Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.

Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.

The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”

We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.

Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.

As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.

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But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.

This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.

Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.

In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.

Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.

Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.

Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.

For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.

Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.

Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.

Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.

Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.

In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.

At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.

Today, opposite the inebriated Labour spads and staffers jabbing furiously at their phones, Cammell Laird shipyard hosts Royal Navy frigates for repairs. One of only four remaining British oil refineries is visible in the distance to the south-east. And, out to the west, in the Irish Sea, a host of wind turbines turn limply in the sunshine. This, then, is the sweep of Labour Britain in microcosm: the one built by industrial laborers, and shaped by the trends of progressive interventionism. And you can see it all from within a sealed, airport-style security cordon full of lobbyists, millennial PR professionals from London, hacks-on-tour, wonks and assorted politicos. They all agree: “The vibe is very different from last year, isn’t it?”

In truth, of course, it’s the same conference bubble strangeness that we are subjected to every year. Each party has its own neuroses. Labour’s principal one is that it’s a party of progressive liberal graduates — but nonetheless clings to its original roots as a manifestation of genuine working-class ascendancy. And here it is encamped as a foreign object in an airless architectural carbuncle on the banks of the river, among the red-brick warehouses and shipyards and the very places that gave the labor movement so much of its original form. Its relationship with working-class Britain is akin to that of the adulterous husband, begging his wife for one more chance. One civil servant-turned-comms girl, here at Conference for the first time, has a slightly different observation. “There’s quite a lot of gimps, isn’t there?” But here, the gimps are king. This is their safe space, the place to indulge in all manner of comforting delusions.

During an extended visit in 1965, Allen Ginsberg called Liverpool “the center of consciousness of the human universe”. Brian Patten, Ginsberg’s weary host, later remarked that “I think Allen believed the center of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the time”. You could say something similar about most Labour types. They consistently engage in what the philosopher John Gray calls “the fatal conceit of the progressive mind”, namely “an invincible faith in its superior rationality”. In this world, if only everyone was party to the facts, nobody would vote Reform; if only more right-on types had their hands on the levers of power, then all would be well. With a straight face, one think tanker told me that the rise of populism could be put down largely to a lack of “up-skilling opportunities” in the left-behind English regions.

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Wherever “the center of consciousness of the human universe” is today, it’s not located in the Conference Fringe Guide. Instead, we have “How Can Employer Partnerships Create Genuine Pathways into Work For Young People?”, and “Closing the Sports Gender Gap with Sky and Lucy Powell”. The slogan of the conference, “Hope Again”, is deliberately broad and absolutely banal. It adorns screens and billboards. For now, drunk on warm wine and good vibes, most attendees are prepared to believe. 

But these dreams will inevitably meet contact with difficult realities: tightening fiscal constraints as a result of geopolitical crises beyond our control; those pesky gilt yields; the recalcitrant PLP, who will meet with hostility any attempt at constraining current spending. The cost of government borrowing is now at a 20-year high. And, 20 years ago, the national debt stood at around 30% of GDP, not today’s 95%. We’re spending three times more on debt interest than we are on infrastructure, almost twice as much as we spend on defense.

But the problems are for later: this is Burnham’s time to shine. A year ago, he was shunned for what was billed as a premature attack on Keir Starmer and the bond markets. Today, he is dominant within a party that has identified him as its last electoral hope. The PM seemed to have a slogan of his own for a speech that rang as hollow as Hope Again: “All together now”. But, for his part, the speech was a success, a classic of mawkish, progressive soft-Left Labourist eulogizing. There were perorations on 1945, tears for his father in an open display of Men’s Mental Health, odes to his “gran”, and the beloved, abstractly conceived working class: who in actuality have abandoned the party in droves. 

Burnham is an infinitely superior speaker to Keir Starmer, and he knows what the Labour faithful want to hear. He has the self-confidence of Tony Blair, and a coherent narrative of how Britain found itself in its current woeful predicament. “Homes, water, energy, transport, care, were broken up and sold off”, he told the gathered activists. “The British Right talk about taking back control”, he added, “but it was them who gave it away.” 

The Prime Minister, in short, is a man who deals in an anti-Thatcherite, progressive social democratic nostalgia — one he hopes can reunite progressive Britain’s warring tribes. He makes Labour people feel good about themselves, which is more than can be said for Starmer. Some in the conference hall wept openly, perhaps in a show of what they like to call “solidarity”. Perhaps they’ve been waiting to hear such a bold assertion of their Labour values since the days of John Smith. There were moments of whooping and shouting reminiscent of a Pentecostal church on Sunday, the congregation all filled with the spirit of Andeh, the spirit of ’45. He is good at this, delivering a broad-tent vision of a liberal Britain that seemed pitched towards uniting left-of-center voters against what he called “division” (which we can translate as still-burgeoning national-populist insurgency). 

And the delegates lapped it up. It was as clear a signal as we have yet heard of the kind of coalition he wishes to build come the next general election: the modern Labour bloc of liberal professionals, public sector workers, young renters, ethnic minorities, students and sections of the old working-class who haven’t been lost to Farageism (particularly in the North). In other words, it’s time for the Green, Liberal and soft-Reform defectors to come home. It may even be enough to win the next election, at least as the largest party in coalition with Liberals and Celtic nationalists, pointing us towards a future of proportional representation, an elected senate, and smug Euro-style consensual technocracy. 

Aware that, as time goes on, the popularity of virtually all political leaders fades, No. 10 would be foolish not to consider the possibility that waiting until 2029 for an election heightens the risk of a Conservative rebound and a Reform-Tory coalition. Certainly, the need to raise taxes to pay for a National Care Service could be the substantive excuse to U-turn on early denials and to go to the polls seeking a fresh mandate.

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Yet if all this makes sense politically, nothing Labour has proposed so far will break the doom loop, nor alter the fundamentals of Britain’s decline. As ever, the yawning gap between the diagnosis and the prescription is the most fundamental contradiction in the Burnhamite project. Though it offers a story of systemic rupture, a “circuit breaker” on “40 years of neoliberalism”, it’s all told to justify a handful of discrete, piecemeal, modest interventions: a revamped help-to-buy scheme by another name; £2 bus fares; VAT off electricity bills; a commission on electoral reform; a slightly modified triple-lock to pay for enhanced social care. Elsewhere at the conference, Shabana Mahmood has agreed to make her migration reforms more palatable to Labour’s metropolitan liberal castes: Blue Labour’s lodestar has gone full woke with safe and legal routes for Gazans and Afghan women. 

This, then, is a shopping list of policies adding to much less than the sum of a “post-neoliberal order”. It didn’t even reveal a new strategy for growth, simply for more fairness within the current ailing model. It was a paean to safe soft Leftism, not an extrapolation of what would really constitute post-neoliberalism: the hard, social-democratic radical reforms that would rebuild state capacity; put us on a pathway towards a more cohesive national economy; and usher in genuine industrial revival and investment-led national renewal. 

Whatever else neoliberalism meant, after all, it really did entail a radical reorientation of the ship of state. It pursued a steady, deliberate retreat of the demos, the public, from ownership and direction over productive assets. It disciplined organized labor, outsourced services, and began to allow markets to allocate capital — in a way that used to be debated politically and enforced via industrial strategy, capital controls, trade barriers and incomes policies. The productive state, that engaged directly in investment and capital formation, became a regulatory state that taxed and tweaked with cash transfers from a financialized, privatized growth model. Nothing on Burnham’s wishlist approaches a reversal of this at anything like the necessary scale. 

Back on the Mersey, the tide is on the turn. Every political economy leaves its monuments here. The refineries and shipyards stand for industrial Britain; the regenerated docks for tourism, services and creative capital; and the turbines out in the Irish Sea for the net-zero revolution. Each epoch wasn’t built by tweaking the old ones. If Burnham truly wants a post-neoliberal order, he will have to build one, and that means large-scale investment in physical things meant to last generations: not regulatory fiddles while Britain smolders. Burnham’s problem, then, is a twofold gap: the first between a diagnosis of systemic rupture and a weak prescription of cheap bus fares and VAT cuts; the second between the hope in the hall and the grim arithmetic waiting beyond the security cordon. Even the grandest of speeches can’t bridge chasms that large.

He later described the episode as like something out of a soap opera. But at the time, it was far from entertaining: it was the beginning of a decade-long nightmare. After spending his early childhood pampered by his mother’s extended family, the respectable and haphazardly social-climbing Llosas, he moved to Lima, where he suffered under a controlling domestic regime imposed by his father, with only his mother for company.

For Gerald Martin, the author of an impressive new biography, Mario Vargas Llosa: A Life, his parents’ reunion was the hinge point of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s life. This brutal end to his innocence left him with an inexhaustible supply of resentment — and a magnified set of Oedipal complexes — which he spent a lifetime converting into fiction.

Judging by his worldly success, the results were tremendous. When Vargas Llosa died last year, it was with a full trophy cabinet, including the Nobel in literature. The Spanish-language world’s best-known public intellectual, he was the last survivor of the great “Boom” generation of Latin American literature, and the sole member of that cohort who lived to see his politics triumphant across the globe. Revolutionary Cuba, having commanded the loyalty of Cortázar and García Márquez, stands today at death’s door — while the Right-wing politicians Vargas Llosa endorsed in his final years have charged to power in Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

Yet there is a strange hollowness to Vargas Llosa’s victory — first of all, in politics. Even as figures such as Javier Milei (who earned the writer’s endorsement) triumph across Latin America and the world, Vargas Llosa seems to be nowhere, in death no longer useful as a prestigious cheerleader. Far from reflecting Vargas Llosa’s gentlemanly version of neoliberal politics, the Argentine president, with his sideburns and his calibrated displays of mania, is the perfect embodiment of the “society of the spectacle” Vargas Llosa so decried toward the end of his life — and of the distortion of the latter’s neoliberal politics into ever more carnivalesque shapes.

Literary posterity, too, has so far been less kind than the prize juries Vargas Llosa rarely struggled to impress. His old rivals are read more widely and fondly, their political stances, having passed into history, lending them the romantic sheen of the lovable loser. Will death reverse all the victories Vargas Llosa enjoyed in life?

That would be a fittingly melodramatic coda to the telenovela of his life — one in which Vargas Llosa could play the merciless social climber whose journey to the top, like those of the dictators in his novels, left an ever-rising tally of victims in his wake.

His ascent began with his adolescent search for a means of escape from the house of his teetotaling, self-made father — efforts which actually afforded him a wider understanding of Peruvian society than middle-class life in Lima would have otherwise lent him. These included years at the Leoncio Prado military boarding school outside Lima, with a racially diverse student body drawn from across Peru; a stint in the communist underground while an undergraduate at San Marcos University; and work at a local newspaper covering the city’s underworld of seedy nightclubs and brothels — a rare encounter with bohemia in his outwardly abstemious life.

These experiences were fastidiously strip-mined for material across his early novels, starting with his 1963 debut, The Time of the Hero, a murder mystery set in the boarding school. But despite his student organizing stint, Vargas Llosa “was never a genuinely convinced leftist”, writes Martin. “All his gut instincts moved in the opposite direction.”

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Still, in those years a Latin American writer had to support Cuba to have any hope of success. Everyone understood then — though many have since forgotten — that Cuba was the political-social-moral motor that launched the great Latin American Boom, even if it was the United States that underwrote the wild commercial success of its leading authors.

So Vargas Llosa made several trips to pay his dues to the cultural brokers of the revolutionary island, visits paid with ever-growing reluctance, Martin argues, until he was able to cut his ties in 1971, when the poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned by the Cuban government for counter-revolutionary writing. Vargas Llosa helped organize the furious denunciations from Left-wing writers and intellectuals in the rich world, which all but ended a period during which the European Left had extended its hand in friendship to the revolutionary government that had brought communism to within 90 miles of the United States.

But breaking with Cuba also meant breaking with the Latin American Left, and with his fellow Boom writers, who remained sympathetic to Havana to varying degrees. Vargas Llosa would never again receive a warm welcome in Latin American universities and other literary spaces where the Left held sway, a fact that would feed his resentment and, many of his defenders claim, drive him further toward the free-market Right.

By this point, Vargas Llosa had already made a similarly dramatic break in his personal life, divorcing his aunt in 1964 in order to marry his cousin. He had married his uncle Lucho’s sister-in-law, Julia, in 1955, only to leave her for his daughter, Patricia, in 1965, after falling for her while she was staying at Mario’s and Julia’s apartment in Paris. And there was more melodrama to come. On the boat back to Lima to set up his life there, accompanied by Patricia and their three children, Vargas Llosa started an affair with a fellow passenger and left his family to travel with her to the Caribbean. The romance burned out within months, but not before it set in motion the most famous punch in literary history.

Patricia returned without Mario to Barcelona, where she accepted a ride home one night from Gabriel García Márquez. When Patricia later mentioned the encounter to Mario, it left her husband seething with resentment. Loath as he would ever be to admit it, he had a controlling tendency and a jealousy reminiscent of the father whom he detested so deeply.

When Vargas Llosa and García Márquez next crossed paths, at a film premiere in Mexico City, Vargas Llosa yelled something — was it “for what you said to Patricia” or “what you did to Patricia”? — and floored him with a sucker punch. The two never spoke again. Martin reconstructs the scene and forensically weighs up the motivations, but like the mysteries in Vargas Llosa’s novels, we never get a definitive answer.

Whatever the motive, it was a gesture that belonged in the macho world of the Leoncio Prado of Vargas Llosa’s youth. Wasn’t The Time of the Hero supposed to be an indictment of that? Martin suggests the punch was Vargas Llosa playing the part of the sore loser, grasping that he had lost his long-running battle with García Márquez for first place among writers of the Boom. His next great loss would not occasion a more generous response.

By 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vargas Llosa had decided he was going to be a candidate for president in his native Peru, which had returned to democracy after a military dictatorship. But democracy had failed to deliver on its promise, a sentiment that would become ever more widespread in Latin America over the decades to come.

Vargas Llosa’s platform promised salvation through the kind of deep cuts to state services that then represented something close to a consensus in the rich world. Having embraced the neoliberal gospel of the Eighties with gusto, and guided by Hayek and Thatcher, he was going to free Peru from the failed utopias of the past.

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Everyone told him not to — even his friend, the Mexican writer Octavio Paz. But Vargas Llosa, white and upper-class, a debonair cosmopolitan running for office in a country rancorously divided between white Lima and the poor, largely indigenous-descended inhabitants of the Amazon and the Andes, went ahead. So sure of victory, he saw no reason to wait until after the election to publish an erotic novel, In Praise of the Stepmother — a book that was better received in Paris than in Ayacucho. What Peruvians “could understand in the book disgusted them and what they could not understand humiliated and affronted them”, Martin writes.

Vargas Llosa chose to run in a coalition with two of the old politicians that Peruvians wanted to throw out, ignoring, for one thing, his promise to clean up Peru’s dirty system. He justified this decision by claiming there was not time to build a political machine of his own — not without getting in the way of his plans for his next novel, he might have added. It was a choice many political outsiders would emulate in the decades to come. Though Vargas Llosa’s novels prove he could pay close and respectful attention to the heavily indigenous population of the Peruvian Amazon, he could never entirely dismiss his disdain for the country’s Andean indigenous majority. Such attitudes were clear for anyone to see in his public appearances, helping to sway the election’s result — and were confirmed, in case anyone doubted it, in the talk in his memoir about the “savagery” of crowds of mestizo Peruvians whom he called “indistinguishable” from animals.

