Decades of Thatcherite individualism made the public good seem foreign and sinister.

Evidence

We are now reaping the rotted harvest of decades of deliberately sown mistrust—mistrust of the very idea that we are members of communities and societies, mistrust of any expectation that governments can and should do anything positive for us. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher once declared. Can we really be surprised that so many people believed her? This impoverished way of seeing the world and one another has gone on for so long, expressed itself in so many dialects (union busting, border cruelty, crumbling public hospitals and schools, etc.), that the very concept of a public good has now become foreign. Literally foreign, in the sense that policies that ask anything of individuals—whether in the face of Covid or the climate crisis or the inequality crisis—are now cast in the Mirror World as part of a Chinese plot to impose CCP values on the West. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 764

Categorization

• XREF: This is the analytic payoff: deliberate mistrust is the mechanism by which collective obligations get recast as Chinese plots. Key to Klein’s Mirror World thesis.