A Contest of Ideas by Nelson Lichtenstein

Author:Nelson Lichtenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals

In the decade that followed the end of the Cold War, a triumphalism of the free market seemed to characterize much social thought and commentary, mainly on the right and within the Republican Party, but among many erstwhile progressives as well. The idea that capitalist markets are essential to, or even define, the democratic idea has always been present in the West, but the idea achieved a near hegemonic power after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Let us celebrate an American triumph,” thundered Mort Zuckerman in U.S. News & World Report late in the 1990s, “a triumph” based on the rock of an unfettered capitalism: “privatize, deregulate, and do not interfere with the market.”1

New Dealers and old-fashioned populists once held that laissez-faire capitalism presented the gravest danger to freedom, democracy, equality, and the material well-being of most citizens. But Americans were now told to believe that democracy and the free market are identical. Rather than distorting or subverting social harmony, capitalist markets would now prove themselves the key to the resolution of virtually all social and political problems, both at home and abroad. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times put it: “International finance has turned the whole world into a parliamentary system” that allows people to “vote every hour, every day through their mutual funds, their pension funds, their brokers, and, more and more, from their own basements via the Internet.” Thus markets are not just mediums of exchange, but mediums of consent.2

And in a maddening piece of ideological larceny, market triumphalists invoked that ultimate sanction—once the principal asset of the left—the stamp of historic inevitability. Francis Fukuyama put this most famously in his essay “The End of History,” written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Liberal democracy combined with open market economics has become the only model a state could follow.” Shortly afterward futurist George Gilder offered a characteristic bit of eschatological certainty: “It is the entrepreneurs who know the rules of the world and the laws of God.”3 The 2002 “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” prepared under the authority of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, seemed to put the power of the American state behind the Fukuyama-Gilder thesis: “The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”4

Even today, words like “reform” and “liberalization,” and sometimes even “revolution,” denote the process whereby an open market in labor and capital replaces the regulatory regimes, either social democratic or autocratic, that were erected earlier in the century. In effect, Woodrow Wilson, or a rather distorted version of Wilsonian liberalism, has won the great debate, not only with V. I. Lenin but also with Eduard Bernstein and John Strachy. “For years socialists used to argue among themselves about what kind of socialism they wanted,” comments Denis MacShane, a former official of the International Metal Workers Federation, later a Labour Party MP.

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