Vargas Llosa lost in a landslide to the “darkest of horses”, the Japanese-descended engineer Alberto Fujimori, a win that represented the dawn of a new global era in politics — the age of the Right-wing populist outsider — that would herald both maximum victory for Vargas Llosa’s neoliberal ideals and their warping into ghastly shapes.

To cope with his defeat, Vargas Llosa became Spanish. From 1991 to 2023, he wrote a column, “Touchstone”, for Spain’s El País. Vargas Llosa’s role was as a respectable Right-wing voice in this authoritative center-Left outlet. He offered his services more broadly to a country eagerly at work renovating its reputation after Franco, and reasserting its cultural influence over Latin America. Mario was there to help lend moral support to Spain against Catalan separatists and Latin American indigenists, for which he was soon rewarded with literary prizes, citizenship, and even a marquisate. He soon cast aside his long-suffering wife Patricia for a late-in-life romance with the socialite Isabel Preysler, the ex-wife of Julio Iglesias.

Through Vargas Llosa’s prime years, Martin spins a yarn worthy of his subject, sometimes withholding a bombshell detail until the moment of maximum effect, a tactic he seems consciously to borrow from Vargas Llosa himself. Martin’s politics, which place him in sympathy with the Latin American Left on which Vargas Llosa turned his back, are never hidden in this book, but they do not seem to color his judgment until near the end of the book, where he downplays the frankness with which Vargas Llosa, in his late novel, Harsh Times, addresses the calamitous impact in Guatemala of the misguided US-engineered coup against Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

For all its insight into his works and life, at the end of this thousand-page biography Vargas Llosa remains, as Martin admits, “an immense conundrum”. In a few short pages in the New York Review of Books, the veteran journalist Alma Guillermoprieto got perhaps closer to the mark, having taken the measure of Vargas Llosa soon before he became a candidate. “I had the impression of a profoundly inhibited man”, she writes, “someone who had spent a lifetime learning that he had a right to be himself, and who, despite his effort, was still trying very hard to behave as was expected of him, to please, to avoid giving offence.”

What did the real Mario believe? Even the received story about the political message of Vargas Llosa’s literature is something of a red herring. His Nobel Prize was awarded for “his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat” against the forces of dictatorship and unfreedom. But what is arguably his greatest novel, Conversation in the Cathedral, is a story about the stony and structural corruption and unaccountability of the ruling elite of a viciously unequal country. It takes place under a dictatorship, but could just as easily have taken place during one of Peru’s periods of democracy. And it is not really about the “individual” struggles of its protagonists, who are aware these can only end in the “defeat” the Nobel committee speaks of, even saying so explicitly in the novel’s first and last sentences.

Vargas Llosa’s legacy may in fact end up being secured by the fact that his novels are to the Left of him (as the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti first said), but not in a narrowly political sense. The first Vargas Llosa novel I read, Harsh Times, impressed me with its demonstration of his gifts as a storyteller and his deep understanding of how politics works in Latin America and elsewhere. But its non-chronological structure seemed to disguise a deeper simplicity and even vulgarity: this was basically a classed-up political thriller, which used all the same exploitative tactics as a Dan Brown novel. The scripted dialog did violence to the real truth of human relationships the way works in such genres often do.

There is much to admire in Vargas Llosa’s more concertedly “serious” earlier works, and several of his later works, especially their social and political perception and frankness: virtues that will last. But I have never quite shed that first impression of him as a writer. There are, it is almost fair to say, no individuals at all in his work, no characters in the higher sense, just ones delivered straight from central casting.

Even in Conversation in the Cathedral, his vaunted formal devices (“communicating vessels” and “Chinese boxes”, he called them) are basically transparent. You can take an anti-Bildungsroman, a political thriller and a Peruvian take on Madame Bovary and riffle-shuffle them together, but that does not make you William Faulkner. The harsh truth — and Vargas Llosa loved harsh truths — is that he is closer to socially attuned but formally pedestrian writers such as Norman Mailer or John Steinbeck than to being a 20th-century, Third World successor to Flaubert or Balzac.

Martin believes that he fell short principally because Vargas Llosa did not truly love his country. And to this obstacle can be added a more serious one: the emotional, psychological and indeed simply human deficiencies of his literature. Martin mentions the “Flaubertian” high points — moments of profound emotional force — in Conversation: the deaths of the protagonist’s father and his wife. These are powerful passages indeed, but across 700 pages, they are the only two that deserve that adjective.

One of the most striking revelations in Martin’s biography was not anything scandalous about Vargas Llosa’s personal life; it was the fact that several of the scenes from Conversation in The Cathedral, which seemed like cliched inventions, were actually real episodes from his life — most memorably, Santiago’s infatuation with a Left-wing student and the ensuing romantic disappointment that leads him away from the organized Left. These passages read like a fifth-rate historical novel about the 20th-century Latin-American university Left: “I’m a Communist.” “Are you really a Communist?” “Actually I am and I’m not. Because where can you find Communists around here?” He thinks: did I fall in love then and there?

How could such an apparently formative personal experience become such lifeless literature? How could a great writer be such an emotional brick wall? Perhaps the simple truth is that Mario Vargas Llosa, having lived a soap opera of a life, could not have hoped to write in any other way.

It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”

When Burnham describes his political awakenings, he likes to hark back to his Eighties boyhood, and to where he thinks it all started to go wrong: when the country adopted something he calls “neoliberalism”. He likes to describe it as a free-market economic model through which “political power was centralized, economic power privatized, large parts of the country deindustrialized”.

But if Burnham the wool came of age in the physical space between Liverpool and Manchester, he also finds himself torn by their different civic responses to this supposedly neoliberal age. Where Liverpool “dared to fight”, railing against budget cuts and the harsh medicine of monetarism, Manchester would become a model pupil of civic governance: sensible, moderate, business-friendly, and co-operative (the divergent fates of the two cities since is instructive). And Burnham the politician wavers between the two poles, the consummate wool: unsure of whether he is more a radical Scouse shop steward, raging against the dying of the light, or an industrious, pragmatic Mancunian.

But what exactly is Burnham railing against? What does it mean to describe our system as “neoliberal”? After all, state spending and the overall tax burden is currently at a 50-year high. Britain hasn’t run a current budget surplus for two decades. Public and private developments alike are constantly blocked by Nimby councillors who act as the political gatekeepers to growth. And, what’s more, core sectors, from energy to transport and a monolithic NHS, are either in public hands or heavily regulated by cumbersome public bodies.

It’s true that the country did experience something of a neoliberal revolution in the Eighties. Deeply ideological actors — some self-identifying as “neoliberals”, others as followers of Friedman or Hayek — set about transforming the country’s modes of economic governance: capital controls were removed, industries sold off, the trade unions emasculated. The neoliberal advance was very real.

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But it was halted in 2008, when the whole edifice of City-friendly, financialized, borderless, free-trading capitalism came tumbling down. It may have taken a few years to register with the political classes, but by the time of the Brexit vote, it was clear that a realignment, a correction, was on the cards. Since then, politicians of all stripes have tentatively experimented with a more activist, strategic statism, trying to resurrect the Leviathan without ever finding or settling on a viable growth model that can deliver prosperity.

Theresa May, for one, softly embraced a more statist red Toryism, rejecting what she called “ideological templates provided by the socialist Left and the libertarian Right” to found a short-lived “post-liberal” settlement, even. But she had neither the political dexterity nor a mandate from her market-liberal colleagues to both free us from Brussels and impose “post-neoliberalism” on a post-Brexit Britain. Then came Boris, whose profligacy was infamous: the biggest capital budgets since the Fifties; nationalized steelworks; hiked corporation tax; and £300 billion to bail out insolvent businesses and pay workers to stay at home.

Perhaps the most obvious neoliberal revolt has already occurred within the Labour Party itself, beginning 11 years ago under Jeremy Corbyn. And, contrary to the generalized apoplexy from the Left, this wasn’t all washed away by a Right-wing Starmerite reaction. If you’d revealed to an inconsolable Corbynite in 2019 that within half a decade they would have a government committed to nationalized railways, a publicly owned green energy company, higher taxes, closed non-dom loopholes, VAT on private schools and more money for “our NHS” — I suspect they would have assumed that a decent, progressive, prime minister had taken charge, and that Corbynism had effected a real, lasting legacy on the party after all.

So, Andy, where exactly is this 40 years of “neoliberal consensus”, and how will your remedy be any different from what came before? We can already see the inevitable dissonance between lofty rhetoric and Cabinet picks. This, Burnham triumphantly claims, is to be the “most significant change moment” in decades. The surprise Chancellor is then revealed: John Healey, a creature of Labour’s trade unionist Old Right, a Brownite Treasury alumnus, hard-headed defense man and all-round “safe pair of hands”. The big, signaling policy opener? Around £50 a year off energy bills — unfunded, as helpfully revealed by a mischievous Darren Jones, the outgoing chief secretary to the PM, already keen to take swipes at his successors.

Yet the Healey pick also signals a seriousness around the strategy of leveraging procurement and defense spending to invest in the domestic manufacturing supply chain: drone factories for every depressed Northern town, or so the story goes. Healey, of course, resigned from Starmer’s cabinet in a row over inadequate defense-industrial plans. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Chancellor served in Corbyn’s Cabinet as shadow housing secretary, at a time when party policy revolved around major public investments in municipal housebuilding.

It’s possible, then, that a Burnham government will veer from an orthodox, laissez-faire, small-state approach to political economy. But it’s also clear that the roots of the PM’s anti-neoliberal tirades aren’t born of any fully developed view of recent economic history, let alone a detailed reading of the country’s very real structural predicaments. Instead, they are built on a romantic and nostalgia-tinged view of Britain, on the folk memory of postwar social democracy: the economic equivalent of Facebook’s “who remembers proper bin men?”

The Eighties were hard years for many in the woolyback mill towns and pit villages, as well as in urban Britain. As Merseyside became known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism” — any firms that went in were liable to never come out — iconic local employers from Tate & Lyle to Meccano to Dunlop moved operations to more peaceable climes. The growth model of Butskellite, post-Imperial Britain was undergoing a major restructure.

Thatcherite ministers looked at the old-fashioned, uncompetitive (and often nationalized) industries of Britain in the postwar era and saw only waste, inefficiency, and an opportunity for creative destruction. The security of a gray, plodding collectivism had to be replaced by dynamism and animal spirits. But Burnham saw it all differently, perhaps in the manner expressed in his favorite Boys from the Blackstuff episode. In the classic, Liverpool-based TV show that inspired his entry into the Labour Party, an old boy on his dying day delivers a wistful soliloquy from his wheelchair, an ode to “the ship repair men, the scalers, the dockers, the Mary Ellens who used to swab and clean the big liners”.

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In the Burnhamite reading, neoliberalism killed that old world off. That’s why our seventh PM in a decade chose in his first speech as Labour leader to deliver a paean to “the mills across the Pennines”, “the shipyards on the Clyde”, “the coalfields of South Wales”. It echoed the mawkish sentimentalism of the Blackstuff. And that’s why the Blairite modernizers accuse him of pandering to a hopeless nostalgia.

But, in all likelihood, the anti-neoliberal crusading will remain in the rhetorical, romantic register — rather than being reified by a concrete, systemic break, whatever Burnham’s talk of “circuit-breakers”. The fact is that the new prime minister is hemmed in on all sides: by a recalcitrant gilt market, an unwieldy parliamentary Labour Party, an orthodox Treasury apparatus, and by his predecessors’ fiscal rules and tax pledges. Nor does he possess a national mandate to veer radically off piste from the 2024 manifesto.

In response to jitters from the financial establishment, a radically post-neoliberal Left might install a new, more pliant head of the Bank of England to support their political program. They might also impose exchange controls to prevent capital flight, as they nationalize industries and direct capital towards domestic investment. But François Mitterrand found out how difficult such a paradigm shift could prove way back in the Eighties, as currency traders piled pressure on the Franc and forced a return to austerity. Don’t expect Burnham — who championed Gulf investment and public-private partnerships as mayor of Greater Manchester — to try the same trick.

Some on the Right clutch their pearls at the prospect of a mild pivot Leftwards, then, but Burnham is unlikely to seriously unsettle markets beyond moderate yield spikes as ministers talk of a smidgen more fiscal “flexibility”. For the Left to expect any different would be to grossly overestimate the sorry state of their own tired movement, and the very real material constraints that any government is now operating under. To that extent, Burnham will persist with incremental divergence from the neoliberal mean — just like May, Johnson, Starmer and the rest.

Of course, it’s risky to disregard the power of nostalgia, of vibes, of stories about security, collectivity and control. The vanished world of dockyards and factories offered a more comprehensible place and a more rooted common life which were shattered by the neoliberal settlement. The rhetoric can potentially act as a powerful tonic, in electoral terms. But governments can’t prosper with only an elegiac register and a robust moral tone.

Burnham will therefore eventually adopt a model of politics defined less by defiance and revolutionary change, and more by tweaks and accommodation. He’ll sell the legacy of Starmerism — the public railways, the publicly owned wind turbines — as a radical rupture. He’ll make the Left feel like they have a home in the Labour Party again, without adopting any of their harder-edged demands. That leaves the Wool Mandela roughly back where he began, somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester, radicalism and pragmatism. A wool can belong to several places at once, but as Prime Minister, he eventually has to choose.

This is a grave error, and Burnham’s Manchesterism speech on Monday — his first major intervention as Prime Minister presumptive — acknowledged as much. Alongside his eyecatching plan for a Northern wing of Number 10, he lambasted the UK’s public sector for “chasing cut-price deals around the world” as opposed to helping our own “British-based suppliers”, and promised to make taxpayers’ money work “harder for them”. This was a theme Burnham aired repeatedly during the byelection campaign in Makerfield. He cited Britain’s “wasted decades” of neoliberalism and the need to end “forty years of failed economic policy”, raising the prospect of a Britain in which wealth will be rooted in actual production, far more evenly distributed across its regions, and democratically controlled.

The significance of his argument is that it points towards a different economic future from the Blair-era comforts that Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been selling us: essentially, spend more, tax fairly, regulate better. This assumes that Britain’s problem is essentially one of distribution and inefficiency, and could be corrected by a more competent management of the existing settlement.

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This was always inadequate, and it is encouraging to see Burnham embrace the concept of Manchesterism, as laid out in The Productive State, by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, one of the most serious economic frameworks to emerge from the Labour center-Left in many years. Nevertheless, Manchesterism, even in its most developed form, does not go far enough. It remains primarily a program for rebuilding the foundations of the economy through better public provision. But Britain’s crisis runs deeper, and Burnham needs to go much further if he is to arrest Britain’s decline and build an economy that rewards rather than punishes its citizens.

What Manchesterism gets right — and where it stops

Manchesterism starts from the observation that the neoliberal model for public services has failed on its own terms. The classic approach of the Tony Blair era was to invite private companies to bid for contracts to run public services, on the theory that competition would drive down costs, via the “cut-price” deals Burnham cited. What it produced instead was a helpless state, stripped of the capacity to do things itself, at the mercy of private companies far more skilled at exploiting contract law than any harassed local authority. The fundamentals of British life — care, energy, housing, transport, health — have become commodified, run by companies more interested in extracting wealth from the public realm than actually helping people lead productive and dignified lives. The tendency is visible all over the economy: in private equity firms making billions from dysfunctional care homes; in train operating companies extracting profits from lucrative franchises while services deteriorated; in “health services” companies milking NHS hospitals as infection rates rise.

The Manchesterism alternative is public corporations borrowing against their own revenue streams at the UK government’s borrowing rate, investing in infrastructure, and running services in the public interest. The Bee Network — Greater Manchester’s integrated bus system, which Burnham brought back under public control — works. Thames Water, by contrast, is a monument to scandalous dysfunction that follows when essential infrastructure is placed under financialized private ownership.

