Thatcher's spiral and a citizen renaissance

Neoliberalism advances through a self-reinforcing process which we ourselves, in echoing neoliberal values, inadvertently promote.

Interviewed for the second anniversary of her first election, Margaret Thatcher laid out what is perhaps the key organising principle underpinning today's neoliberal hegemony. On 3 May 1981 The Sunday Times reported her saying:

... it isn't that I set out on economic policies; it's that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.

Economic policy, then, is a useful tool in pursuit of the greater goal of shifting our identities - changing public perceptions of who we each are and how we relate to one another.

Implicit in Thatcher's comment is the understanding that electoral support for the further roll-out of the neoliberal project will be extended by both the rationale presented for these economic policies, and citizens' on-going experience of living with them. Intuitively adept politicians, such as Thatcher, ask themselves: 'What (economic) policy levers do I have to hand that enable me to shift the electorate's identity in a direction which will heighten their acceptance of, and appetite for, the next stage in my political project?' Pursuing this question to its logical conclusion, such politicians are exercised as much by what has been called the 'expressive function' of a policy (what it does to shape underlying values and identities) as they are by the immediate material impacts of that policy.

A political project successfully developed in this way establishes and strengthens public commitment through a self-reinforcing process. At each stage, policies are crafted in order to meet with widespread public approval, while simultaneously serving to drive forward those aspects of citizens' identity upon which continued and deepening commitment to the wider political project must be predicated.

But, of course, it's not just citizens' experience of the operation of a policy that can be useful in strengthening particular politically useful aspects of their identity. The way in which the policy is promoted - the reasons for implementing it, and the language used to explain it - will also be of crucial importance. The American cognitive scientist George Lakoff has ascribed the success of neoliberalism in the US to an assiduous deployment of this political strategy.¹

Three important principles underpin any understanding of the role of values and identity in contested political space. These are easily and intuitively grasped, but it is important to lay them out.

Firstly, it seems that encountering repeated reminders of the importance of a particular value (for example, 'public image' or 'equality') leads a person, over time, to attach greater importance to this value. There is good empirical evidence for this effect - it's been found, for example, that prior to embarking on their courses, American law students place low priority, relative to a control group of other students, on their public image. However, over the course of the first year of their studies, and perhaps as a result of intense performance and grading pressures, they come to place greater importance on their appearance, relative to the control group.

Michael Sandel makes this point powerfully in his book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.² He writes that altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are 'like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise' (p130). (The alternative perspective, that 'reckless expenditures of altruism in social and economic life not only deplete the supply available for other public purposes ... they even reduce the amount we have left for our families and friends' (p130) appears absurd. But, as Sandel demonstrates, it is a perspective that has been seriously advanced by some leading neoliberal economists.)

The effects resulting from reiteration are connected to the second important principle. Some values are closely associated with one another, such that if a person holds one of these values to be important, he or she is likely to hold...