When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts--in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance--that we have to abide by "the rule of law," this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.
One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything--everything--is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange--which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.
Neoliberalism is often described--and this creates a lot of confusion--as "market fundamentalism," and while this may be true for neoliberalism's self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the marketas we have understood it from previous ideologies.
The neoliberal state--actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum--is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.
There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.
Of course the word hasn't gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism--i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self--has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.
I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe--unlike Hillary Clinton--that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton's impending "victory" (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism, as the force that couldn't be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders's. Although Sanders doesn't specify "neoliberalism" as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes it.
Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort with the logic of the market is as pervasive as in the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement's loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred "politically incorrect" fight with all others: they want to be "winners," even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn't acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace.
In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated in such a fashion, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercial[11] so overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.
This is the dark side of neoliberalism's ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics neoliberalism promotes.
And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person shouldbe able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities,[12] all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).
The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable. The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary "crime bill" pushed by the Clintons, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market.
I believe that the generation of people--in their forties or older--supporting Hillary have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism, refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities. After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the discipline of the market.
I spoke of the myth of the market, as something that has no existence in reality, because none of the elements that would have to exist for a market to work are actually in place; this is even more true for neoliberalism than it was for the self-conscious annihilation of the market by communism, because at least in that system the market, surreptitiously, as in various Eastern European countries, kept making an appearance. But when the market takes neoliberal shape, i.e., the classical conceptions of the buyer and seller as free agents are gone, then radical inequality is the natural outcome. And inequality in the last four decades, as statistics for the U.S. and everywhere neoliberalism has made inroads prove beyond a doubt,[13]has exploded, thereby invalidating neoliberalism's greatest claim to legitimacy, that it brings about a general increase in welfare. So neoliberalism, to the extent that the inequality discourse has made itself manifest recently, must insist all the more vocally on forms of social recognition, what Clinton, for example, likes to call the "fall of barriers."
Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt--in the Clinton years debt reduction became a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy and on wars of choice--rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation, which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse--except when Sanders, Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script.
So to recapitulate neoliberalism's comprehensive success, let us note that we have gone from a liberal, Keynesian, welfare state to a neoliberal, market-compliant, disciplinary state.
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