: federal spending on people of color would be framed as a collective redistribution of wealth coming at the expense of white people and their rugged individualism (an extension of the post-1930s argument of the wealthy: redistribution of wealth came at the expense of the rich).¹²⁴ The late 1960s white “silent majority” greeted conservative calls for liberty, equality, and less government interference enthusiastically.¹²⁵ Despite decades of federal intervention through housing, defense, and infrastructure spending, the white working- and middle-classes shifted to the right in the wake of social equality legislation, slowly voting away many of the redistributive elements of the welfare state that contributed to the environment in which white people could fully express their individualism. The concept of a “golden age” coincided with the unfolding conjuncture as the 1960s became the 1970s, resulting in a curious memory. On the one hand, the memory of simpler times gained popularity, depicting a pre-1960s era when white men were free of economic competition from women and people of color, including the memory of economic security rooted in full employment and good wages (i.e., the “family wage”). On the other hand, the memory of the federal intervention demanded to make this happen found itself safely warehoused in academia. For the majority of people, the age of American social democracy silently dissolved into air.

Cultivated by Richard Nixon on the road to his 1968 victory, the rhetorical strategy of the “silent majority”—or “the Southern strategy”—sought an imagined community made of the white working and middle classes who felt overwhelmed by the upheavals of the 1960s, especially the disturbances questioning racial and gendered hierarchies.¹²⁶ In that same year, Harold Cruse noted the future: “White America has inherited a racial crisis that it cannot handle and is unable to create a solution for it that does not do violence to the collective white American racial ego.”¹²⁷ With the weight of the past bearing down on the reality of legislated social equality, conservatives produced the appropriate adhesive conjoining the culture war with the language of neoliberalism: individualism, liberty, and their genealogical connection to Western civilization. The concept of the silent majority focused “on people’s resentments,” allowing Nixon—along with other conservatives and neoliberals to create a political space for this demographic to be viewed as innocent victims of government overreach and its unfair attack on their individualism and liberty.¹²⁸ Perlstein notes, “Nixon made political capital of a certain experience of humiliation: the humiliation of having to defend values that seemed to you self-evident, then finding you had no words to defend them, precisely because they seemed self-evident. Nixon gave you the words. ‘A great many quiet Americans have become committed to answers to social problems that preserve personal freedom,’ he said. ‘As this silent center has become a part of the new alignment, it has transformed it from a minority into a majority.’ ”¹²⁹ Characterizing the literal majority of the United States into a “minority” under siege proved to be a brilliant maneuver, as any action toward groups disrupting “self-evident” truths, such as white male entitlement and privilege, could be framed as a righteous defense of one’s hard work, one’s rugged individualism toward achieving the American dream. The sentiment seemed familiar: violent antagonism toward Native Americans found justification through the rhetoric of defending the settler family; and the freedom to lynch Black people was rooted in protecting white womanhood, an individual right celebrated by the segregationist Ellender. Indeed, Buckley’s counterattack against Baldwin’s criticisms of the American dream becomes the “silent majority’s” defense. Humiliation in the face of social equality legislation renewed innocence, as the court decisions and legislation came from the interventionist federal government: the “silent majority,” who were the primary recipients of the redistributionist welfare state, now viewed government intervention as betraying their civil rights by unfairly allowing people of color access to spaces and institutions designed specifically and traditionally for white Americans through the logic of white supremacy. Furthermore, the innocence of American individualism reinforced the disavowal of the legacies of racial and gendered violence buttressing the Jim Crow welfare state, let alone the ideological and material foundations of Western civilization.

Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom helped shape the reception of this renewed emphasis on individual freedom, as his once marginal thoughts now cohered with the anxieties of the silent majority: the enlarged New Deal state had concentrated too much power into the hands of government, becoming “a threat to freedom.”¹³⁰ As the lecture was written in the mid-1950s, precisely the same moment when the civil rights movement started challenging institutional racism, one may safely assume that the “freedom” Friedman speaks of wholly belonged to those traditionally envisioned as having inalienable rights to the full fruits of citizenship: those classified as “white,” and predominantly male. Government intervention on behalf of minorities and against the wishes or market desires of whites appeared as a threat to free institutions—and the liberty to choose. Friedman’s thoughts on the civil rights movement hardly veered from this attitude.

