Dedemocratizing citizenship: how neoliberalism used market justice to move from welfare queening to authoritarianism in 25 short years

ABSTRACT

Twenty-five years ago the new citizenship studies rightly predicted the egregious inegalitarian effects of neoliberalism’s dismantling of the social welfare state, but misrecognised the cause as a retreat of the state and the return of unfettered market forces. That continuing misrecognition obscures the roots of today’s surging authoritarianism and the dedemocratization of citizenship. The attack on social citizenship was instead a battle over control of the predistributive powers that engineer the market economy. Because social citizenship is not merely an effect of democracy but also one of its conditions, neoliberalism weaponized the moral economy of market justice and the mechanisms of dedemocratization against expanded social rights to give cover to its now increasingly successful war against democratic citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• dedemocratization
• predistribution
• social citizenship
• market justice

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Fred Block and David Jacobson for their generous comments on an earlier draft and Citizenship Studies’ editors Engin Isin and Leah Bassel for their especially astute feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Isin and Turner (2007) for their powerful agenda for Citizenship Studies a decade after its founding.

2. In Heffner (2020) Masha Gessen argues that the U.S. is in the first stage of an autocratic transformation.

3. This all too facile observation must be seriously caveated by the economic, political, and legal apartheid of Black Americans that, thanks to the racism and exclusions built into the New Deal, redlining, and finance, prevailed throughout much of the so-called egalitarian interlude of the ‘trentes glorieuses.’

4. Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), Somers and Block (2005), and Somers (2017) emphasize how the first step to destroying social citizenship programs is to define the beneficiaries as morally undeserving, worthy of what Hancock calls ‘public disgust,’ and thus engaging in what Somers (2017) deems a ‘political economy of moral unworth.’ In the U.S. from the 1970s-early 1990s, this kind of disgust was successfully targeted at women of color receiving AFDC, setting the stage for the ‘end of welfare as we know it’ in 1996 under the Clinton Presidency, the most significant undermining of the welfare state since the New Deal. This in turn became the vector for delegitimizing the already fragile and short-lived rights-bearing status of marginalized African Americans in the current (2022) onslaught of voter suppression and forced participatory exclusion.

5. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in which thousands of black Americans were abandoned to perish can be explained by this same dynamic (Somers 2008, Ch. 2).

6. This and several of the following paragraphs draw from Somers (2021).

7. The interest of political liberals in protecting property from the Crown or the government and that of economic liberals’ in protecting property from the People converged in their mutual need to control the bodies and economic value of enslaved people who, because they were for so long defined as the property being protected, were subsequently never fully incorporated as legitimate members of The People. Thanks to Leah Bassel for urging me to include this point.

8. The term predistribution is usually attributed to political scientist Hacker (2011), and for having been put into currency by Ed Miliband in 2012, then leader of the UK’s Labour Party. See Vogel (2019) for how predistribution was used in context of the 2020 American presidential election.

9. See fn. 4 supra re the necessary racial caveat to this characterization.

10. Thanks to Engin Isin for reminding me of the importance of this aspect of Marshall’s theory and especially the post-war class compromise embedded within social citizenship, which was among the first social accomplishments to be brushed away by the wreckage wrought by neoliberalism’s attack on the working class.

11. https://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett/#10fd80af4639

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret R. Somers

Margaret R. Somers is Professor Emerita of Sociology and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.