But while bringing the foundations of daily life under public control is welcome, it will only go so far. The only way to rebuild the engines of wealth creation and ensure that productivity gains translate into broadly-shared prosperity is to restore working-class power through secure, well-paid, productive jobs. GB Energy, if properly capitalized, could begin to change the terms on which Britain generates power. But it can only do so if Britain has the domestic manufacturing base to build the turbines, cables, and grid infrastructure required. There’s no point in trading a reliance on imported gas for a reliance on imported “clean” technology.

Instead, we must recognize that Britain’s political dysfunction is really a reflection of our failure to answer two fundamental questions: namely, who owns and operates the foundations of the economy? And in whose interests? Today, the economy serves shareholders, management consultants, financiers and property owners. The real challenge is to create an economy that instead serves workers, and rewards the creation of real wealth. In other words, Britain’s crisis goes deeper than Manchesterism — and the debate must be conducted at the level of rigor and ambition appropriate to the moment.

The productive crisis

Britain’s fundamental economic problem is structural and specific. Labor productivity has been essentially flat since the financial crisis of 2007-9. British workers produce less output per hour worked than their counterparts in Germany, France, or the United States — and the gap has been widening. Net national savings have been in negative territory for nearly two decades, and we have meanwhile been consuming our accumulated capital stock — letting factories rust, railways decay, and infrastructure crumble — rather than investing to expand it. Our trade deficit in goods has also been persistent since the mid-1980s. We have become a nation of consumers, and we are consuming on credit.

The scale of the destruction that created this situation is still not adequately appreciated. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for close to 30% of British GDP. Today, that figure is 8-9%, with employment in the sector falling from 6.8 million to 2.6 million workers. The well-paid, unionized factory jobs that sustained communities across the North, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland have meanwhile been replaced by insecure, non-unionized work in call centers and distribution warehouses. These are the communities that have voted for change at successive elections — including Brexit —and have been repeatedly disappointed. In the regions that bore the brunt of the destruction, economic inactivity among working-age people now runs at between 24 and 28%.

The financial sector that subsequently grew did not magically compensate for this destruction. Rather, it profited from it. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s new government implemented one of its signature policies in removing controls on the international flows of capital. This enabled the City of London to speculate with the wealth that had been generated by British production in international financial markets. When steelworks in Sheffield or shipyards on the Clyde or car plants in the West Midlands closed, the banks and asset managers were not passive bystanders. They recycled the capital — putting it into property speculation, consumer credit, and financial engineering.

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One notorious instance occurred in 1991. Hanson Trust quietly acquired a stake in ICI, then Britain’s largest manufacturing company, in what was widely seen as the opening move in a hostile takeover. Hanson had no interest in building Britain’s chemical industry. Instead it hoped to unlock shareholder value through the break-up of one of Britain’s great industrial companies. Although the takeover never materialized, the episode accelerated a profound shift in ICI’s strategy. Within two years it had demerged its pharmaceuticals business as Zeneca and embarked on a prolonged restructuring driven increasingly by shareholder value rather than long-term industrial development. Hanson exited after making a substantial profit, having contributed precisely nothing to Britain’s productive capacity. This, in microcosm, has been Britain’s industrial policy over the past 40 years.

But this hasn’t just been bad for British industry. Financialized capitalism has also had consequences for equality. The richest 10% of the population now receives 35% of Britain’s income in yearly bonuses, dividends, capital gains, and rents. The richest 1% holds more than 20% of the total wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds around 5%. Real wages in 2023 were barely higher than they were in 2007. A third of children now live in poverty — more than half of them from working households.

This escalating inequality is not only the result of an unfair distribution of the proceeds of growth. An economy built on Serco contracts, Deliveroo riders and Cavendish Square hedge funds does not present us primarily with a distribution problem — which is why the old Blairite formula of spending more, taxing fairly and regulating better isn’t going to do much to improve it. This is, instead, an economy that has stopped growing in ways that reach most people. Stressed workers scrabble for gig work between insecure care-home shifts while those who own the businesses extract ever more wealth. This is because the productive base that once made broadly shared growth possible was deliberately dismantled.

So Britain cannot create prosperity, reduce inequality, or regain genuine sovereignty without rebuilding its productive base. Manufacturing is where labor productivity rises most systematically through mechanization, automation, technical change, and information technology. It is where workers’ power has historically been strongest, allowing productivity gains to translate into wage increases rather than shareholder returns. And it creates deeper growth around it too, since manufacturing doesn’t just create jobs in factories — it also supports jobs in the businesses that supply materials, transport goods, and sell finished products.

Moreover, services, including finance, which have become the mainstay of the British economy, will never correct the persistent trade deficit in goods. The alternative to reindustrializing Britain is not the economy of highly-paid knowledge workers that we were once promised. It is a low-tech, low-paid service economy in which finance continues to dominate and inequality persists. In other words, the Britain we live in now.

The skills catastrophe

Integral to Britain’s productive failure is an acute crisis of labor skills. The destruction of manufacturing did not simply eliminate jobs but extinguished the knowledge that lives within workforces, apprenticeship networks, and technical colleges — as well as the relationships between firms and the people who build and maintain things. The steel towns of South Yorkshire, the shipbuilding communities of the Tyne and Clyde, the sheet-metal and toolmaking traditions of the Black Country had distinct identities built on skill, pride in craft, and knowledge passed down over generations.

Once this knowledge is gone, it does not return automatically when investment arrives. British manufacturers regularly report the absence of welders and metal fabricators, toolmakers, electrical and instrumentation technicians, mechatronics and robotics engineers, and CNC programmers. These are the foundational competencies of any modern industrial economy — and without them, reindustrialization is far harder even when the will and the finance exist. The technical education system that might address this gap is fragmented and poorly funded. England is particularly weak on post-16 higher technical training — the kind of provision that Germany delivers through dual vocational apprenticeships and the Berufsschulen system. Worse, mainstream commentators have consistently failed to grasp the depth of the problem because they treat skills as a training policy question rather than a structural consequence of forty years of productive decline.

The coming wave of artificial intelligence displacement makes the urgency greater still. Without a deliberate and funded redeployment and retraining of workers, tied to real posts in expanding industrial sectors, Britain will face a hollowing out of its services workforce. We need a national labor plan, offering long-term training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships of a kind Britain has not had for decades.

The bond market as political test

One argument commonly ranged against public corporations is the idea that they will spook the bond markets. The specter of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of September 2022 is never far from such discussions. But the bond market panic Truss unleashed was a response to unfunded sovereign borrowing without specified supply-side returns. This was effectively a subsidy for the wealthy, not targeted public investment in productive assets.

By contrast, public corporation financing is usually acceptable to bond markets — as long as it is credibly structured and borrows against its own revenue streams. The Netherlands finances public corporation liabilities equivalent to nearly 80% of GDP without sovereign disruption, though, to be sure, the institutional framework is different from Britain’s.

Burnham has taken a position on this issue, even stating that “Britain is in hock to the bond markets” — though he has also sometimes tied himself in knots trying to reassure financial markets that an ambitious program would not alarm them. The Dutch example shows it need not be the dire problem it is often made out to be.

But a Labour government that begins to implement a truly ambitious industrial policy can expect a different order of response from the City of London — which will inevitably generate pressure on gilt yields, pressure on sterling, and pressure on the political class to abandon ambition. That pressure will not be a market verdict, however — but, rather, a political intervention by concentrated financial interests whose position would be threatened by the program.

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In other words, the barriers to taming the bond markets are political, not technical. A government that issues debt in its own currency and is prepared to use its central bank cannot be forced into default by bond market pressure. Central bank independence is a shibboleth of the neoliberal era — a constraint entrenched by Gordon Brown’s decision in 1997 to grant the Bank of England operational independence. However, its time has now passed. The Bank of England is a public institution, and part of its mission must be to deploy its control over the nation’s credit to rebuild the nation’s productive base. Since the crisis of 2007-9, the Bank has created vast amounts of money to bail out failing banks and manage stagnation. There has always been money for that. The Bank should be at least as forthright in rebuilding Britain’s productive capacity.

An ambitious Labour government should be able to rely on the Bank to continue holding its gilt stock rather than unloading it at loss-making prices, as it is currently doing at vast cost to public finances. The Bank ought to reinvest maturities and keep interest rates low and stable while Britain rebuilds its productive capacity. A break from the Bank’s current posture is a break from New Labour’s foundational economic settlement and should be named as such.

But even a cooperative Bank of England would be insufficient without a wave of public investment in key infrastructure capable of “crowding in” private investment. It would further require a well-capitalized Public Investment Bank with preferential access to the Bank of England. It would thus raise immediately the issue of some degree of capital controls, in order to ensure that money generated in Britain stays in Britain rather than being spirited away to accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands the moment a government pursues policies that threaten the returns of mobile capital.

Capital controls are neither exotic nor radical. This was standard policy in Britain from 1945 to 1979, the period of the country’s strongest growth performance in recent decades. They are currently used by China, India, and many other successful industrializers. Even the IMF has acknowledged their legitimacy under conditions of financial instability. Their purpose is not to cut Britain off from the world but to change the incentives for fast-moving speculative capital, preventing it from disrupting the productive sector and limiting the power of finance over elected governments.

A Labour leadership candidate who cannot articulate a credible strategy to prevent capital flight, including the readiness to use targeted capital controls as and when they are necessary, has not yet answered the fundamental question about surviving contact with the City of London.

The policy space Brexit created

Beyond finance, a serious industrial strategy will also take advantage of the policy space that Brexit created and that no government since 2016 has exploited in the ten years since the vote. This failure makes Labour’s continuing internal paralysis over the question of rejoining the single market all the more damaging. Britain is now free to align trade policy with domestic investment and employment in ways that EU single market membership foreclosed.

An industrial strategy that hopes to deliver results will need time for productive capacity to take root. In the meantime, the risk is that new capacity will be killed through cheaper imports from countries with lower wages, laxer standards, state-sponsored overcapacity and so on. This is how capitalism works, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Nevertheless, there are several tools available: WTO anti-dumping measures and safeguards; a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that could equalize the carbon price of imports in steel, aluminum, cement and other foundational sectors from 2027; procurement rules requiring domestic content and supply chain traceability. If necessary, tariff-rate quotas, national security designations, and domestic content conditions can be attached to public subsidies and grid connections. Donald Trump has made managed trade a normalized reality in the world market — and there is no going back to the free-trade consensus of the previous, now defunct, era. Britain should use the space available to it and stop wasting time.

Organized labour as key mechanism

There is one further dimension of this debate which has been less visible so far, but is crucial to whether Britain can come up with a genuine alternative to an extractive economy— trade unions. Organized labour is not simply a constituency to be won over but a key mechanism for restoring Britain’s wealth-creating capacity. Union representation on the boards of public corporations is the lever through which public ownership serves the interests of workers and the public. Union power in Britain is how regional rebalancing becomes real rather than rhetorical. The skills crisis cannot be addressed without organized labour either — for workers tend to understand the needs of their own industries better than those outside them.  The reconstruction of apprenticeship frameworks, the rebuilding of technical education, the link between training investment and union density that coordinated market economies have consistently demonstrated — all of this requires workers’ collective power, organizational capacity and crucially, their practical knowledge.

The tests of seriousness

Andy Burnham could run on Manchesterism and offer a better-managed version of the current settlement. That would be an improvement — but it would not be the breakthrough that Britain truly needs. The country desperately needs policies that address its deep productive crisis. If a radical Labour government is to go down that path, four specific commitments will be the test of its seriousness, as we show in detail in our forthcoming book.

First, a target to raise manufacturing’s share of GDP to an achievable and sustainable level that could act as a base for further increases. This should be backed by a costed investment program that includes public equity stakes, a properly capitalized Public Investment Bank, and union board representation as a condition of public finance.

Second, graduated and targeted capital controls to protect democratic economic decisions from speculative financial attack.

Third, trade regulation that uses the policy space Brexit created and no government since 2016 has seriously exploited.

Fourth, a national labor plan for rebuilding skills and training, with long training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships with high completion rates, as the vital human foundation without which an expanding industrial base cannot exist.

Britain has had nearly five decades of neoliberal failure, punctuated by the periodic realization that its decline is worse than previously acknowledged. The debate that Manchesterism has opened is the right one, and the left should deepen it. The central challenge remains Britain’s crisis of production, from which its crisis of provision ultimately flows. The four commitments we have outlined are the minimum conditions for a genuine break. Anything less is a better-managed version of what we already have — and we know that it does not work.

Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott, and Doug Nicholls are the authors of Reindustrialise Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation (Polity Press), forthcoming, September 2026.

To the Indian migrant of recent vintage — such as myself — the curry house was always something of a culture shock. No such institution quite exists in India: no laminated menus promising “Madras (Hot)” as a fixed rung on the Scoville scale; no vindaloo calibrated for stag nights; no chicken tikka masala swimming in its sunset-colored gravy. That last dish, famously christened Britain’s “national dish” by the Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001, at the soggy zenith of the Blairite multicultural rapture, was less a testament to British cultural absorption than to a proclivity for unadventurous adaptation.

For better or worse, that Britain is on its way out. Where once Brick Lane’s neon promised a Soviet sameness, today’s openings — typically regional, not national; a touch evangelical about provenance — suggest a city that prefers its cuisines less translated. If the old curry house served up a hospitable fiction, the new arrivals dish out the real thing.

And yet, just as London acquires a taste for the truly local, one of its grandest culinary generalities approaches its centenary. This week, if fate and the facilities managers permit, the Michelin-starred Veeraswamy will turn 100. For a century now, the establishment has served mulligatawny beneath low chandeliers, its monogrammed silver and formal service staging a certain vision of Anglo-Indian continuity above Regent Street.

Mulligatawny itself — from the Tamil milagu tanni, or “pepper water” — began as a thin broth before being refashioned into one of the statelier soups of the Raj. In trendier circles in 1780s London, it was thickened with stock and meat, standardized with curry powder, and promoted to a fashionable first course. Thereafter, tins accompanied Victorian expeditions, and, on one occasion, an overgenerous cook left David Livingstone’s party incapacitated for “several days in severe suffering”. In a later age, it surfaced in Seinfeld as Kramer’s tepid libation of choice: “Yeah, it’s an Indian soup. Simmered to perfection by one of the great soup artisans in the modern era.”

Mulligatawny remains the signature dish at Veeraswamy, theatrically poured at the table from a silver tureen. Other offerings, too, flit with similar ease between the Subcontinent and the Home Counties. A “Calcutta” beetroot croquette, for instance, appears with a Stilton sauce and Bhutanese chili — the Raj rendered as canapé.

The mains, too, are curiously gentle. The spices arrive almost meekly, as though still mindful of interwar digestion. One imagines the ghost of a Twenties diner, moustache bristling, brow beading nervously at the prospect of chili. By modern standards, the seasoning is restrained to the point of bashfulness; yet there is a quiet pleasure in that restraint.

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Such easy-going culinary federalism has long been the restaurant’s métier. But now, the institution faces a singularly modern demise. The Crown Estate, which owns the building, intends to refurbish Victory House — that splendid slab of Twenties Imperialist Baroque — to bring its offices up to contemporary standards. The plans involve altering the ground-floor entrance: a minor architectural adjustment, perhaps, but unfortunately the very corridor through which diners ascend to the restaurant upstairs. Once the lease expires, there will be no practical way for Veeraswamy to remain where it’s been for nearly a century.

