Of course, different variations of this idea were advanced by opposing sides. Through much of the 1960s, the activist left and the liberal center aimed to use the welfare state to extend this family wage to people previously excluded from it, namely African-American male heads of household. Though many Republicans hoped to eliminate welfare programs that they judged to be too generous, the right more or less conceded that “we are all Keynesians now.” The Fordist family wage, Cooper reveals, united everyone from the anti-poverty activist Frances Fox Piven to the New Deal liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the moderate Republican Richard Nixon. Even Milton Friedman — whom Cooper describes during this period as a “pragmatist” willing to compromise with the left and center — was on board with the idea of a moderate welfare state that extended benefits to more and more male-led families. [...]
Cooper believes this project was inseparable from that of contemporary social conservatives, starting with the former liberals — like Moynihan, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Bell — who came out as neoconservatives in response to the New Left. The neoconservatives, she argues, were firm believers in the Fordist family wage, and found those elements of 1960s radicalism that challenged accepted notions of family and sexuality deeply threatening. In reacting against the counterculture, the neoconservatives provided a convenient explanation for the excessive welfare spending and inflation highlighted by neoliberals. Not only did the counterculture encourage “hedonistic” spending beyond one’s means, as Bell suggested in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but neoconservatives also made the case that, under the influence of the radical left, the welfare state was actively causing the breakdown of the American family by distributing funds to people who did not conform to traditional norms (or who challenged dominant racial hierarchies). More than two decades before Bill Clinton’s reforms, for example, Moynihan warned that single black mothers were becoming the “aristocracy of welfare recipients.” [...]
This sort of moral logic, Cooper argues, has become a fixture not only of health care, but of American policy thinking in general. Family Values demonstrates in exhaustive detail how conservative normativity pervades the neoliberal approach to education, housing, prisons, religion, and practically every other area of our sociopolitical landscape. Though many supporters of neoliberalism over the years have claimed to be indifferent to matters of family, morality, and sexuality — indeed, today’s libertarians of the Ron Paul variety consider themselves radically open-minded on questions of individual behavior — Cooper shows that this misses the point. Neoliberalism could never be a movement of pure deregulation, whether in economics or in morality. Just as the privatization of the economy requires the political power of the state, the privatization of society more broadly requires the enforcement of a certain moral order. And so, Cooper writes, “neoliberals must ultimately delegate power to social conservatives in order to realize their vision of a naturally equilibrating free-market order and a spontaneously self-sufficient family.” [...]
Cooper’s analysis in Family Values suggests that it is a mistake to regard today’s right-wing resurgence as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Just as the “family values” conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s worked hand-in-hand with neoliberalism to construct the Reagan-era economic order, today’s return to the values of white American identity — also a defense traditional sexual norms — has again and again proven its willingness to assist in the entrenchment of unequal economic structures. Today, Bannon and many others on the alt-right profess their aversion to neoliberal capitalism, just as neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol once claimed to be the opponents of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Cooper makes a well-documented case that now, as then, they are not to be believed.
