"Most people trace the birth of neoliberalism to Ronald Reagan—with the Democrats hopping on board in the 1990s with the election of Bill Clinton. But Clinton merely consolidated neoliberal ideas and turned them into a national agenda. I do not blame Clinton’s successful presidential campaign focus on “It’s the economy, stupid” for kick-starting the party’s fascination with neoliberalism in 1992. I place the birth date of neoliberalism on October 24, 1978, because that is the day that President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law.
I will freely admit that the Airline Deregulation Act is something of a pet peeve of mine. It’s a law that makes me irrationally angry, although it is objectively not as important as our antidemocratic voter suppression techniques, nor as vile and racist as our treatment of immigrants. But I believe the law to be a consequential misstep for the entire country. It is the moment when the Democratic Party turned its back on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and instead adopted the language of the free-market, unregulated claptrap pushed by capitalist thugs. It’s a language that has been swallowed whole by the corporate media and now bleeds out into our national conversations about the social safety net, social justice, and even the power of the government to combat the greatest threat of our age, climate change.
I cannot say that the Airline Deregulation Act caused many of the bad laws we still live with today. I can say that if you understand how Democrats passed the Airline Deregulation Act, you will understand nearly every fucking mistake the Democratic Party has made over the last 50 years.
Bork’s theory is that the entire point of laws is to bring about these market efficiencies and lower prices. Not to build a better, more fair society or, you know, stop evildoers, but to increase profits while lowering costs. Bork belonged to a school of thought called law and economics (sometimes scholars will shorthand this to the Chicago School, because a lot of these people were incubated at the University of Chicago School of Law), which holds that just about every law can and should be understood through an economic cost-benefit analysis, and the government should pick the most profitable one. It’s incredibly popular in legal circles, and if you spend any time studying law, you will quickly come across people, both liberal and conservative, who will blithely reduce every legal question—from abortion rights to First Amendment issues to healthcare—to a back-of-the-envelope math equation.
Neoliberalism eventually took over the Democratic Party, capped off by Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. Bill and Hillary Clinton both studied under Bork at Yale Law School, which is a fact I often think about when contemplating why the Democratic Party sometimes looks like an uncanny valley version of the Republican Party. Clinton would go on to appoint Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court in 1994, giving neoliberals key footholds in all three branches of government. In 1996, Clinton declared in a State of the Union address, “The era of big government is over,” to the thunderous applause of both houses of Congress."
As I've shown before I get defensive when people try to blame Neoliberalism on Carter; probably, principally, because he was the first potus that I got to vote for. He lost, of course. I responded to Carter, knowing practically nothing at the time, as sympathetically populist; more obviously for the people, the many, than the other guy.
But my betters have worn me down. There is no gainsaying Carter making Paul Volcker head of the Fed, the monetary system.Volcker's animus for labor unions and working class people was legendary. And I admit Carter got the deregulation craze going, in airlines, trucking, etc, undeniably.
I'll only maintain that while in retrospect Carter was crucial to the pre-history of Neoliberalism the official Neoliberal Order still did not take over until 1980, the Reagan Revolution, when conservative Neoliberal economics icon Milton Friedman joined the government and tax cuts for the rich and deregulation and hostility to labor unions and government programs became official policy.
I also get defensive when people try to blame Neoliberalism's successful anti-Big Government takeover on Ralph Nader, a case I first encountered in Paul Sabin's Public Citizens (2021). The relevant case here is that Nader supported the deregulation of the airlines and maybe trucking too. These appear as mistaken positions (deregulated industries turned against unions) in retrospect but they didn't mean Nader was opposed to all government regulations or Big Gov. Establishing government safety regulations on the automobile industry was his first big consumer crusade after all. It's important to note that Nader opposed the industry capture of the regulatory departments of government. This was a big part of the whole Public Citizen thing. Nader's likely hope in the case of the airlines was that the labor unions could negotiate fairer contracts with the airline industry without the meddling of a captured government regulatory agency. He was wrong. But Public Citizen harbored no illusions about industry, the central conceit of the Neoliberal anti-Big Government position. Nader's fatal flaw, if you ask me, and this is what Yale Professor of History Sabin's book drove home for me, was Nader's Humpty-Dumpty attitude about the two major parties, failing to find some kind of compromise with the Democrats and failing to see the Republicans were a far bigger threat to his consumer protection interests.
Beyond these quibbles, maybe every word here by Nation writer Elie Mystal is right on. My take on Clinton's role is more or less the same, he consolidated Neoliberalism as the national agenda (Rubin, Summers, etc) but he didn't start it.
And, again, another story putting a spotlight on Bork as a monumental baddie. Bork was utterly foundational to the Neoliberal takeover with his "economics and law" doctrine. Bork was portrayed as something of a villain on TV in his failed bid to sit on SCOTUS during the Reagan administration. But I had no idea the depth of his villainy back then. Basically, over the past half century Bork's teaching at Yale bent the entire legal system into supporting profit seeking efficiencies over basic human rights and community welfare; in short, turning the courts away from any consideration of social justice. He wasn't entirely successful but he's a dominant intellectual figure on the libertarian right and amongst conservatives and the Federalist Society; and even an important influence on Neolib civil rights hybrid Dem pols like Clinton and Obama. There is more good stuff on Bork's terrible legacy in Matt Stoller's Goliath (2019).
Anyway, Mystal, Harvard law grad, critic journalist, makes the personal case for Carter's deregulation of the airlines in 1978 as ground zero for the Neoliberal Order in the US. Still debatable but Mystal's style of debate, which actually reminds me of super smart second generation rock criticism, populist ripostes to the elite condescension of the 1960s Tom Wolfe prototype, concise, penetrating, captious, and funny but, unlike Wolfe, pugnaciously liberal and endlessly polemical. I always enjoy his stuff, even when I know he's exaggerating.
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