The result has been a curious spectacle of culinary petitioning. More than 20,000 people have appealed to Charles Windsor to intervene and preserve this slice of Anglo-India. The Crown Estate, meanwhile, speaks in the antiseptic idiom of modern property management, explaining that the redevelopment is required to “bring the building up to modern standards”, and free up office space to secure long-term value. Free-market fundamentalism, in royal livery, has come at last for the chutney trays.

Founded in 1926, Veeraswamy was the brainchild of Edward Palmer, the great-grandson of an East India Company general and a Mughal princess, a lineage so operatic it sounds like something conjured up by E. M. Forster. The restaurant opened in Piccadilly Circus and has remained there ever since, stoically serving through the Blitz and Brexit. It has some claim to being Britain’s first upscale Indian restaurant: not the first curry house, since lascar sailors had been feeding Londoners since the 19th century, but the first to present Subcontinental fare with silverware and ceremony.

Palmer’s ambition was pedagogical. The early menu was designed to introduce Britons to Indian cooking: in a form tempered for insular palates. Royal, diplomatic, and political patronage duly followed. A Danish prince, legend has it, even helped inaugurate the great British ritual of “pints and curry” by arranging for his preferred lager, Carlsberg, to be shipped over for his visits.

The original Veeraswamy menu, as the food writer Sejal Sukhadwala notes, became the template for what would later solidify into the standard curry-house repertoire: kormas, biryanis, rogan joshes. It also came to structure expectations: poppadoms first, vindaloo for the brave, korma for the timid. The British curry, then, owes something of its grammar to this glitzy setting — aristocratic beginnings for what would become a thoroughly plebeian pleasure. There is some irony there. Curry, that workers’ favorite, once dismissed as little more than “blotting paper” food — useful chiefly for soaking up heroic quantities of beer — was in fact born in one of London’s grandest dining rooms.

The story has come full circle. When the journalist Mihir Bose first arrived in Britain in the Sixties, Indian food was regarded with something approaching suspicion. Factory colleagues in Leicester warned him not to bring his “funny-smelling” cooking into the workplace. Curry would later enjoy a quite different sort of ascendancy, becoming a firmly hoi-polloi favorite, with no pretensions to haute cuisine. Now, half a century on, it has drifted loose from its working-class associations once more. A clutch of Indian restaurants hold Michelin stars, while nothing announces bourgeois takeaway quite like Dishoom. In his memoir, Bose recalls a young fitness trainer confessing to sudden late-night cravings for curry — and refusing to believe there had ever been a time when Brits recoiled from it.

What’s more, “going for an Indian” no longer means going for a curry. If Veeraswamy once educated Londoners about Indian food, today the capital scarcely requires instruction. The city’s culinary map runs from Punjabi grills in Southall to Keralan cafés in East Ham, from Gujarati thali houses in Wembley to tasting menus in Mayfair that treat asafoetida with the reverence once reserved for truffles. The children and grandchildren of postwar migrants have moved the cuisine on. Paradoxically, post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain is more cosmopolitan, more culinarily curious, than imperial Britain ever was.

When I visited on a Thursday evening, Veeraswamy was oddly heaving. The lift kept disgorging diners in twos and fours, many of them casting the same slightly conspiratorial glance around the room. Variations of the same question drifted between tables: was this to be our last meal here? At the entrance a genial usher, splendid in durbar-kitsch regalia, greeted arrivals with the air of a man presiding over a minor pageant.

To step inside Veeraswamy today is to wander into a minor museum of late-imperial camp. The place has the air of a colonial cousin of Wiltons. One senses the regulars have been coming for decades, perhaps generations. Lights hang low over white tablecloths tended with mortuary diligence; chintz and polished silver conspire to evoke not India so much as a certain idea of India once issued by an Edwardian pen. This is not the India of Bombay or Delhi but the India of The Far Pavilions, which is to say it feels unmistakably British — certainly, a relic of Britain that has largely slipped from view.

My waiter, who combined clubland bonhomie with flashes of dramatic flourish, told me business had rarely been brisker. The threat of closure has evidently sharpened appetites. People want, as he put it with a shrug, “their last mulligatawny”. There is also a final opportunity to sample the house cocktail, dating from the restaurant’s founding and simply called the 1926: an arrestingly verdant concoction, floral and faintly medicinal, like something a Raj apparatchik might once have taken to steady the nerves when the natives began entertaining ideas above their station.

There is, of course, no accounting for taste. Veeraswamy will not be to everyone’s liking. Yet establishments are not preserved because they are fashionable but because they carry institutional memory. The spectacle of campaigners beseeching the King to save their curry house, no doubt, has about it the air of an Evelyn Waugh plot twist: empire’s aftertaste petitioning empire’s heir. But one can smile at the absurdity and still feel the pathos.

If it closes, London will not starve. There are fiercer curries and cleverer chefs across the city. But a world will have vanished. It says something about the state of Britain today that empire — or at least its culinary afterlife — could survive decolonization, yet may not survive the unsentimental logic of property and profit. Neoliberalism, after a fashion, has defeated imperialism.

All the quagmires of government failure are distilled into this sector. An aging population puts the Treasury under ever more strain, but successive governments are too afraid of upsetting the asset-rich gray vote. Staffing crises are assuaged by importing cheap foreign workers, and local authorities are bankrupted by ballooning costs. All the while, council tax payers wonder where on earth their money goes.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting wrote in The Guardian at the beginning of the year to tell us how seriously he was taking the crisis. Despite our aging population, the number of people receiving state-funded social care has fallen by 10% in a decade, adding huge demand pressures on hospitals and GPs. Around one in seven hospital beds are taken up by fit patients with no discharge plan in place. What’s more, social care costs are expected to double by 2038. But there’s no idea about what to do. As the ratio of workers to pensioners becomes more and more lopsided, fewer taxpayers will have to foot the bill for larger numbers of dependents. One of the larger items on the bill will be a rapidly expanding workforce in an already enormous sector; while over 1.5 million people work in social care today, even amid chronic shortages, by 2040 that number is expected to rise by 470,000 to over two million.

Meanwhile, ultra-liberals wrap their gratitude for bargain-basement social care workers in paeans to diversity and cosmopolitan tolerance. I’m thinking, of course, of Zack Polanski. “One in five care workers are foreign nationals,” he reminded a Question Time audience earlier this month. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum, and I’m very grateful for the people who do.” It seems the progressive mindset is now so flexible that it can accommodate an attitude to labor relations that would be familiar in an autocratic Gulf petrostate: grossly underpaid foreign workers are invited and maintained as a vast, low-waged service army, while the middle classes engage in more dignified work, like making podcasts about “eco-populism”.

There’s a more essential challenge here, too, as services including residential care homes are hollowed out by parasitic ownership models, hedge funds and private equity — a model which has been adopted across the public sector, not just in social care. Councils often award contracts to large providers based on “value for money”, handing over service provision to private firms that can supposedly deliver with economies of scale. But studies have shown that the outsourcing of provision almost never has a positive impact on quality of care — it simply increases costs for service users. Currently, anyone with assets over £23,250 contributes to their own costs of care, while local authorities shoulder much of the increasingly heavy burden. To make matters worse, research released last month found that, over the course of just three years and in only three English regions, £250 million in profit was extracted from social care provision, often by companies registered in tax havens.

This is the end result of a particular kind of political economy. It was in the 19th century that Joseph Chamberlain, then the Liberal mayor of Birmingham and later a prominent pro-imperialist Tory, pioneered what was called “gas and water socialism”: municipal authorities would provide basic public utilities directly. Yet somehow we’ve regressed over the last century and a half, with anyone now proposing a model like Chamberlain’s liable to be dismissed as a socialist fantasist. Instead, for almost 50 years we’ve advocated a model that sells England by the pound: the government structures that once promised cradle-to-grave care are now emaciated and powerless in the face of foreign investors. Everything is put out to tender and outsourced, with the local and national state as the customer. Around a third of government spending now goes on procurement from the private sector. And ultra-dry Thatcherites, the Blairite modernizers, and their Cameroonian heirs have all played their part, extending the practice and allowing the core capabilities of the state itself wither. The taxpayer pays, but it’s often an opaque world of para-state private behemoths delivering everything at the coalface, disguised behind a government logo.

The results are mixed, at best, and the only sure winners are the investment groups themselves, and perhaps the expensive lawyers that oversee the Byzantine tendering process. As for the state’s own capacity, institutional memory, expertise and personnel — all these are now woefully inadequate.

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In social care, it wasn’t until the Eighties that local authority-run homes began to be sold off. The NHS and Community Care Act of 1990 took away councils’ responsibility to provide care directly, replacing it with a requirement simply to buy care from private providers. Where 89% of care provision used to be delivered by public providers or charities, today the proportion of private provision stands at 83%. Service users are left vulnerable, as care homes are taken over by the sovereign wealth funds of more entrepreneurial, agile states — ones that patiently invest in long-term assets rather than rushing to sell them off to the highest bidder.

Taken together, the sector encapsulates our embrace of the twin liberalisms that have defined the last decades. The economic liberals first insisted we break up the state monoliths, and introduce internal markets, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and healthy competition into public service delivery. Soon after, the social liberals demanded that we welcome historically unprecedented numbers of arrivals into the country. The British labor market at the lower ends of the wage scale has paid the price.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, successive governments have avoided tackling this crisis head-on. Fine words aside, Streeting is no exception, ordering yet another lengthy review, not due to report until 2028. Andrew Dilnot, the respected author of the last review, was openly disparaging of Labour’s delays. He has already offered his own solutions: one involves a national criterion of eligibility for care. Beyond replacing the current postcode lottery hodgepodge, this would, in effect, create a National Care Service of sorts, paid for with capped contributions from individuals with social care needs, and levied upon estates over a certain threshold. The Holy Grail for local authorities would be a truly integrated national service, taken out of the purview of cash-strapped municipalities. They would be then free to focus on the services used by the majority of people who do not use social care, but who nevertheless pay up to two thirds of their council tax bills toward its failing institutions.

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At its best, care work could be transformed into a secure, decently paid profession, on a similar footing as nursing or teaching, ending the doom-loop of high turnover, chronic shortages and low skills. That would have a fiscal cost, of course, and may require controversial incursions into the enormous real-estate portfolios of human history’s most fortunate generation: the Baby Boomers. But the point is that Streeting already knows what needs to be done, and yet he is unwilling to expend the political capital to do so. Memories of Theresa May’s ill-fated “dementia tax” are raw.

Such timidity is grimly to be expected. For if it’s impossible to escape the feeling that nothing now works, it’s equally hard to avoid the fact that our politicians seem totally adrift, powerless amid the global forces swirling around them. What’s worse is the growing realization that this impotence has been self-inflicted. It’s the result of conscious decisions to wind down and outsource the direct functions of state, to diminish the powers of the executive, to degrade and then offload assets, in effect to sell the family silver. We’ve got ourselves in chronic indebtedness and at the mercy of international lenders and speculators — only to then turn around and cry “not me, guv” when things fall apart.

One might expect a Labour government that talks of “resilience” to grasp the nettle and finally start rebuilding the capabilities of the British state, taking on private interests and rebuilding the public realm in public hands. But why wreck a career on social care, as so many senior ministers have before, especially for a man as clearly ambitious as Streeting? The dysfunction is such, after all, that any attempt at reform may open a Pandora’s Box, leaving even the best of our secretaries of state without a future. And so, when it comes to social care, nothing is to be done, and nothing sums up our very British dysfunction quite like it — the truest icon of our national decline.

The long and bumpy journey there began one hot summer night in 1992, in the same city that gave us Mamdani. Then, Bill Clinton stood before a packed Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination for president. “The Cold War is over,” he said. “Soviet communism has collapsed and our values — freedom, democracy, individual rights, free enterprise — they have triumphed all around the world.” Having declared the death of socialism, he then outlined a program to pivot the Democrats towards a new ideology that would “end welfare as we know it” and create a “government that is leaner… that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy… that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise”.

The previous Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had begun experimenting with neoliberal policies in the late Seventies — trying deregulation and the use of tight monetary policy to fight inflation — but Clinton went full-hog and made small government the new creed. Its basic premise, that social progress resulted from individuals pursuing their self-interest in an enlightened manner, essentially took Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and gave it a liberal sheen. Most significantly, by burying the Keynesian consensus that had dominated the Party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clinton joined the Democrats to the Republicans in a new neoliberal consensus. This doctrine, which would dominate American policy-making for the next three decades, would prioritize free trade and globalization, deregulation, a leaner state with less generous welfare, low taxes, balanced budgets, and an independent central bank that used monetary policy as the final arbiter of the government’s fiscal rectitude.

Ever since, it’s been an article of orthodoxy among Democrats that no party which welcomed socialists could ever stand a chance outside of America’s liberal heartlands. Candidates could talk a good line on change, as Barack Obama did in his 2008 election campaign, but once in office quickly reasserted the hold of the neoliberal wing on economic policy. Obama did just that when he handed his economic policy-making over to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

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Various theories have been put forth to explain the seemingly visceral antipathy Americans have long had to socialism. The frontier thesis posited that European settlement of the West created a culture of rugged individualism; the fragment thesis suggested socialism came to America via German rather than British immigrants, and so was Marxist and counter-cultural rather than Fabian and non-revolutionary. Marxist historian Mike Davis held that organized labour chose not to form a party, as happened in Europe; instead, they hoped to play one party off against the other to secure maximal benefits. Sociologist Barrington Moore believed the outlet of Western settlement acted as a pressure-release valve of urban working classes in 19th-century America’s industrial seaboard. But to this day, polls consistently show that most Americans dislike anything that smacks of communism. Mamdani, for example, polls better in the Big Apple than in the wider country.

That doesn’t mean Americans haven’t been building an appetite for significant change. Over the course of the Obama presidency, the public began turning against the neoliberal consensus, spawning the Occupy movement on the Left and the Tea Party revolt on the Right. But when the 2016 presidential primaries saw insurgent candidates openly challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, the Republicans succumbed to the anti-free-trade populism of Donald Trump while the Democrats stood firm, delivering the nomination to the uber-establishment Hillary Clinton rather than the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders.

In hindsight, though, that was the beginning of the end for the Democratic neoliberals. Clinton’s subsequent humiliating defeat at the hands of Trump rankled with the Democratic Left, which pointed to polls that said a hypothetical Sanders-Trump contest would have been won by the Brooklyn-born firebrand (though hypotheticals rarely tell us much). Since then, Left-wing populists have repeatedly surfaced, and the establishment has kept beating them back. Most recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was working as a bartender in the Bronx when she won a shock victory in the 2018 House of Representatives election, found her wings clipped last year when she tried to win the top Democratic position on a powerful House committee, only to be beaten by a septuagenarian. AOC, as she is popularly known, then set off on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with her mentor Sanders, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds in unlikely places such as Oklahoma, Utah and Montana. The tour culminated in September in her native New York City, where the star attraction was none other than Mamdani.

On Tuesday night, more than 30 years after Clinton pronounced socialism dead, the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani stood before a raucous crowd as proof that it had risen once more. Like AOC, Mamdani came out of nowhere to rocket to victory. Like AOC, he is a charismatic and articulate master of new media. Like AOC, he deeply unsettles the Party establishment — the Clintons refused to back him, as did Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

But by defeating the establishment and its deep-pocketed backers in a hugely lopsided contest, Mamdani may have given the Left both inspiration and a significant base from which to launch a run for the 2028 presidential election, with AOC frequently topping lists of the papabile. While that possibility still seems a long shot, she and Sanders may well emerge as kingmakers in the Democratic primaries, one way or the other.