Friedman condemned government interference in de jure segregation, writing that “fair employment practice commissions” bent on countering discrimination via religion, color, or race are a direct threat to the “freedom of individuals to enter into voluntary contracts with one another.”¹³¹ Friedman’s conservatism held firm in the maintenance of the cultural-economic relationship characterizing U.S. capitalism under the Jim Crow/de facto segregation schemes. Friedman’s ideas of freedom and the individual obviously disavowed the racial dictatorship and gendered exclusions cultivated through the processes of modernity. Skeptical of removing or even questioning these U.S. traditions, Friedman added quotation marks to “discrimination” in Capitalism and Freedom, implying that the word was merely an allegation and not based on evidence—further buttressing the white reader’s presumed innocence in the longue durée practices of discrimination on the behalf of whiteness. The contours of this logic haunted conservative arguments and criticisms of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—from Goldwater to Reagan—including the racial conservatism of Buckley and James Kilpatrick’s defense of segregation.¹³²

Discrimination under the guise of markets found new legitimacy amid civil rights legislation, however. Neoliberal arguments highlighted market relations as the ultimate guide to freedom—Hayek’s market as “information processor”— at precisely the same moment old forms of de jure exclusion collapsed after centuries of eluding constitutional censure.¹³³ The conjuncture between the development of neoliberal thought and the dismantling of the Jim Crow welfare state via civil rights legislation can be viewed as one of the earliest gestures toward systemic deregulation. On the one hand, the civil rights movement and legislation represented the legal reform of the racist and sexist structures guiding American society and economy; on the other hand, the rise of neoliberalism against the backdrop of civil rights reform provided neoliberals and conservatives with the language of freedom from coercive tyranny. Ironically, conservatives also embraced the color-blind rhetoric of civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. to innocently argue for a society based on content of character and not skin color as legalized white supremacy confronted dismantlement.

A few outcomes become apparent through this historical moment. First, the deregulation of civil rights represented not just a reform of social relationships but, crucially, a deregulation of economic-cultural designations denoting values measured through ideas of race: white skilled workers earned more than Black skilled workers (if, of course, someone of African descent was allowed into a union apprenticeship program). With civil rights legislation, this informal-formal relationship is ostensibly removed in the name of social equality; for business, the blending of the two previously segregated pools of labor—now also including women—created an ostensibly color-blind workforce, while the immense expansion of wage workers helped squeeze wages down at the same moment blue-collar jobs increasingly disappeared across the 1970s.¹³⁴ Added to the erosion of wages, the longue durée social construction of race would continue to act as a roadblock to solidarity between racial and gender groups as racial distrust disrupted organization drives; in the meantime, politicians associated with labor concerns were seen by the conservative white working class as only working on behalf of minorities to take their jobs.¹³⁵ In short, the 300-year aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion continued to prove useful for the white economic elite.¹³⁶

Although the removal of legislated racial hierarchies among the working class was hardly a conscious policy of neoliberal thinkers, the conjuncture of the civil rights movement and the ascension of neoliberal and conservative alternatives to the welfare state nevertheless intimately converge with a core tenet of neoliberalism: “a project of taking measures and principles from the marketplace, and using these to perform judgements across social and political spheres, including the state itself.”¹³⁷ As the United States entered an era of legislated social equality, large-scale structural policies directed to correct centuries of inequalities tied to wealth or access to employment opportunities shriveled to half-hearted affirmative action policies which were immediately attacked by conservatives as reverse discrimination. The centuries-old momentum of racism and sexism pressed forward as resentments amid the collapse of the white labor movement in the 1970s found a voice in a rejuvenated conservatism long-practiced in the art of racial and gendered scapegoating.

