Neoliberalism, Shock Doctrine, and Dear God It Has Only Been Like a Week

Naming a thing doesn’t make it disappear. In fact, naming something can be reductive, intellectualizing or oversimplifying things in a harmful way. 

But when I’m trying to work through an enormous and sticky problem, one that’s hard to see because it’s a hyperobject—so big that it’s everywhere all at once—sometimes I need the reductive power of naming something. Even if it’s just to help me get my bearings or help me get unstuck. Naming something helps me pull my imagination back from the narrow, one way path my fear consigns it to. 

So here goes: 

This past week has been a textbook example of neoliberal shock doctrine.

Neoliberalism is an economic theory that the US has exported around the Global South since the 1970s and one that every president since Ronald Reagan has embraced at home. Neoliberalism seeks to “liberate” the market from regulations, to shrink government spending, and to privatize state programs and assets. Neoliberal policies allow corporations to move billions and billions of public dollars into the hands of a small number of corporations and individuals. This privatization hollows out government in the process, increases the income inequality gap, and causes widespread civil unrest and human suffering. (But hey, at least corporations have all this freedom now.)

Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine is an excellent crash course in the rise of neoliberalism in the 20th century. I wish I could say that this book is no longer relevant, but since neoliberalism has only spread since 2007, it is sadly more relevant than ever.

Economist Milton Friedman is considered the father of neoliberalism. In 1973, Friedman moved his economic theory out of a University of Chicago lecture hall and into the world when he became an advisor for the Chilean dictator Pinochet. Through Pinochet, Friedman treated Chile like an economics laboratory, a sandbox to test his theories about intense deregulation and privatization. He advised Pinochet to make sweeping, drastic, and sudden cuts to government programs and regulations, a move that Friedman referred to as “economic shock treatment.” He theorized that it would grant Pinochet—and the market—unchecked power.  Friedman’s theories proved true, but that power came at the cost of three digit inflation, the collapse of most of Chile’s public systems, and the torture, disappearance, or execution of around 40,000 Chileans —a number that continues to rise as the Chilean government periodically recognizes more victims of Pinochet (and Friedman).

Here is a short list of neoliberal moves that have dragged other countries (Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Iraq, just to name a few) to economic ruin, plunging millions of people into misery and early graves while making a relatively small number of companies and individuals very, very, very rich: increased surveillance and incarceration, retracted civil liberties, defunding education and privatizing schools, increased military and security spending, privatizing healthcare, prisons, the postal service, communications, utilities, data security, police, military, and literally every other service for the sake of “corporate efficiency” and then bidding out those services to an unregulated and uncompetitive private market where many of the politicians who wrote the legislation to privatize these systems are primed to earn millions or billions of dollars in the process. 

As Klein explains, all incarnations of neoliberalism “share a commitment to the policy trinity–the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations, and skeletal social spending” (18). Sound familiar?

Step one in the neoliberal process of breaking and privatizing the assets and functions of government (in order to “liberate” the market from regulations) is always some type of disaster or chaos. As Klein points out in her book, “Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones” (175). 

This past week, we watched Trump manufacture crisis after crisis with each chaos-inducing executive order. But this administration isn’t chaotic because its inexperienced; it is deliberately chaotic.

Many of Trump’s executive orders were designed to manufacture widespread chaos that will allow his administration to circumvent democracy, paving the way for neoliberal policies. Here’s the strategy in Friedman’s own words, from his 1982 book Capitalism and Freedom: 

“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Just how closely and openly connected is our current president to Friedman’s policies? The answer to that can be found in the Heritage Foundation–a conservative think tank that Klein calls “ground zero of Friedmanism” (448). A quick trip around the Heritage Foundation’s website reveals how influential Friedman still is for the organization, even though he died in 2006. Here are just a few of the website’s articles and pages that mention Friedman: “Milton Friedman, the Father of Economic Freedom,” “Commemorating Milton Friedman’s 100th Birthday with the Index of Economic Freedom,” (I did not explore this index because I am already in a pretty bad place right now, so I have no details), and “Thankful for Freedom’s Greatest Teacher, Milton Friedman.”

So what does Friedman’s fanclub, The Heritage Foundation have to do with this past week and the deluge of cruel executive orders? A considerable amount since The Heritage Foundation authored Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, also known as Project 2025. (You know, the thing Trump swore he wasn’t connected even though this last week has proven that he was definitely lying.)  Project 2025 provides a blueprint for this administration’s first 100 days. Most of the executive orders coming from the oval office this week are based on suggestions from The Heritage Foundation. 

This isn’t the first time a neoliberal think tank has whispered in a president’s ear in order to siphon as much money as possible from the American government and people. Reaganomics were a neoliberal’s deregulated, barely taxed, trickle-down wet dream (and are credited for the high inflation rates of the 1980s). It’s tragically relevant to note that Friedman’s influence helped Reagan bust up the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981 and deregulate the airlines.

