Neoliberal welfare attacks racialized dependency and framed the family as women’s natural sphere

Evidence

At stake in this emancipatory language was an attempt to mobilise the republican valorisation of freedom and independence against a welfare system that was implicitly racialised and aligned with slavery, blackness and dependence. But the centrality of this myth of independence to neoliberal attacks on welfare goes back much further than Reagan, as does the association of state welfare provision with moral hazard and family breakdown. For Röpke, the most serious symptom of the revolt of the masses was the decline of the family. As the family is ‘the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community’, the German neoliberal argued that women were the real victims of a welfare state that prevented them fulfilling their ‘vital functions’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ type genealogies of moral panic, and to debates on welfare, gender, and the family in the reviewer’s austerity reading. — connects to: Chicago School economists blamed the welfare state, not feminism, for family breakdown — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 210; American neoliberals defended kinship bonds as noncontractual obligations and opposed no-fault divorce — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 214; Reagan’s California welfare reform enacted neoliberal family-responsibility policies — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 242 (+12 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the pre-Reagan genealogy of anti-welfare moral hazard discourse, showing Reagan’s ‘emancipation from dependence’ framing as old ordoliberal doctrine.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals attacked welfare as a threat to family, race, and dignity #corroborates (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 178
• Neoliberals gendered welfare dependency as emasculating female domestic servitude #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 177
• Early neoliberals framed welfare dependency as a degrading threat to human dignity #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 176
• Neoliberalism functioned as a defense against perceived erosion of white privilege #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1764