The scholarly literature on neoliberalism tends to focus either on the intellectual genealogy of neoliberal thought (which starts, more or less, in Europe in the nineteen-thirties) or on the political history of neoliberal policies (which start in the nineteen-seventies). Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market” (Bloomsbury) adds a third dimension to the story. In their account, neoliberalism—they prefer the term “market fundamentalism,” which they credit to George Soros—represents the triumph of decades of pro-business lobbying. They also tell the intellectual story and the political story of neoliberalism, so their book is, in effect, three histories piled on top of one another. This makes for a very thick volume.
The lobbying story is good to know. Most voters are highly sensitive to the suggestion that someone might take away their personal freedom, and this is what pro-business propaganda has been warning them about for the past hundred years. The propaganda took many forms, from college textbooks funded by business groups to popular entertainments like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books, which preach the lesson of self-sufficiency. (The books were promoted as autobiographical, but Oreskes and Conway say that Wilder, with the help of her daughter, completely misrepresented the facts of her family story.)
The endlessly iterated message of this lobbying, Oreskes and Conway say, is that economic and political freedoms are indivisible. Any restriction on the first is a threat to the second. This is the “big myth” of their title, and they show us, in somewhat fire-hose detail, how a lot of people spent a lot of time and money putting that idea into the mind of the American public. The book is an immense scholarly feat, but the authors insist that it is not just an “academic intervention.” They have a political purpose. They think that one role of government has been to correct for market failures, and, if government is discredited, how is it going to correct for what may be the biggest market failure of all: climate change?
Oreskes and Conway suggest that we can get an idea of what we’re up against from the pandemic. Millions of Americans seemed either to disbelieve what government officials were telling them about COVID or to regard public-health measures like vaccines and mask mandates as encroachments on their liberty. (There was also some anti-vaxxer hysteria.) Fantastically well-compensated professional athletes, on whose liberties very little encroaches, were among the worst role models.
