SPONSORED: This article is part of a series that seeks to elevate and define a progressive vision of “the good life,” developed by the Roosevelt Institute in collaboration with The American Prospect. You can read the whole series here.
“Somebody told a lie one day.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
Neoliberalism was marketed as an elegant solution to all our problems. It was a license for people, across class, to opt in to a new mode of overindulgent, financialized capitalism. It offered a vision of the good life: The rich could get richer, the middle class could achieve a version of the American dream, and the poor were promised personal pathways to freedom. As it turned out, the poor got the system balanced on their backs, and some tokens for their troubles and struggles.
After 40 years of neoliberal hegemony, political buy-in to the ideology has shifted. Instead of living by the once-popular saying that “there is no alternative,” the state of play is now more evidenced by Joe Biden’s remark in his first State of the Union address that “trickle-down economics has never worked.” The rich did, indeed, get richer through the systemic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. The trickle-down economics that was supposed to quench everyone’s thirst turned into a drought by the time it got to the rest of us.
It turns out that privatizing public goods, ceding to the profit motives of shareholders, and outsourcing our industrial base through free trade not only failed to result in a good life for the overwhelming majority of people, but, on the contrary, came with a hefty cost that has come to permeate just about every dimension of our lives, for people of all backgrounds. Today, we’re seeing unprecedented levels of both loneliness and alienation, which has led to a public-health crisis that even the surgeon general was compelled to acknowledge.
This crisis of connection is also the by-product of 40 years of neoliberalism that hasn’t led to its promises of shared prosperity.
We were sold magic beans that weren’t magical at all. If we went to school, worked hard, and pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, we were promised the American dream: a house, a car, 2.5 children, and a happy retirement. What we received were wages that didn’t keep pace with inflation, crippling student debt, skyrocketing housing costs, and jobs that keep us away from the people and activities we love most.
We weren’t working to live; we were living to work.
Because of these failures, there’s a political vacuum begging to be filled. People are looking for meaning. The faction that successfully makes sense of the mess we’re in will win the ultimate prizes of hearts and minds and governing power.
Right-wing authoritarians have a simple message for how we got here: Big government and its allied elites rigged the game and stole from you. Those eggheads in academia, the scientists, the bureaucrats, the out-of-touch limousine liberals, and more recently, the woke corporations. These elites stole from you and gave everything to which you’re entitled to the lazy, the undeserving, the “other.” To those people on welfare. To people of color, if you’re white. To women, if you’re a man. To trans folks, if you’re cisgender.
Make no mistake, there will be change—the direction of that change is up to us.
The message is that the “other” should be derided, feared. The other should be eliminated, by you, one of the good guys, one of the eliminators. And once we eliminate the others, we can regain our sense of dignity, our sense of security, and we’ll prosper together. That will get us to the good life. Because even if some folks are near the bottom, pitting them against somebody even lower creates a psychic benefit that cannot be underestimated where there’s material lack. In a sense, that division fills in the psychic space where wages and benefits should be. The right knows this, and it knows it well.
At the opposite end, defenders of neoliberalism continue to say, don’t believe your eyes and ears, everything is fine. Continue pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, focusing on yourself, and working hard—this is how you find happiness and fulfillment. This is how we get to the good life. Continue to trust us with power so we can manage our society roughly as it has been. Maybe we’ll float you a couple extra dollars or a scholarship program. Neoliberals will often talk about lofty ideals like democracy and “being in this together.”
But people can’t eat bromides about democracy. I can’t pay my mortgage or my light bill with appeals to protecting institutions. Worse, there’s an extra slap in the face when we’re told we live in the greatest country in the world, while our lives are anything but.
Again, we find the authoritarians ready and willing to step into this void, while neoliberals insist on telling us everything is OK. Authoritarians say, “Give us power and we’ll protect you.” The neoliberals are saying, “Give us one more chance and we’ll protect, maybe even slightly improve, the existing system and status quo.”
So what are we, the organizers who believe the radical idea that working people should govern, to do?
What we must do is tell a compelling story of our own. The benefit we have is that, as opposed to the right’s narrative, it’s a true story, and unlike the right’s vision of utopia, ours has the potential to be far more compelling, because it’s inclusive, equitable, just, and morally superior.
And it starts with an acknowledgment.
We say, look around: We know that you feel a sense of loss you can’t completely describe. From the climate, to the economy, to public safety. Believe your eyes and ears; something is wrong. For generations, we were told people who were smarter, more talented, and richer would take care of us. And what happened when those alleged elites took the wheel? They drove us into a ditch. Every time. Economic crises, environmental crises, a gun violence epidemic. The list goes on.
We see one corporate collapse after another, where the titans of industry are building their businesses on a bed of lies. We were told to work 40 hours a week, keep our heads down, and look to them for answers.
But what if instead of looking up, we look across at each other for answers?
What if, even despite some of our differences and disagreements, we had a shared understanding that, at a baseline, every job should pay a living wage, every child should go to a great school, and everyone deserves access to quality health care?
When people come together across differences, we’ve seen magic happen. In 2023, we saw unprecedented labor organizing that ushered in a new era of better wages and working conditions for autoworkers, Hollywood writers, UPS drivers, and more. As I write this, there are dozens of other organizing efforts across the country.
What happens if we keep looking across? We organize and surface the community leaders of today who become the elected leaders of tomorrow. So after we dream up our agenda for working people, we aren’t appealing to the fascists that want to kill us or to the neoliberals that are only willing to give us crumbs. We’re asking an elected official who already acknowledges our humanity and doesn’t have to be convinced we deserve more.
I’m talking about an agenda that is our generation’s Marshall Plan or New Deal. Historic investments in working people that fundamentally change our lives. We saw the Child Tax Credit lift children out of poverty, even if temporarily. We’ve seen record investments to fight climate change. We’ve seen billions of dollars in student loans canceled. What if we kept dreaming and organizing? What else could we come up with?
Make no mistake, there will be change—the direction of that change is up to us. If we become the subjects of our destiny, we can seize governing power for working people. Our job is to give our people a story they can rally around. A narrative that says we can have control of our communities without oppressing others, and that we can all eat without fighting for crumbs.
And when we seize governing power, we can invest in our people so that everyone, regardless of their ZIP code, can do more than survive. They can thrive, make meaning in these crazy times, and get the dignity they deserved all along.