And while the Party leadership still invokes the need to cleave to the center, the Left-wing Democrats seem to have two things going in their favor. First, sentiment is shifting. Ever since the bank bailouts that followed the 2008 crash, Americans have grown less enthusiastic about capitalism, with Democratic voters now expressing strong and growing support for socialism. Most notably young voters, who broke strongly for Trump last year, have soured quickly, apparently disappointed that his anti-establishment rhetoric gave way to a warm embrace of tech oligarchs. Meanwhile, Sanders remains one of the most popular politicians in America and even AOC, who is more divisive, enjoys substantially better approval ratings than Trump.

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The second thing going for the radicals is that Americans don’t always do what they say they’ll do. The received wisdom in 2016 was that Clinton was a shoo-in because Americans would not vote for a candidate as far outside the mainstream as Trump. But they did, twice. The secret to Trump’s success seems to be that even though he seldom enjoys majority approval, his supporters are so devoted to him that the Party has opened an enthusiasm gap with the Democrats. It may be that the secret to Democratic success lies in a similar strategy: don’t worry if a majority don’t like your candidate, provided a highly-motivated plurality turns out on election day. Mamdani may show how to do it.

While a socialist is still unlikely to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2028, the resurgence of radical populism within the party makes it probable that the next candidate will have to repudiate neoliberalism. In other words, the odds have improved that the 2028 election will pit a MAGA Republican against a Left-wing Democrat. The resulting pyrotechnics might obscure the true significance of that development: a definitive end to the neoliberal era.

A new consensus might not immediately emerge to replace the fallen neoliberal one, given that both parties are engaged in internecine warfare between rival wings. Among the Democrats, the establishment won’t give way without a fight, and they can point to the fact that centrist Democrats did well in other elections on Tuesday night. Among the Republicans, while loyalty to Trump binds the Party together, splits are emerging between different factions as the fight for the 2028 nomination heats up. Policy volatility could result, as one administration after another repeatedly undoes its predecessor’s work, as Trump has done with the Biden administration’s.

Nevertheless, on several points, MAGA Republicans and the Democratic Left seem to be converging — not least because some of Trump’s neoliberal reversions, such as tax cuts, deregulation and a rollback of public health care, have landed uneasily with many of his supporters (witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent meltdowns). But the deeper trends seem increasingly clear. Globalization will likely diminish as trade deals and immigration policy pay more attention to worker rights and supply-chain resilience. Central bank independence may no longer be sacrosanct, and the Federal Reserve may be expected to underwrite looser government spending. Inflation may consequently settle at the higher level it’s at now. There is likely to be some restoration of regulation, and the tech oligarchs especially may come back into the crosshairs of populists on both sides of the political aisle. Tax policy may be revised to be less favorable to the rich, and more to the middle class. A cross-party consensus on health care reform may yet emerge. In other words, American capitalism may be entering a new and uncertain age. The future could look quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

For there is little that Downing Street’s chief of staff seems to enjoy more than “hippy-punching”. The irreconcilables on the party’s Left have been sidelined or exorcised through a combination of forcible banishment and self-exile. Party discipline has been enforced more rigidly than ever before. But, at some point, you have to identify yourself positively, with what you are for, rather than simply buckling down for permanent counter-insurgency, identifying yourself negatively, with what you’re against. On Friday afternoon, Starmer said that Labour faces “a battle for the soul of this country”, offering “patriotic national renewal”. But what kind of patriotism is he offering, and what kind of renewal, and to what kind of nation?

These are the questions that might normally be answered with the help of McSweeney. But McSweeney is in trouble. Revelations about £700,000 in undeclared donations to Labour Together, a think tank that he led during the Corbyn years, have recently resurfaced. Leaked emails reveal that lawyers advised that there was “no easy way to explain” the supposed oversight, telling the Starmerite outfit to blame “admin error” since they could not deal with the discrepancies “substantively”. Labour Together has already been fined, way back in 2021. But the story rumbles on. Perhaps more importantly than the low-level pecuniary scandal, McSweeney has become a lightning rod for everything that has afflicted a spluttering Starmerism in recent weeks.

The British press delight in creating a Machiavellian puppetmaster: the power, the anchor behind an otherwise ideologically unmoored throne. But unlike Boris Johnson’s equivalent Rasputin figure, Dominic Cummings, with whom he is often compared and is rumoured to have met on several occasions, McSweeney has not produced hundreds of thousands of words of esoteric, polemical invective via his personal blog before ascending to the apex of the British political system. There are no McSweeney lectures on YouTube, explaining his role in organizing against the BNP in Dagenham, where by most accounts he played a crucial role cleaning up fly-tipping zones and fixing up dilapidated housing to counter an incipient far-Right threat.

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But this kind of “pavement politics”, redolent of a well-worn hyper-localism long practiced by the Lib Dems, is no substitute for a coherent worldview. Even New Labour’s own Prince of Darkness — the thrice-disgraced Peter Mandelson, a close McSweeney confidant — had the kind of intellectual scaffold that his softly-spoken younger protégé lacks. Third Way theorists like Anthony Giddens and the trendy bourgeois-bohemian Eurocommunist thinkers around Marxism Today presaged a post-class, center-left politics for the individualized, post-industrial consumer society, buoying Mandelson’s back-room Svengali operations in service of a Blairite nation-building project that was, at least, ideologically coherent.

But what is McSweeney’s guiding light, the source of his first principles? Thatcher, perhaps apocryphally, slammed down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty during a tense cabinet stand-off, bellowing “This is what we believe!” What book does Starmer slam down? Is it Roy of the Rovers? Nobody can say. And what about McSweeney? We hear, in briefings, second- and third-hand, that he has an instinct for the electorate, and a strategic mind that is lacking among many members of the political classes. No doubt this is true. He correctly surmises that the niche obsessions of the contemporary Left are an electoral dead end: the old, stalwart “anti-imperialist” stances that lead to alignment with terrorist groups; the apologia for all variants of anti-American Third World strongmen; and, among the younger, millennial-socialist currents, the obsessions with gender fluidity, postmodern cultural poses, or wildly unpopular attempts to push extreme climate evangelism on a bemused public. These are what drove the Irishman’s war against Corbynism. But to what end, other than victory for victory’s sake?

This week, an international brigade of center-left sensibles met for the Global Progress Action Summit in London. McSweeney was reportedly behind preparations for the event, which included high-profile Democrats like Pete Buttigieg, alongside the Spanish Socialist PM, Starmer himself, and senior UK cabinet ministers, among them Rachel Reeves and David Lammy. It was briefed that the PM’s chief of staff “sees Keir as being a leader among global progressives”. Perhaps becoming a leader among British progressives would represent the first baby steps. One has to crawl before one can walk. But the source of the briefing nevertheless claimed that the social-democratic jamboree would look to “write a kind of playbook of what it means to be a center-left government in the era that we’re now in”, eschewing both Left and Right populisms and the Third Way model of the Nineties.

The problem for all these parties, from Labour to the Democrats to their European equivalents, is that they’ve never abandoned the Third Way. They each placed all-in bets on the inevitability of a linear progression towards an end-of-history vision of social and economic liberalism. They consciously realigned themselves to rainbow-coalition voter blocs constituted around groups of urbanite sophisticates that represented a future of knowledge and service work and the sublimation of class for identity politics; the professional-managerial classes, public sector workers, the urban precariat, and ethnic and sexual minorities. The working class, understood traditionally as those in manual professions not requiring a degree, were considered expendable; their industries were on the way out, in any case, and they would be consigned to the dustbin of history.

That politics has died in a wave of populist insurgency across the developed world. The working class didn’t disappear, but they’re no longer working on production lines, or unionized, and they’ve certainly no longer got an ear bent towards the gray, stodgy representatives of a distant liberal graduate class. And the attempted reconstitution of productive industrial capacity in Western economies is now the core focus of center-left politics. McSweeney seems to grasp both these trends. But he also seems either unable or unwilling to do what’s necessary to chart a course for genuine renewal for building a new growth model, almost two decades since neoliberalism died, or for reanimating Labour as the real party of the labor interest. This would involve identifying losers, as well as picking winners.

Over the summer, an anonymously authored paper circulated among disgruntled backbenchers and parliamentary staffers. “What did we learn on our summer holidays?”, it asked. It provided a brutal diagnostic for those returning from recess. “Labour”, it says, was governing “a country it does not know”. A rudderless government “is divided in itself”. Multiplying crises “have not produced positive change but political inertia”, with the governing party retaining “its old atrophying instincts… repeating its mistakes, ad nauseum.”

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Even McSweeney’s allies stress his weakness. A Blue Labour-aligned party figure laments the fact that “Morgan is just one man”, albeit a powerful one, struggling forlornly against the tide. But in Get In, McSweeney is the clear protagonist. Rather being driven by Sir Keir, the narrative is centered on the mysterious Irishman who conducts apparent Sun Tzu-like factional warfare while engineering an emphatic but clinical and loveless general election result, only for the curtain to fall and reveal it was all a pyrrhic victory, all much ado about nothing; a government with a historic supermajority, but without a plan for power, a project, or a guiding philosophy.

The Prime Minister’s most senior aide is quoted as telling a friend that “Keir acts like a HR manager, not a leader”. He’s “not driving the train”, says another. “He thinks he’s driving it, but we’ve sat him in front of the DLR”. Everyone knows who we’re meant to think is the real driver. But the thing about briefing to all and sundry that you’re a Clausewitzian strategic genius, pursuing politics as war by other means, is that you have to take the rough with the smooth: you can’t claim credit for the good times without being blamed for the bad. And on the eve of the Labour conference, these are no doubt bad times. One might even posit that for the Government, things can only get better.

MPs with thin majorities smell blood, and Downing Street is rankled. McSweeney is not universally loved even there. Some Labour staffers still gripe at a supposed boys’ club that was built around the Cork man. “I don’t rate him,” one tells me, “but I know I’m an outlier”.

McSweeney isn’t omnipotent. There’s more than a little frustration with the way the Government’s crucial first year has gone in Number 10. National renewal feels more like managed decline. The “Change” headline of the rather thin manifesto turns out to involve only barely perceptible, piecemeal reforms. “Insurgent government” looks more like a process-obsessed administration; government of, by and for the lawyers. If the standard quip is that politicians must campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then Starmer campaigned in prose and is governing in disjointed bullet points. Next week in Liverpool, both the PM and McSweeney will be hoping that today’s Labour librarians stay silent.

For years, Trump lambasted Fed Chair Jerome Powell as a “numbskull” and a “stubborn mule” for refusing to slash interest rates on command. But now the rhetoric has turned to action, with Trump firing the sitting Governor Lisa Cook over claims of mortgage fraud. Enter Miran, an acolyte who has publicly argued for the President’s right to dismiss Fed governors at will, yet who promised in his written testimony to uphold the Fed’s cherished independence.

This dramatic confrontation has sent a familiar shudder through the halls of global finance: central bank independence, they tell us, is under grave threat. The guardians of economic orthodoxy — from central bank governors to mainstream economists and pundits — are ringing alarm bells, warning that political control of monetary policy would be a “very serious danger” to the global economy and would “undermine the very foundations of our democracy”. This has been the mainstream mantra for the past 40 years. The narrative is clear: independent central banks are technocratic bulwarks against the short-term, populist whims of politicians, and their autonomy is synonymous with economic stability and democratic health.

The concept of central bank independence appeared in the wake of the stagflation crisis of the Seventies. According to the Chicago School economists, short-sighted, vote-hungry politicians could not be trusted with the levers of monetary policy: they would be tempted to juice the economy with low rates before an election, risking longer-term inflation for short-term gain. The solution was to hand the keys to the economy to a priesthood of supposedly apolitical and neutral experts — technocrats immune from electoral pressures who could make tough, necessary decisions for the long-term health of the economy.

This idea was institutionalized globally in the Eighties and Nineties. Countries like the UK, Canada, and Sweden granted their central banks statutory independence. The pinnacle of this movement was the creation of the European Central Bank in 1998, designed from the ground up to be fiercely independent with a single-minded focus on price stability. To this day, it remains an unquestionable dogma. As IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva stated earlier this year, “independence is critical to winning the fights against inflation and achieving stable long-term economic growth.” Any threat to it is treated as economic heresy. But this dogma collapses under scrutiny.

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The most compelling rebuttal to the panic is also the simplest: the myth of independence was always just that — a myth. As economist James Galbraith noted, the historical record shows that since its inception the Fed has been a creature of the state. Created by Congress in 1913, its powers are granted, limited and revised through legislation. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978 also subjected it to regular congressional scrutiny. Congress, in other words, has always held the ultimate authority. It appoints the Fed’s leadership and, crucially, has the legal power to mandate policy changes, a threat it wielded in 1982. Former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke himself once conceded that “the Fed will do whatever Congress tells us to do”. The debate thus shouldn’t be about defending a fiction, but about deciding who the Fed should answer to: the
executive — as Trump would want — the legislature, or, ideally, the public.

Moreover, on a practical and operational level, central banks cannot be fully independent from the treasury. The functions of the two have to be closely coordinated on a daily basis to ensure that the policy targets of each can be met. They are two wings of the same government body, not separate entities. This is the case in most Western countries: a former Reserve Bank of Australia governor, for example, noted in 1994 that legislation in most democracies allows the elected government to override the central bank. Independence, in other words, was always conditional, a carefully managed illusion. The only real exception is the ECB — a point we will return to.

Central bank independence may be an illusion, then, but it is one that has proved extraordinarily useful for elites. It has been one of the most powerful neoliberal tools to depoliticize unpopular economic actions, such as austerity or high interest rates, allowing elected governments to divert responsibility to “external” agencies, such as budgetary offices, or to “independent” central banks, for policies that they themselves supported but feared selling to the public.

In Britain and elsewhere, governments are once again accused of “overspending”, and citizens are told that ballooning deficits and rising bond yields leave no choice but to cut spending or raise taxes — even, in some cases, to consider an IMF bailout. But this yet another myth: while fiscal deficits are often linked to bond issuance — seemingly giving private markets leverage over governments — in reality central banks can (and do) always intervene, purchasing bonds themselves and setting yields at will. The real problem lies in the deliberately opaque accounting structures that conceal this fact, perpetuating the illusion of market discipline where none truly exists.

Small wonder the establishment is freaking out as Trump’s actions risk exposing their cynical ruse. Especially since the era of supposedly independent central banking has been a parade of catastrophic failures. These expert technocrats failed to predict the 2008 financial crash. They then spent a decade failing to revive inflation to their targets. And from 2020 onward, they catastrophically failed to see the coming inflationary surge, responding with the most aggressive rate-hiking cycle in decades while failing to bring down inflation.

This isn’t just because central banks privileged policies that benefited the financial sector at the expense of the real economy. Ultimately, it’s because their power to steer the economy has been exaggerated. In the past, the Fed could influence the economy through commercial banks. Today, shadow banking and global capital markets dwarf its traditional tools — not to mention the fact that the true drivers of inflation, supply and demand, are largely beyond the control of
central banks. Galbraith put it bluntly: “Fifty years ago, the actions of the Federal Reserve mattered. Today, they do not.” Their policies have often simply exacerbated inequality and fueled financial bubbles, proving their technocratic expertise is a shadow of the power ascribed to them.

In any case, even if true independence were possible, it would be profoundly undesirable, since the institution would be truly unaccountable. Just look at the only major central bank designed to be truly independent of democratic institutions: the European Central Bank. Whereas in currency-issuing nations, the central bank is effectively dependent on government or representative institutions, that relationship switches in the euro area, where governments are dependent on their central bank.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the ECB revealed itself as a brutally political actor. In 2011, it forced Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favor of the unelected Mario Monti, by effectively engineering a fiscal crisis by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases. Then, in 2015, it arbitrarily shut down the Greek banking system to force an elected government to accept austerity.

