Humanitarians served as moral shield for the free-enterprise counter-attack on redistributive demands

Evidence

Humanitarians, LSF wagered, were better equipped than ‘the specialists of the economy, politics or business’ to win an argument that liberalism is not simply conducive to economic growth, but in fact the only system capable of securing justice and liberty. The humanitarians lent their moral prestige to what the Heritage Foundation called the ‘free enterprise ideological counter-attack’ on Third Worldism and the NIEO. Their key impact was on the terrain of political idealism, as they helped long-cherished right-wing themes cross over to the political left, and re-signified state-led redistribution as a totalitarian threat to liberty and human rights. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 438

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the moral capture of neutrality — how a humanitarian NGO’s apolitical prestige was instrumentalized to move right-wing economic doctrine across party lines.
• XREF: connects to: Humanitarian NGOs helped shift blame for poverty onto Third World states. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 381; Humanitarian actors reframed underdevelopment as domestic failure to defend liberal markets. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 423; The Heritage Foundation reframed redistributive demands as attacks on free enterprise. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 424 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Moral clarity sells as history but masks humanitarian imperialism #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 622
• Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents #expands (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 390
• NGOs function as corporate-funded missionaries serving imperial warfare #complicates (0.75)
• Failing war justifications were swapped for humanitarian and democratization aims #corroborates (0.72)