Austerity politics endured because publics willingly embraced ascetic sacrifice

Evidence

Yet it can be suggested that some of these tensions have in fact been successfully contained by neoliberal politics all along. The aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 saw an amplification of the conservative ethics of individual responsibility, as well as a discourse of sacrifice and “tightening the belt,” which helped justify years of austerity politics (Konings 2018). According to this view, ordinary people did not so much involuntarily adopt the ascetic logic of austerity as willingly embrace it. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 113

According to this view, ordinary people did not so much involuntarily adopt the ascetic logic of austerity as willingly embrace it. Neoliberal reason thus bolstered (rather than undermined) a renewal of the Protestant ethic of “asceticism,” with paradoxically reverse effects on the legitimacy of experts (who were rejected for their duplicitous espousal of marketization policies) and that of markets (which were respected for their upfront, if unapologetic, pursuits of capital accumulation). Thus, even as experts, political elites, and publics entered into new conflicts around neoliberalism’s broken promises, markets and publics did not part ways. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 75

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — here sacrifice reappears in secular, voluntarily-embraced austerity form, a modern reflexive counterpart to ritual sacrificial logics.
• DEEPTHINKING: Challenges the common post-2008 ‘neoliberalism is crumbling’ narrative, proposing publics actively embraced austerity rather than having it imposed — a genuinely counterintuitive claim about legitimacy and consent.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 113; Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 75
• XREF: connects to: Austerity was willingly embraced while experts, not markets, lost legitimacy. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 75; Austerity frames national crisis as requiring patriotic individual sacrifice in frugality and labor — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 803; Italian and British technocrats shared the purpose of imposing sacrifice on the public — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1585 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Austerity was willingly embraced while experts, not markets, lost legitimacy. #corroborates (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 75
• Austerity frames national crisis as requiring patriotic individual sacrifice in frugality and labor #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 803