Families and neighborhoods were promoted to replace a dismantled welfare state

Evidence

As an already meagre American welfare state was dismantled or commercialized by successive presidential administrations, families and neighborhood groups were promoted as private social safety nets. The AIDS crisis of the 1990s, for instance, was not met with an expansion of healthcare provision; in fact, many American gay men lost insurance coverage as their sexual orientation came to be considered an “uninsurable risk.” At the same time, banks discovered in this same demographic a new credit market, from which they had previously been excluded. Efforts to legalize same-sex marriage also gathered steam, allowing gay couples with the means to do so to set aside savings in the event of an emergency. It offered a textbook case of what Nancy Fraser would later term “progressive neoliberalism,” albeit with a faintly conservative inflection. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s focus on hollowed-out mass institutions: the same period saw parties/unions decline while private safety nets (family, credit) were promoted — a mechanism of depoliticization. — connects to: Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 19; Reagan’s California welfare reform enacted neoliberal family-responsibility policies — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 242; Decades of neoliberal reform reinstated the family as first-line welfare provider — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 260 (+2 more)