Post-2008 austerity politics were legitimized by conservative individual-responsibility ethics.

Evidence

Yet it can be suggested that some of these tensions have in fact been successfully contained by neoliberal politics all along. The aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 saw an amplification of the conservative ethics of individual responsibility, as well as a discourse of sacrifice and “tightening the belt,” which helped justify years of austerity politics (Konings 2018). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 75

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘tightening the belt’ discourse of individual responsibility relates to the reader’s prior 2019 article on sacrifice and to how sacrificial logic gets repackaged in financialized politics.