{"id":9005,"date":"2018-02-01T14:43:27","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9005"},"modified":"2018-02-01T14:44:28","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:44:28","slug":"the-unholy-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/02\/the-unholy-family\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unholy Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jacobin\u00a0<\/a>– \u201cFamily values\u201d and neoliberal capitalism are supposed to be enemies. A new book begs to differ.<\/p>\n

\n

Review of Melinda Cooper,\u00a0Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism<\/em>\u00a0(Zone Books\/MIT Press, 2017)<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

What comes to mind when we think of neoliberalism?<\/h1>\n

When the word first entered widely into left-wing vocabulary in the early 2000s, it likely conjured up scenes of men in suits walking briskly through big cities: the Gordon Gekkos and the Wolves of Wall Street; World Bank and International Monetary Fund bigwigs like Lawrence Summers or Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In 2018, neoliberalism calls to mind the seemingly more laid-back atmosphere of California. The people who run Silicon Valley style themselves as the heirs of the hippie movement, whether by wearing jeans at the office or by experimenting with\u00a0free sex<\/a> during their free time. (These same people, of course, are nonetheless working tirelessly to run every single element of our personal and work lives through an app.)<\/p>\n

In their own way, each of these images represents the brave new world we imagine neoliberalism has created: both the banker\u2019s world of \u201chigh risk, high reward\u201d and the techie\u2019s world of Uberized jobs and Tinderized relationships. Everything is monetized, and nothing is stable or sacred. With the arrival of neoliberalism, it appears, all that was solid has finally melted into air.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that does\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0seem to fit into this neoliberal world, it\u2019s the traditional model of morality and the family. Sure, conservatives were the first to bring neoliberalism into power, at least in America and the United Kingdom. Yet the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher represented coalitions between an emerging neoliberal economic elite, on the one hand, and \u201csocial\u201d or \u201ccultural\u201d conservatives on the other. And like any coalition, these right-wing alliances risked breaking apart once some of its members felt their needs to have been satisfied.<\/p>\n

So if social conservatism helped bring neoliberalism into being in the 1970s and 1980s, what need did neoliberal elites have for their more backwards-looking comrades once financial markets had been allowed to dominate the global economy, and once twentieth-century social democracy was put on the defensive?<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one lesson to be drawn from Melinda Cooper\u2019s masterful new study of capitalism and the American right, it\u2019s that this supposed opposition between neoliberalism and social conservatism is a caricature. The central argument of\u00a0Family Values<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is that a shared normative project united neoliberalism and social conservatism as they arose beginning in the 1970s. At the center of this project was the notion of the family. For Cooper, neoliberalism is far from the amoral, or even radically \u201cantinormative\u201d creed it is often made out to be (including by left-wing theorists such as Wolfgang Streeck and Nancy Fraser). No less than social conservatism, neoliberalism sought in its own way to reestablish the family as the basic unit of social life in response to the crises of the second half of the twentieth century. The two movements were hardly mere allies of convenience, let alone mortal enemies. On the contrary,\u00a0Family Values<\/em>\u00a0reveals how their close conceptual and practical collaboration helped to build the foundations of the contemporary social world.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

Moral Crisis<\/h1>\n

To understand why the idea of the family was so central to the neoliberal-conservative project, Cooper argues that we need to begin by looking at the political climate of the late 1960s. At the peak of American Keynesian social democracy, an overwhelming consensus existed in favor of the \u201cFordist family wage.\u201d That the best way to ensure a decent standard of living was to provide a livable wage to each male breadwinner at the head of a traditional heterosexual family was an idea nearly everybody accepted.<\/p>\n

Of course, different variations of this idea were advanced by opposing sides. Through much of the 1960s, the activist left and the liberal center aimed to use the welfare state to extend this family wage to people previously excluded from it, namely African-American male heads of household. Though many Republicans hoped to eliminate welfare programs that they judged to be too generous, the right more or less conceded that \u201cwe are all Keynesians now.\u201d The Fordist family wage, Cooper reveals, united everyone from the anti-poverty activist Frances Fox Piven to the New Deal liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the moderate Republican Richard Nixon. Even Milton Friedman \u2014 whom Cooper describes during this period as a \u201cpragmatist\u201d willing to compromise with the left and center \u2014 was on board with the idea of a moderate welfare state that extended benefits to more and more male-led families.<\/p>\n

