When I talk about elite consensus, I’m referring to a set of core economic and political beliefs broadly shared among the dominant political, business, and media classes, regardless of party, that shape the framework within which “serious” policy debates happen.
This consensus isn’t about every detail, it’s about the major underlying assumptions that guide how elites think about governance, the economy, and social order.
Some key features of this elite consensus include: a commitment to neoliberal economic policies such as free markets, deregulation, low taxes on capital, and trade liberalization. It includes acceptance of the global capitalist system, supporting globalization, financialization, and multinational corporations as the engines of growth. There is a prioritization of fiscal responsibility, with a strong focus on balanced budgets and debt management, often at the expense of expansive social programs.
Do you really not understand why this tripe is so insulting? It is so tiring when you chalk up every difference of opinion to some sort of corruption at the hands of a shadowy elite -- especially since you are provably wrong for the most part.
1. When I was young, I believed all that leftist political theory. Multinational corporations = bad. Free trade = bad. etc. So I decided to study the matter with an open mind, but an expectation that I would see all the flaws I'd been assured were there. My expectation was not remotely accurate. So I changed my views. Not because I sold out to an elite consensus or aligned myself with the dominant classes -- because that's the truth, as best I can see it.
Thing is: at least I had an excuse for my errant views. At the time, there was real penetration of the American market from East Asia mostly from Japan only. By mid to late 90s, the trade-led economies of East Asia more generally were humming. Meanwhile, the leftist economic policies in Latin American had more or less led to ruination. It should be shocking to think that Cambodia has the same level of economic development as every Central American country save Costa Rica. CAMBODIA! You don't have to hold a brief for Allende -- which I won't -- to note that Chile is now substantially richer than Argentina. While Argentina was busy trying to make all its products itself, Chile started exporting wine and fish to the world.
2. Nowhere in your world view is there any room for truth. I also used to be like that, sort of. I accepted the critiques of positivist epistemology and indeed I still have a soft spot for epistemic deconstructionists like the great philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. But also, at the time time, science works, right? We are having this conversation because someone invented the transistor, and the integrated circuit, and digital conversions and all the other stuff that makes the internet possible. All the while, there were leftists talking about how science just reflects the views of the dominant class, that the elite had fallen into techno-optimism (contrary to some of your claims, neither techno-optimism nor critiques of it are in any way new -- one need only read Galbraith or D. Bell to know that).
In other words: there was a clash of ideas. The anti-capitalist, anti-globalizing left versus the technocrats. It was not much of a contest, though. While the left was celebrating the great anti-hegemony of revolutionary regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America and Africa, the technocrats built the internet. And then the left saw that internet (this was before you were born) and imagined it as the greatest tool of democracy ever invented. There were countless homilies in the pages of the Nation and Dissent and other leftist sources about how the hegemony of the corporate media was about to be broken, that soon everyone would be able to make their voices heard and the authentic populist perspective would be finally revealed.
I kid you not. The left foresaw twitter and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I was horrified by the prospect. I guess this is when I became a "technocrat." I could not see the benefit of letting just anyone have a soap box. It seemed like epistemic suicide. And I used to have this conversation with leftists. I would cite the now-classic Onion article, "Nation Eagerly Awaits Address By Uneducated Forklift Driver on Limbaugh" and ask -- this times a million is what you want? Yes, came the response. Because, I was lectured, once the people can truly speak unfettered, the false prophets like Rush will be driven under.
I don't think we need to debate too much about who was right.
3. So it really pisses me off when people, with the benefit of all that history and natural experiments, return to the same critiques that were so thoroughly debunked. It pisses a lot of people off, which is why Bernie Sanders was such a problem. Bernie, like most leftists, has no theory of political disagreement. Everything is just corruption. If you think markets work better than state industries, you're sold out to the capitalist elites. Whether markets do in fact work better (they do!) is irrelevant because there's no space for intellectuality. As you yourself say, everything is class politics.
Class politics cannot explain the internet. Class politics cannot explain electric vehicles. It cannot explain the apparent conquering of the business cycle (the the last cyclical recession we've had was 2000, and that was mild).
4, So then the leftists come back with the greatest hits: the famine in Ethiopia caused by the IMF, the corruption and depravity of some world bank programs under McNamara, etc. I know all that. So do the economists who work at those institutions. While leftists languish in the shadow of past failures, the IMF and the World Bank were reformed. They don't do that naked Washington Consensus stuff any more (ironic since y'all have oriented your entire critique around an idea that is no longer all that relevant in practice).
It is exhausting, really. Before the advent of social media, which brought out the ZenModes and the right-wing know-nothings, the constant goalpost-moving, circular arguments, bad faith attacks and dubious empirical claims filled the pages of the Nation and nascent left-wing online media.
And the progressive law students? OMG. Kids who thought they were super-smart because they got As in their humanities courses at Cornell or Duke (even though the median GPAs in the humanities at those schools was like 3.8). Then they got to law school and they weren't superstars any more. Did they change their study habits? Get more serious? Open their mind? Nope. The professors were all neoliberals (that was the word at the time but the idea was more or less the same -- remember that the left both-sided in the 2000 election). It became something of a conspiracy.
In particular, there was one professor who was so much of a neoliberal optimist that no progressive student could ever get an A. It wasn't even worth trying, they said. Well, I got an A+ from that professor. Did that change their views? Of course not. Obviously what had happened was that I sold out.
5. It is just as difficult to talk with a committed leftist as a MAGA. There is the same commitment to truth (i.e. none), the same disparagement of experts, the same irrelevant bullshit used to deflect what can't be answered.
6. So after all this, after a lifetime of being told that I was a corrupt sellout to the corporate class because I followed the evidence (note: right-wingers were even more hostile, sensing accurately that I was still progressive in outlook but frustrated that I could speak economics better than they could (law and econ being a very conservative sub-field at the time), I have so little tolerance for the constant implication that mere deviation from the party line made me automatically suspect.
You guys really need a more nuanced theory of knowledge. There has to be a way to formulate your critique without sweeping in authentic knowledge and good faith inquiry. "Multi-national corporations" ain't it. Most people who use that phrase don't really know what a corporation is or does, let alone what it would mean to be "multinational" (this is a bogeyman which, as described in the pages of the Nation, exists nowhere).
There has to be a way to acknowledge that corporate power can be especially problematic in a post-industrial age AND to acknowledge that, without corporations, our economy would be stuck in the 19th century. If corporations had not been invented, we would not be having this conversation -- in part because the internet didn't exist, and in part because we'd both be due back in the factory for our second 9 hour shift following our 15 minutes for lunch. That's right. Corporations are necessary for us to be even having this conversation about how wicked corporate power can be. And I'm also tired of being accused of apology when I point out this unavoidable fact.
The real program for progressive political economy should be to untie that apparent paradox: how can the corporation, the locus of oppression, also be the institution by which billions escaped poverty. I mean, I think I remember a leftist or two who situated the resolution of such paradoxes, or contradictions if you will, at the very heart not only of social theory but of history. Alas, there's a different approach taken when the paradox du jour is more or less created by bad progressive theory.
