Month: November 2024

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (New York: Crown, 2024).

From the advent of the Nixon Coalition of 1968 to the Trump election of 2016, the Republican Party had three key planks in its platform. The first is strong military defense spending, coupled with the claim of being the party of the “patriot” or the “real American.” The second is a social conservativism with policies largely in line with Catholic and Evangelical morality. The last plank is what has been called fiscal conservativism by its friends and neoliberalism by its enemies. In their recent book, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, Guardian columnist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison take aim at this third plank of the contemporary American Republican Party.

Monbiot’s and Hutchison’s premise is that neoliberalism is the dominant Weltanschauung of the 21^st century. And while everyone (or nearly everyone) frames their own personal worldview in neoliberal terms, it is, as the title of their book suggests, an invisible power. According to Monbiot and Hutchison, those on the right who call Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or any other progressive figure a communist or Marxist are only fooling themselves, for Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are neoliberals. Those who, in turn, call Donald Trump, George W. Bush, or Steve Bannon fascists or Nazis are, in the view of Monbiot and Hutchison, also fooling themselves, for Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Steve Bannon are neoliberals as well. Neoliberalism, according to the authors, is today economics simply considered. 

Neoliberalism has, in the authors’ view, eroded politics by replacing citizens with consumers. It has granted increasing liberty to the 1% to exploit the 99%, whose free speech and right to organize are curtailed by neoliberal legislators. It is further responsible for the sense of isolation and the rise of mental illness and suicide among Westerners, for neoliberalism allegedly teaches a philosophy of individualism and cutthroat, Hobbesian competition. 

Monbiot’s and Hutchison’s history of neoliberalism has a number of parallels to that of Naomi Klein’s 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. These authors’ twist is, however, to locate capitalism’s origins in the Portuguese colonization of Madeira. When the Portuguese arrived at the island of Madeira in the 1420s, it was largely uninhabited. As a result, the Portuguese were free to strip the island of its resources (namely lumber) and to utilize the land for farming and livestock. Monbiot and Hutchison see these events as the birth of a pure capitalism in which the previous social ties and moral structure of feudalism were abandoned for an entirely deracinated economic system. This rather reactionary argument is carried through the book to demonstrate that capitalism and neoliberalism have a fundamentally destructive and exploitative character. They feed off resources until exhaustion, alienating and exploiting workers, who are themselves mere resources or tools for the capitalist system. 

Like others before them, Monbiot and Hutchison see John Locke as one of the most important early theorists of capitalism. Locke argued that the world was originally a blank slate and that ownership is achieved through one’s labor on land. This, according to the authors, creates a vision of the world (and even the universe) as merely “standing reserve” or raw material for exploitation and use. No longer are human communities based on ethnic, cultural, and religious ties. No longer are peoples rooted in the land and part of a living history. Now, it is every man or woman for him- or herself in the great race to make money from the exploitation of labor and land. 

One of the book’s strong points is its criticism of certain left-wing movements. Invisible Doctrine takes to task the notion that individual recycling has a profound benefit for the environment. The authors note that the 1970 “Keep America Beautiful” recycling campaign was “pure Astroturf” and was funded largely by corporations that wanted to shift the blame for pollution to consumers. Monbiot and Hutchison further note the irony that the reusable grocery bags meant to reduce plastic consumption are themselves enormous drains on the environment. The authors also, like their conservative rivals, call out left-wing billionaires who chide common people for their waste but themselves consume enormous amounts of energy, making special note of Bill Gates’s travel carbon footprint. 

Like a host of other recent progressive books, Invisible Doctrine proposes saving humanity and the world by rewiring the human person. While neoliberalism (and many on the right) see humans as naturally competitive and aggressive, Invisible Doctrine proposes a renewed vision of humans as naturally social, cooperative, and empathetic. Monbiot and Hutchison also believe that getting a certain number of people to reject neoliberalism will have a viral effect and that people can be converted to the authors’ vision of an internationalist, eco-friendly socialism. 

There are a number of points in the book with which readers of a variety of political stripes would disagree. Monbiot and Hutchison have a special animus against Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and other populist politicians. Whatever legitimate criticisms the authors have of these populists, it is difficult to label them as neoliberals without qualification. In fact, Donald Trump is widely opposed by neoliberals in the Republican Party, and the “never-Trump” movement is largely a movement of neoliberals. Moreover, while Monbiot and Hutchison are right to argue against blaming migrants as the root cause of problems in the West, they, like many progressives, gloss over the importance of ethnic community and culture. The authors’ vision of a global village itself sounds a lot like a communitarian version of the deracinated individualism of neoliberalism. Nonetheless, Invisible Doctrine provides a trenchant critique of the excesses of certain types of capitalism and is worth a read.  

There is a popular scenario that, prior to the stock market/housing crash of 2008 and the more recent calls for populist economics, was common in conservative (especially academic) discourse. In this scenario, a progressive professor or writer flies to a major city on a commercial jet, is picked up at the airport by an (often luxury) automobile, is driven to a (luxury) hotel or conference center that is heated and cooled with tremendous expenditure of energy. After consuming food that was flown in from all over of the world and drinking water and coffee that themselves were transported via a complex logistical process, the aforementioned progressive professor denounces capitalism, (post-) modernity, carbon use, plastics, (neo-) colonialism, and the growing divide between rich and poor around the world. In the back of the conference room, a few neoliberal business professors chuckle to themselves at the irony. 

But the chuckling neoliberal professors are a bit unfair. Margaret Thatcher is still right, “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. Liberal capitalism (increasingly, a neo-feudal technocracy) is the only game in town. In fact, as Mark Fisher and Slavoj Zizek have noted, it is difficult to imagine anything but capitalism in the 21^st century; it is easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Barring an apocalyptic catastrophe, the rise of some global fascist or communist military dictatorship, or a literal act of God, neoliberalism will continue to run its course until exhaustion. 

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Jesse Russell is an assistant professor of English at Georgia Southwestern State University. He is a senior writer with Voegelin View and writes for a number of publications including The European Conservative, Catholic World Report, and The New Criterion.