Leftists should relish Trump’s revolution The end of neoliberalism brings opportunity

In his 1910 bestseller, The Great Illusion, the journalist Norman Angell aimed to demonstrate that, so interwoven were the globalised industrial economies sustained by British world hegemony, war would be economic madness, and so unthinkable. The coming years did not bear out his thesis: international politics had a logic of its own, in which the material concerns of economists and capitalists alike proved subordinate. The first great period of globalisation came to a juddering halt in the trenches, and with it Britain’s hegemonic status as the arbiter and protector of international free trade.

In the same way, war has always been the likeliest exit route from the world’s second, American-led phase of globalisation. War would sever the supply chains that span the world, replacing them with government-directed industrial policy that prioritises security over economic efficiency. If Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from neoliberal globalisation strikes the commentariat as perverse, it is because the economic consequences now precede the war itself: the economic arms race has broken out, while the guns, for now, remain silent.

For the political Left in the West, reduced to a helpless spectator by a resurgent Right that has become the engine of history, the present moment is one of analytical confusion. Having long settled, for good reason, on neoliberal globalisation as the driving motivation of its political enemies, the seeming demolition of the West’s political and economic order by America’s new revolutionary regime is difficult for them to explain. Two different recent efforts, Hayek’s Bastards by the American historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian, and the venerable British Marxist Perry Anderson’s latest expansive essay, “Regime Change in the West?“, approach the populist moment from opposing standpoints. Comparing them tells us less, perhaps, about objective reality than about the Left’s difficulty keeping up with the mercurial Weltgeist in the White House.

Slobodian’s excellent 2018 book Globalists charted the birth of neoliberalism in late-Habsburg Vienna and its progression to intellectual hegemony in the thinktanks and chancelleries of the late 20th-century West. In Hayek’s Bastards, published next week, he aims to show that the populist Right-wing revolt against neoliberal globalisation is less than it seems. He argues that “important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism” and that “many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it”. The book is, Slobodian claims, “a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing”. If the timing of the book’s release, at the precise moment Trump’s neoliberal acolytes like Milei decry his neo-developmentalist rejection of free trade dogma, appears unfortunate for Slobodian, his argument is that things are not as they seem. “Rather than a rejection of neoliberalism”, Slobodian’s framing sees “the Far Right [in which Slobodian counts the Trump administration and the European populist Right] “as a mutant form of it, shedding certain features — like a commitment to multilateral trade governance or the virtues of outsourcing — while doubling down on Social Darwinist principles of struggle in the market translated through hierarchical categories of race, nationality, and gender”.

To make this counterintuitive case, Slobodian marshals impressive archival research from within the neoliberal think tank world, from the in-house publications of Buchananite Palaeoconservatism and the online pamphleteering of Anglo-American White Nationalism, tracing the growing qualms of neoliberal ideologues with the world of unfettered movement of capital and people they had brought into being. Yet if the research itself is dazzling, the overall argument remains unconvincing. Proving that dissent, mounting into open rebellion, against globalisation’s demographic and economic consequences existed within the neoliberal intellectual sphere is not the same as tracing the origins of the current Rightist revolt against free trade. Slobodian asserts that “we cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often- tangled genealogies traced in this book”. Yet the lines of descent do not appear clear at all. Simply, one does not need to mine Mises or Hayek’s writings to construct an argument that unfettered mass migration is socially, culturally and economically destabilising to nations engaging in this novel experiment. That the neoliberal Right also began to share this opinion does not prove that the current populist moment derives from their late-flowering qualms.

Perry Anderson, by contrast, is a European Marxist, rather than an American progressive committed, as American progressives have become, to globalisation’s unfettered movement of people. As such, Anderson’s survey of the moment appears to align more closely with observable reality. Indeed, speaking to the Politics Theory Other podcast, Slobodian recently flagged the “low-key anti-woke tenor to [Anderson’s] work”, gently rebuking the patrician Leftist’s scepticism that mass migration is a Leftist cause worth defending. Slobodian emphasises that the AfD derives its intellectual origins from the free-trade Right, eliding the fact that, as a purely neoliberal party, its electoral impact was marginal: it is only the demographic question that has it now pegging Germany’s incoming party of government. For Anderson, with a European disregard for American progressive taboos on such matters, the question is simpler: “it is not pure myth that business imports cheap labour from abroad — that is, workers typically unprotected by citizenship rights — to depress wages and in some cases to take jobs from local workers, whom any Left must seek to defend. Nor is it the case that, in a neoliberal society, voters have usually been consulted about either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad: this has virtually always happened behind their backs, becoming a political issue not ex ante but ex post facto.”