In short, by adopting the euro, European nations did not merely relinquish control over their monetary policy to a supranational authority — an unprecedented move in monetary history — but they ceded it to an authority with a clear, elite-driven socioeconomic agenda. This underscores the reality of a central bank that is truly independent of democratic mechanisms.

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Kaja Kallas is the real threat to Europe

By Thomas Fazi

But even currency-issuing governments are not immune. The fate of UK Prime Minister Liz Truss is a stark example. The mainstream narrative is that the “markets” punished her for an irresponsible budget. The reality, as Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, noted, is that “markets didn’t oust Truss, the Bank of England did”. Like Trump, Truss’s real sin was challenging the orthodox narrative and questioning the Bank’s remit, not her admittedly questionable economic policies.

One of her first acts was to sack the Treasury’s top official, a symbol of fiscal conservatism and central bank deference. In response, the Bank of England, by deliberately refusing to quickly quell market turbulence, effectively orchestrated her downfall. Truss, of course, bears responsibility for failing to stand up to the central bank — and for not insisting that it accommodate the policy of the elected executive. It was a stark lesson in how the myth of independence empowers unaccountable institutions to veto the platform of an elected government.

The real debate we should be having, then, is not about preserving a myth, but about redesigning the system for genuine democratic accountability. The advent of quantitative easing proved what critics always said: money is created out of thin air. The urgent question is who controls that process, and for what purpose. Optimally, the central bank and treasury should be formally consolidated. There is no technical reason for one part of the state to “lend” to another.

This would end the obfuscation, make macroeconomic policy fully accountable to voters and refocus our efforts on the policies that truly matter: fiscal, industrial and investment strategies. The implications are particularly stark for eurozone countries: the only way to restore genuine democratic accountability is to abandon the single currency and reclaim economic sovereignty. Until we smash the myth of central bank independence, we will remain trapped in a system where economic power is wielded without responsibility — a system that is not only inefficient but corrosive to democracy itself.

Draghi is often praised for his rare bluntness in assessing Europe’s condition, a quality that has earned him a reputation as one of the continent’s most insightful thinkers. And, certainly, he is right in arguing that the neoliberal architecture of the EU — grounded in “a conscious reduction of the power of states” in favor of rules-based market mechanisms — has left Europe woefully unequipped to navigate a world where military and economic power are increasingly deployed to protect national interests.

The problem is, Draghi’s so-called analyses usually amount to little more than stating the obvious — facts that are evident to anyone not blinded by ideology or vested interests. The acclaim, in short, says less about Draghi’s brilliance than about the poverty of European public debate. But even more importantly, while Draghi may correctly grasp the surface symptoms of Europe’s malaise, he consistently fails — deliberately so — in properly diagnosing their underlying causes.

For if he is right to say that the EU’s neoliberal framework — based upon state retrenchment, fiscal austerity, wage compression and an obsession with boosting exports — has weakened Europe, it’s a policy cocktail that he himself helped blend. He was an architect and enforcer of that model. Already in the early Nineties, when he was director general of the Italian finance ministry, he emerged as a leading advocate of the concept of vincolo esterno (“external constraint”) — the idea that only by “tying the hands” of national governments via a political-economic straitjacket could neoliberal reforms, which lacked popular support, be forced through. That external constraint was, of course, the European Union, and above all the single currency, whose roadmap was laid out in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. In that position, Draghi was also instrumental in driving forward the large-scale privatization of Italy’s state-owned enterprises.

Over the next three decades, moving between the private sector (notably Goldman Sachs) and senior public posts, Draghi established himself as one of the foremost champions of neoliberal orthodoxy. This role reached its fullest expression during his tenure as president of the ECB from 2011 to 2019, and the act that symbolically marked the beginning of his tenure couldn’t be more paradigmatic.

In August 2011, at the height of the so-called “euro crisis”, Draghi and his outgoing predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet sent a letter to the Italian government. Intended to remain secret, it was subsequently leaked. The letter claimed that Italy’s post-crisis deficit-cutting plan was “not sufficient”, and set out detailed demands, including “the full liberalization of local public services”, “large scale privatizations”, wage reductions and even “constitutional reform tightening fiscal rules”. Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s then-minister of economy and finance, later privately told a group of European finance ministers that his government had received two threatening letters that year: one from a terrorist group, the other from the ECB. “The one from the ECB was worse”, he quipped.

Draghi must have concluded that the conditions set out in the letter had not been met, because a few months later he “forced” (to quote the solidly neoliberal Financial Times) Silvio Berlusconi to leave office in favor of the unelected Mario Monti. Draghi achieved this by discontinuing the central bank’s Italian bond purchases — thus deliberately causing interest rates to rise above safety levels — and by making Berlusconi’s ouster the precondition for further ECB support of Italian bonds. This was belatedly admitted by none other than Monti himself, who claimed in a 2017 interview that, in late 2011, Draghi “decided to stop the purchases of Italian government bonds, which had kept the Berlusconi government afloat in the summer and autumn of 2011”.

It is hard to imagine a more disturbing scenario than a supposedly “independent” and “apolitical” central bank using monetary blackmail to oust an elected government from office and impose its own political agenda. Yet all evidence suggests that this — a monetary coup d’état — is exactly what happened in Italy in 2011. Just a few years later, Draghi deployed the same tools against Greece, effectively shutting down the country’s banking system to force the government to comply with EU-demanded austerity policies, which Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s then-finance minister, likened to a form of “economic waterboarding”.

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The real winner of Europe’s Russia policy

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Even in his brief role as Italian premier, between 2021 and 2022, Draghi continued these policies. The few “structural” measures enacted by his government were all aimed at promoting privatization, liberalization, deregulation and fiscal consolidation — while he imposed on his country some of the most draconian Covid policies in the world.

Overall, then, few figures over the past decades have been more unwavering in their commitment to advancing undemocratic neoliberalism than Mario Draghi. But his responsibility for Europe’s downward spiral extends well beyond his role as neoliberal enforcer-in-chief. In his speech last week, he effectively conceded that the EU had been vassalized by the United States. Yet, once again, Draghi omitted any mention of his own role in bringing about this sorry state of affairs: he has always been a staunch Atlanticist, and as such has played a key role in ensuring the EU’s structural subordination to Washington.

The EU’s response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis is a good case in point. In his much-discussed report on European competitiveness, published a year ago this week, Draghi highlighted high energy costs as one of the main reasons for the EU’s loss of competitiveness. The report emphasized that European companies face significantly steeper prices compared to their US counterparts, seriously hindering industrial growth and investment.

Fair enough — yet this was hardly an act of God. Rather, it was a direct consequence of the EU’s decision to decouple from Russian gas, which before the war accounted for almost half of the bloc’s supply, in favor of much more expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG). More to the point, this policy was vehemently supported by Draghi. Shortly after Russia’s invasion, he defended as prime minister the EU’s decision to impose a gas embargo on Russia, from which Italy imported around 40% of its gas. “Do you want air conditioning or peace?”, he asked, the logic stark in its dubiousness. Draghi was likely suggesting that sanctions would soon cripple the Russian economy and force an end to the war — a scenario that anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economic and geopolitical realities could have dismissed from the outset.

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A few months later, in a speech at the UN that in retrospect appears almost comically misguided, Draghi doubled down, claiming that the sanctions had imposed “extremely harsh costs on Russia” and had “a disruptive effect on the Russian war machine and on its economy”, making it “harder for Russia to respond to the defeats piling up on the battlefield”. As we know, none of this came to pass — the Russian economy proved resilient, the war machine kept churning, and the defeats mounted not in Moscow but in Draghi’s delusional forecasts. All of this was easily predictable, and indeed was predicted by many of us.

All this raises an obvious question: how is it that Draghi continues to be an enlightened statesman for denouncing the consequences of flawed policies he himself promoted? In a normal world, he would be laughed off the stage — or pelted with rotten eggs. That he so easily evades accountability is the clearest expression of the kakistocratic nature of EU politics, where failure is not punished but rewarded, and where incompetent leaders routinely fail upwards.

But if Draghi’s refusal to acknowledge responsibility for the EU’s problems is bad enough, his proposed solutions are worse still. For Draghi, the cure for the EU’s dysfunction is — to give the EU even more power. “The European Union will have to move towards new forms of integration”, he declared in his latest speech. Translation: yet more political, fiscal, military and technological centralization. In other words, then, Europe’s problems, in Draghi’s view, can only be solved by transferring still more authority to Brussels and further sidelining national governments and parliaments.

But the last thing Europe needs is to give even more power to people like Draghi. On the contrary, if the continent is to have any chance of reversing its decline, it must reject the delusional dogma of “more Europe” and finally hold to account the very technocrats who built the crisis-ridden order they now pretend to diagnose.

Over the next three decades, those roles didn’t just fade — they completely reversed. Ozzy, far from the evil Svengali he was once imagined to be, re-emerged as the harmless, bumbling patriarch of  The Osbournes, a proto-Kardashian reality-TV show in which he muttered endearments to his dogs and struggled to work the remote. Meanwhile, Hulk Hogan’s legacy curdled amid sex tapes, lawsuits, and racist remarks.

What’s most striking today, however, isn’t how their reputations flipped. It’s that their reputations were considered important by serious institutions. The cultural gatekeepers who had once ignored or sneered at the two took them seriously once they passed from this earthly veil. A generation or two ago, Ozzy and Hulk were both largely considered lowbrow trash, the obsessions of the prime consumer of commercialized entertainment: the lower middle class. Yet after both figures died this month, The New Yorker ran an obituary for Ozzy, treating him as a misunderstood bard of evil with a heart of gold. PBS News, meanwhile, published a lengthy obituary that called Hogan “an icon to his ‘Hulkamaniacs.’”

Legacy media, the same outlets that looked down their noses at these men during their heydays, now solemnly reflected on their legacies. No one rolled their eyes. Perhaps it’s because Donald Trump, another cartoonish reality-TV patriarch who gained superstardom in the Eighties, has been handed political power twice now, and the old elite are now bending the knee.

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If this were the Eighties, this triumph of the lowbrow would be a moment to cheer. A common trope of Reagan-era comedies was the slobs versus the snobs, in which a ragtag gang of working-class kids or bros used their moxie to beat the aging establishment, the pretentious old-money types. But now we know how those stories really ended: the US class structure became even more lopsided, with the top 10% owning nearly 70% of all wealth, while 57% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The culture-industry slobs did not alter this trend. They just lent it a more vulgar veneer.

At the level of the culture, this turn of events does not represent authentic egalitarian progress, but a general decline in standards. The fact that the majority of Americans have lost economic mobility and security, combined with the mentally impairing effects of excessive internet and social media use, has transformed almost all of us into what was once considered lower middle class. Our reverential treatment of Ozzy and Hulk reflects our own childish sensibilities.

If that sounds snooty, look back and consider the breadth and mainstream popularity of elite and middlebrow institutions of the previous century, made possible by a specific set of conditions. The New Deal and the postwar economic miracle created an unusually stable and prosperous middle America comprising salaried professionals, civil servants, unionized workers, and strivers who had both disposable income and leisure time. Aspiration wasn’t just about the pure accumulation of wealth; it also meant pursuing intellectualism and cultural pursuits and democratizing them in the process.

Among members of the Greatest Generation, it wasn’t just the rich who subscribed to literary or political magazines, attended the symphony or opera, were card-carrying members of public libraries, or had museum and social-club memberships. My grandfather, a small-town mechanic with a formal eighth-grade education, once subscribed to National Geographic and Time, regularly tuned into 60 Minutes, and had a cultural and social diet that might now be called elitist.

Two factors changed everything. First, media technology has dramatically improved in fidelity and been integrated into almost every aspect of life, including both work and leisure. The shift from flesh-and-blood life to an internet-first version flattened all forms of entertainment and culture into a uniform sludge of content. Meanwhile, the economic foundation of the New Deal order crumbled, and neoliberalism became the dominant political philosophy. The downstream effects of the changes meant that the cultural standards of yore began to slip into oblivion.

To get a sense of how much has changed in 50 years, consider the historian Arno Mayer’s 1975 essay, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem.” In it, he described the lower middle class as literate but not cultivated, aspirational yet anxious, self-reliant yet highly individualistic, obsessed with their own property, terrified of downward mobility, and quick to mobilize politically only under conditions of stress. Too educated to be at home in folk culture, too economically precarious to claim elite culture, they became early adopters of the modern mass-media machine. “The modern opiate dispensers provided a heady mix of entertainment, distraction, diversion, and fantasy for a composite lower middle class that was characteristically insecure,” he wrote. As Mayer put it, “media and audience found each other.”

What Mayer is describing sounds less like a small slice of our nation’s class makeup and more like a blueprint for 21st-century American life writ large. Cable television may have given way to TikToks, but it’s still a culture where the defining class condition is not proletarian solidarity or elite professionalism, but a twitchy, consumerized in-betweenness. That psychic tension fuels both spectacle and political grievance.

In 2014, when actor Gary Oldman told Ted Koppel that “reality TV to me is the museum of social decay,” it was the last gasp of a dying worldview. By then, the reality juggernaut, the same genre of television once deemed brain-dead TV, had all absorbed Ozzy and Hogan and Trump into the maw of the spectacle. A decade later, when Trump clinched the presidency a second time, it was fitting that Hogan played a part as an Republican National Convention sideshow. The lowbrow shock and awe of the convention that ushered in Trump II was the culmination of a cultural reorientation that began in the Eighties.

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Trump’s place within the unholy trinity is ironic. Unlike Ozzy and Hogan, both of whom were working-class heroes of humble origins, Trump was a man born into wealth but who spoke and had the cultural tastes of someone without a silver spoon in his mouth. He insulted people like a talk-radio caller. He loved McDonald’s and candy. His political base, MAGA Nation, shares cultural DNA with Hogan and Ozzy fandom. They love Trump not in spite of his crudity, but because of it. He sounds like them. He hates the same people. He gets the joke, and is the joke, and doesn’t care either way. And maybe that’s the point. The joke has become the organizing principle of American life. Once, the Ozzy fan or Hulkamaniac was a punchline for the old-school commentariat, a proxy for tastelessness, vulgarity, or low aspirations. Now, those very traits are recoded as authenticity for everyone on the political spectrum, Left and Right.

It’s no wonder, then, that in 2025, the Democrats are casting off the blinkered brand of elitism-dressed-up-as-non-elitism they were associated with in the previous decade — by which I mean identity politics — and disregarding the old Michelle Obama dictum “When they go low, we go high.” Their answer to MAGA is to accept the new rules of engagement and start making stupid memes and yelling the F-word. The liberals have even elevated Kendrick Lamar to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s old post as their symbolic poet laureate — the rapper who used his Super Bowl show as one loud and expensive roast of Drake. In a new profile in The Atlantic, congressional Democrat Jasmine Crockett is presented as the future (“A Democrat for The Trump Era,” runs the headline). Why? She has a big social-media following and went viral for describing Marjorie Taylor Greene as “bleach-blond, bad built, butch body” during a House Oversight Committee meeting.

Forty years ago, Hulk Hogan used to say, “Whatcha gonna do, when Hulkamania runs wild on you?” It was a threat, a promise, and a sales pitch all rolled into one. Today, American culture has yet to answer that question.

In his latest series, Shifty, he repeats this story for our own collapsing regime, at times obliquely and at others through more direct comparison. “There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move,” reads the caption at the beginning of each episode, setting up what is essentially the origin story of today’s troubled and quasi-revolutionary UK, witnessing “the last dying gasp of an old system of power.”

