Prática de Shadowing: The Liberalism to Fascism Pipeline (Neoliberalism Explained) - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo

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We got a lot of work to do.

Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken.

But all over the world, they're coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia.

And you know who's being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country?

The black population and the Hispanic population.

The crime is going to be tremendous.

The unions are suffering because of it.

They're poisoning the blood of our country.

That's what they've done.

You would think that at a time when economic stratification and marginalization are running rampant, a time where the rich grow richer at the expense of everyone else,

politicians would tailor their rhetoric to tackle the real issues at hand and not just stir division amongst races, genders, creeds, and religions,

but no. Why do figures like Donald Trump point the finger

at immigrants as though they are the reason for economic instability and not oligarchs?

Will he ever mention the fact that in 2022 alone,

undocumented migrants paid nearly $100 billion in tax revenue while being shut out of the very programs they helped fund?

Why is the blame for a failing economic model rarely placed on the model itself, but instead transferred to groups who are already having a hard enough time?

Why does this economic instability lead to divisive in-group-out-group rhetoric

and not toward a productive discussion about the innate instability of the economic model we live under?

I hope I can answer that question by the end of this video, but first, we have to go back in time just a bit.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Western governments and economists alike were scratching their heads trying to come up with economic reforms

that would prevent a calamity like the war they just endured from ever occurring again.

The Great Depression still lingered in the minds of many, with unregulated capitalism widely seen as its cause and an unstable economic model.

Western governments didn't want to scrap capitalism altogether, but they believed that by guaranteeing their populations basic dignities and social safety nets,

it would prevent them from entertaining alternative economic and political ideas.

Keep in mind, it was the disillusionment

and suffering of the German citizenry post-World War I that allowed for Hitler's rhetoric and ideas to flourish.

By preventing that level of economic instability from occurring again, Western governments believed that they could prevent fascism from gaining traction in the future.

They also wished to prevent socialist or communist sentiment from strengthening.

It's important to note that post-World War II, the socialist bloc was guaranteeing employment, healthcare and housing to its citizens.

If the capitalist West didn't try to appease its populations in a similar way, it feared that revolutionary leftist movements would flourish and,

in the eyes of many liberals, fascism and socialism are totally the same level of evil.

One for one.

And that brings us to this dude, John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes was an economist who stressed the demand side.

To put it very simply, he believed that when people have more money to spend, especially workers who make up most consumers, it drives demand, keeps businesses running,

and helps the economy stay healthy.

And when that doesn't happen naturally, he argued, the government should step in to boost spending and keep things moving.

Think of it as a kinder form of capitalism that Keynes was advocating for.

One designed to prevent catastrophes like the Great Depression and keep the economically downtrodden from revolting against their governments.

After the Second World War in the 40s and 50s, Keynesian economics began to rise to prominence.

Western governments embraced Keynes' ideas and enacted policies that built the foundation for what we now call social democracies.

They were done with unfettered capitalism and knew

that a mixed social democratic type model was the way to not only keep their populations happier, but keep both fascism and socialism at bay.

Because, again, those two things are totally morally equivalent.

One for one.

I have my issues with social democracy, we'll get into that later in this video, but one thing that's for certain is

that the social democratic model was an improvement to the unregulated capitalist hellscape that preceded it.

As the Western world continued to embrace Keynesian economics and shift toward social democracies, there was a very notable man who was just not fucking with it.

This guy, Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek was an Austrian economist who believed that an overemphasis on collectivism would fast-track a society to totalitarianism.

He believed that social democracy and expansive welfare states would erode the individual and eventually morph into authoritarianism.

In 1944, Hayek published a book called The Road to Serfdom in which he made his argument,

and it did not take long before this book of his was picked up by business communities and wealthy,

powerful people who saw his ideas as a way to champion a reversal of the Keynesian era.

While Keynesian economics improved financial stability for the average person, the ultra-rich resented it because it limited their ability to maximize profits.

The business communities and the ultra-rich saw in Hayek's ideas a chance to reverse labor protections,

taxes, regulations, and usher the world back into an era where unfettered capitalism ruled supreme.

An era where they could grow their wealth exponentially without having to worry about who or what they exploited.

