Are you going to blame the “neoliberal consensus” for the first, US Civil War, and for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan?
What does “neoliberal consensus” mean, exactly, anyway, given that Democrats, Republicans, and Trump supporters, can all represent themselves as “fighting for freedom”, in some way or another, and therefore can technically all be called “liberal”, notwithstanding the fact that two of those groups don’t self-identify as liberal and use it as a negative epithet for the other group that does so self-identify?
Googling the question, this article, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot , gives a quick and magisterial survey of the relevant factors and relations.
What is called, the “neoliberal consensus”, is basically government by corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism is a practice and ideology intrinsically predicated on colonial economics and extraction.
The East India company has often been called the first corporation. That’s obviously colonialism.
So have the Knights Templar been called the first corporation. That’s obviously a sort of colonialism, too, resource and capital extraction from foreign markets.
It was obvious, at least to me, in the last century, that contemporary scenarios could occur.
They were guaranteed to occur given the onion-like layers of colonial propaganda constituting the base but convoluted norms of so-called, “Western nations”.
Corporate capitalism has to exploit someone or something, somewhere, in order to accrue profits significant enough to attract investment.
The colonial or neocolonial model of extraction is always the governing ideal of corporate capitalism, of Occidental, or western and middle eastern forms of capitalism, in general.
It’s a habitual and historical instinct, deep in the Occidental psyche.
So, if Western economies cannot impoverish foreign natives in foreign lands so as to accrue profits, or if they have done so and there is no more surplus value to be extracted; then the Western hunger for profits is going to colonise and feed on the domestic population’s wealth.
But the domestic population, though resenting such exploitation, is going to be caught up in a moral bind due to its own complicity in colonialism – in (neo-)colonial ideology and (neo-)colonial benefits.
In the same way that European governments had the difficulty of reconciling colonial wealth extraction with international laws concerning private property, domestic populations of Western nations enriched through colonialism and neocolonialism have the problem of trying to exempt themselves from being colonised by the very processes that they otherwise have a history of happily subscribing to and benefiting from.
European governments solved the problem of reconciliation by noting that European nations themselves were colonised by imperial forces, at the outset.
The reconciliation attains a consistency of sorts, but at the expense of enshrining imperialism and injustice as governing values.
That obviously militates against all of the nonsense propaganda produced by European nations and colonial extensions, such as the USA, concerning justice.
The domestic populations of Western nations, though statistically supportive of the view that colonialism was beneficial to those who were colonised, seem hypocritically reluctant to engage in similar colonial relations with their own governments and corporations.
So those domestic populations are caught in contradictory commitments; on the one hand, they identify with the forces of colonial or colonising capital; but, on the other hand, they are opposing the corporate forces of colonial or colonising capital, in so far as those forces are directed at them.
Identification is usually ethno-national; opposition is based on capital relations such as ownership and finance, usually according to some other associated form of class grouping.
Corporate forces deploy racism and nationalism, leveraging ethnonational identification as a distraction from oppositions based on ownership, finance, and other associated, class divisions.
Domestic populations of Western nations, or more precisely of those Western nations caught up in colonial and neocolonial relations, are thus on the cusp of the contradiction between the ethnonational identification identifying domestic populations with colonial exploiters and the property divisions identifying those same domestic populations with the colonised and exploited.
Domestic populations of Western nations, thus inhabit a schizophrenic, socio-economic position.
It’s a position that naturalises hypocrisy for those domestic populations as default behaviour.
The biggest market in the US mediascape is that of European-Americans who wish to believe in the twisted worlds of romanticised and revisionist colonial propaganda and call it “history”.
Note how all of the historical fantasy that those people seem to like carefully avoids the colonial era.
Most of it is mediaevalism, apartheid temporality, apartheid fantasy history.
It’s natural that such a market wishes to avoid narratives of its own villainy, however accurate those narratives might be.
And so it is that such market desire becomes the architect of apartheid fantasy history and of a new sort of commodity mnemonics, one that can be delivered in increasing HD, in 3-D, eventually as a holographic sensorium and artificial environment rivalling or even exceeding the resolution of reality itself!
This then is the ultimate escapism, into the commodity mnemonics of apartheid fantasy history!
It’s a commodity mnemonic environment driven by algorithms of Euro-American, ethnic anxiety, the crafted data of what right-of-centre, Euro-Americans, call “race realism”.
One, where eventually, in accord with the stringency to not cause European-American anxiety, ethnic otherness is carefully reintroduced into apartheid fantasy history as the themed spice of carefully categorised, commodity mnemonic exotica.
Everything is processed according to those commodity mnemonic machines driven by market desire and Euro-American, ethnic anxiety.
The USA as racialised regiments of productivity*; the so-called, right-wing, Euro-American regiments, constantly faultfinding with regard to non-Euro-American regiments, masking the faultfinding as the somehow de rigueur behaviour of free-market competition and free expression.
It’s all game theory and if the USA always and invariably proceeds according to game theory predicated on concepts of self-interest, then does the concept of the game itself take on the role of the real?
It seems obvious that it does, given the tu quoque robotics of US citizen response!
Very much a robotics of full commitment, there never seems to be any hint of awareness of anything beyond the games played.
* The USA dream consists of what is supposed to be the morality of equal opportunity in conjunction with what is supposed to be the meritocracy of devotion to and competence at productivity games.