But if the consensus around the Fordist family wage was remarkably broad, equally remarkable was its swift collapse during the 1970s. The turning point, Cooper argues, was the failure of the Family Assistance Plan, a crucial piece of legislation that aimed to replace much of the Great Society welfare programs with what was effectively a\u00a0guaranteed income<\/a>\u00a0for male-headed working households, inspired by the work of Milton Friedman. Intended to be the culmination of the family-wage welfare state, the bill failed \u2014 largely thanks to Nixon\u2019s unexpectedly pulling his support from it as it made its way through Congress \u2014 and in doing so, it ultimately sounded the death knell of the Fordist consensus. A large-scale expansion of the family wage was no longer on the table politically.<\/p>\n

The economic and cultural crises of the 1970s, both real and perceived, soon created conditions that made it necessary to abandon the Fordist wage system altogether and reimagine the role of the family in the American economy. Neoliberal economists began to argue that \u201cstagflation,\u201d the 1970s-era combination of unemployment and inflation, was primarily the result of the out-of-control expenditures and \u201cperverse incentives\u201d created by twentieth-century social democracy. No longer as \u201cpragmatic\u201d as Friedman had once been, they advocated an aggressive policy to tackle the inflation crisis by replacing as much of the welfare state as possible with private sector mechanisms. They believed that by doing so they could create adequate pressure on individuals to work, thereby leading to economic growth.<\/p>\n

Cooper believes this project was inseparable from that of contemporary social conservatives, starting with the former liberals \u2014 like Moynihan, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Bell \u2014 who came out as neoconservatives in response to the New Left. The neoconservatives, she argues, were firm believers in the Fordist family wage, and found those elements of 1960s radicalism that challenged accepted notions of family and sexuality deeply threatening. In reacting against the counterculture, the neoconservatives provided a convenient explanation for the excessive welfare spending and inflation highlighted by neoliberals. Not only did the counterculture encourage \u201chedonistic\u201d spending beyond one\u2019s means, as Bell suggested in\u00a0The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism<\/em><\/a>, but\u00a0neoconservatives also made the case that, under the influence of the radical left, the welfare state was actively causing the breakdown of the American family by distributing funds to people who did not conform to traditional norms (or who challenged dominant racial hierarchies). More than two decades before\u00a0Bill Clinton\u2019s reforms<\/a>, for example,\u00a0Moynihan warned<\/a>\u00a0that single black mothers were becoming the \u201caristocracy of welfare recipients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faced with what Cooper calls the \u201cmoral crisis of inflation,\u201d neoliberal thinkers began to discover that the language of family values was more than just an expedient way to sell an attack on the welfare state to the public. Neoliberals did not always share the moralistic convictions of the neoconservatives, nor the religious or traditionalist beliefs of others within Cooper\u2019s pantheon of \u201cnew social conservatives.\u201d But they nonetheless recognized that their ambition to transfer state responsibilities to the market required the enforcement of a strictly normative view of the family. Privatization, it turns out, required a moral vision of what exactly the \u201cprivate\u201d is.<\/p>\n

With the help of social conservatives, neoliberals reimagined the family as the basic unit of a market society. If under the Fordist system the male-headed family was the recipient of welfare benefits, neoliberalism saw intra-family care as a replacement for state transfers. Cooper views this shift as a return to the once-archaic \u201cPoor Law\u201d tradition of social policy, in which family members were forced to assume financial responsibility for their dependent relatives. Under the Clinton-era welfare reforms, for example, benefits to single mothers were replaced by childcare payments that required tracking down the child\u2019s biological father (a practice that soon became quite costly for a program designed to reduce spending). At the same time, the costs of healthcare and education were shifted from the collective purse to the private family, where relatives could be made to care for one another without pay or share the burden of mounting student debt.<\/p>\n

