Take Care How You Dip Your Snuff Tonight (Candid Camera)


A genuinely important—and surprisingly understudied—historical hinge. Let me lay out the correlation cleanly, because once you see the structure, the parallel rise of Likud and New York–style neoliberalism stops looking coincidental and starts looking like two expressions of the same deeper realignment.

1. The New York Turn (1975–1976): The First Fully Articulated Neoliberal State Regime - New York’s fiscal crisis produced the first operational neoliberal state in the world—years before Thatcher or Reagan.

Key legislative and institutional shifts (1975–76):

- Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB)  

- Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC)  

- Balanced‑budget requirements

- Wage freezes and union contract oversight

- Creditor primacy written into state law

- Shift from democratic budgeting to technocratic oversight

These measures subordinated democratic claims to bondholder confidence; established austerity as a permanent governance logic; created a template for later IMF/World Bank conditionality; normalized the idea that elected governments must yield to financial discipline.

This is the birth of neoliberal governance as a legal regime, not just an ideology.

2. Likud’s Ascendancy (1977): A Parallel Political Realignment - Likud’s 1977 victory—the Upheaval—was not merely a partisan shift. It was the moment when the labor‑socialist founding elite lost its monopoly; a market‑oriented, nationalist, anti‑establishment coalition took power; the Israeli state began moving toward privatization, deregulation, and financial liberalization (slowly at first, then rapidly in the 1980s–90s).

Likud’s rise is best understood as the political expression of the same structural forces that reshaped New York.

3. The Correlation: Both Events Are Expressions of the Same Global Realignment.

New York (1975–76) = the first neoliberal governance regime.

Likud (1977) = the first major political victory of the global New Right outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Both emerge from the same underlying pressures:

A. Collapse of the postwar economic order.

- stagflation  

- oil shocks  

- declining profitability  

- fiscal crises in social-democratic states  

B. Revolt of creditors and capital.

- bond markets disciplining governments  

- financial institutions demanding austerity  

- the rise of monetarist thinking  

C. Breakdown of the old social-democratic coalitions.

- working-class fragmentation  

- ethnic and regional resentments  

- loss of legitimacy of the old ruling parties  

D. Rise of new political blocs.

- ethnonationalist, populist, anti-elite, anti-bureaucratic  

- skeptical of unions and state planning  

- open to market reforms and privatization  

In Israel, this took the form of:

- Mizrahi voters rejecting Labor’s Ashkenazi establishment  

- skepticism toward socialist institutions  

- openness to a nationalist, market-friendly alternative  

In New York, it took the form of:

- the state overriding democratic budgeting  

- the end of the New Deal municipal order  

- the rise of technocratic austerity governance  

4. The Deep Structural Link.

The correlation is not chronological coincidence. It’s structural simultaneity.

New York 1975–76 = neoliberalism becomes a governing technique.

Israel 1977 = neoliberalism becomes a political coalition.

One is the administrative revolution, the other the electoral revolution.

Together they mark the moment when:

- the Keynesian/postwar order collapses  

- the New Right becomes viable  

- financial discipline replaces social-democratic planning  

- nationalist politics fuses with market logic  

5. Why this correlation matters.

Because it shows that neoliberalism did not begin with Thatcher or Reagan.  

It began with:

- New York’s fiscal restructuring (1975–76)

- Likud’s political realignment (1977)  

These are the first two major ruptures in the global shift from the postwar order to the neoliberal one.

They are not causally linked, but they are structurally synchronous—two fronts of the same global transformation.

If you want, I can go deeper into how the Volcker Shock (1979–82) completes the triad.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blueprint v. the Altar Call

Obama didn’t use the word deindustrialization as often as economists or critics did, but his administration’s stance is very clear in the record: he saw the long decline of U.S. manufacturing as a structural problem that needed active correction, not something to accept as inevitable.  In Obama’s view, deindustrialization was a threat to middle‑class stability. Obama consistently treated the erosion of manufacturing capacity as a danger to economic resilience and to the social fabric. His policy documents describe the loss of industrial jobs as something the federal government should reverse, not merely cushion. His “Blueprint to Support U.S. Manufacturing Jobs” explicitly framed offshoring as a harmful trend and proposed tax changes to discourage it. He regarded offshoring as a policy failure, not a natural market outcome.  Full marks, Mr. President!   His administration argued that the tax code rewarded firms for moving production overseas and needed to be rewritte...
Read more

MY HUMBLE CONTRIBUTION TO COGNITIVE FATIGUE (OR, CONATIVE PSYCHOLOGY WRONGLY VESTED)

Image
Conative psychology is the lesser-known sibling of cognitive, affective, and behavioral psychology — but it plays a crucial role in understanding human motivation and volition. While cognitive psychology focuses on thinking and reasoning, and affective psychology deals with emotions, conative psychology is all about doing — our drive, willpower, and purposeful action. The term “conation” comes from the Latin 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘪, meaning “to try” or “to endeavor.” It refers to the mental faculty involved in goal-directed behavior: how we initiate, persist in, and regulate actions based on our desires and intentions. In other words, conation is what bridges the gap between knowing and doing. Here are a few key aspects of conative psychology: - Volition and agency: It explores how people make choices and commit to them, even in the face of obstacles. - Motivated behavior: It examines the internal forces that push us to act beyond just instinct or emotion. - Self-regulation: It includes how we ma...
Read more

So You Want Your Minsky Euphoria Back? I Won't Have It Back

Image
Michael Hudson’s great answer to a journalist's question about the nature of financial capitalism: Speculative gains are financial in character. They are deliberately created by using revenue to increase asset prices, not to expand the business. I am reminded of Sun Tzu's The Art of War: "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Yet most of what the West reports as GDP consists of financial wealth, along with real estate and monopolies. Their gains are not earned by productively employing labor, but in ways that slow investment in the means of production to make short-term hit-and-run gains. Say what you will about how Eurocentric Condorcet's chronology of human progress is, the West indeed took off and ran really really fast. The Abo mother crooning over her infanticide can't compare to a penicillin shot. As for all those babies put in jars and abandoned on the Acropolis hill, Athens' democratically sanctioned imperialism must bear the blame....
Read more