Neoliberalism replaces the welfare state with a traffic-cop state

Evidence

The differences in social welfare and neoliberal state commitment are revealing. Where the welfare state was committed to ameliorating what were deemed structurally produced or magnified deficits for individuals, the neoliberal condition is committed to calculating optimalities in reductively economic terms, to speculative financialization, and to what Peck and Tickell characterize as “selective ‘deregulation’.” Where the prevailing social commitments for the liberal democratic state had to do with social wellbeing revealed in the registers of education, work, health care and housing, the neoliberal state is concerned above all with issues of crime and corruption, controlling immigration and tax-cut-stimulated consumption, social control and securitization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1755 (#expands, via linked claim)

Civil society both fuels and is underpinned by a state. But the state form, its principal modality, has transformed from one earlier conceived as caretaker of the population’s welfare, its pastoral prescriptive (to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term) enacted through modalities of constraining, confining, and containing the undesirable, to that of traffic cop. The traffic cop state polices flows human, capital, and commodity, regulating the political, cultural, and economic. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 211 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179; Neoliberals now frame behavioral nudge policy as a new road to serfdom — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 313; Neoliberals sought minimal welfare that avoided legitimizing the welfare state — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 206 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• A welfare state targets structural deficits while a neoliberal state targets crime and securitization #expands (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1755
• The welfare state has transformed into a policing state of flows. #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 211