In some ways, the deregulation of race proved fruitful for the allegiance of white working and middle classes, particularly men, who were most negatively affected by civil rights reforms. Discrimination could still influence social and economic relationships in the color-blind world of the post–civil rights era, where access to the full fruits of the American dream demanded capital and education, but also the enduring social connections based on prior access to opportunities before the civil rights era. Once free of the overt policies of the Jim Crow welfare state, the age of color-blindness and social equality legislation permitted a “born again” rugged individualism to flourish, now innocent of institutional racism based on white group identity, allowing decades of white male affirmative action to dissolve into the asphalt surfacing the road to neoliberalism. Conservative policies downplaying and ignoring civil rights violations—institutionalized by the Reagan administration—helped disavow ongoing discrimination as well.¹³⁸ As John McConahay et al. noted above, for whites in the 1970s and 1980s, racism was a thing of the past.¹³⁹ Accordingly, Friedman’s abstract model of Capitalism and Freedom gained a wider, more receptive audience.

Business Week’s review of Capitalism and Freedom illustrates the clear break between the dominance of the liberal consensus and the ascension of neoliberal ideas into the realm of American common sense.¹⁴⁰ Calling Friedman a “genuine radical” and his ideas “an extreme program,” the magazine equated his philosophy to Adam Smith and the “hidden hand.”¹⁴¹ The charge of radicalism stemmed from the philosophical nature of Friedman’s economic theories, equating economic freedom with political freedom. A brief description of the liberal consensus by Business Week underscores the challenges facing Friedman’s neoliberalism: “These doctrines are virtually the antitheses of the ones that have dominated U.S. monetary and fiscal policy for the last 30 years. To most American economists, the Depression of the 1930s demonstrated once and for all that capitalism, whatever its other virtues, is inherently unstable. Since then they have been seeking the best ways for government to correct that instability and thus promote full employment and growth.”¹⁴² Listing the sets of institutions Friedman sought to privatize—from National Parks to the postal system—Business Week noted that there would be pain in surrendering to “the ruthless rule of impersonal market forces,” but the economist saw these changes as being “in the public’s best interests in the long run—and anyway, it’s freedom, not economic security, that counts” for the neoliberal.¹⁴³ Friedman’s fellow economist Theodore W. Schultz asserted at the time, “Some of Friedman’s policy proposals are nonsense. But he is one of the great minds now at work in economics—and a man certain to be remembered 50 years from now when most of us will be forgotten.”¹⁴⁴ Although dismissive of Friedman’s radicalism, the winds appeared to be shifting toward Schultz’s prophecy.

A few years after the review of Capitalism and Freedom, Business Week noted the comeback of “monetary policy” in the wake of the 1964 tax cut, where “a quiet revolution is brewing in economic theory.”¹⁴⁵ Written at the height of postwar prosperity in 1965, the article examined the Third Annual University Professors Conference, sponsored by the American Bankers Association, which brought together fifty economists to debate the fiscal policy of Keynesianism and the monetary policy of the Chicago school. The argument centered on early 1960s economic growth, with monetarists arguing that the “money supply” in deposits, rather than the (Keynesian) fiscal policies of deficit spending, accounted for the exceptional economic growth.¹⁴⁶ The ideas framing this debate came from Friedman’s work with economist Anna J. Schwartz on the Depression, where their argument asserted that a lack of monetary policy was the primary culprit for the Great Depression. The basic premise Friedman wanted economists to understand was that “fluctuations in the quantity of money offer a better statistical explanation of business cycles than does instability of investment.”¹⁴⁷ This assertion of downplaying the demand-side argument of Keynesian economics and reframing the economic debate around monetary policies controlling money—whether through lowered taxes or the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of interest rates—offered a preview to a future neoliberal supply-side economics policy.

By the late 1960s, Friedman increasingly found broader platforms for his message, including the January 8, 1968, televised meeting of Friedman and Buckley on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.¹⁴⁸ In their criticism of the welfare state, the conservative and neoliberal anchored the debate on the trope of the “Negro problem”—the long familiar way to explain negative features of American life (historically, this involved the valorization of whiteness as the norm through the exploration of pathologies tied to Blackness). The conversation centered on the “urban problem” (the color-blind alternative referring to what in the early 1960s was called the Negro problem) and the coding of the welfare state as, literally, welfare for “dependent” African Americans. Buckley asked Friedman a question regarding the connection between government welfare programs and the “diminution of poverty,” with Friedman answering, “Oh, there’s no question about that. The major source of poverty has been the welfare programs of the government.” The economist then brought out notions of supply and demand: the more programs and spending enacted, the more it would create welfare recipients. Underlining the familiarity of the concept of dependency to American viewers’ minds, Friedman unpacked his equation using African Americans as the quintessential state burden:¹⁴⁹

