TINA — There Is No Alternative. The long list of her high priests and priestesses extends from Margaret Thatcher via Tony Blair down to Angela Merkel. Anyone who wished to serve tina, to the accompaniment of the solemn chorus of the united economists of the world, had to recognize the escape of capital from its national cages as both inevitable and beneficial, and would have to commit themselves to help clear all obstacles from its path. Heathen practices such as controls on the movement of capital, state aid and others were to be tracked down and eradicated; no one must be allowed to escape from ‘global competition’ and sink back into the cushioned comfort of national protections of whatever kind. Free-trade agreements were to open up markets and protect them from state interference, global governance was to replace national governments, protection from commodification was to be replaced by enabling commodification, and the welfare state was to give way to the competition state of a new era of capitalist rationalization.
By the end of the 1980s at the latest, neoliberalism had become the pensée unique of both the centre left and the centre right. The old political controversies were regarded as obsolete. Attention now focused on the ‘reforms’ needed to increase national ‘competitiveness’, and these reforms were everywhere the same. They included more flexible labour markets, improved ‘incentives’ (positive at the upper end of the income distribution and negative at the bottom end), privatization and marketization both as weapons in the competition for location and cost reduction, and as a test of moral endurance. Distributional conflict was replaced by a technocratic search for the economically necessary and uniquely possible; institutions, policies and ways of life were all to be adapted to this end. It follows that all this was accompanied by the attrition of political parties—their retreat into the machinery of the state as ‘cartel parties’ — with falling membership and declining electoral participation, disproportionately so at the lower end of the social scale. Beginning in the 1980s this was accompanied by a meltdown of trade-union organization, together with a dramatic decline in strike activity worldwide—altogether, in other words, a demobilization along the broadest possible front of the entire post-war machinery of democratic participation and redistribution. It all took place slowly, but at an increasing pace and developing with growing confidence into the normal state of affairs.
As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics. This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised. [...]
with the neoliberal revolution and the transition to ‘post-democracy’ associated with it, a new sort of political deceit was born, the expert lie. It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts. It was followed, inter alia, by the European Commission’s ‘Cecchini Report’ (1988), which, as a reward for the ‘completion of the internal market’ planned for 1992, promised the citizens of Europe an increase in prosperity of the order of 5 per cent of the European Union’s gdp, an average 6 per cent reduction in the price of consumer goods, as well as millions of new jobs and an improvement in public finances of 2.2 per cent of gdp. In the us, meanwhile, financial experts such as Bernanke, Greenspan and Summers agreed that the precautions taken by rational investors in their own interest and on their own account to stabilize ever ‘freer’ and ever more global financial markets were enough; government agencies had no need to take action to prevent the growth of bubbles, partly because they had now learned how to painlessly eliminate the consequences if bubbles were to burst.
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Characteristic of today’s zeitgeist is a new cultural divide that has struck the capitalist democracies without warning. Structurally, it has its roots in long-festering discontent with ‘globalization’, while simultaneously the number of ‘globalization losers’ has been steadily growing.
The high phase of globalization sponsored the establishment of a cosmopolitan consciousness industry, which discerned opportunities for growth in turbocharging the expansionist drive of capitalist markets with the libertarian values of the social revolution of the 1960s and 70s and their utopian promise of human emancipation. In the process, the technocratic pensée unique of neoliberalism became fused with the moral juste milieu of an internationalist discourse community [..]. a cultural struggle of a special kind, one in which the moralization of a globally expanding capitalism goes hand in hand with the demoralization of those who find their interests damaged by it.
After decades of decline, voter participation in the Western democracies has recently begun to bounce back, especially among the lower classes. The rediscovery of democracy as a political corrective, however, benefits exclusively new kinds of parties and movements whose appearance throws national political systems into disarray. The mainstream parties and their public-relations experts, which have long been closely associated with each other and with the machinery of the state, regard the new parties as a lethal threat to ‘democracy’ and fight them as such. The concept employed in this struggle, and rapidly included in the post-factual vocabulary, is that of ‘populism’, denoting left-wing and right-wing tendencies and organizations alike that reject the tina logic of ‘responsible’ politics in a world of neoliberal globalization.
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The fissure between those who describe others as ‘populists’ and the objects of their description is the dominant political fault line in the crisis-ridden societies of financial capitalism. The issue at stake is none other than the relationship between global capitalism and the state system. Nothing polarizes the capitalist societies of today more than the debates about the necessity and legitimacy of national politics.
What is significant about the politics of internationalization is the conformity with which those described as ‘elites’, contemptuously by the ‘populists’ and approvingly by themselves, react to the new parties. ‘Populism’ is diagnosed in normal internationalist usage as a cognitive problem. Its supporters are supposed to be people who demand ‘simple solutions’ because they do not understand the necessarily complex solutions that are so indefatigably and successfully delivered by the tried and tested forces of internationalism; their representatives are cynics who promise ‘the people’ the ‘simple solutions’ they crave, even though they know that there are no alternatives to the complex solutions of the technocrats. In this way, the emergence of the new parties can be explained as a Great Regression on the part of the Little People, manifesting itself as a lack both of education and of respect for the educated. This can be accompanied by ‘discourses’ about the desirability of abolishing referendums or handing political decisions over to unpolitical experts and authorities.
At the level of everyday life, this leads to the moral and cultural exclusion of anti-globalization parties and their supporters. The declaration of their cognitive immaturity is followed by moral denunciation of their calls for a national politics providing a bulwark against the risks and side effects of internationalization. The relevant battle cry, which is to mobilize painful memories of racism and war, is ‘ethno-nationalism’. ‘Ethno-nationalists’ are not up to dealing with the challenges of globalization, neither the economic ones—‘global competition’—nor the moral ones. Their ‘fears and concerns’, as the official phrase puts it, ‘are to be taken seriously’, but only in the mode of social work. Protests against material and moral degradation are suspected of being essentially fascist, especially now that the former advocates of the plebeian classes have switched to the globalization party, so that if their former clients wish to complain about the pressures of capitalist modernization, the only language at their disposal is the pre-political, untreated linguistic raw material of everyday experiences of deprivation, economic or cultural.
