Neoliberalism suppresses both liberal and radical-democratic traditions.
Evidence
More than merely saturating the meaning or content of democracy with market values, neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institutions of democracy understood as rule by the people. And more than merely cutting away the flesh of liberal democracy, neoliberalism also cauterizes democracy’s more radical expressions, those erupting episodically across Euro-Atlantic modernity and contending for its future with more robust versions of freedom, equality, and popular rule than democracy’s liberal iteration is capable of featuring. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 13
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to critiques of actually-existing liberal democracy from Mouffe/Laclau and to the ‘left melancholia’ debates. — connects to: Neoliberal market discipline deliberately breaks political subjectivity and weakens solidarity. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 334; Neoliberal homo oeconomicus dissolves the citizen-bourgeois split that defined liberal democratic political life. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 546; Neoliberalism’s weakening of democratic values enables neoconservative moralism and authoritarianism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 169 (+5 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that neoliberalism cauterizes democracy’s radical counter-tradition — not just liberal democracy — extends and complicates the standard critique.
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism’s construction of persons and states is emptying out democratic principles publicly.
#expands(0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 42 - Neoliberal rationality reduces the very desire for democracy
#expands(0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 398 - Neoliberalism’s weakening of democratic values enables neoconservative moralism and authoritarianism
#complicates(0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 169 - Neoliberal economic rationality is extinguishing the domains through which democracy materializes.
#expands(0.80) - Neoliberalism reframed democracy and unions as enemies of market truth.
#expands(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 123