Shock tactics were first deployed in the service of neoliberalism in the early 1970s, in Latin America, and they are still being used today to extract “free-market” concessions against the popular will.
We’ve seen it happen recently, before Trump, in US cities including Detroit and Flint, where looming municipal bankruptcy became the pretext for dissolving local democracy and appointing “emergency managers.” It is unfolding in Puerto Rico, where the ongoing debt crisis has been used to install the unaccountable “Financial Oversight and Management Board,” an enforcement mechanism for harsh austerity measures, including cuts to pensions and waves of school closures. It is being deployed in Brazil, where the highly questionable impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was followed by the installation of an unelected, zealously pro-business regime that has frozen public spending for the next twenty years, imposed punishing austerity, and begun selling off airports, power stations, and other public assets in a frenzy of privatization.
And it is happening in blatant form under the presidency of Donald Trump. On the campaign trail, he did not tell his adoring crowds that he would cut funds for meals-on-wheels, a vital source of nutrition for the elderly and disabled, or admit that he was going to try to take health insurance away from millions of Americans. He said the very opposite, as on so many other issues.
Since taking office, he’s never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up. The outrages come so fast and furious that many are understandably struggling to find their footing. Experiencing Trump’s tsunami of Oval Office decrees—seven executive orders in his first eleven full days, plus eleven presidential memoranda issued in that same period—has felt a little like standing in front of one of those tennis ball machines. Opponents might swat back a ball or two, but we’re all still getting hit in the face over and over again. Even the widespread belief among many (or is it hope?) that Trump will not last his full term contributes to the collective vertigo: nothing about the current situation is stable or static, which is a very difficult position from which to strategize or organize.
Democracy, Suspended until Further Notice
The last half century shows how deliberately—and effectively—the shock doctrine strategy has been deployed by governments to overcome democratic resistance to profoundly damaging policies. And some kind of democracy-avoidance strategy is needed, because many neoliberal policies are so unpopular that people reliably reject them both at the polls and in the streets. With good reason: as the tremendous hoarding (and hiding) of vast sums of wealth by a small and unaccountable global class of virtual oligarchs makes clear, those who benefit most from these radical social restructurings are a small minority, while the majority see their standard of living stagnate or slip, even in periods of rapid economic growth. Which is why, for those who are determined to push through these policies, majority rule and democratic freedoms aren’t a friend—they are a hindrance and a threat.
Not every neoliberal policy is unpopular, of course. People do like tax cuts (for the middle class and working poor, if not for the super-rich), as well as the idea of cutting “red tape” (at least in theory). But they also, on the whole, like their taxes to pay for state-funded health care, clean water, good public schools, safe workplaces, pensions, and other programs to care for the elderly and disadvantaged. Politicians planning to slash these kinds of essential protections and services, or to privatize them, are rightly wary of putting those plans at the center of their electoral platforms. Far more common is for neoliberal politicians to campaign on promises of cutting taxes and government waste while protecting essential services, and then, under cover of some sort of crisis (real or exaggerated), claim, with apparent reluctance and wringing of hands, that, sorry, we have no choice but to go after your health care.
Doing It Fast and All at Once
The bottom line is that hard-core free marketers or “libertarians” (as the billionaire Koch brothers describe themselves) are attracted to moments of cataclysm because non-apocalyptic reality is actually inhospitable to their antidemocratic ambitions.
Speed is of the essence in all this, since periods of shock are temporary by nature. Like Bremer, shock-drunk leaders and their funders usually try to follow Machiavelli’s advice in The Prince: “For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.” The logic is straightforward enough: People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine. (Recall the description of Poland’s shock therapy as unfolding in “dog years.”)
The Shock Doctrine was controversial when it came out in 2007. I was challenging a rosy version of history that many of us have grown up with—the version which tells us that deregulated markets and democracy advanced together, hand in hand, over the second half of the twentieth century. The truth, it turns out, is much uglier. The extreme form of capitalism that has been remaking our world in this period—which Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has termed “market fundamentalism”—very often could advance only in contexts where democracy was suspended and people’s freedoms were sharply curtailed. In some cases, ferocious violence, including torture, was used to keep rebellious populations under control.
The late economist Milton Friedman called his most famous book Capitalism and Freedom, presenting human liberation and market liberation as flip sides of the same coin. And yet the first country to put Friedman’s ideas into practice in unadulterated form was not a democracy—it was Chile, in the immediate aftermath of the CIA-supported coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed a far-right dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.