But convincing the world of an ideology that is objectively dogshit just

because it would be friendly to the rich and powerful wasn't easy.

This was going to take a lot of money and resources, so rich, moneyed interests immediately got to work promoting Hayek's book.

Dewitt Wallace, the anti-communist editor and founder of Reader's Digest, published a condensed version of Hayek's book in an attempt to make his ideas more digestible for casual readers.

A million reprints were ordered, many of which were at the requests of companies trying to indoctrinate their workers.

Look Magazine adapted Hayek's book into a cartoon which was distributed by General Motors to its workers,

and Hayek was being booked for well-paying speaking gigs in America so his ideas could be propagated further.

In 1947, Hayek went on to found the Mont Pelerin Society,

which was an organization where he and other like-minded individuals went on to promote his theories of free-market, deregulated capitalism.

The ideas propagated by Hayek and his organization have come to be referred to as neoliberalism,

and this doctrine of his was financially backed by some of the richest, most powerful interests on earth forces such as the Koch brothers,

William Volcker & Co., General Electric, DuPont, and many many more.

They saw in Hayek's neoliberalism a way to liberate themselves from the regulations and responsibilities that Keynesianism imposed on them.

Now neoliberalism as a term in the modern day tends to

be used mostly as a pejorative by people critical of the ideology, but it absolutely still is a real and pervasive parasitic force.

To define it can be tricky, but here are a few attempts that I think do a good job.

Historian David Harvey says, Neoliberalism is a theory of political-economic practices that proposes

that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms

and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

The state has to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets.

If markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, healthcare, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created, by state action if necessary.

But beyond these tasks, the state should not venture.

Deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision have been all too common.

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison define neoliberalism as, an ideology whose central belief is that competition is the defining feature of humankind.

It tells us that we are greedy and selfish, but that greed and selfishness light the path to social improvement, generating the wealth that will eventually enrich us all.

It casts us as consumers rather than citizens.

It seeks to persuade us that our well-being is best realized not through political choice, but through economic choice, specifically buying and selling.

It promises us that by buying and selling, we can discover a natural meritocratic hierarchy of winners and losers.

The market, it contends, will, if left to its own devices, determine who deserves to succeed and who does not.

The talented and hardworking will prevail, whereas the feckless, weak, and incompetent will fail.

The wealth the winners generate will trickle down to enrich the rest.

Neoliberals argue that an active state seeking to change social outcomes through public spending and social programs rewards failure, fuels dependency, and subsidizes the losers.

The role of governments, neoliberals claim, should be to eliminate the obstacles that prevent the discovery of the natural hierarchy.

But very simply, neoliberalism is the ideology that clears the way for unfettered capitalism to rule supreme.

As you can probably tell, this is the perfect ideology for the ultra-rich to get behind because not only does it frame financial success as purely meritocratic,

but it also paints monetary gain as some sort of moral accomplishment that the state should by no means interfere with, even if that gain is achieved through exploitation or injustice.

It treats the market as a wholly infallible force

that rewards the strong and worthy while while ignoring the fact that markets are indifferent to human suffering.

Since this market fundamentalism is a key component of the ideology, markets are often forced into sectors where they shouldn't be.

This ideology, in an almost Calvinist sense, allows for the rich and powerful to reframe their opulence and greed as moral and just.

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It allows corporate interests to ignore those pesky market externalities, to forget about the pollution and exploitation their operations create,

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because if the free market rewards them with riches, then they must be on the right path.

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No wonder the ruling class jumped at the opportunity to push Hayek's ideas.

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But again, they were faced with the obstacle of democracy.

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Neoliberalism, to most normal people, is not a very enticing ideology and they sure as shit wouldn't vote for it if they knew what it was.

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Despite the millions of dollars that went into promoting the ideas of Hayek and his cohort, Keynesian economics remained as the mainstream economic consensus.

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But that was soon to change.

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The neoliberals knew that it would be hard to implement their policies domestically without first testing them out abroad.

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And the country that they set their sights on was Chile.

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Throughout the Cold War, the US government was very involved in Chile.

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They did not want it to turn communist and they did everything they could to exert economic and political influence over it.

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The US even brought Chilean university students to America to study economics at the University of Chicago

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because it had a reputation for being anti-left.

