June 2, 2010
Over at Lenin's Tomb we find this summary of a post on Schmitt and Hayek which explores the influence of undemocratic radical right-wing political theory on neoliberalism:
If the neoliberal project is a restorationist one that consolidates the power of capital with respect to its opponents, it has accomplished this substantially by "hollowing out" the state, by depriving it of democratic and representative capacity, by treating governmentality as a technocratic issue, the efficacy of which can best be measured by its resemblance to market transactions in the private sector. The new rightist radicals, and their assault on the 'special interests' and 'old elites', amounted to an outright attack on democracy. It is to the success of this project above all that we must credit our current democratic impasse, the imperviousness of the state to pressures from below, and the growing disengagement of significant layers of the population from electoral politics.
He ties this to conservatism, which he says is not fundamentally about tradition, but about conserving hierarchy and domination. This allied itself to neo-liberalism that was destructive of national and ancient traditions so as to further globalization and the hegemony of the hegemony of the financial sector. It is necessary to restore and conserve the kernel of liberal social relations against democratic intervention; to prevent the interventionism that would threaten or abridge the rule of capital.Hence it opts for a radical curtailing of the welfare state and a return to the "neutral state of the liberal nineteenth century.
What emerges is a high-handed social authoritarianism that attacks unions, cuts welfare, baits immigrants and cuts taxes for the rich----Abbott's Coalition whose matey populism abets an elitist agenda and locks in the rule by capital.
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