Sean Duffy Serves Neoliberalism for Thanksgiving

It can’t fly and tastes terrible.

Sean Duffy, the head weasel in charge of transportation in our current Christofascist regime, has been preparing for Thanksgiving travel season by preemptively shifting blame, as weasels do. Specifically, Duffy has suggested that the likely misery many will experience at the airport is not because of Trumpian government chaos and understaffing, and not because airlines are deliberately fucking with you to increase profits.

No, Duffy claims that the problem is…you.

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Specifically, Duffy argues that the flight experience has gotten worse because there’s “a degradation in civility, in the airspace.” Duffy admits he can’t legislate that, but nonetheless appealed to the public to start

dressing with respect —whether it’s a pair of jeans and a decent shirt, I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better which encourages us to maybe behave a little better. Let’s try not to wear slippers and pajamas as we come to the airport…Let’s all travel better together. It honors our country, it honors our families…

Duffy has been widely and rightly mocked. The problem with air travel is not that the person in the seat next to you is wearing sweat pants. The problem with air travel is that you and the person sitting next to you have been forced to sit on the tarmac for hours after a 5 hour delayed start and you still can’t get reimbursed because Trump gutted Biden’s regulations. The problem with air travel is that airlines can hit you with hidden fees without clear disclosure—which Trump again enabled by killing Biden-era regulations. The problem with air travel is long term understaffing, exacerbated by Trump not knowing how to run a fucking government and also by Trump not caring about anyone who can’t pay him billion-dollar bribes.

Duffy obviously doesn’t want to admit that his administration has done everything it could to make air travel more miserable. So instead he tries to sell you neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is a term that gets thrown around a lot and which has been used to mean a range of things. In this context, though, it refers to a form of capitalist meritocratic propaganda, which insists that we’re all self-optimizing corporations of one with sweeping control over our own destinies, experiences, income flow, and consumer experiences.

Per neoliberalism, if you don’t have enough money to buy food, that’s a you problem—you need to work harder. If you contract COVID and it destroys your lungs, that’s a you problem—you needed to eat healthier and exercise more. And if you get to the airport and try to check in and they tell you that you need to use the app to check in and the app doesn’t work and they say that unless you use the app they’re going to charge you $20 so you stand there getting more and more frustrated as the airline personnel all just stare at you, elaborately not helping, and then you finally get it sorted and stand in a security line for two hours and your flight is delayed three times and you still have to race to your gate and haven’t eaten and you get on the plane and they’re charging you $5 for literal peanuts—if you get upset at any of that, it’s your fault for wearing shorts.

Neoliberalism is obviously a way for Duffy and Trump and their ilk to avoid responsibility; they’ve catered to corporations in return, probably, for outright bribes, and then they blame you for the fallout. More, than that, though, neoliberalism is a way to get people to blame each other.

Duffy claims that he’s trying to increase civility and make a better airline experience for everyone. But what will actually happen if people believed him, and began to blame their bad travel experiences on poor dress habits? Would that mean that people would be more civil? Or would people start to police each other’s clothing choices?

I think tired, angry, cranky people at airports already often are irritated with each other, and may look judgmentally on that person over there talking too loudly on their cell phone, or failing to wrangle their kids, or, sure, decked out in some fashion disaster. Usually you just keep these uncharitable thoughts to yourself—but if the Secretary of Transportation convinces some MAGA asshats that your decision to wear shorts is the reason they can’t get to Orlando? You could see that going ugly places.

Duffy isn’t Trump; most MAGA aren’t paying attention to what he says and I don’t think his half-assed plea for civility is likely to result in Christofascist assaults on people wearing fanny packs. But the dynamic there does help explain how neoliberalism, corruption, moral panic, and scapegoating get mixed together into a single toxic pepper spray. The person who is the cause of all your troubles isn’t the system established by the powerful. No, it’s you, or someone like-but-not-exactly-like you, who is standing right over there. Observe their sweatpants on this day of nightmare travel and be enraged.

If Duffy actually wanted to make Thanksgiving travel easier, he could have devoted his first year on the job to building up capacity—or at least to not gutting the regulations that force airlines to treat people with minimal decency. Instead, he and the administration did everything they could to make your holiday travel into a nightmare of humiliation, confusion and despair. And now they want you to wear a tie on top of it. Choke on that.