Labour Party and became a social democrat. In 1986, his views shifted towards neoliberalism in the hope that the free market would lead to further individual emancipation, ending a perceived oppression by state bureaucracy. In 1991, he proposed firing half of all civil servants and promoted privatisation and decentralisation. In 1992, Fortuyn wrote Aan het volk van Nederland ("To the people of the Netherlands"), in which he declared himself to be the spiritual successor of the charismatic but controversial 18th-century Dutch patriot politician Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol. The book urges the already culturally emancipated citizen to use the free market to also liberate himself economically, from the welfare state. In 1989, Fortuyn left the Labour Party and during the 1990s became a member of the centre-right VVD and was briefly a political consultant to the Christian Democratic Appeal in the early 2000s. Though on economic matters Fortuyn would largely remain a neoliberal, culturally he soon became strongly influenced by the neoconservative political philosopher and chief editor of the weekly Elsevier Hendrik Jan Schoo who made him a columnist in 1993. Schoo deplored that a progressive new class would have promoted multiculturalism, founding an anti-racist civil religion on article 1 of the Dutch constitution, forbidding discrimination. Whereas in the early 1990s Fortuyn had held liberal views on immigration, this changed under the influence of Schoo. Dutch neocons understood that in the evermore secularising Netherlands a change on the lines of the Reagan Revolution had become highly improbable. Women's rights, gay rights, abortion and euthanasia had been generally accepted. In his 1995 book De verweesde samenleving ("The orphaned society"), Fortuyn claimed that the progressive movement of the 1960s had eroded traditional norms and values. Both the roles of the "symbolic father" and the "caring mother" had been lost, leaving an orphaned population without guidance, to live out a meaningless decadent existence. However, Fortuyn did not propose a return to old socially conservative or Dutch Calvinist and iconoclastic values and argued that the media, schools and artists should provide a moral leadership, explicitly promoting and defending the new values of modern Western society, constantly recreating the Dutch identity. Fortuyn consistently retained a liberal stance on matters such as LGBT rights throughout his political career. Adopting the philosophical analysis by Carl Schmitt, it was assumed that such an identity could only be defined in antithesis to some actually existing concrete