THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER

A survey of the profound political changes that have marked the last 50 years.

Historian Gerstle connects the current state of American politics—characterized by a rise of enthnonationalism and populism, distrust of open borders and free trade, and disillusion with democracy itself—with the fall of neoliberalism, which had prevailed from the 1970s through the 1990s. He traces the germs of neoliberalism to the 18th century, when classical liberalism promised “new forms of government, new ways of organizing the economy, and new possibilities for cultivating the self.” In the 1920s and ’30s, liberalism, often conflated with progressivism, shaped Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, whose “broad commitment to the public good” included government oversight of capitalism to control the dangerous market forces that led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s, however, what appeared to be an “organized and bureaucratized society” was assailed as “suffocating the human spirit,” a feeling that became exacerbated in the next decade. The oil crisis and recession of the 1970s opened the door to Ronald Reagan, the “ideological architect” of neoliberalism. Reagan melded a policy of deregulation, open borders, and globalization with a revival of neo-Victorian values of order, discipline, strong families, and self-reliance. “Many of the principals in the story of neoliberalism’s rise,” Gerstle notes, came to identify themselves as conservatives. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a push to foster the “capitalist penetration” of new markets in parts of the world that emerged from communist rule further fueled the tenets of neoliberalism—and positioned Bill Clinton as its “key facilitator.” Gerstle sees failing economic and political policies under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as the recession of 2008, as giving rise to the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter: protests from left and right that laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. Acknowledging that neoliberalism is broken, Gerstle sees the nation’s prevailing disorder and dysfunction auguring both “great possibility” and “great peril.”

A cogent, erudite historical analysis.