Early in the five-part series, we see miners hauling wooden pit props into the shafts by hand, pensioners bundled against the cold trudging through vast, alienating Modernist housing estates, and families fighting to survive in damp, freezing council flats. The effect is to conjure Soviet-style squalor and quiet collapse. Yet the cure, we soon see, is worse than the disease: “In 1986 Mrs Thatcher opened Britain to the full force of international capital,” the caption reads. “A new breed of tycoon emerged. They used the vast power of this new money to take over landmarks of the old Britain.” With his disembodied captions — a stylistic device introduced in TraumaZone in place of Curtis’s old, avuncular voiceover — he later observes of privatization, “and just like the Soviet Union/many of the old state managers were now running the companies/and just as in the new Russia they exploited the new system ruthlessly.”

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By Mary Harrington

The birthpangs of today’s UK are presented as a horror story. Discordant electronic drones and whines soundtrack the camera as it hurtles along silent corridors, abandoned factories and empty Tube stations with the superhuman speed of a pursuing wraith. At other times, there are glimpses of folk horror between the imagery of industrial decline, and a picture of some lost pastoral England that functions as a dark, bitterly ironic Anglofuturism. We see cricket matches under electric pylons, fox hunting in front of closing coal mines: like the hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain abandoned on a lonely Falklands shore, Britain’s industrial future is a forgotten relic. Landscapes both bleak and bucolic break up the scenes of urban decline with bitter irony: Thatcher reads a Rupert Brooke poem to the sarcastic accompaniment of Britten’s Peter Grimes, riot police break up a New Age Traveller encampment in Wiltshire’s ancient countryside, an electric storm breaks over the forbidding Belfast Hills. In undercutting the shallow myths of Our Island Story, Curtis still alludes to something older and more powerful beneath the ailing state.

The series plays on the feeling, surely common now, that today’s headlines are the fodder of some future history, establishing the background of the dark events to come. Foreboding news stories screen in the background: footage of riots in northern England play across the screen in the window of a TV rental shop, as an employee dusts the sets unconcernedly. Dark, paranoid themes — state surveillance, masonic conspiracies, the illusory nature of reality — are introduced, and abandoned, as either consciously unresolved loose ends or spinning off in strange directions. The effect is unsettling, disorientating: we are not witnessing a logical argument being constructed, but a society coming apart, with all the surrealism that entails. Northern Ireland features heavily: for Curtis, as for other dissidents, the province functions as a dark mirror revealing the British state’s true form. In Belfast, young Loyalist women clap along to songs of sectarian violence with footage of flames and the pounding tribal rhythm of drums. “When Britain was powerful it could hide its dark secrets and cruelties,” we are told, “Now as the power declined they were going to start coming to the surface.”

Curtis’ politics, always a matter of speculation, are here laid out in economic terms as resolutely Old Labour. In pursuit of a Utopian vision, the Thatcher government’s privatization and financialization schemes (in one scene, a City trader rattles off an impeccable Marxian critique of them) are shown to have established the dysfunctional political economy of today’s ailing UK. On the other issue roiling modern Britain, that of immigration, Curtis works more obliquely. Footage of skinheads and of victims of racist violence punctuate each episode as mood music, without textual commentary. An old man listens to a recording of the last evensong in a deserted Rotherham church; we see the birth of al-Muhajiroun; Morrissey wanders the Manchester streets of his childhood, saying “The place I grew up no longer exists. Now it’s just so foreign to me, and that’s sad I think.”

For all the misery he presents, there is a constant nostalgia evoked by the footage, shown in BBC employees assembling Airfix kits to cover the Falklands War, joyful house parties in the provinces. Curtis is happy to deconstruct the myths of the old Britain, yet also deftly shows that its replacement is simply… nothing. As New Labour struggle to fill the Millennium Dome with banal platitudes, we are told that “The liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years/now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth/they no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future/and they were left with practically nothing.” As well as a farewell to the postwar social-democratic state, the recent past is reassembled as a bricolage portrait of today’s UK. Unease, distrust and paranoia are everywhere. Vigilantes film their sex-crime stings, with the captions noting, from an ambiguous vantage point, that “They didn’t trust the corrupt mainstream media to expose the corruption of the police.”

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What does it all mean? Is it a chronicle, cataloguing the disconnected succession of events, or a history, driven by an overarching narrative? Time across the series is meaningless, chronology is complicated: narratives overlay each other like audio samples. A subplot on the introduction of the synthesizer observes of its pop-cultural fruits that “They became known as remixes. Others realized they could use the same technology to manipulate and play back images from the past/ They could remix history, which meant that maybe you couldn’t trust the past.” Here the auteur, always in love with digital media, reveals his own craft: “Is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia/repeating back sounds, dreams and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you/and is the way this series is made?”

The most obvious, though perhaps counterintuitive, parallel to Curtis in British politics is Dominic Cummings: both reach back to historical parallels, and use scientific metaphors, to explain the current moment of regime crisis. Indeed, both Curtis and Cummings have recently likened the present moment to 1848, and both anticipate a revolutionary tumult to come. The series concludes, over footage of fiery riots and revolution, with the question “Will people come together as they have in the past and fight back?” Like the viewer he has guided to the dismal death spasms of our old political system, Curtis views its looming, so far formless replacement with a mixture of hope and apprehension, scrying a vision of the future like the soldiers in rural Northern Ireland he shows struggling to make out a Magic Eye picture. We already live in post-Soviet Britain, Curtis shows us, but something else is coming: whether it is something new or very old is a matter of interpretation.

There are, however, some notable exceptions. Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last month at the age of 96, was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent, learnt how to read Irish as a child, and could still do so well into middle age. His father was one of the first generation of his family who spoke English as his first language. His hero was Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England. Though he taught at a range of universities, from Brandeis to Boston, Duke to Notre Dame, he kept Oxbridge for the most part at disdainful arm’s length, uneasy with its high-toned English culture. High Table and croquet in the quad weren’t his style. When he delivered a public lecture in Dublin some years ago, and was afterwards guest of honor at a banquet, he fled from the festivities and was found eating a sandwich alone in the bar.

Despite his suspicion of sociability, MacIntyre was a compulsive joiner, and in this sense true to his belief in the corporate rather than the individual. In the Fifties and Sixties, he moved from Presbyterianism to Christian Marxism, then to Marxism proper, joining the Communist Party only to leave it for various Trotskyist grouplets. He was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Two decades later, he came (almost) full circle by converting to Roman Catholicism. Aristotle, Marx, Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas competed for his intellectual loyalty, most of them distinctly out of favor in orthodox philosophical circles. In fact, MacIntyre was throughout his life a ferocious critic of that orthodoxy — a scourge of liberal individualism, abstract human rights, the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth and the whole moral temper of Western modernity. (A belief in universal rights, he once wrote, was equivalent to a belief in witches and unicorns). His disillusion with Marxism first set in when he was dean of students in the late Sixties, at the politically turbulent University of Essex, then in the grip of student insurrection. One suspects that some kind of personal trauma was involved in this confrontation between a Marxist dean and his unruly flock. Not long after, MacIntyre published a blistering critique of the revolutionary students’ guru, Herbert Marcuse.

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In the wake of this disenchantment, he moved to the United States, renounced all political engagement, and began to speak in mildly nostalgic terms of small, self-governing cooperatives, communities of frugal fishermen, craftsmen and the like. It was this — the self-help America of the early puritans, not the later human jungle of Wall Street or Hollywood — which helped to tempt him, rather improbably, across the Atlantic. At the point when the capitalist system was becoming increasingly global in reach, MacIntyre was singing the praises of the local. Advanced capitalism was here to stay, but more humane forms of life could be practiced on its fringes. The operatives of capitalism were citizens of the world, and thus what the ancient Greeks knew as barbarians, meaning those who belonged to no city. But mini-cities could be constructed in the system’s shadow.

Despite his international celebrity, achieved through such masterpieces as After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre was always a voice from the Gaelic margins, deeply at odds with metropolitan English culture. He was keenly aware how the liberalism it took for granted was itself a specific, contestable tradition. Those who stand at an angle to conventional society can unmask what it takes as natural and universal as arbitrary and contingent. In fact, it’s remarkable how many of the luminaries of the so-called New Left of the late Sixties and Seventies were exiles and émigrés of one kind or another. Perry Anderson, for many decades the leading Marxist intellectual in Britain, is an Anglo-Irishman from County Waterford; Alexander Cockburn was an Anglo-Irishman from County Cork; Raymond Williams hailed from the Welsh borderlands, Eric Hobsbawm was a Jewish refugee from Central Europe. Tom Nairn came from Scotland, Tariq Ali from Pakistan, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall from Jamaica and the philosopher Charles Taylor from Quebec.

As a Scot of Irish descent, MacIntyre was heir to a history which for all its violence and deprivation was more attuned to the communal than the individualist. It could therefore provide the basis for a powerful critique of a liberalism for which men and women weren’t fundamentally social animals, reason was abstract and instrumental and the most precious value of all — freedom — would tell you little or nothing about what the good life is or how to attain it. Instead, it leaves such matters to one’s subjective choices in the moral marketplace. In MacIntyre’s view, this way of seeing overlooks the fact that individual reasoning participates in a more collective reasoning, one which is always historically specific. Liberty is in the end the liberty to seek truth, another concept increasingly redundant in the modern age. Ethics become little more than an expression of personal preference in a world which has lost almost all sense of the common good. The moral universe is privatized. We still use terms like “goodness” and “happiness”, but the concrete contexts in which they were once embedded have disappeared with the onset of modernity, leaving moral concepts hanging uselessly in the air.

For MacIntyre, by contrast, the good must be more than just what I happen to desire. It’s always embedded in a particular set of collective cultural practices. If we have forgotten this, it’s largely because the 18th century Enlightenment stripped the self of its concrete social identity, so that each of us becomes an isolated, autonomous self in a world of abstract universal principles. Anxious to avoid moral relativism, MacIntyre acknowledges that there are certain standards which different cultures share. But to live well is less to conform to principles common to everyone from 13th century Padua to 20th century Pasadena, as some Enlightenment thinkers would hold, than to flourish in a way appropriate to one’s role in a concrete form of life. A good merchant is someone who behaves as a good merchant should, according to the standards set by his particular culture and tradition. Whether this is also true of a good blackmailer is rather less obvious.

Since social roles are in some sense objective, moral values become so as well. A lot of modern moral thought makes a sharp distinction between facts and values. You can describe a situation as scrupulously as possible, but doing so won’t lead you to a moral judgment or obligation. In the era of modern science, facts are just blank, inert stuff, and values must consequently be imported from elsewhere. Perhaps they’re simply subjective, or the arbitrary decrees of a capricious God. MacIntyre rejects this dualism: for him, describing a social role already implies certain values, in the sense of the need to act in certain ways. It’s because the self has been shorn of this social dimension in modern times that the problem arises. At the same time, it has been deprived of what MacIntyre sees as its status as a form of narrative. In his view, we live in narrative, but can no longer recount coherent stories of ourselves.

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All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century. He was a radical Scottish puritan, austere and high-minded, who ended up supporting the revival of monasticism and switched his sympathies from the Bolsheviks to St Benedict. His dissent from the priorities of the modern age took an incongruous variety of forms but remained wholly self-consistent. If he turned back to Aristotle and Aquinas, it was in order to move beyond what he saw as the skepticism and subjectivism of the present. His work showed up the limits of rationalism, but was deeply averse to the irrational. It could win praise from both Leftists and conservatives, but gave no comfort to neoliberalism. MacIntyre refused to subscribe to the view that the individual was at the center of the universe; that reason is timeless and independent of practical social life; and that relations are primarily contractual and actions chiefly instrumental. In contrast with a mean-spirited utilitarianism, he saw society not as a means of individual self-promotion but as a good in itself. He was interested in practices like playing chess or writing poetry whose goods, as he would say, were “internal” to themselves rather than external goals to be pursued.

MacIntyre celebrated rootedness, yet as an academic was continually on the move. He was a critic of capitalism who rejected multiculturalism and looked askance at the struggle for recognition of women, gays and others. His dislike of the autonomous self could lead him to overvalue the corporate and collective, as well as to bowing the knee to an authoritarian Church. Yet in an age when Anglophone philosophy had been reduced to a trivial game for those in the know, complete with its in-jokes, ritual gestures and stereotypical turns of phrase, he never ceased to raise the most profound of questions.

Squint and you can see this working out. Sort of. As with earlier Right-wing coalitions — like the one between religious conservatives and foreign-policy hawks that defined the Bush era — both camps can claim some wins. Populists got an immigration crackdown plus tariffs; the tech bros neutered entire regulatory agencies. But when it comes to combating monopoly, Big Tech’s default business plan, the contradiction threatens to make the populists look like utter saps.

Standing at the sharp edge of these tensions is a diminutive Dublin-born lawyer named Gail Slater, who leads the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice as assistant attorney general. Given her reputation as a fierce enemy of monopolies, Trump’s choice of Slater for the job drew cheers from the market-skeptical corners of the so-called New Right. Yet Slater views her mission as protecting markets — not attacking them.

“We see what we’re doing as an essential part of the American free enterprise system”, she tells me in an interview at her office deep inside the DOJ’s labyrinthine Washington headquarters last week. “We think that we should have more confidence in our system and not think that in order to compete with China, we have to become more like China” — that is, an economy in which most sectors are dominated by a handful of giants coddled and controlled by the state.

The tech lobby insists that US national security and dominance in fields like AI require government to get out of industry’s way. Slater doesn’t see it this way, and the disagreement is more than academic. This week, an antitrust suit against Google launched in the first Trump administration and carried through by Team Biden entered its remedies phase. In 2024, Google was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the online search market, and now the court has to decide how to hold it accountable and prevent future wrongdoing.

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Slater’s litigation team argued that Google operates a “vicious cycle”, spending enormous sums to become the default engine worldwide, then improving its search results with better data gleaned thereby, and then using the windfall revenues to deepen its advantage as the default engine. The Trump administration insists that Google must sever its default-engine partnerships with the likes of Apple, divest from its own Chrome browser, and license its data to competitors.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission — a parallel independent agency with rule-making authority as well as the power to bring its own cases — is trying a suit against Meta launched in 2020, during the first Trump term. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg attempted to forestall the trial by offering a $1 billion settlement, far short of the $30 billion demanded by FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. Trump himself was reportedly open to a cash deal, but the FTC ultimately spurned Zuckerberg’s payout after a meeting involving Ferguson and key staff.

Was Slater worried that a cash offer, however high, wouldn’t bring about structural fixes to Meta’s overweening market power? Yes, “and I’m told I was in that meeting”, she adds knowingly — that is to say, she inveighed against settling. A progressive antitrust veteran tells me he believes that Slater’s arguments played an important role in the outcome.

In response, Big Tech and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce Right have characterized Slater as a dangerous radical who’d sacrifice American innovation on the altar of fair play. But she insists her philosophy has a solidly conservative precedent in the Reagan administration’s decision to break up AT&T.

“This is an argument that’s been made before”, she tells me. “AT&T made a similar argument when this division, the Antitrust Division, in the mid-Eighties” resolved to “break them up.” Back then, “AT&T said, ‘You can’t do this. We are a national champion. We are critical to this country’s success. We will lose the Cold War if you break up AT&T’, in so many words.” Even so, “the division moved forward, and the Reagan administration, which is not thought of as the toughest antitrust enforcer in the history of the country” divided the firm into smaller units. Bell Labs, its research and development arm, was spun off.