Moralistic family values also became a major component of how a thrift-minded neoliberal public policy determined who did and did not deserve a large variety of state-funded benefits. Cooper cites, of course, the \u201cworkfare\u201d reforms of the 1990s, which deemed a person deserving of welfare based on employment, and therefore capacity to be \u201cresponsible\u201d for one\u2019s family. But she also finds less well-known examples of this sort of moral distinction, for example in the arguments of neoliberal theorists\u00a0Richard Posner and Tomas Philipson<\/a>\u00a0against public funding for AIDS prevention. By actively fighting the disease, the government effectively encouraged \u201crisky\u201d behavior such as gay sex \u2014 though the authors claimed to have no moral objections to homosexuality \u2014 and in so doing charged the public for the irresponsible acts of individuals. They recommended promoting marriage and traditional sexual norms as a way of containing the costs of individual health choices to the family.<\/p>\n

This sort of moral logic, Cooper argues, has become a fixture not only of health care, but of American policy thinking in general.\u00a0Family Values<\/em>\u00a0demonstrates in exhaustive detail how conservative normativity pervades the neoliberal approach to education, housing, prisons, religion, and practically every other area of our sociopolitical landscape. Though many supporters of neoliberalism over the years have claimed to be indifferent to matters of family, morality, and sexuality \u2014 indeed, today\u2019s libertarians of the Ron Paul variety consider themselves radically open-minded on questions of individual behavior \u2014 Cooper shows that this misses the point. Neoliberalism could never be a movement of pure deregulation, whether in economics or in morality. Just as the privatization of the economy requires the political power of the state, the privatization of society more broadly requires the enforcement of a certain moral order. And so, Cooper writes, \u201cneoliberals must ultimately delegate power to social conservatives in order to realize their vision of a naturally equilibrating free-market order and a spontaneously self-sufficient family.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

The Bannon Illusion<\/h1>\n

Cooper\u2019s intervention is important, not least because so much of our current discourse about the right assumes a stark opposition between neoliberalism and social conservatism. And this opposition has indeed been at the heart of the far right\u2019s attempts to justify its worldview. The story goes something like this: for four decades now, neoliberal elites of both center-right and center-left have run roughshod over the institutions that protect ordinary Americans\u2019 ways of life, whether by closing Rust Belt factories, \u201cbringing in\u201d illegal immigrants, or undermining the nation\u2019s moral values. In the narrative of Steve Bannon and his ilk, Donald Trump\u2019s combination of economic protectionism with nationalist and traditionalist moralism appears as a serious challenge to neoliberalism\u2019s dominance.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, the illusion of Bannon\u2019s genius as a political strategist appears to have begun\u00a0wearing off<\/a>. But the fact remains that since Donald Trump\u2019s victory in 2016, many liberals and leftists have been all too willing to indulge Bannon\u2019s interpretation of these events. To some extent, this has been a matter of editors attempting to jump on the far right as the next media craze: from the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u2019s recent publishing of\u00a0letters<\/a>\u00a0from Trump voters on its editorial page to the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s and many other publications\u2019 profiles of\u00a0Richard Spencer<\/a>\u00a0to the frenzy over J. D. Vance\u2019s\u00a0Hillbilly Elegy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and the abortive Simon and Schuster deal for Milo Yiannopoulos. But in the shock of Trump\u2019s victory, many people to the left of center have sincerely begun to think that the right knows something they don\u2019t. If the \u201cneoliberal\u201d Hillary Clinton lost key Midwestern states to Trump, perhaps the Bannonite right has something to say about how to organize against neoliberalism.<\/p>\n

The idea that capitalism and conservatism are essentially opposed, of course, has deep roots in the history of ideas. Today\u2019s far right did not invent it, but the notion perhaps explains the durability of Bannon\u2019s appeal. We can find this opposition not only in Marx \u2014 who believed that liberal capitalism was essentially an enemy of traditional ways of life \u2014 but also, and perhaps most importantly, in the work of the Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi. In his magnum opus\u00a0The Great Transformation<\/em><\/a>, Polanyi observed that capitalism\u2019s endless drive for the accumulation of wealth and the introduction of disruptive new techniques represented a destructive social force. For this reason, it periodically sparks movements of resistance from those whose lives it upends. Polanyi therefore argued that modern capitalist societies progress through what he called the \u201cdouble movement\u201d: after each moment of capitalist upheaval, countermovements arise in the attempt to defend ways of life threatened by economic transformations. Writing at the end of World War II, Polanyi recognized that these countermovements against capitalism were all too likely to include reactionary conservatism and fascism. Hence Polanyi\u2019s conviction that in the face of capitalism\u2019s inevitable tendency to destabilize social life, left-wing social democracy was the only viable bulwark against both extreme liberalization and the kinds of fascist experiments that arose in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

