The Neo-Liberal Myth

“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,” it’s a popular American ideal based in classical liberalism, and on its face it seems logical, but somehow it stumbles upon one glaring issue – its enforcement. How does one go about enforcing self truth? Is it through the private sector? A governmental entity? Is the onus on the individual? This question gets to the crux of classical liberalism. How does the individual achieve their god given right to liberty in a world marred by systems that go against it? Throughout the 17th and 18th century this political movement was summoned and manifested by the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the American “Bill of Rights.” From there, the paradoxical narrative of classical liberalism’s journey to modern liberalism and then to Neo-liberalism is best observed through the laws of the 11th Amendment onward. These addendum’s still continue through this time to showcase how the need for revisions still persists. Liberalism, in all its forms, is a perfect ideal exercised within an imperfect doctrine that must continuously be revisited and added upon. At its inception though, classical liberalism was a defiant stand against the “old-world’s” conservative dogma. The ideological battle between the two still persists to this day but in a new and more intentionally misframed way. This modern misframing is best observed and understood through examining the polarizing life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In ‘America A.D’ we spoke to the historically penultimate importance of Dr. King’s life and legacy. Ironically in retrospect, that legacy can also be attributed as the birth of “Neo-liberalism” because of its consequential outcome. There was no other American life that more accurately displayed all the ‘idealist vs materialist’ issues of classical liberalism in its time and the subsequent misframings of neoliberalism after its time than did the life of MLK. At its core, the term Neo-Liberalism champions free market capitalism as the preferred route to personal liberty. Contrarily though, it believes this is only achieved through invasive governmental agendas that extend beyond boundary-setting. This inherent contradiction is also highlighted by MLK’s legacy and the consequential role he played within the transitional divides between classical liberalism, modern liberalism and neoliberalism posthumously. Former President Ronald Reagan is widely considered the “Father of Neo-Liberalism” by economists. But to understand all the ideological misframings upon which his false idolatry stands we must first go back to the 1930s. At that time, Ronald Reagan was chasing fame as an actor in Hollywood when FDR was implementing socialism in the United States via “The New Deal.” As FDR’s movement played out through the 30s and 40s, it became clear that it was being used as a vehicle for strategic racism by state governments. The National Recovery Administration was the oversight committee charged with enforcing anti-discrimination standards across all the job distributions associated with the New Deal. But, according to the Encyclopedia, not only was the NRA ineffective in helping black Americans climb out of the Great Depression and into the New Deal, but it excluded a large portion of them from attaining governmental benefits or protections whatsoever. Overall, be it within the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Housing Authority Act, the Social Security Act or the National Labors Relations Act, all these New Deal programs accelerated existing discriminatory practices that worsened the second class citizenry of black Americans within a segregated America. In retrospect though, The New Deal is still regarded as an honest but misinforming campaign that was designed to help everyone but failed. Instead only helping whites while disenfranchising blacks in a brutal manner. A manner so inhumane that the consequential rise of MLK and the civil rights movement was inevitable. After MLK’s assassination in April of 1968, Black America went on a fury of riots nationwide that went on for over a year. During this tumultuous time, a previously failed presidential candidate by the name of Richard Nixon ran a second presidential campaign under the strategically racist slogan of “Reclaiming Law and Order.” He would exploit this fear-mongering slogan throughout his short presidential run and in doing so set the foundations for a Neo-Liberal culture that Reagan would exploit a decade later. Neo-Liberalism was and is nothing more than a language framing tool that allows the means of the “white collar” class to capture the economy. Through Reagan, the “spirit” of Neo-Liberalism was able to be exploited by elitist under the veneer of free markets and deregulation. The market was perceived as the arbiter of merit when in reality it was the balkanizer of capital for a select, oligarchical few. Unlike the New Deal's misinformation, “Neo-Liberalism” straight up gaslit everyone into a misframing of the economic and cultural landscape that allowed the elitist capture, which now, several decades later has been fully realized. In closing, ‘The Civilization Myth’ touched on how misframing language, particularly in matters of racial and/or cultural coding, is used to prop up and justify empire building/sustainment. It turns out this tactic is no different when Neo-liberalism comes into play. Whenever used, it’s framed under the guise of free market capitalism, when in reality it’s a euphemistic gaslight harping back to a feudalistic order. An order that has sealed 99% of us into a perpetual second class citizenry of sold lives.