This neoliberal tendency to privatize the public sphere and capitalize on crisis has only grown more common in the last 30 years with some of the most transparent moves made by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W Bush—the trio that auctioned off the American military to private contractors during the chaos-generating War on Terror that exported neoliberalism to Iraq. Rumsfeld’s neoliberal leanings were on full display when he announced the US military strategy for invading Iraq: shock and awe. In the democracy-free chaos of 9/11, Bush’s administration also made the “politically impossible…inevitable” with the Patriot Act. 

(Important to note that Milton Friedman and Rumsfeld were good buddies. In fact, Friedman advised Reagan to include Rumsfeld as his running mate during the 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan declined.)

But through Trump, neoliberals are making their biggest, most transparent power grab—and not just through executive orders. Considering Trump’s disproportionate representation in the Supreme Court, the MAGA-ruled majorities in the Senate and House, the Heritage Foundation has its hands on all three levers of the American government. 

This is the reality of the post-Citizens United v Federal Election Commission world—a supreme court ruling that allowed individuals and corporations to donate as much money as they want to political campaigns, This ruling gave neoliberalism another leg up and allowed them to purchase a significant amount of political will through campaign donations. (The Heritage Foundation’s response to the Citizens United v FEC decision is best summed up by an article posted on their website just after the ruling: “Money Has the Right to Talk.”)

Considering the Heritage Foundation’s open neoliberalism, its history with Friedman, and its authorship of the blueprint for Trump’s first 100 days, it’s pretty obvious that this deluge of cruel and chaotic executive orders are the opening salvo of shock doctrine. Trump—and the Heritage Foundation—are just waiting to usher in the neoliberal policies on the backs of that chaos, in those democracy-free zones Republicans hope to profit from. And the US doesn’t need legislated chaos. After decades of neoliberal policies, we are flush with chaos. We are already experiencing environmental disasters, domestic terrorism, and critical infrastructure failures on a regular basis.

Based on the catastrophic long-term effects of Milton Friedman’s policies and the bleak track record of what neoliberalism means for public welfare, we are in for a bumpy, scary ride.

This administration is determined to break the government into pieces, not so they can rebuild it or “make it great again.” Their plan is (and always has been) to sell each piece off to the highest bidder—a move intended to benefit the corporations they own or invest with. Why else was the inauguration stage full of the richest people on the planet, representing the largest corporate empires? And just like on inauguration day, when Trump’s “government transformation” is complete, regular American people—MAGA included—will be left out in the cold.

Again, naming the horrors of this past week doesn’t keep them from happening. But knowing that this administration is following the Milton Friedman playbook helps us anticipate its next moves. They will create chaos and then make sure that the “politically impossible” ideas they want to make “politically inevitable” are the closest, easiest ones to pick up. And if you want to see the ideas that the Trump administration has lying around, all you have to do is download and read the PDF of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

So as the deliberate chaos of this administration trickles (or pours) down on our own communities, we need to make sure that we have our own ideas lying around. Because here’s the good news about neoliberals: they can’t be everywhere all the time.

Neoliberal shock doctrine works best if we don’t anticipate it or are too stunned to have any ideas lying around in the aftermath. And while we might not be able to get our ideas into the oval office or keep Project 2025, Milton Friedman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al out of the federal government, we can minimize the effects of their greed and cruelty in our own communities.

The Achilles’ heel of neoliberalism is its relationships with community. Neoliberalists can build chaos and profits but they are complete dog-shit at building community. The fundamentals of neoliberalism depend on hyper-individuality, competition, extractivism and unlimited growth. But when we move in our immediate communities—when we build small systems of care with the people we see on a daily basis—those are not the fundamentals we value. We depend on cooperation and regenerative economic practices. And since our community interactions aren’t concerned with maximizing profits but instead aim to maximize well-being, they absolutely DO. NOT. COMPUTE. in the neoliberal mind.

If we want to keep this administration’s cruelty from trickling down into our communities, we need to protect and support the people caught in the crosshairs of the brutal culture war that got this administration elected in the first place. (The relationship between neoliberalism and conservatism/evangelical christianity is fascinating and super gross (I’m looking at you, Prosperity Gospel) but that is another essay entirely.) 

We need to get to know our neighbors and community members better and normalize leaning on one another. Start a group-text or email with your community and normalize offering and asking each other for help. Start a weekly community potluck and make bringing a dish optional. Combine forces to rotate providing childcare for each other. (You know, the things many churches used to offer communities before they became right-wing campaign centers or culture war fortresses.)

Neoliberalists aren’t just confused by the “unprofitability” of our small communities working toward collective well-being; they are also threatened by them. Neoliberalism seeks to privatize as many functions of government as possible, turning citizens into consumers, forcing us to participate in a deregulated market with few consumer protections. But robust and cooperative communities are able to bypass these markets more often. By normalizing leaning on each other, these communities are able to spread the cost of living (such a fucked up term) around. And that’s why the internet keeps telling you to “find your people” and “take care of one another” and “lean on community” during these cruel times.