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This operation came to be known as the Chile Project and, as author Naomi Klein put it, the goal of the Chile Project was to produce ideological warriors

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who would win the battle of ideas against Latin America's pink economists.

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As this battle was taking place on the ideological front, Chile, in 1970, had elected a socialist leader which was not going to fly with the Americans.

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The US spent millions of dollars and used every available resource to destabilize Chile and create the conditions for a coup.

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They wanted that pesky leftist out so they could replace him with someone else and test out neoliberalism.

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In 1973, that wish came true.

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Chile's Marxist president was overthrown and replaced by a military junta which eventually consolidated under the rule of Augusto Pinochet.

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Pinochet was a brutal dictator whose fascistic regime was marked by mass murder, torture, sexual violence, kidnappings, and the persecution of leftists.

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He rid the country of any socialist or Marxist influence, and in the eyes of the Americans, he was the perfect man to implement neoliberalism in Chile.

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Those same students who studied economics at the University of Chicago were now fully equipped to return home

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and put their lessons of mass privatization, deregulation, and market fundamentalism into practice.

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University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman played a key role in indoctrinating these young men, and he was also a prominent member of Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society.

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Remember that?

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As the years passed under Pinochet's brutal dictatorship, Chile's wealthy elite thrived, along with American corporations

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which were free to exploit Chilean resources without the threat of nationalization or government regulation.

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Pinochet allowed them to operate without restrictions, and if the Chilean population had a problem with that, he would kill or torture them into compliance.

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Nothing was to get in the way of the almighty invisible hand of the free market.

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Friedrich Hayek even had this to say about Pinochet's Chile.

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My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.

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Need I remind you, this fucking guy built his entire career by fear-mongering about how welfare programs were a slippery-sloped tyranny.

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But as As soon as he was faced with a tyrannical despot who just so happened to promote his economics,

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suddenly all that talk about freedom and liberty wasn't so convenient and he didn't mind a dictatorship all too much.

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As long as it was, quote, a liberal one.

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Unlike the corporatist blend of state and business seen in fascist regimes of old, such as Mussolini's Italy, Pinochet's regime maintained the hyper-militaristic,

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ultra-nationalist authoritarianism intrinsic to fascism, but repurposed the state to clear the way for corporate dominance

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model has laid the groundwork for what some have referred to as neoliberal fascism.

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Which brings me to one of the main points of this video.

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Free market economics and fascistic regimes are not mutually exclusive.

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As we can see, fascistic despots like Pinochet were propped up solely to protect capital,

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exploit labor, and enforce what Hayek would call liberalism.

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By that point, Hayek had distanced himself from the term neoliberalism due to its negative connotations

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and just went with liberalism or classical liberalism.

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So now that the Chile project was complete and neoliberalism was proven to treat the ruling class quite well,

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it was time to bring it home to the West in the forms of Reaganism in the US

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and Thatcherism in the UK.

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I should note that neoliberal policies did technically start up under Carter, which is why some people say Reaganism came before Reagan,

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but it wasn't until Ronald came around that the full ferocity of neoliberalism would be unleashed in the US.

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I think we all know what Reaganism is, the heavy emphasis on supply-side economics, mass privatizations, deregulations, attacks on labor protections,

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and the whole neoliberal nine yards.

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A similar set of policies was enacted in Britain, under Thatcher, when she privatized the railways and other public utilities,

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implemented the poll tax, sold off public housing to private interests, privatized the prison system, and so on.

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These economic reforms, by prioritizing the business communities and the rich, we were told, would deliver a tide that would lift all boats,

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but in reality, to quote David Harvey, neither Britain nor the US achieved high levels of economic performance in the 80s,

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suggesting that neoliberalism was not the answer to the capitalists' prayers.

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To be sure, inflation was brought down and interest rates fell, but this was all purchased at the expense of high rates of unemployment, averaging 7.5% in the US during the Reagan years,

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and more than 10% in Thatcher's Britain.

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Cutbacks in state welfare and infrastructural expenditures diminished the quality of life for many.

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The overall result was an awkward mix of low growth and increasing income inequality.

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But none of that actually mattered

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because the real goal in both instances was to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

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The relentless privatizations and the creation of markets any and everywhere did the trick.

