Neoliberal rationality reduces the very desire for democracy

Evidence

Put the other way around, a liberal arts education available to the many is essential to any modern democracy we could value, but is not indigenous to it. Democracy can defund, degrade, or abandon the education it requires, undermining its resources for sustaining or renewing itself, even for valuing or desiring itself. Indeed, one crucial effect of neoliberal rationality is to reduce the desire for democracy, along with its discursive intelligibility when it does appear. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 398

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that people under neoliberal rationality lose the desire for democracy, not just the capacity, is provocative — worth chasing how Brown operationalizes ‘desire’ here.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense point: democracy is self-undermining because its survival requires an education it can freely choose to defund — a second Rousseau’s paradox layered on the first.
• XREF: connects to: Minimal survival attention is deficient in three ways that expose the neoliberal rationality gap; Public choice theory depicted democratic politics as systematically harming the public interest. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 481; Neoliberal thinkers repeatedly countenanced dictators as the lesser evil — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 905 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal economic rationality is extinguishing the domains through which democracy materializes. #corroborates (0.92)
• Neoliberal deregulation erodes democracy as politics abdicates to market pressure #corroborates (0.85) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 81
• Neoliberalism exists to reverse modernity’s claims to self-determination #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 116
• Democracy is endangered by assuming all human action is rational #expands (0.72)
• Democracy and liberalism can be decoupled and even opposed #qualifies (0.70) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 235