Stop Chasing Ghosts!

How We Defeat Neoliberalism and the Horse it Rode in On

Dear Readers: We just published two days ago but consider this emerging analysis so important that we’re rushing it to print.  If you haven’t yet had time to read the December 18 issue, please circle back to it as soon as you can. 

It’s become clear to us that neoliberalism, an expansive concept that has been accurately described as a cultural doctrine, politico-economic philosophy, and political theology, has been so successful because it is serving currently in its best role as an optimized control system for elites.  It has become the dominant sociopolitical ethos and mode of discourse in the United States, and is being wielded effectively, ruthlessly, and surreptitiously by our elites to control the nation’s idea space, political agenda, and economy.

Like a living organism, neoliberalism has evolved over the centuries through trial and error and has now essentially outcompeted cruder, less elegant, and less stable control systems such as monarchism and totalitarianism.  It is perfect, at least for the current times, because although it theoretically coexists peacefully with democracy, it is actually a parasite that has tricked its hosts like cats do with toxoplasmosis (the virus that cats carry and deploy to control their human hosts). 

Unfortunately, the sociopolitical system known as democracy -- as it is currently practiced, is no longer either a worthy or direct competitor of neoliberalism.  One reason it cannot compete is that it is insufficiently robust -- its adherents lack the strategies, organization, dedication, and perseverance to take on neoliberalism across the entire contested national space or to outlast its adversaries -- at least at this point.  

Neoliberalism does not seek to vanquish democracy; it seeks to co-exist with a toothless version of it.  Within elite strategy, democracy is a useful feint and cover for tactics that are practiced and perpetuated because they keep the workers working, consuming, and paying taxes while their rights and power are being systemically eroded.  Things are so perverse in the U.S. now that most Americans of both political parties enable neoliberalism’s advances: directly and combatively in the case of MAGA; and in the case of democrats -- indirectly through passive acceptance.   

The way this works is that teams of people on the right, think tanks, data scientists and a shitload of money are continuously employed to “launder” individual elements of the neoliberalism ethos, cynically propagandizing and mainstreaming them, through endless repetition, until they are ultimately accepted as common sense by most citizens. 

Nauseating examples of this effort include the insufficiently challenged canard that: “people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” because “I” did, and if “we” give “them” money they’ll lose motivation and we’ll be paying for them forever. 

This idea’s effective mainstreaming led directly to then President Clinton all but dismantling Aid to Families with Dependent Children (the program most people know as “welfare”), and Biden prematurely shutting down the massively effective “American Rescue Plan,” to avoid being politically skewered by the right.

The fact that neoliberalism exists for the right to exploit it is historically contingent and a happy accident.  It was not invented by Republicans any more than democracy was “invented by” Democrats – American, Greek, Roman or otherwise.  It is a combination of meme cluster, social shaping force, and mind control toolkit being vectored and shaped to some degree, and expanded to a large number of hosts by, the right.  But it also exists as an independent sociobiological entity and, as such, is a force that must be reckoned with on its own as we simultaneously battle kinetically with people-led movements that harness it, such as MAGA.  In that regard it is akin to technology in its relationship with and to people.    

That said, “the people” cannot reverse this dynamic riding solely on the democracy horse, nor can we win by taking on MAGA and its allies in a primarily ‘force on force’ manner.  Rather, the people can only win through a mass movement that illuminates and de-legitimizes all elite control systems and reimagines societal organization, focusing on the people’s evolving desired ends instead of concentrating on controlling the pathway to get there. 

Historically, fear has led the people to accept forms of social organization and governance that emphasize control and security, and elites have been quite happy to supply them.   But no business or military organization concentrates on control systems first, or even primarily.  Successful organizations start with visions and objectives -- and then figure out which systems and incentives it needs to achieve them.  And so, it can and must be with the ultimate in organizations – that is, societies and nation states. 

The classic social science argument that democracy is perpetually challenged and fragile because it has difficulty achieving consensus, does not adequately account for the knowledge gap between elites and the people, and endangers the people through weak and unwieldly control systems, is a red herring.  Each of those challenges is not only harder for authoritarian systems to address, but their inevitable failures to address them have always had more immediate and cataclysmic consequences for the state and its people.

What we continue to propose as the way forward -- Participative Democracy – is considered by most Americans who consider these things at all – to share the same faults as Representative Democracy, but to have them on steroids.  Interesting, it has never actually been tried at large nation state scale, so there is no proof that it cannot work.  And it has succeeded where it has been tried, with Indigenous American peoples being one example, and the European Union’s European Citizen’s Initiative a more current one. 

Driven by the elite’s neoliberal miasma, MAGA is mindlessly “chasing ghosts” with its authoritarianism flirtation.  But the specter of a fascist America is all too real – we see it with Trump everyday but fail to acknowledge it for what it is; consequently, we fail to address it robustly. 

Thus, we reiterate our recommendation that before we discard democracy as a failed system, we augment our admittedly struggling Representative Democracy with Participative Democracy mechanisms – as history has proved time and again that -- contrary to common perception -- authoritarian systems are actually far more fragile and much less powerful across the range of sociopolitical domains than are democracies. 

Simultaneously, we must animate our oft-proposed Just Nation Movement to serve as the kinetic offensive counterforce to MAGA and neoliberalism, and to defend the emergent and fledgling Participative Democracy initiatives.  We’re in for a rough ride, we’ve got to be riding the right horse.

Dear Readers -- Revelatur is a nonprofit endeavor -- and we're providing you a unique and valuable service.  Glad to do it, but we're operating at a non-sustainable loss.  We're not trying to get rich, we're trying to change the world.  Pease consider a paid subscription so we can get it done."  Cheers, Mark and Corey