2024-03-03 03:43:00
Libertarians do not want to be called that, nor do they want to be neoliberals and even less conservatives. However, these three ideological camps come from a family that claims to hate the State but justifies its existence, as they need it for their ideological-political purposes. The State has always been key for neoliberals, but: How do you prohibit freedom?
When Milei prohibits the use of inclusive language in public administration documents, it not only confirms that freedom is a piece of gum to the liking of those who regulate it, but also establishes itself as its owner. It aspires to control the limits of freedom where the State operates – public administration – and above all of the inclusion that is denied.
So far it seems like a short version of a narcissistic tyrant. However, it is a solid project where the State has a fundamental role.
The father of many neoliberals, Milton Friedman, writes “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” to highlight that the word neoliberalism would refer to a new perspective of reworking liberalism in relation, above all, to the role of the State. This in the context of the crisis of liberalism and what neoliberal theorists diagnosed in the 1950s as state interventionism with a collectivist bias (communist milieu).
In the cited article, Friedman affirms that the State must intervene to create key conditions for competitiveness, among other things, since they have already proven that “letting things go,” that is, full freedom, does not build societies, rather it destroys even the societies themselves. productivity conditions. For this reason, Friedman considers the creation of antitrust laws, to prevent the ambition for maximum profitability of powerful sectors from impeding free competition.
Just as the State is central to neoliberalism economically, so too is it socially and culturally. It is from there that the model of society they require is built: totally conservative of an original liberal order, where everyone accepts that the order is hierarchical, not egalitarian (for neoliberals this is “communism”). Thus class, race, gender and all other inequality will be ensured by the State.
And here we must consider how the right constructs its own cultural battle. In this case, by prohibiting inclusive language, favorable conditions are created within the public administration itself, so that the ‘parasites’ (that’s what Adam Smith called state officials) be the first to reconsider their ideas after repeating their opposite meaning so much, and if the officials learn, the first cultural battle is won. Because from there the social cultural battle is directed; the social helm is the State.
These explanations allow us to find a pattern in the behavior of right-wing leaders and a common thread between their personal actions and acts of government, which sometimes seem spasmodic or meaningless: visiting the Pope (when he was despised), valuing the family of human people (when before it was that of dogs), showing themselves heterosexual, denying the right to abortion.
Authoritarian, misogynistic, patriarchal, antidemocratic, social repressive leaderships, because the violence of dispossession and exclusion that neoliberalism implies requires acts of salvaging the order that preserves patriarchal, unequal and exclusive patterns.
I conclude, as I have already done, with an extraordinary series that represents this union between neoliberalism and conservatives. ‘Mrs. America’, with Cate Blanchett playing Phyllis Schlafly as the main opponent of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and a woman of the American conservative sector, shows the struggle of the feminist movement emblematized by Gloria Steiner in the 1970s, in conquest for women’s rights. Although it is clarified that some of the events are fictitious, most of the scenes reflect, in a fairly similar way, the true events of that time.
Pyllips is not a housewife furious with feminists, she does not defend domestic life, she herself wants to exercise her freedom, and she knows that she needs to exercise power, that is why she maintains: “We defend the freedom of women to choose to care for families, core of American values” and for this she is a candidate for the House of Representatives. She is a woman with the clarity that family values are the only ones capable of defending a system in which life, liberty and the defense of private property, typical of neoliberalism, are essential to sustain the American system. The scene in which Phyllis Schlafly says in the series to justify her struggle is wonderful – with a broken voice and anguish on her face.–: Why would God put this fire inside me if it wasn’t because he wanted me to act for him?
Libertarians, neoliberals and conservatives are united by a law: the “other”, the different, is a subvertor of values, whether of the law of God, of morality, or of the neoliberal holy father of the family.
* Professor and researcher at UNC. Director of the research program of the Center for Advanced Studies of the UNC Faculty of Social Sciences.
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