Neoliberalism arose precisely when democracy was declared triumphant.

Evidence

In a century heavy with political ironies, there may have been none greater than this: at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream pundits hailed democracy’s global triumph, a new form of governmental reason was being unleashed in the Euro-Atlantic world that would inaugurate democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment. Within thirty years, Western democracy would grow gaunt, ghostly, its future increasingly hedged and improbable. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 12

Categorization

• CANDY: A stark, tweetable irony: democracy’s ‘triumph’ coincided with its dismantling.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal market discipline was adopted to pacify unruly democratic publics — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 122

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal market discipline was adopted to pacify unruly democratic publics #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 122