Forever Young
During the British raj, the elite officers who ran the famous India Civil Service had a fixed term of service. Though they would often spend their working lives in India, they could serve a maximum of 35 years. The policy of mandatory retirement meant that imperial rule was always rejuvenating itself. Men were born and died in Britain, but the people they ruled over only saw them in their prime.
Neoliberalism, the ruling ideology of our time, has a similar strategy of representing itself. It is always young, vigorous, disruptive.
To be sure, we are presented different types of young disruptor: the impetuous Beto O’Rourke and the precocious Pete Buttigieg give us this decades’ models of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
The insidious thing about the eternal youth of neoliberalism is that we are told the “young leaders” of today are offering novel policies, and not the same policies as decades of deteriorating human-development indices and increasing inequality. But as young men, they can’t be held responsible. Precocious young Mr. Buttigieg can’t be held responsible for the Reagan-Clinton war on the poor. He’s got a smart new approach!
But the credo is the same. Everything is the market. The city and the country. You and me. Everything can maximize its potential. Everything can actualize itself.
The argument is presented in one metaphor: dynamism. Movement! The nimbly adapting organism. The public-private partnership that can move to occupy any space and contort itself to fit anything that used to be called public: pensions, policing, prisons: public good or public bad.
Privatizing the public is always presented as a new idea. Always a bold alternative to the tired either-or binary of left and right. “Why can’t we have both?” We’re supposed to congratulate the chipper young man on coming up with the possibility of the win-win.
Of course, capitalism is not win-win, it has winners and losers, or more often, winner and losers and losers and losers. The young men making the pitch gloss over that part. They’re not being dishonest exactly, everybody does win under neoliberalism, in a sense. It’s just, what everybody wins, even under a booming stock market and with full employment, can be pretty unsatisfying for 99% of the winners.
That 99% of winners, who most of the time feel like losers, are periodically at a loss with their winnings in the new economy, and that’s when somebody else is the young man with a bold plan: neoliberalism’s man on the spot. He’s got a nimbly-improvised vision of another win-win.
Just think of it. It’s eternal youth in representation. But in fact it is not eternal youth in the sense of spry and virile forever, which is the Silicon Valley fantasy of being forever young.
It’s eternal youth in the sense of perennial naivety, perennial callow self-satisfaction, the same naïve shit over and over again.
It’s a fantasy, which like the subjects of the empires of the 19th century, we’re trapped in. It’s someone else’s fantasy.