March Toward Zero

Years ago, a dentist in the small Kansas town of Iola treated a girl brought in by her parents with a severe toothache. After briefly checking the parents’ health insurance, the dentist drilled the painful tooth a little, then filled it with Styrofoam. The Kansas dentist’s creative approach didn’t work. The girl later had to have her jaw amputated due to serious complications.

Such tragic stories of people at the social bottom in one of the world’s richest countries are not uncommon, but this one is especially harrowing—not only because high insurance costs prevented the girl from receiving a standard ceramic or porcelain filling, but also because of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s economic experiment. In 2012, the Republican governor introduced a tax reform under the slogan “the march toward zero.” Brownback drastically cut taxes for the wealthy, significantly reduced or eliminated corporate and small business profit taxes, slashed social transfers, restricted access to health insurance for the lowest earners (hence the Styrofoam filling), closed numerous schools and public agencies, and laid off 2,000 public employees.

The governor promised the reform would be an adrenaline shot for the economy, sparking investment and boosting employment. But it didn’t work out. In just a few years, Brownback turned a billion-dollar state budget surplus into a billion-dollar deficit. The expected growth in investment and jobs never materialized, and economic growth lagged significantly behind other U.S. states. To patch the budget hole, Brownback raided infrastructure funds, stopped highway repairs, and sharply raised sales taxes—hitting low-income people the hardest, who ended up paying more tax than before the reform.

The Kansas experiment is one of the clearest examples of how destructive attempts to implement the neoliberal “trickle-down” dogma can be in practice—but it’s not the first such case. Three decades earlier, Britain’s “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher launched a neoliberal revolution as soon as she took office. She urged Britons to “find glory in inequality” and, in the name of this “value,” waged and won a war against powerful trade unions, privatized much of the state’s assets, and announced radical tax cuts.

Paradoxically, Thatcherism still serves as a model for many—also in Slovenia—of how governments should manage the relationship between capital and society: everything for the former, because, after all, “there is no such thing as society.” Paradoxical because Thatcherism also failed—both for the people and by the goals it promised. Historian Mark Mazower, in his book Dark Continent, notes that before Thatcher took power, public spending accounted for 42.5% of the UK’s GDP. After ten years, it had dropped by just 0.7%.

Spending levels barely changed—which marks a key difference from Brownback’s Kansas experiment, which went even further. Thatcherism used the money it “earned and saved” by privatizing state assets to fund welfare for the massive numbers of unemployed it created. According to Mazower, Thatcherism ultimately “failed” in part because even the Iron Lady didn’t dare significantly cut spending on health and education. The British were too attached to their public healthcare system and were unwilling to accept Styrofoam fillings.

And it’s this “failure” of Thatcherism that explains why her neoliberal fiasco still enjoys a better reputation than it deserves. Because Thatcher didn’t go all the way, she caused less harm than she might have. But neoliberal experiments lost the support of key parts of Britain’s business sector. The financial markets’ reaction to yet another neoliberal revolution—this time by Thatcher’s very short-lived successor Liz Truss—made it clear that post-Brexit Britain was not willing to risk another ideological project of neoliberal experimentation.

If anything, Margaret Thatcher fulfilled her promise to “celebrate inequality.” By the 1990s, the United Kingdom had become the most socially unequal society in Western Europe, with fourteen million citizens—nearly a third of them children—living in poverty. Her drastic cuts to housing investment caused an explosion in homelessness that continues to this day. Mazower notes that Britain’s neoliberal revolution found no imitators in the rest of Western Europe. Why? In his view, historical memory: even conservative politicians on the continent, like Helmut Kohl, still remembered the consequences of ideological battles and political violence from the 1930s—and were unwilling to risk a repeat.

To be fair, Dark Continent was published in 1998, and later events showed that the rest of Western Europe’s historical memory wasn’t strong enough to prevent it from slowly following Britain’s path.

The situation in Eastern Europe is even more complex. Mazower argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall marked not the triumph of democracy, but of capitalism. Democracy still had to be built, based on a new social contract—like the one the West forged after the bloodshed of WWII. But in Eastern Europe, the historical memory of the 1930s was replaced by a fresher, painful memory of authoritarian socialism. Understandable, perhaps, from a human perspective—but hardly ideal for building liberal democracy, which depends on social justice and solidarity.

In other words, Eastern Europe jumped from socialist authoritarianism into the most ruthless neoliberal capitalism, without the legal and institutional safeguards to prevent abuse, theft, corruption, and other social pathologies. In rejecting their immediate past, neoliberalism was fetishized as the ultimate form of freedom. Any effort to establish social justice or solidarity was condemned as a return to authoritarianism. Under such conditions, building a functioning liberal democracy is not only difficult—it may be impossible. What emerges instead is a society increasingly defined by selfishness, dysfunction, polarization, and political manipulation through hate—echoing the darkest periods in modern history.

The fact remains that neoliberalism not only doesn’t work—it causes harm. Thatcher, Brownback, and others have proven this. In the end, it’s ordinary people who suffer. This is why we now see a cultural war that, as in the 1930s, dominates social life—not just in the East, but in the West too, including in Slovenia.

Neoliberalism needs and fuels a culture war—against feminism, migrants, the LGBTI community, and other scapegoats—because it distracts from the consequences of its own policies, while leveraging public discontent to strengthen the political power of those willing to serve it. These actors are ready to sacrifice civil liberties, human rights, social peace, and stability for their own interests. This is the reality represented in the U.S. by Trump, DeSantis, and their Republican allies, and in Europe by a far right that is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Kansas showed how neoliberalism—even in its most visibly dysfunctional and destructive form—still empowers the far right through cultural war. Just two years after Brownback’s failed experiment ended, Kansas voted majority Republican for Trump in 2016. But the story can turn out differently: in the UK, conservatives are in serious trouble, and in Spain, the mainstream right’s flirtation with the far right didn’t pay off as many expected.

Where Slovenia positions itself will depend on us. If we fall into the trap of blindly pledging allegiance to crude neoliberalism, shouting “communism!” at every policy aimed at achieving the social justice democracy requires, things won’t end well. Nor if we swing the other way, returning to discredited ideologies of our recent past.

The framework for an independent and democratic Slovenia is laid out in our Constitution. It guarantees both private property and free enterprise, but also defines Slovenia as a social state that respects human rights and political freedoms. Within these constitutional bounds, we can pursue left-wing, right-wing, or centrist paths to a truly democratic, free, and successful society—based on democratic mandates earned through elections. Outside those bounds—whichever direction we stray—lies the risk of authoritarianism.

Perhaps we could take inspiration, not just from the Constitution, but also from the vision of a society “in which few have too much and even fewer too little.” Before anyone accuses me of spreading communist ideas, let me clarify: this is a thought from Danish Protestant pastor Grundtvig in the second half of the 19th century. His legacy remains one of the foundations of Denmark’s welfare society—what’s left of it. But let that not discourage us. Perhaps we should stop trying to become a second Switzerland—and instead become even more Danish than the Danes.