It is because of this question, roiling Europe’s politics, that, as Anderson observes, “the reason populism of the right has enjoyed an advantage over populism of the left is not hard to see”. America, historically an immigrant society, differs from Europe in this regard, he notes: “there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.” Indeed, Slobodian and Anderson’s differing attitudes to the question highlight this Atlantic breach within the intellectual Left. Yet while the Right-populist response to mass migration — that it is a catastrophic error, to be rectified — is simple and intuitive to voters, within the Left “nowhere has a politically coherent, empirically detailed, candid answer yet been spelled out. So long as that persists, populism of the Right is all too likely to retain its edge on populism of the left.” Anderson does not trawl the archives of neoliberal ideologues to find reasons why mass migration is electorally unpopular. The reasons, both economic and cultural, are to him self-evident, in a way that, for Slobodian, requires a tangled intellectual origin story.

When one compares the two Leftist historians’ analysis of the present, the opposing worldviews multiply. Anderson approvingly cites (to Slobodian’s chagrin) the conservative German Marxist Wolfgang Streeck’s “pathbreaking” 2014 analysis of neoliberal capitalism’s eventual collapse as being built on the shaky foundations of credit, rather than investment: “claims on future resources that have yet to be produced” or as “Marx more bluntly called it ‘fictitious capital’”. Yet even as the economic and political system began to run out of road, there was no coherent economic doctrine with which to replace it, leaving a void to be filled by its “antibody, deplored in every reputable organ of opinion and respectable political quarter as the sickness of the age – namely, populism”. Slobodian is correct in that Anderson’s analysis shares its discursive framework with that of the populists themselves. “What [populists] oppose,” Anderson observes, “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it: neoliberalism. Their common enemy is the political establishment that presides over the neoliberal order, comprising the alternating duo of centre-right and centre-left parties that have monopolised government under its rule.”

Slobodian’s task in his book is to prove that this framework is a false consciousness, in which critics of neoliberalism have been duped by their professed saviours. “The parties dubbed as Right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalization,” he notes. “They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a Golden Age of job security, or end world trade. By and large, the so-called populists’ calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.” The current moment is, for Slobodian, a false dawn, as proven by its genealogy: the populist apple cannot fall far from the neoliberal tree. The historian of neoliberal globalisation is not yet ready to consign the object of his research to history.

Yet for Anderson, even if “no populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces”, leaving “the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism… for the most part whistling in the dark”, the moment is still pregnant with opportunity. Though the road ahead is obscure, and branches in many opposing directions, for Anderson, the present moment is one of flux, in which genuine change is possible. For Slobodian, the revolution is illusory. For both, the essential problem remains that a Leftist goal — the disestablishment of the global neoliberal order — now appears to be well underway. Yet it is the Right that is undertaking this work, and it is a Right to whom Slobodian and Anderson are mere spectators.

The decades-long dogma that There Is No Alternative is being smashed by the Trump regime, even if undertaken in a chaotic way, whose effects may not be those intended. Trump’s neo-mercantilist revolution, undertaken in an uneasy alliance with America’s tech oligarchs and the post-liberal wing of the American Right represented by JD Vance, represents strands of Rightist thinking beyond pure neoliberalism, which may not survive its own contradictions. The result, for now, is that Trump’s supposed ideological allies abroad have been left scrambling for a response that marries their professions of political fealty with their economic dogma. Just as sanctions on Russia, foreseen as catastrophic by their free-trading architects, have left Moscow’s thrumming war economy riding an economic boom, so may Trump’s retreat into splendid Hemispheric isolation provide the former hegemon with the industrial basis for an economic resurgence to come — or equally, it may accelerate the world economy’s collapse. Like the looming First World War Angell saw as senseless, the driving logic is primarily one of imperial, even civilisational competition rather than mere economic utility.

In dismissing the revolutionary nature of the moment through a narrow emphasis on one strand of the Right’s historical thinking, Slobodian risks losing sight of the grand vistas opening up beyond the accumulating wreckage. His emphasis on the intentions of those driving this upheaval disregard the opportunities offered by the unintended consequences, to which Anderson, alert to historical precedents both “improvised and experimental, without pre-existent theories of any kind”, remains alive. “Everywhere the scene is one of instability, insecurity, unpredictability”, Anderson observes, not without a glimmer of revolutionary relish. “‘All is disorder under the heavens,’ and there is little sign of a return to order, as understood by those accustomed to rule the West.” This project of the American Right may yet work towards Leftist ends, if not narrowly progressive ones. Either way, what was once unthinkable is now the new normality, leaving historians and policymakers alike scrambling to keep up.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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