Kamala Harris’s “Opportunity Economy” Is a Repackaging of the Neoliberal Status Quo

The phrase struck me the first time I heard it. Like “Toyota Celica” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, itself an utterance of pure, fabricated nonsense honed into something like a meaningless religious mantra. “Opportunity Economy” drifted into my subconscious and stuck there.

It is, like a brand of vehicles released by a car company, one of the most consultant crafted and utterly empty phrases I have ever heard. Listening to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris make her case for the presidency by continually presenting this as her “agenda” can’t help but evoke rooms and Zooms full of lobbyists and communication strategists. You can practically taste the cooling coffee as one of them snatches it out of the air during a bull session.

Over time, this term’s implications have only grown more disturbing as its amorphousness becomes more obvious.

The slapdash shuffling of the Democratic ticket two months ago presented a host of concerns and hopes. Joe Biden needed to forego his reelection campaign. That much was obvious. And the hurried coalescing around Harris meant a possibility that, perhaps, a sea change might manifest within the party. It was a passing of the torch, for sure, and maybe, just maybe, the hold of market-based politics could be broken and replaced with something different and more egalitarian.

The hard case for this “Opportunity Economy” was made at the Democratic National Convention, which hammered home the torch passing theme with a parade of meticulously strategized stagecraft. Then, after Biden spoke on the first night, the party veered hard to the right, laying claim to patriotism, faith, support of law enforcement, and a need for “the strongest, the most lethal fighting force in the world” (which as The Intercept noted, was a turn of phrase you usually only hear from Pentagon officials). And then, in Harris’s acceptance speech, the vocalization of an economic agenda that, surprise surprise, sounds almost exactly like the same old agenda with a new coat of paint, much of it literally copied and pasted from Joe Biden’s website.

Add to that, a touting of the support of Goldman Sachs, neoliberal economists, and the full-throated backing of Wall Street, and the impact of her “opportunity economy” becomes clearer. 

Like the turning of the seasons, the veering rightward of a Democratic nominee is a reminder that, though time passes, some things remain the same. We are beset with incredible crises. Global climate change. Historic, intentional inequality. A class of oligarchical authoritarians who are busy building personal space agencies as they are attacking democracy. And yet, even as the need for something new and different throbs like an infected tooth, we are just rehashing old and tired ideas.

The idea that the best we can do is offer an “opportunity” is the most insulting part of Harris’s pitch that is vague on details. Many of us in this trumped-up exploitation economy have heard that lie before. Someone from the wealth class touting an opportunity always carries the same connotations. As a worker, as a person, we may not deserve it, but it’s being given as a benevolent if not impatient gift, and the gift is to see whether we can sink or swim. Whether we can “earn” the trust of the gifter. It is an invention to be gracious for our own exploitation in an economy designed to restrict opportunities for the less fortunate.

A true answer to the neoliberal consensus of the last forty-plus years is not simply opening up “opportunities.” This economy was tirelessly rigged for a small slice of the population, resulting in tens of trillions of dollars being redistributed from the working and middle classes. Undoing that crime relies on truly unfucking the system that was created over the last half-century, including a global structure that opened trade up to construct a workaround avoiding regulations and taxes, all while presenting it as an opportunity to the so-called “Second” and “Third Worlds” in order for these individuals and corporations to loot their resources and virtually enslave their populations. Even in the United States, slavery is still alive and well today and big corporations are taking advantage of it.

An “opportunity,” in this context, means a place to fit in underneath the giants that have benefited most from this economy. An actual opportunity economy would upend decades of neoliberal decline to create a new, less oligarchical infrastructure.

To make matters worse, this horrible phrase seeks to reinvent the destroyed myth of a meritocracy, putting the onus, the risk, and responsibility on the individual in the face of these terrible circumstances.

Given that opportunity, you either sink or swim based on your performance and worth.

Succeed and you’re part of the chosen elect.

Fail, and the system did its job weeding out the losers.

And, if it sounds like Reaganism or Thatcherism, or whatever you want to label cold, neoliberal austerity and precarity that places the onus on the individual, that’s because it is that. 

The news this week that the Teamsters Union has decided not to endorse a presidential candidate was not surprising, but still telling. After Biden became the first president to walk a picket line last September – after royally screwing rail workers the prior year in a move that won’t be soon forgotten – his support among the Teamsters was adequately strong. Since, polling of the organization has shown a strong swing away from Harris and to Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly yucked it up with oligarchs and openly praised them for firing union workers.

The Harris Campaign has made a conscious decision with this agenda and unfortunately it highlights a decades-long shift within the Democratic Party that originated with the Democratic Leadership Council in the face of neoliberal successes. Moving away from the old Democratic base – namely labor, people of color, and other vulnerable populations – and toward the corporate, professional-managerial class, brought us here, and now the defined struggle is to simply get us back to where we have an “opportunity” to make it, without forcing much sacrifice from the managerial class who now control much of the party. 

It is as hollow as it is insulting. The crisis of rising authoritarianism and its continued attacks on democracy, which are real and observable problems, requires a redress of the neoliberal conditions that created this situation in the first place. The damage must be undone and repaired, not mitigated. We have been besieged by half-measures, given means-tested scraps, and this promised “Opportunity Economy” feels depressingly like more of the same. We deserve something real and something better. And those peddling this rehashed, warmed-over slop should be ashamed.