Shock Doctrine

Jonathan Chait – no Bush-loving right-winger he – doesn’t at all like Naomi Klein’s popular Shock Doctrine . Her thesis is that Milton Friedman is the evil genius behind the history of global economics and politics in the last three decades. The idea is to disorient the public by “wars, coups, natural disasters, and the like,” in order to seize the opportunity to promote pro-corporate policies and extend free market dominance.

Chait criticizes Klein for low-level inaccuracies. She criticizes neoconservatism “but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is,” writing that neoconservatism emerged in the 1990s (not the 1960s) and that it was promoted by Heritage and Cato (neither of which is identifiably neoconservative).

Most damaging, Klein says the Iraq war is a “careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology.” Chait points out that “what she does not mention – not once, not anywhere, in her book – is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of ‘aggression.’” He did so because “he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism.” He concludes that “the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement.”