Neoliberalism and the racialized critique of democracy

It is a grave error to believe that it suffices to transfer the democratic institutions that we acquired through centuries-long efforts to the undeveloped countries without a period of transition …. The path to growth is a tedious path. Democracy, liberty, and prosperity are found at its end. They do not fall effortlessly into one's lap but must be won gradually. —Louis Rougier (1961, p. 191, author's translation) The neoliberal assault on democracy is without doubt one of the most pressing concerns for critical democratic theory today. Although the economic policies it tends to advocate and the cultural agenda it is wont to generate are objectionable to many, neoliberalism's anti-democratic disposition troubles the progressive mind more fundamentally because it threatens to undermine the very possibility of alternative arrangements. This, in any case, is the position taken by Wendy Brown, arguably neoliberalism's most vehement critic. For her, “democracy is neither a panacea nor a complete form of political life. Without it, however, we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future” (Brown, 2015, 210). This explains why so much critical scholarship on neoliberalism is animated by a profound concern for its antipathy toward democratic imaginaries (e.g., Biebricher, 2015; Bonefeld, 2017; Brown, 2006, 2019; Dardot & Laval 2019; Irving, 2018; Kiely, 2017; Lösch, 2008; Olssen, 2018; Slobodian, 2018). The present essay will contend that this literature has by and large failed to account for the intersection between the neoliberal critique of democracy and racial (or racialized) differentiation. It argues, in other words, that the neoliberal assault on democracy frequently passes through a moment of racial othering. This applies especially, if not exclusively, to global south contexts, where democratization is viewed by many prominent neoliberals as a potential obstacle to economic development and the establishment of a market economy. In such cases, neoliberals argue, a choice must be made between economic development and democratic self-governance. The problem, as they imagine it, is that what they call “underdeveloped” populations lack the cultural or civilizational “maturity” to be entrusted with self-rule, as they are unlikely themselves to establish the legal and institutional framework necessary for material growth. In reconstructing the foundations of this argument, I turn to neoliberal discussions of post-colonial self-determination in the post-war period, which provided the template for later neoliberal critiques of democratization in the global south. I show that these discussions were steeped both in racialized tropes and in more explicitly racial theories, which served to enframe post-colonial peoples as “civilizationally immature” and hence unfit for democratic rule. I then turn my attention to later iterations of this same argument, pointing to their continued reliance on a racialized approach to the question of democracy. The remainder of this essay is divided into four sections. In the first, I reconstruct in broad brushstrokes the commonplace critical account of neoliberalism's anti-democratic thrust, arguing that this literature has largely overlooked the racialized slant of the neoliberal critique of democracy. The second section opens by historically contextualizing the emergence of the neoliberal thought collective and highlighting the importance to early neoliberalism of decolonization. It then proceeds to consider a range of neoliberal positions on post-colonial governance, arguing that to the neoliberal imaginary, formerly colonized populations cannot be entrusted with democratic self-determination as they lack the cultural, spiritual, or epistemic qualities necessary for enlightened self-rule. The third section unearths the nexus between this view and the neoliberal conception of racial hierarchy. The fourth section briefly discusses two later iterations of this argument, focusing first on the neoliberal justification of the 1973 coup in Chile and second on neoliberals’ attitudes, early in the 21st century, to Middle Eastern populations. The concluding section reflects on the implications of my contention for critical democratic thought. Political theorists critical of neoliberalism widely consider it to be inherently anti-democratic. As an intellectual tradition, neoliberalism has been shown to be “skeptical of existing democratic arrangements” (Biebricher, 2019, p. 108); as a mode of reasoning that has come to suffuse ever more spheres of life, it stands accused of “quietly undoing basic elements of democracy” (Brown, 2015, p. 17). Neoliberalism, on this view, mounts a two-pronged assault on the democratic imaginary. First, it discursively reconstructs democracy by assigning it a series of alternative meanings, casting it as a “marketplace of opinions,” for instance (Brown, 2015; Lösch, 2008), or as a purely utilitarian means of electing governmental officials (Dardot & Laval, 2019). This strips the concept of democracy of even its most basic connotation—that is, the “rule” of the “people”—even as it redefines it in strictly transactional terms. Second, it generates a form of political reasoning that, nurtured by neoliberal ideas, empties institutions and states of their democratic content, replacing more or less genuine modes of accountability and participation with managerialism, governance practices, and competitive pressure (Brown, 2015). Neoliberalism, both in its ideational and its practical dimension, hollows out democracy and renders it powerless to mount an alternative hegemonic project. As critical scholarship has reconstructed it, neoliberal thinking about democracy is, at root, animated by one key concern: if left unchecked, democratic electorates will put pressure on their representatives to redistribute wealth, intervene in markets, or cater to specific interest groups (Biebricher, 2019; Irving, 2018). Not only does this generate policies that, on the neoliberal view, are unjust (such as progressive taxation or wage regulation); much more disconcertingly, it also threatens the very conservation of free markets. Understood by neoliberals as “spontaneous orders” that can emerge only out of the countless uncoordinated actions of individual economic agents, markets are fragile and precarious systems that are thwarted if not demolished if they are interfered with. When the state intervenes in the marketplace, it threatens private property and disrupts the spontaneity required by competitive enterprise. Democracy is, then, a problem for neoliberalism because it cannot exist alongside a market economy without imperiling its most basic preconditions: free exchange, the protection of private property, the iron discipline of competition. Crucially, however, this did not prompt neoliberals to reject democratic decision-making out of hand, as democracy did have some—if restricted—place in their political philosophy, appearing to them the best available means of selecting governmental officials (see Cornelissen, 2017). Although the problem of democracy has been approached by neoliberal thinkers in myriad different ways (Biebricher, 2015, 2019; Lösch, 2008), the one solution they most commonly theorized (and that has arguably proved the most influential) is the establishment, through legislation or even constitutional design, of strict limitations to the influence and reach of the citizenry (Cornelissen, 2017). The neoliberal critique of democracy is, as one recent study puts it, “ultimately a matter of assigning non-negotiable limits to representative democracy itself” (Dardot & Laval, 2019, p. 33). The concrete form taken by such limitations differs from author to author. The work of James M. Buchanan, for instance, was largely devoted to designing constitutional restraints to popular intervention in economic policy, which would render it unconstitutional for governments to accrue deficits beyond a certain threshold (Biebricher, 2019; MacLean, 2017; Rosanvallon, 2011), thus leveling considerable restraints upon public spending or economic reform. F. A. Hayek, on the other hand, was not content with such measures, as he believed that democratic rule impinged not just on economic policy but on the integrity of the rule of law as such. He accordingly spent the last decades of his life articulating what he termed a “model constitution” (Hayek, 2013) that, if implemented, would drastically restrict the people's influence on the legislature, effectively cutting it off from the law and divesting it of its sovereignty (Lösch, 2008).2 My contention is that although the account reconstructed here is by and large correct, and neoliberals did labor tirelessly to imagine and implement restrictions on democratic populations, it has largely failed to pay attention to the racialized nature of this effort. Indeed, although the centrality of racial (or racist) categories to early neoliberal thought has been established (see Plehwe, 2009; Slobodian, 2018; Whyte, 2019), critical scholarship has yet to do the same for the neoliberal critique of democratic self-governance.3 One book that attempts to do just this, Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains (2017), has been faulted by neoliberal commentators (Boettke, 2019) and their opponents (Mirowski, 2019) alike for too brazenly ascribing racist views to individual neoliberal authors. 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