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One aspect of this neoliberal transformation

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that often gets ignored is the think tanks funded by dark money

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that actually come up with these policies that then get handed to governments.

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To quote Monbiot and Hutchison, we've discovered that the Koch brothers, two of the richest people in human history,

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developed an entire network of think tanks to lobby for extreme neoliberalism.

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In Reagan's case, the Mandate for Leadership was a 3,000-page document written by the Heritage Foundation, the same force behind today's Project 2025,

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that was given to Reagan and entailed thousands of policy prescriptions that ranged from mass privatizations, the the scaling back of welfare programs, massive tax cuts for the rich, and so on.

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We begin to see how this ideology, heavily funded by the ultra-rich, serves the ultra-rich without any concern for democracy.

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The more governments deregulate, privatize, and implement neoliberal policies, the richer the ruling class becomes and the more they can exert their influence over politicians and governments.

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In capitalist democracies, money serves as voting power.

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The more of it you have, the more of the vote share you effectively control.

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Neoliberalism seeks to break the chains that restrict unfettered capitalism, and as a result it breeds plutocrats and oligarchs, not democracy.

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It's very easy to point the finger at Reagan and Thatcher, but the idea that it started and stopped with them distracts us from the fact

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that the same plutocratic forces behind their administrations, are still around today, and they don't just back conservatives or Republicans.

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Everyone is a neoliberal now.

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Some of the most grotesque displays of neoliberalism often come from Democrats, Canadian liberals, UK Labour, and similar parties.

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From Bill Clinton's repeal of FDR's Glass-DeGaulle Act, legislation designed to regulate the financial sector,

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the revocation of which played a role in the 2008 financial crash, to Tony Blair taking a neoliberal hatchet to the UK's beloved National Health Service,

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these displays of neoliberalism should not go unmentioned.

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And this brings me back to the question I asked at the start of this video.

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Why is it that instead of blaming the neoliberals running our failing economic system, the blame always gets dumped on marginalized groups?

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And the answer is simple.

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Because when we're conditioned to believe that hard work guarantees success, that the so-called winners and overachievers will naturally rise and reap the rewards,

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it's a lot easier to scapegoat and outgroup when that promise falls apart than to question the system itself.

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It's reassuring to believe that all we need to do to live a fruitful life is work hard.

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But those who were told to work hard did work hard, and often times found the results underwhelming.

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This creates an opening for fascistic, divisive rhetoric and strong men to rise to power.

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We saw this with Trump, who blamed everything on immigrants and the swamp, but once he was in office, he did nothing but serve the same corporate interests.

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He slashed taxes for the wealthy, he boasts a horrendous anti-labor record, and, on his last day of his first presidential term,

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he rescinded Executive Order 13770, lifting restrictions that had made it more difficult for government officials to transition between public office and the private sector,

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particularly in terms of lobbying.

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After all that talk about draining the swamp, we were left with an even more corrupt corporate Schill who used populist rhetoric to stoke hatred

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and distract us from the real enemy, neoliberalism.

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If you think this video is going to end with me calling for a return to Keynesian economics

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or a push towards social democracy, then you would be mistaken.

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Social democracy would undoubtedly improve the lives of many people living within it, but it does not adequately address the underlying issue.

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It's still capitalism, and therefore it is still animated by the profit motive and not human well-being.

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If we look back at the era where Keynesian economics ruled supreme, say in the US for instance, yes, the quality of life domestically was better.

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However, it's very easy to forget the fact that, that way of life was paid for with the blood and sweat of the developing world.

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Capitalism, fundamentally, is a system founded on colonial looting and the transformation of natural resources into private property.

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As President Eisenhower was blessing his population with a 91% top marginal tax rate and a 52% corporate tax rate.

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His administration was overthrowing democratically elected leaders in Guatemala,

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Iran, and more, just to turn those countries into outposts where American interests could siphon away the wealth

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and exploit the labor and resources.

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So yes, although he was taxing the rich domestically and funding social programs, we often forget about all the exploitation abroad that Keynesianism,

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or social democracies, not only fail to address, but often times thrive off of.

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Social democracy is essentially a compromise.

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It occurs when a capitalist state, often through tripartite negotiations, brings labor and capital together to strike a deal while emphasizing social programs and safety nets.