Let’s get down to specific details. Why is it that 25% of Negro teenage boys—male teenagers, young men between the ages of 16 and 19, are unemployed and walking the streets? Because of a government program supposed to be for welfare purposes, namely, the Minimum Wage rates. The government has legislated that it is far better for a Negro boy of 18 to be unemployed at $1.50 an hour, than to be employed at $1.00 an hour. That’s the only reason why unemployment among Negro youngsters is 25%, instead of 7 or 8%, which is what it was before the minimum wage was raised so high.

Connecting minimum wage laws, welfare support rolls, and Blackness, Friedman’s logic pointed to minimum wage laws as the primary culprit for Black unemployment. Institutional anti-Blackness and capital flight following white flight (to subsidized white suburbs) were invisible in this equation. Buckley then added his concern over those who “deserved” welfare—another legacy of American ideas surrounding dependence and poverty—and those who did not, again using African Americans as the focal point. Buckley eloquently stated:

Well, I see that point, and it certainly is a logical extension of the whole idea of rule by law, but in fact, don’t we know from the evidence of our census that the poor really are divided into two categories: there are the poor who are victimized by circumstances—let’s say a Negro who leaves the South and arrives in New York and finds that he is not in command of any negotiable skill, though he’s anxious to work—that’s one category. The other category, and it is generally estimated this would make up for about 50% are simply the disorganized poor—the people who are poor because they are completely unmotivated and because there is some sort of a neurotic block that keeps them from acting in the way that under—if you deal with universals—you would expect them to act. Now, you say, or do you say, that they should be treated alike. What are you going to do with the poor person who, having consumed his $3,000, or whatever it comes up to under the Negative Income Tax, spends all of that on the races, and then turns to the community and says, this is the 2nd of January, I have consumed my year’s income. Now, meanwhile, I have four children.

These mundane meanderings fortifying existent anti-Black sentiment among Buckley’s audience played on the longue durée sense of Black “savagery” derived from the era of slavery, the early twentieth-century mainstream belief in the racial science of eugenics, and the work of sociologists to construct “cultural pathology” as a replacement to overt racism: African Americans had too many children, were unmotivated and lazy like the Sambo whites consumed through popular culture since the 1800s, while government aid only made this “pathology” worse.¹⁵⁰ In addition, Buckley helped establish the identity of what Reagan would popularize in the mid-1970s as one of the key color-blind monikers of the culture war, the “welfare queen,” which was code for unmarried Black women on welfare.¹⁵¹ For a television program aimed toward middle-class whites, the scourge of the welfare state was placed on a small impoverished minority, a demographic long despised, and deemed a tax burden by those enjoying the economic opportunity of the postwar welfare state. Long a target of white discipline and control, Black women and their reproductive choices would remain an important pillar for the conservative culture war’s deployment of white resentment.¹⁵²

Exchanges such as these underline how the late 1960s culture war regenerated the longue durée sentiments of Western civilization and its struggle against savagery.¹⁵³ Through these interactions with one of the most important facilitators of the New Right (Buckley), Friedman brought neoliberalism into dialogue with the broader conservative movement and its obsession with anti-Blackness as a wedge issue for whites benefiting from the welfare state conservatives wished to dismantle. In the exchanges between Buckley and Friedman, one noteworthy aspect was Friedman’s relative color blindness in the face of Buckley’s blunt insertions of Blackness into the dialogue, ensuring that particular phrases such as “welfare” would be explicitly coded “Black” for viewers.

At the close of the decade, Business Week continually noted the increased respectability of Friedman’s monetarist thinking in cracking through the dominant Keynesian model.¹⁵⁴ The debate came to a head under Nixon in 1969, with Keynesians and monetarists agreeing over easing the money supply.¹⁵⁵ By 1971, the combination of recession and inflation helped to further dent the reputations of Keynesians while the monetarists predicted the recession. As the decade progressed, the project of Hayek and Friedman thrived amidst the “economic dislocations of the 1970s,” establishing “an environment in which neoliberal nostrums finally acquired real traction.”¹⁵⁶ Support for neoliberal policies received further justification as the two economists won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 (Hayek) and 1976 (Friedman). Although their strict brand of monetarism was never fully adopted—except between 1979 and 1982—the intricacies of the two economists’ logic and the phrases connecting ideas to policy implementation would help to define the new economic common sense through the 1980s and beyond.

