Uncle Milt

In this introduction, Schwarzenegger's borderline lunatic enthusiasm for Friedman shines through. Perhaps it’s the sheer relief of having escaped the hellish Gulag that is post-war Austria, still, due to the terrible depredations of Socialism, the country with the most even spread of wealth and the lowest crime rate in the world. What’s undoubtedly true is that a tiny country such as Austria would not prove conducive to an ego of world-historical proportions such as Schwarzenegger's and that in many ways only the U.S.A. could fully allow his self-actualization. Schwarzenegger moved there, and possibly subsequently spent some time as an illegal immigrant, in 1968, immediately falling under the spell of the great thinker and statesman Richard Nixon during a televised Presidential debate and becoming a lifelong Republican.

It would perhaps seem contrived to try and link Schwarzenegger and Friedman’s lives too closely, after all the diminutive Jewish American professor and the hulking Austrian seem to have little in common, and to be an essentially comedic combination, somewhat along the lines of Schwarzenegger's pairing with Danny De Vito in 1996’s Twins. Indeed it might be even more appropriate to conjure up the image of the good Doctor Friedmenstein throwing a switch and bringing Schwarzenegger juddering to life. If Milton is the visionary, Schwarzenegger is in many ways his vision of a New America made flesh, the living embodiment of the Neoliberal dream. Homo Neoliberalisimus!

Just a month before Schwarzenegger was born, in July 1946, Friedman attended the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society under the auspices of F.A. Hayek, who would finally, after years of neglect, receive a Nobel prize for Economics in the 1970s. The Mont Pelerin society was dedicated to combating the waves of Socialism, Communism and Keynesian economics about to engulf the globe over the next thirty or so years. In a sense Friedman is already working for Arnold even before his birth, dedicating his life to the promotion of the free market and that prosperous and free new America for which Arnold will become the oversized poster boy. In this sense then Neoliberalism is not something that emerges out of necessity as a result of the manifest failings of the postwar settlement, it’s not a pragmatic response, the only possible reaction to the crisis of the Seventies, but is there at its inception, ideologically committed to its destruction from the start.

Both Friedman and Schwarzenegger share a heroic, rags-to-riches American immigrant-made-good narrative, which reinforces and re-iterates the sense that certain degrees of self-transcendence are only attainable within the unrestricted individualism of American life. Friedman was the child of uneducated Hungarians, whilst Arnold arrived in the US with nothing but the proverbial pocket full of dreams. Both also have an undeniable charisma, a twinkle in the eye, the common touch. Friedman’s avuncular charm is a huge part of what makes him such a good salesman for Neoliberalism. Opposed as one may be to his policies, Friedman is the kind of person it is almost impossible to dislike, a part of this is both his even-temperedness, his plain approachability, and the barely contained delight at the rightness of his own beliefs. Though it might sound odd to discuss a bald, borderline-midget sixty year old economist in such terms, Friedman is seductive, because history is on his side. So too is Schwarzenegger, for similar reasons. In the documentary Total Rebuild, which revolves around Schwarzenegger’s return to the Mr Olympia competition after a five year absence from competitive body-building, just prior to his first starring role in John Milius’ Conan The Barbarian, the sense that Schwarzenegger will win purely through being who he is, that he is elect, is almost immediately evident despite Schwarzenegger's own uncharacteristic humility. It’s hard not to sense something of the same momentum, the mandate of heaven settling on Friedman as he becomes the housewife’s favourite on the Phil Donahue Show.

For both Friedman and Schwarzenegger, the Seventies are the best of times, the worst of times. Friedman receives the Nobel prize for economics in 76, just two years after his mentor Hayek is finally acknowledged and becomes the great, popular American Economist of the Seventies and Eighties, wresting the mantle from the patrician John Kenneth Galbraith who had made his own television series on the history of Capitalism upon the invitation of the BBC in 1976. Friedman's Free to Choose was intended to rebut Galbraith's pessimistic view of the socially divisive role of markets and his advocacy of strong governmental regulation in order to curb their worst excesses. Even a cursory viewing of the series that the two men made for television is revealing, Galbraith's overview of Capitalism's rise and wayward progress, The Age Of Uncertainty, from the oneiric credit sequence on is a stately and ironic affair, Galbraith a wry observer of History’s Folly. Friedman's Free to Choose is a sprightly, optimistic call to arms: the enemy is of course Big Government.

Arnold is about to break out of the bodybuilding ghetto just as body building itself is about to shift from being a marginal concern to a multimillion pound industry, for which Schwarzenegger will largely be the figurehead. He is also about to appear in two movies, the documentary Pumping Iron and Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry.

Tomorrow belongs to them.