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The issue with this is that capital is still the force with all the real political pull.

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If capitalists decide to claw back workers' gains because their margins are looking a little thin, the state will have to side with them or else risk things like capital strikes.

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In practice, social democracies are still beholden to private interests.

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We can see in some of the Nordic countries today this very phenomenon occurring.

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Sweden is clawing back a lot of its social democratic policies and spiking on the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality.

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So although social democracies are preferable to neoliberalism, and although I consider social democrats friends of mine, I think we can do a little better.

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Social democracy, at the end of the day, is still capitalism.

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The plunder of the third world will be and has been at the heart of the capitalist mode of production for centuries.

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All the neoliberal era did was bring some of that exploitation back home.

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When I talk about liberalism leading to fascism, it's not because I think all the ideas from liberal thinkers or the Enlightenment era are bad.

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I don't.

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Concepts like empiricism, anti-dogmatism, rationality, and freedom are great.

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However, the economic model that emerged from the Enlightenment era was capitalism, which I believe jeopardizes the very principles I just mentioned.

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Whether it takes the form of Keynesian liberalism, where the majority of the burden is placed on the developing world, or neoliberalism, where that suffering makes its way back home,

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the embrace of capitalism by liberals will lead to the demise of the very ideals of freedom

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and democracy they claim to uphold.

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We've seen this in Pinochet's Chile, where the interests of capital were protected by violence.

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We've seen it during the Reagan-Thatcher era, where the will-of-moneyed interests began to brazenly take priority over the will of the majority.

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It's not what a healthy democracy is supposed to look like.

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Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição

Este vídeo tem 230 frases e 3882 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 21:51. O falante fala em ritmo natural, cerca de 178 palavras por minuto, próximo de uma conversa do dia a dia. Apenas 77% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês, por isso o vocabulário é exigente.

Vocabulário principal deste vídeo

15 palavras do vídeo que vale a pena aprender, com pronúncia e significado:

Palavra	Pronúncia	Significado
capitalism substantivo	/ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/	capitalismo
economics substantivo	/ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/	economia
ideology substantivo	/aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/	ideologia
liberalism substantivo	/ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/	liberalismo
capitalist substantivo	/ˈkæp.ɪ.tə.lɪst/	capitalista
occur verbo	/əˈkɜː/	ocorrer, acontecer
welfare substantivo	/ˈwɛlˌfɛɚ/	bem-estar
reward substantivo	/ɹɪˈwɔɹd/	recompensa
regime substantivo	/ɹəˈʒiːm/	regime, regimento
socialist substantivo	/ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/	socialista
implement verbo	/ˈɪmpləmənt/	implementar
economist substantivo	/iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/	economista
exploitation substantivo	/ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃn̩/	exploração
instability substantivo	/ɪnstəˈbɪlɪti/	instabilidade
communist substantivo	/ˈkɑ.mjə.nɪst/	comunista, marxista

Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir

Palavra	Pronúncia	Significado
come up with verbo		pensar (em), alcançar
come around verbo	/kʌ.məˈɹaʊnd/	mudar de ideia
fall apart verbo		cair aos pedaços
make up verbo	/ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/	compensar
pick up verbo		pegar

Pronúncia para ficar de olho

O falante usa 19 contrações e formas reduzidas, como didn't, wasn't, we've. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.

Os sons de “th”: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, thin /ˈθɪn/, worthy /ˈwɝ.ði/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/
Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: regime /ɹəˈʒiːm/, socialist /ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/, exploitation /ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃn̩/, dictatorship /ˈdɪkteɪtəɹʃɪp/, transformation /ˌtɹæns.fɔɹˈmeɪ.ʃən/
Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: capitalism /ˈkæp.ə.təlˌɪzm̩/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, ideology /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, liberalism /ˈlɪ.b(ə.)ɹə.lɪz.əm/, capitalist /ˈkæp.ɪ.tə.lɪst/

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Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como capitalism, economics, ideology.

Gramática neste vídeo

As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:

Estrutura	No vídeo
Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz	being squeezed · being hurt · being shut
Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora	they've done · have come · have been
Orações relativas who / which + oração — informação extra sobre uma pessoa ou coisa	man who was · people who saw · cartoon which was

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