'Personal responsibility' is the catch-cry of the right as they slash social spending and services and undermine wages and conditions. Increasing austerity is what the profit system demands and the blame game against the poor and disenfranchised is only going to intensify. Your perspective is shaped by your class interests, but dressed up in your mind to make it more palatable as you desperately search for evidence America isn’t in terminal decline.
https://newint.org/features/2020/04/07/feature
The pervasive rhetoric of personal responsibility has transformed the role of government and society in the neoliberal era. Where once the role of government was to safeguard the general happiness of the majority of citizens, albeit to varying degrees, its primary role now is to facilitate the conditions where each citizen can take on more and more individual responsibility, absolving the state from its responsibility towards its citizens.
The demonization of the notion of dependency and the legal enforcement of personal responsibility by New Right and Third Way politicians (and their offspring) is nothing more than an attempt to privatize risk. We see this most evidently in discussions around healthcare, where victim blaming is the modus operandi of contemporary political rhetoric.
Recently, the Conservative MP and Secretary for Health and Social Care in the UK, Matt Hancock, told us that ‘[illness] prevention is … about ensuring that people take greater responsibility for managing their own health. It’s about people choosing to look after themselves better, staying active and stopping smoking. Making better choices by limiting alcohol, sugar, salt and fat.’ Furthermore, and following a similar logic to Clinton and Blair, he claimed that ‘the biggest impact on your health from the economy is whether or not you have got a job.’
And yet we could legitimately ask that if having a job leads to greater health, then why are governments going out of their way to make the world of work increasingly precarious? If the role of government is to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens, and if that wellbeing is tied to the security of employment, then surely the government should be safeguarding the labour sphere from exploitative practices by businesses and corporations.
The narrative of personal responsibility is simply another story for austerity, but one that is masked as a tale of empowerment and liberty. Yet the effects of this tale are continually revealed as tragic and debilitating. In the UK, austerity has been cited as the primary reason for rapidly worsening child poverty, a sharp increase in suicides and suicide attempts, and even a decline in life expectancy, particularly in post-industrial areas. But Hancock is probably right. A bit less full-cream milk might help reverse these trends.