______

The evolution of neoliberalism’s ideology anticipated and ultimately wove itself into the post-1960s culture wars. First, fear and anxiety—and later, resentment—accompanied the inclusion of historically marginalized groups into the public sphere, with old conservative dread toward overturning entrenched hierarchies evolving into market-based solutions to inequalities between groups (in other words, using Hayek’s idea of the market as “information processor”). However, the success of this market-based solution more often than not demanded access to economic opportunity the previous system (the Jim Crow welfare state) firmly embedded into the “traditions” of society. For white Americans uneasy about casting expressions of overt racism (at least beyond the confines of the private sphere), the color-blind rhetoric of conservatives filled the rhetorical void. Now, criticism of African Americans could be veiled in the defense of one’s “liberty,” including the language of property rights. Buckley’s “ethos” argument sunk in as well: white affluence was imagined as the fruit of individual responsibility—and not the Jim Crow welfare state—while a broken culture of deviance accounted for Black poverty. The rhetoric of “law and order” offered further reassurance by disqualifying civil disobedience as a form of legitimate protest as conservatives equated protest with street crime (a notion further reinforcing the idea of Black cultural pathology).¹⁵⁷ Second, as the field of democracy expanded, neoliberals proposed and embraced laws geared toward protecting private property and investment through the strict separation of democracy and the market. The place of lobbyists—funded by big business and labor unions—fail to appear in these equations designed to remove the possibility that the state can and should alleviate hardships resulting from free market capitalism. The bailout of the finance industry in the wake of the 2007–8 crash, and not the unemployed whose taxes bailed out bankers, underscores the extent of neoliberalism’s normalization since the 1970s.¹⁵⁸ William Davies notes, as “economics techniques for measurement and evaluation” arose in the marketplace and these ideas were codified within late-nineteenth-century “neoclassical economics,” these techniques were mobilized to critique the welfare state: quantitative analysis should guide policy, not ideas about “fairness” or “public ethos” or a social safety net.¹⁵⁹ Creating a just society free of wealth inequality, even if unemployment ripples through a quarter of the population, went against the nature of markets. And protecting markets was protecting Western civilization.

The reification of Western (white) man—or Western civilization—as embodying superior cultural norms operated as the bridge between the racial science-based white supremacy and the color-blind era of neoliberalism, providing white Americans steeped in the postwar Jim Crow welfare state with a universal concept to reform the language and institutions of American capitalism. This deregulation and reform of the crudely outdated overt racism of Buckley’s 1950s white nationalist writings provided a color-blind cultural guideline for justifying ongoing racial discrimination. The concept of freedom envisioned by Friedman and Hayek coalesced around a theoretical model of the world in which the legacies of white supremacy, settler colonialism, slavery, or patriarchy had nothing to do with the ideas and policies shaping the material life of the United States in the twentieth century—despite the visibility of African Americans and other people of color facing de jure or de facto segregation or women being denied equal access and rights to the public sphere before social equality legislation in the 1960s.

The possession of history proved critical in procuring this common sense. It took decades for neoliberalism and conservative economics to reshape the American political-economic system into an invisible, normalized framework reoriented toward the wealthy and corporate community while summoning coded appeals to whiteness for the demographic that both voted for these changes and suffered economic contraction from their implementation. Patience was well rewarded, however, as the affluent made incredible gains in the share of American wealth after the 1970s. Meanwhile, those in the working and middle classes who benefited from the Jim Crow welfare state, including those who voted it away at the dawn of legislated social equality, would see their wages stagnate and purchasing power diminish in the years to come.¹⁶⁰ Resentment against the historically marginalized would expand in sync with wealth inequality. In many ways, the use of the longue durée for conservatives and neoliberals paid off handsomely: the possessive investment in whiteness continued to pay dividends for the economic elite, as the ghosts of Bacon’s Rebellion helplessly looked on.¹⁶¹