There is a name for the discomfort, delays, overcrowding, and price gouging we all experience when we fly. That name is “neoliberalism.” If neoliberalism were a feeling, it would be that feeling when the person in front of you reclines their seat into your lap: that feeling that somebody else’s free market choice has encroached so far into the shared public space that now there’s not enough room left over for you. If neoliberalism were a place, that place would be a departure gate, right after a flight has been summarily canceled and the airline disavows responsibility for the travelers they’ve stranded. Every time I’m marooned in an airport for hours, waiting for my flight to be inevitably canceled, I know that my suffering is not due to Delta or a snowstorm or some random act of God. I know that neoliberals have decided that wasting my time is the most efficient use of market resources.
Neoliberalism, in the American context, essentially means letting the market take over for the government when it comes to providing essential public goods and services. It means transferring the public space from the government that is supposed to use it to benefit everybody to private actors who want to use it to make a buck. It’s long been the favored approach of capitalists, Republicans, and people who can ask their daddies for venture capital. But in the late 20th century, the same kinds of pro-business, anti-regulation, anti-labor, “let the market in its infinite wisdom decide our fate” notions effectively took over the Democratic Party. The country has yet to recover from this.
Neoliberalism can sound benign. After all, it’s a theory of government predicated on the government getting out of the way and doing no harm. But the force that replaces the government when it abdicates its collective responsibilities is “the market,” and that is a force that is inherently amoral and ungenerous. The market values profits over people and commodification over children.
More importantly, the market doesn’t allow you to vote for the outcomes you want. Sure, market aficionados will say you can “vote with your wallet,” but even that pallid analogy presumes people have wallets hefty enough to make a difference. In a market-driven government, the people with the most money get the most “votes.” When neoliberals cede government functions to market forces, what they’re really doing is giving away the power of the people to affect and change the society they live in. From prisons to pollution, neoliberals have let the profit motive—instead of the will of the people as expressed through representative democracy—decide what kind of world we live in.
Most people trace the birth of neoliberalism to Ronald Reagan—with the Democrats hopping on board in the 1990s with the election of Bill Clinton. But Clinton merely consolidated neoliberal ideas and turned them into a national agenda. I do not blame Clinton’s successful presidential campaign focus on “It’s the economy, stupid” for kick-starting the party’s fascination with neoliberalism in 1992. I place the birth date of neoliberalism on October 24, 1978, because that is the day that President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act into law.