The question of where neoliberal thought comes from often brings to mind the chicken or the egg issue. Of course it is apparent that neoliberal ideas were developed by reactionary thinkers and pushed hard by resurgent capitalists through various public and private institutions. But then the way in which the ideas were formulated and transmitted did have a kind of mass appeal, suggesting that the general everyday consciousness of industrial populations was changing in a way that encouraged receptivity to those ideas.
Today this is all too apparent in the mass failure of systems thinking and public sentiment. Common contentions through the course of the pandemic involve whether one is personally safe in the face of the virus, say by masking up, getting one's vaccine, and so on, or whether one's individual civil liberties are being infringed on by being told what to do and etc.
Early on there was some talk and practice around "flattening the curve," with the understanding that the hospital systems did actually have finite material capacities and that health care workers themselves are actually people with real and finite qualities of daily functionality and endurance, and that the cumulative effects of many individual choices could indeed influence the whole of those systems, but those considerations and practices quickly evaporated as time went on, and people were ready to be "back to normal" and such, and as businesses swung their doors wide open in deference to the "let 'er rip" approach.
Understandable sentiments no doubt, but it doesn't seem apparent that a lot of Americans especially are aware that Bad Things can happen, and will happen on their very soil. There does seem to be a relationship with the profound suffusion of the virus within American society and the fading privilege of global imperial hegemon, as well as the benefit of several generations having not experienced their home turf as an actual war zone. The twin liberal "everything is fine let's move on" smiley face and the conservative "don't tread on me it's all a hoax" impulses achieve similar enough ends in this case.
Don't get me wrong. Yes, historically there are plenty of biological nasties that make this coronavirus look like something closer to the flu that many detractors wave it away as, at least relatively speaking. Though influenza itself was also a stone cold killer right out of the gates, and continues to be a killer too. Further, on the ground, covid is currently nothing like the common flu. It is far more dangerous and does much more damage, and is able to mangle a proportion of its survivors for the long term (like polio and smallpox), singlehandedly creating another class of people with a different life experience and set of medical needs, the consequences of which are still not well understood.
But for example, historians have described whole towns and cities in the Black Death years as having been virtually hit by a neutron bomb. Fine. But with the incredible contagiousness, dynamism, rapid mutation, and thorough suffusion of this virus, it does plenty enough damage as it is, and it does this damage nearly everywhere simultaneously within a society already traumatically weakened across every social system simultaneously.
One can point to the physical damage and make a strong enough case: the interpenetration of the virus throughout the economic sphere is knocking down enough workers that it has started to look like a perpetual moving general strike, just without the solidarity and directionality to back up its economic damages.
But just as importantly, there is a profound psychic and social damage being incurred as well, which is proving to be systemic and institutional. To begin with, the immense strain on the medical systems is damaging both the outlooks of the medical professionals themselves and the public that interacts with them. But what's more, the Russian Roulette roll the dice and see what happens nature of the virus is enough to induce a sort of grim inverted Rawlsian social contract in which everyone worried about the virus must assume the worst about getting the thing, which is a heavy load on top of an already heavy load of financial, political, and environmental worries.
Now, we talked before about the multitude of actual ideologies and perceptions. We have people who are still worried about the virus and neurotic enough to change their behaviors in relation to it, and people who were quite a bit worried but now want things to return to normal, and then all of the antagonisms and fears bound up with those conflicting stances coming right up against the antagonisms and fears of those who don't believe in the virus, or at least believe it is being blown out of proportion, and those antagonistic to any sort of mitigating action in light of the virus, and so all of these competing fears and irreducible conflicts themselves make up immense antagonistic forces, and so whatever one's perception of the virus itself, it is still proving to be an incredible vehicle of social, political, and economic displacement and disruption.
With the shredding of that connective tissue in particular, namely in the logistics and medical industries, we are talking about putting a whole lot of pressure on a society that is deeply interconnected by its interdependent nature: indeed it is that interconnectedness that must necessarily make the whole thing work, with vast swathes of territory in which millions of human beings are daily regenerating themselves without the basic capability of producing food and procuring water, which has opened up enormous distances of virtual desert, which must be traversed mechanically with a lot of energy. I'm going to get more into the dynamics of that issue in a separate post.
My point here is that though the neoliberal consciousness does seem to be on its way out in the US, it is probable that it is at a moment too late, and that consciousness is a stubborn one that continues to assert itself besides. One may have lived all of one's life only worrying about one's self and one's immediate family and social circles say, but those selves and families are connected to larger systems that have, as it happens, atrophied as a result of the truncated public perceptions. One can't constantly pound one's fist at the dashboard and demand that everything keep working as before if the thing really is starting to seize up, and no one is bothering to go under the hood to have a look-see.
For the time being, I also have to set aside the geopolitical implications of the sharp contrast between much of the Western government fumblings and the swift, effective measures of several of the Asian governments in particular, though the latter certainly have their own serious problems to deal with. And after all, that greater set of existential threats designated in the climate issue transcends geopolitical struggles and makes those points moot anyway. But geopolitical issues are still plenty interesting; just as interesting as maintaining gaze on internal social questions as they unfold, and of course the two are bound to each other and influence each other, and this forms an important part of the analysis.
But to get back to the dashboard pounding and then to wrap things up, I don't actually think a return to public and civic responsibility is on the table, at least in its previous form. We may be returning to a collective awareness of public systems as those things finally begin to fail in a decisive fashion, but it doesn't necessarily mean assuming responsibility for those systems en masse. Indeed, the idea that "we are on our own" will proceed from the half-baked, ruling elite idea pushed around in the 70's and 80's to the fully baked necessity of daily survival, as those systems really do fail, with higher-minded civic and collective ideals returning to the backburner, though eventually they'll be acted on again. A balkanization is more likely, after which smaller broken up systems may be assumed and stewarded, hopefully with a little more care and a little less recklessness than what we are seeing now.
