Left responses to crisis fail because they seek restoration instead of reconstruction

Evidence

The current problem of left political movements, whatever that benighted term might encompass nowadays, is that they have fallen into the trap where discussions of the crisis end up being hopelessly backward-looking: perhaps preaching “restoration” of proper “regulation,” reenergizing mid-twentieth-century configurations of state power, or returning to a more “fair and equal” income distribution, or redeeming and making debtors whole through debt forgiveness, refurbishing an economy less beholden to and less composed of financialized corporate entities, resembling that which reigned during the immediate postwar period. Some have waxed openly nostalgic about the New Deal; others idealize the 1960s. Yet this ignores a basic truism learned by conservatives long ago: “To preserve the regime, the conservative must reconstruct the regime.” The superior insight of the neoliberals, in particular, is that you can never go home again, largely because they have sought to build intentional irreversibilities into their previous political interventions. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 903

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the reactionary-vs-revolutionary distinction and connects to Mirowski’s broader argument about the neoliberal thought collective, as well as to Gramscian concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony. — connects to: Old moral panics about community loss breed reactionary nostalgia rather than constructive reform — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1445; Post-crisis orthodoxy rebounded as the left lacked a diagnosis — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 16; The left lost because it failed to produce its own version of post-Fordism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2099 (+1 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘You can never go home again’ as the core strategic asymmetry that lets the neoliberal thought collective keep winning — the left proposes restoration, the right offers reconstruction.