There are few concepts that divide, befuddle, and antagonize scholars of American politics more than neoliberalism. The term is subject to interrogation in other subfields—theorists, comparativists, and students of international relations consider neoliberalism to be worthy of serious examination. In other domains of study, such as anthropology, sociology, geography, and urban studies, debates about neoliberalism as an ideology, epoch, or political project are common. Not so in American politics, where those of us who take neoliberalism seriously are few and far between. As Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, and Nic Theodore note in their 2010 article in Global Networks, neoliberalism is a “rascal concept.” In Democracy in Default, Brian Judge bravely puts his head above the parapet to offer an innovative account of the role of neoliberalism in shaping American politics and the American political economy.
Judge posits a novel argument about the relationships among liberalism, neoliberalism, and finance in the U.S. While many scholars have viewed neoliberalism as a sharp break with liberalism, especially in its New Deal and/or Great Society guise, Judge emphasizes important continuities between the centuries-old “liberal imperative of neutralizing distributive conflict” by diverting it from the political sphere to the seemingly apolitical economy (p. 7) and the more recent process of financialization, which “deploys neoliberalism” (p. 13) to resolve the new distributive conflicts that emerge in postwar America. Among the more recent conflicts that financialization defuses are the inflation (chapter two) and attendant tax revolts of the 1970s (chapter five), and the fallout from the global financial crisis circa 2007–8 (chapter 6). For Judge, “financialization was not the result of an ideological imposition but a nearly spontaneous political reaction to distributive crisis. Accordingly, financialization is not originally an ‘economic’ phenomenon that later infiltrates ‘politics,’ but a new chapter in the old story of liberal depoliticization” (p. 106). Thus, rather than thinking about the momentous shift toward financialization as a result of “neoliberalism by design,” Judge suggests that we should see financialization as a pragmatic response to crises, which in turn shapes neoliberalism.
Judge makes two especially useful contributions. The first is his multi-scalar approach. Whereas many studies of neoliberalism are located at the national or local levels, Judge offers insightful treatment of inflation at the national level; of the role of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) driving financialization and “shareholder value ideology” (p. 167) in the state of California; and of city-level neoliberalization using Stockton as a paradigmatic case (chapter four). At each of these scales, Judge sheds new light on the processes of financialization and neoliberalization and, crucially, highlights the connective material and ideational tissue that links these key developments at the national, state, and local levels. Second, Judge impressively breaches intra- and interdisciplinary boundaries, connecting political theory with political economy and drawing on a range of scholarly perspectives from geographers to political scientists to historians. In so doing, he offers a perspective that would have been too easily obscured by the usual disciplinary silos. Judge’s capacious method of inquiry clarifies how contemporary forms of neoliberalization are rooted in the effort to depoliticize the market, which is a fundamental tenet of classical liberalism.
Despite these notable strengths, some of the key planks of Democracy in Default rest on foundations that are compromised by Judge’s tendency to caricature arguments in the literature on neoliberalism. For instance, at the outset of the book, Judge presents his work as a challenge to the “conventional story” of the transformations in American political economy in the latter half of the twentieth century: “Neoliberalism, the common story goes, was enacted by design” (p. 3). As Judge explains, “From this perspective, neoliberalism is explained as an intentional policy paradigm serving the material interests of capital deployed to defuse rising labor militancy and reverse declining rates of profit” (p. 4). From here, Judge proceeds to examine the “major problems with this account” (p. 4), which include: that it “acquiesces to the neoliberal diagnosis” of the stagflation of the 1970s; that it “cannot explain the massively increased role and importance of finance” (p. 5) or the “seemingly limitless and totalizing reach of neoliberalism” (p. 5); that “neoliberalism by design misses the crucial role of democracy in supporting the neoliberal agenda” (p. 5); and that this perspective “struggles to explain” how neoliberalism survived despite its almost self-evident failure in light of the 2007–8 financial crisis.
While each of these claims can be readily contested, I will focus on two key concerns. The first is that most of those who work on neoliberalism, including those whom Judge cites, rarely limit their analysis to the “neoliberalism by design” mechanism, which in Judge’s rendering places neoliberal ideology and class interests as the exclusive drivers of neoliberal political development. Indeed, when I coined the term “neoliberalism by design,” it was explicitly intended to describe one of two crucial mechanisms of neoliberalization: neoliberalism by design and neoliberalism by default. I elaborated this account in a 2016 book, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom, and a 2018 article for Urban Affairs Review, “By Design or by Default: Varieties of Neoliberal Urban Development”—the latter of which Judge cites as the chief example of the “neoliberalism by design” perspective.
In one sense, Judge’s argument that the neoliberalism by design frame is insufficient to explain fully the transformation of the American political economy is convincing. He is correct to say that the adoption of certain policy prescriptions, such as privatization, was not part of the original neoliberal vision and that neoliberal techniques, like the deregulation initiated by President Carter, were promoted even by those who were not ideologically motivated by neoliberal ideology. The difficulty, however, is these shifts—while not envisaged by neoliberals at the outset—were nevertheless wholly consistent with neoliberal thinking and served neoliberal goals.
The second problem regarding Judge’s analysis of neoliberalism is his failure to acknowledge an alternative mechanism: neoliberalism by default. The key idea behind this formulation, seemingly in keeping with the spirit of Judge’s argument, is that often neoliberal policies and practices were adopted by political actors who did not subscribe to the neoliberal worldview but conceded, or were forced to concede, that they had little alternative but to do so, either due to their own ideological blinkers, the constraints of coalition building, or the strictures of institutions such as financial control boards. Openness to this more subtle form of neoliberalization would resolve several of the examples on which Judge’s account rests. The case of Stockton is instructive in this respect. As Judge details, the city’s embrace of tax increment financing, privatization, and pension obligation bonds left it severely exposed to the financial downturn following the great recession. As a result, it imposed austerity measures that cut city services to the bone. Moreover, he is right to note that at neither stage in the city’s neoliberalization were neoliberal ideologues in the driving seat. While Judge might credibly claim that Stockton’s neoliberalization stands at odds with neoliberalism by design, this would appear to be a classic case of neoliberalism by default. Judge’s failure to consider the default dimension of neoliberalism represents a missed opportunity and a surprise, given the book’s title. Had he been more open to the alternative already laid out in the literature, the apparent contradictions with which the book grappled might have been more easily resolved.