For Cooper, however, the intimate collaboration between neoliberalism and social conservatism over the past five decades is ample grounds to revise Polanyi\u2019s notion of the \u201cdouble movement.\u201d Social conservatism did not arise as an external reaction against neoliberal capitalism. In reality, neoliberal disruption and the conservative defense of tradition both played integral roles in the construction of contemporary American capitalist society. \u201cWhat Polanyi calls the \u2018double movement,\u2019\u201d Cooper writes, \u201cwould be better understood as fully internal to the dynamic of capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooper\u2019s analysis in\u00a0Family Values\u00a0<\/em>suggests that it is a mistake to regard today\u2019s right-wing resurgence as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Just as the \u201cfamily values\u201d conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s worked hand-in-hand with neoliberalism to construct the Reagan-era economic order, today\u2019s return to the values of white American identity \u2014 also a defense traditional sexual norms \u2014 has again and again proven its willingness to assist in the entrenchment of unequal economic structures. Today, Bannon and many others on the alt-right profess their aversion to neoliberal capitalism, just as neoconservatives such as\u00a0Irving Kristol<\/a>\u00a0once claimed to be the opponents of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Cooper makes a well-documented case that now, as then, they are not to be believed.<\/p>\n

But if Cooper relies on a radical revision of Polanyi\u2019s theory of the \u201cdouble movement\u201d to reject the far right\u2019s claims to be the resistance against neoliberal capitalism, where does that leave Polanyi\u2019s social-democratic convictions? For Polanyi, as Cooper points out, social democracy was a preferable alternative to fascism and other right-wing countermovements, but he saw them as different more in degree than in kind. Both social democracy and reactionary conservatism seek to reestablish what capitalism threatened to destroy. If only the former was capable of doing so in the name of humanitarian ends, it nonetheless performed the same conservative role of propping up destructive social patterns. As Cooper points out throughout\u00a0Family Values<\/em>, the vast majority of postwar progressive liberals and leftists were committed to similar kinds of family normativity as the neoliberals and social conservatives: from African-American radicals like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to the anti-poverty champions Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (not to mention the Democrats of the Clinton and Obama eras). Cooper demands that we ask whether attempts to radically transform capitalism do not ultimately fall back on moral logics that help keep it the way it is.<\/p>\n

Cooper doesn\u2019t think this has to be the case. On the one hand, she expresses clear admiration for those movements on the radical left that are thoroughly and authentically \u201cantinormative.\u201d Though Cooper believes such movements have mostly remained marginal even within the queer and feminist left, she sees in the unequivocal rejection of dominant conceptions of sex and sexuality the potential to break the cycle of capitalism\u2019s internal \u201cdouble movement.\u201d But Cooper does not praise \u201cantinormativity\u201d merely for its own sake, nor does she believe that issues of women\u2019s liberation, gender diversity, or personal identity ought to supersede questions of economics.<\/p>\n

Indeed, what is so powerful about her argument is her rejection of the distinction between the \u201ccultural\u201d and the \u201ceconomic,\u201d or between \u201crecognition\u201d and \u201credistribution<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Family Values<\/em>\u00a0provides ample evidence not only that questions of family and sexual norms are at the heart of economic structures, but also that \u201cantinormativity\u201d is not merely a question of individual expression. The single mothers in the Welfare Rights movement who demanded benefits independently of a male breadwinner \u2014 among the heroines of Cooper\u2019s book \u2014 were neither dogmatic \u201cclass-firsters\u201d indifferent to gender and sexual equality nor self-absorbed partisans of \u201cidentity politics.\u201d\u00a0Family Values<\/em>, then, not only helps us resist the far right\u2019s narrative of how to oppose neoliberalism but also begins to provide a picture of the kind of social democracy that ought to replace it.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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