With the nation lurching from one crisis to the next, many Americans
believe that something fundamental has gone wrong. Why aren't college
graduates able to achieve financial security? Why is government
completely inept in the face of natural disasters? And why do pundits
tell us that the economy is strong even though the majority of
Americans can barely make ends meet? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa
Baradaran, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that the
system is in fact rigged toward the powerful, though it wasn't the
work of evil puppet masters behind the curtain. Rather, the rigging
was carried out by hundreds of (mostly) law-abiding lawyers, judges,
regulators, policy makers, and lobbyists. Adherents of a
market-centered doctrine called neoliberalism, these individuals,
over the course of decades, worked to transform the nation--and
succeeded.
They did so by
changing the law in unseen ways. Tracing this largely unknown history
from the late 1960s to the present, Baradaran demonstrates that far
from yielding fewer laws and regulations, neoliberalism has in fact
always meant more--and more complex--laws. Those laws have uniformly
benefited the wealthy. From the work of a young Alan Greenspan in
creating "Black Capitalism," to Supreme Court Justice Lewis
Powell's efforts to unshackle big money donors, to the establishment
of the "Law and Economics" approach to legal
interpretation--in which judges render opinions based on the
principles of right-wing economics--Baradaran narrates the key
moments in the slow-moving coup that was, and is, neoliberalism.
Shifting our focus away from presidents and national policy, she
tells the story of how this nation's?laws?came to favor the few
against the many, threatening the integrity of the market and the
state.
Some have claimed
that the neoliberal era is behind us. Baradaran shows that such
thinking is misguided. Neoliberalism is a failed economic idea--it
doesn't, in fact, create more wealth or more freedom. But it has been
successful nevertheless, by seizing the courts and enabling our age
of crypto fraud, financial instability, and accelerating inequality.
An original account of the forces that have brought us to this
dangerous moment in American history, The Quiet Coup reshapes
our understanding of the recent past and lights a path toward a
better future.
