John Quiggin writes about how neoliberalism as a term is used almost exclusively by opponents of it and not by its supporters, as are the various synonyms for it. In the process of offering an explenation for this he makes a point that explains a lot of how the news is structured.
From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense. Hence, politically dominant elites don’t see themselves as acting ideologically and react with hostility when ideological labels are pinned on them. Ideology is only useful for an insurgent group of outsiders, seeking a coherent basis for a claim to displace the existing elite.
Which may help explain why the core assumptions underlying government policy are so rarely questioned on the news. Individual policies may be challenged, details of implementation will certainly be challenged, but rarely will the ideology behind it be even discussed. In the UK budget discussions yesterday, how often did the option of saving money by scrapping the whole idea of private finance initiatives come up?
We live in a world where the majority of our political and economical elite believes in neoliberalism and where the few mainstream figures who attack it largely just want to put a more “human face” on it. To our elites, neoliberalism is common sense, the way the world works and you don’t need to justify it through ideological debates.