America didn’t lose the Cold War, and contrary to the corporate fearmongering, the following decades saw the communications revolution that allows you to read this very article. “From that [breakup] came a lot of competition and innovation”, notes Slater. “The wireless industry came from that breakup. Bell Labs was unleashed, because the innovations at Bell Labs had been suppressed for the reason that AT&T didn’t want to disrupt its own monopoly.”

It’s true that bigness is sometimes rational. Most modern industries entail network effects, increasing returns to scale, or both. It’s why you don’t see mom-and-pop tire manufacturers, as UnHerd contributor Michael Lind often quips. But as the AT&T case shows, bigness can also generate sclerosis. Firms that dominate “toll roads”, whether landline connections or search engines, collect hefty rents without having to innovate or improve their products. They begin to put much of their energy into maintaining the chokehold.

As a result, market power translates into political power and vice versa in an accursed loop all too characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. It’s why Slater views antitrust as a critical component of the post-neoliberal turn in American political economy and the bipartisan rethink on globalization.

“I came from a family of lawyers”, she recalls. “And for people of my generation in Ireland, a lot of our legal education was influenced by being part of the European Union”, and that meant “competition law and economic law. Law and economics was a big part of, you know, European Union law, because it was all about integrating those economies”.

A pinched account of antitrust law, in which the only thing that mattered was consumer prices, was critical to the neoliberal revolution. That model “did very, very well for a lot of companies and the stock market” — and for a narrow slice of the population with the right degrees and the equity portfolios to show for it. The rest lost well-paying, often-unionized jobs and were told to take solace in cheap flatscreens.

There has to be an alternative model that “has more of a care for … American citizens, right?” asks Slater. “We see ourselves as part of that project.”

From an antitrust point of view, this means taking a more holistic view of the consumer-welfare standard that is at the heart of American monopoly law, crucially determining whether mergers should go forward. Slater laments how neoliberals of the Left and the Right, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, reduced consumer welfare to consumer prices alone, neglecting other factors, such as whether a merger would substantially lessen competition or cost jobs (consumers are also workers, after all).

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Today’s antitrust renaissance — represented on the Right by Slater and Ferguson and on the Left by Biden-era czars like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter — is all about reopening windows onto the economy that had been shuttered by the neoliberals. Yet Slater resists the “Khan-servative” label embraced by Right-of-center fans of the progressive antimonopoly crusader.

“There’s some overlap, like in the Venn diagram, there is some overlap” with Khan’s approach, Slater says. But there are also significant points of departure. For one thing, Khan led the FTC, aggressively using that agency’s rulemaking authority, which had long been left dormant. Slater, by contrast, is at the Antitrust Division, strictly an enforcement agency.

Philosophically, too, Slater sees herself as perhaps more deal-friendly compared to Khan. “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign”, says Slater, “we’ll just get out of the way. There was a perception . . . that a lot of deals were being held up for a long time, unnecessarily by both agencies [the FTC and the Antitrust Division]. And that was leading to inefficiencies” and hindering “deal flow”. Slater hopes that her approach — “If your deal is not a problem, we’re gonna say, ‘OK, you’re free to merge’ ” — will lead to less polarizing drama in the business community.

At the same time, she has so far retained the merger-review guidelines the Trumpians inherited from Team Biden. Though standard practice, the move has triggered grumbling in the pro-business press. It also garnered praise from a group of high-ranking progressives and Biden alumni I spoke with earlier this month. Slater is also scrutinizing the use of anticompetitive practices to suppress wages — winning a criminal conviction against a home health agency to fix nurses’ wages in Las Vegas. And she beams about meeting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien as one of her earliest steps in the role.

Speaking to Slater and her colleagues — one of them vents rage about how corporate attorneys used to walk around the DOJ building as if they owned it — it’s hard to believe they’re part of the same administration as Elon Musk, who positively loathed Biden’s trust-busters. Slater says she supports DOGE’s mission, even as she has resisted its efforts to shutter her division’s local field offices.

After our interview, I email her to ask if she would hesitate to act against one of Musk’s firms if she concluded that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior. In response, she sent me a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post announcing her nomination to the job, underlining the President’s expectation that she will enforce the law “vigorously and FAIRLY.”

If you had to invent a way to discredit populist reform — to trick Americans into embracing unlimited free trade, dominance by Wall Street and Big Tech, and Chinese control of manufacturing — you couldn’t do a better than President Trump’s recent flip-flops around tariffs. As a bonus, Trump is also fueling a resurgence of free trade among other nations, even those traditionally critical of the trading regime, and encouraging them to align more closely with Beijing.

Trump doesn’t seem to have a clear strategy or goal, and has sought no clear path toward reviving domestic manufacturing. One day, he’s an ardent protectionist. The next day, he contradicts his own officials and strips tariffs in response to bond-market reactions. There are no consistent explanations, and no way for businesses to plan how to reshore, or even incentives to do so at all.

The backlash has been swift, and it’s only going to get worse.

One of us is a Left-leaning populist. The other one is a developmentalist social democrat. For years, we have worked with American conservatives and policymakers worldwide to address deindustrialization, monopoly power, and other scourges of the working class.

America’s basic problem is that the country imports a trillion dollars of stuff that we used to make. As a result, the United States has sabotaged its working and middle classes, while losing the domestic capacity to make the medicines, industrial goods, and electronics on which Americans depend. At this point, America, which has some of the best farmland in the world, is now a net food importer. America has no domestic merchant marine, and largely lacks shipbuilding capacity. Take away Wall Street, and the United States would look like a middle-income country propped up by asset values.

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A significant portion of the rest of the world faces similar issues. By the Sixties and Seventies, most Latin-American nations had sizable industrial sectors and a growing urban middle class, supported by import-substitution strategies. However, these policies were dismantled after Wall Street’s massive loans to Latin-American governments, which left them vulnerable to shifts in US monetary policy and brought about a decade of financial crises. Instead of rethinking the region’s reliance on foreign capital, industrial strategies were abandoned, and much of Latin America became a commodity-exporting region.

It’s taken at least 45 years to get America into this same situation. Basically, American elites decided in the Eighties that high-value patents, design, and finance work was what the United States was good at, and the grubby stuff could be done by foreigners. That was, of course, a huge and gruesome error, one that free-trade critics rightly decried. Opposition to free trade was a successful electoral strategy early on in Latin America, and leaders like Lula da Silva bolstered their popularity by opposing deals like the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Trump likewise rode anger over this status quo to the White House — twice.

And yet Trump never pointed out that the reason for offshoring wasn’t that foreigners screwed us, but that Wall Street did. The trillion dollars of foreign goods we buy is a trillion dollars Americans hand to Big Finance, which it then recycles into stocks and bonds. Those who benefit in this system aren’t just producers based in industrial export-oriented countries, but people who own and manage financial assets, as well as adjacent “services” industries like tech and consulting.

Moreover, by claiming that the world is taking advantage of America, Trump overlooks the fact that other countries that have embraced neoliberalism find themselves in a similar position and could serve as potential allies in reshaping the international economy. China’s strength isn’t just its manufacturing might, but its scale. The Chinese have a billion and a half people and an authoritarian government that can direct the economy in ways democracies can’t.

The response to the increasingly visible problems free trade has wrought, then, should have been to leverage our strengths into rebuilding some industrial capacity, working with other countries who could work with us to match some of the scale of Chinese production and markets, and develop a minimum set of standards to guarantee fair competition. That would have required rebalancing trade.

Tariffs have a role in that, but so does taxing or controlling those trillion dollars of capital that flows into the United States. And more important, so does industrial policy to actually reconstruct our domestic capacity. If we want manufacturing plants, we have to finance building them and skill up the workers who will work them.

During Trump’s first term, United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer managed part of a successful process to try to reorient production. Lighthizer had bipartisan support to renegotiate NAFTA, which was re-christened as the USMCA, including to add a facility-specific enforcement tool to punish corporations that bust unions so as to pay ultra-low wages to Mexican workers, undercutting American workers.

Lighthizer used tariffs strategically to reduce US over-reliance on Chinese imports. Trump’s tariffs in his first term generally didn’t hit products we couldn’t make here or that we couldn’t source from countries other than China. They were designed to move supply chains, and mainly didn’t hurt American exporters, who need to import intermediate goods.

Former President Joe Biden had tepid policies to reindustrialize America through gradual ratcheting up of tariffs combined with subsidies to construct factories and domestic capacity. It wasn’t enough, it didn’t move fast enough, and Wall Street had too much influence over the Biden administration. He also got zero help from populists on the Right, including Trump, who routinely lied about and mischaracterized what Biden was doing.

But the idea from the smarter strategists on the Left was to accomplish competently a renewal of US production, while building up relationships with countries with similar goals. By the end of 2023, the United States had the highest rate of investment in factory construction in 30 years.

In his second term, Trump could have brought this vision to completion. Instead, he tapped Howard Lutnick — a Wall Street man and a yes man — as an architect of trade policy. And the President launched on a confused and contradictory strategy.

First, he’s trying to liquidate all parts of the government that could help increase domestic capacity, such as trying to kill the Biden CHIPS Act that financed semiconductor production. Second, he’s undermining American alliances and credibility with nations that could help create the scale to counter Chinese manufacturing dominance. It might be hard to find a common strategy with many of these countries, but scale is what is needed, and they could have been brought along into a new global arrangement. Now, even Lula has come out against protectionism. And third, he’s flip-flopped on tariffs, while putting arbitrary levies on lots of stuff that we need to reshore production, like machine tools necessary to make the equipment to go into domestic factories.

Even his allies say it’s bad, albeit politely. Oren Cass of American Compass, in a laudatory post, noted severe problems in technocratic language: “Going literally ‘0 to 60’ with a country like China imposes large costs on American firms and consumers much more quickly than they can plausibly take the constructive actions we might want. That serves no one. Likewise, if we expect producers to lose access to foreign markets — especially China’s — it’s important for that not to happen faster than the removal of Chinese firms from the US and allied markets is creating new opportunities for sales.”

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Late last week, as if to put a fine point on how little Trump cares about a coherent populist approach, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency eliminated Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, one of the few tools the government offers to help business operations.

America is going to suffer very badly from what Trump has wrought, even if he pulls it all back now. The country will probably go into recession, and small businesses will be unable to replace Chinese supply because Team Trump just didn’t put the careful time, planning, and effort necessary to prepare for that. Meanwhile, Trump’s failure to be honest about the malign role of Wall Street and finance means America is ill-prepared for a trade-related financial crisis, should that occur.

The most prominent critics of Trump’s tariffs are Wall Street and China, two forces hardly beloved in the United States and abroad. Yet as a result of Trump’s failure, Americans may see industrial sovereignty as impossible and foolish, and both major parties could become even more closely aligned with Wall Street. Meanwhile, other nations are seeing in China a more reliable trading partner than the United States.

The damage could get still worse if the administration embarks on a Trumpian dealmaking spree. Forcing foreign nations to buy more American oil and gas won’t help US manufacturing, nor will targeting other countries’ efforts to tax Big Tech platforms or to boost access to generic medicine for their citizens. If a barrage of such “great deals” leads Trump to repeal the tariffs, America will still remember the reciprocal-tariffs episode as a failed experiment, and other countries will remain hesitant to strengthen their ties to the US economy.

Populist conservatives have been saying these things privately. But the moment calls for public honesty—to speak out about Trump’s calamitous failure to align his foreign economic policy with domestic governing capacity. If they don’t, Trump will continue down this reckless path and destroy the legitimacy of populism in the Republican Party, cheered all the way by those who should know better. More important, the costs to America and the rest of the world could be that we become low-wage commodity exporters in the Chinese century.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic.

In the same way, war has always been the likeliest exit route from the world’s second, American-led phase of globalization. War would sever the supply chains that span the world, replacing them with government-directed industrial policy that prioritizes security over economic efficiency. If Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from neoliberal globalization 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 globalization 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.

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Liberalism won't survive 2025

By Aris Roussinos

Slobodian’s excellent 2018 book Globalists charted the birth of neoliberalism in late-Habsburg Vienna and its progression to intellectual hegemony in the think tanks 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 globalization 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 Paleoconservatism 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 globalization’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 destabilizing 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 globalization’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 skepticism that mass migration is a Leftist cause worth defending. Slobodian emphasizes 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 labor 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 labor 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.

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Britain is lost in Trumpland

By Aris Roussinos

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 center-right and center-left parties that have monopolized 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 saviors. “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 globalization 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 civilizational 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.

Yet as Musk is reportedly being ushered out of the administration, there is reason to be skeptical of overheated reports of a fundamental rupture.

Points of divergence are obvious, to be sure. MAGA represents a repudiation of older neoliberal orthodoxy, the article of faith once held by the mainstream of the Republican Party and the triangulated center-left of the Clinton-Blair and Obama years. Capturing the GOP through the gravitational force of Donald Trump, MAGA rejected the imagined globalist free-market paradise in which products and workers flowed freely in a borderless, flattened world. Dreams of a liberal international order led by US and European elites have been shattered as old allies now regard each other with deepening mistrust. Deportations, tariffs, and a focus on regional hegemony have become the centerpiece of a robustly America First reorientation.

DOGE, by contrast, appears to be a reconstitution of a longstanding libertarian agenda. While MAGA emphasises the need for a powerful government acting forcefully on behalf of its citizens, DOGE has revived unfulfilled Reagan-era commitments to downsize and outright eliminate vast swaths of the federal government. It promotes an agenda of deregulation and economic and individual liberty. Its commitment to a more porous economic landscape is now muted, but not forgotten.

The techno-libertarians preference for open borders (at least, for some classes of newcomers) has been silenced for the moment by the furious MAGA response to then-DOGE co-director Vivek Ramaswami’s efforts to increase the number of H1B visas for engineers from Asia. Musk’s dreams of colonizing Mars likewise reflect DOGE’s deepest commitments not just to a borderless world, but a borderless humanity, as does his most recent claims on X that biological humanity is a “boot-loader” for “digital super-intelligence”.

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JS Mill and the despotism of progress

By Patrick Deneen

Yet stories about the divide, mainly from journalists in mainstream newspapers and journals, increasingly seem to be born of a lack of political acumen born of an excess of wishful thinking. A yearning for a crack-up and attendant dysfunction has blinded many political observers to the more complicated reality of coalition politics. American politics invariably gives rise to political coalitions that are always to some degree internally incoherent.

However, philosophical incoherence does not equal governing inability or paralysis. The success of all political coalitions depends in equal parts on deeply shared animus against a common enemy, on the one hand, and overlapping consensus in some key areas, on the other. If those two main conditions persist, then a successful political agenda, even amid a degree of constrained internal conflict and compromise, is not only possible, but likely.

This was true during the Reagan administration — when pro-business libertarians, Cold War Hawks, and social conservatives were able to maintain a working coalition; and it was true during the two terms of Obama, when the woke “identitarians”, the old labor Left, and neoliberal technocrats were able to maintain an esprit de corps.

Like those two administrations, the Trump coalition enjoys a common enemy and an overlapping consensus. For that reason, the MAGA-DOGE coalition will persist in relative comity at least until the start of the next campaign cycle, which begins in fewer than two years. Even after that point, MAGA-DOGE will be the working coalition to which presumptive 2028 Republican candidate, Vice President J.D. Vance, will seek to appeal and ride to victory.

Indeed, there is no better figure than Vance to provide a window into the reasons why this coalition is not in the midst of fracturing. Not only has Vance studied with seriousness their respective intellectual sources, but as a matter of deeply personal biography, he understands himself as a cohesive combination of those two intellectual and political streams. In three notable speeches, Vance has already begun to lay out his vision for both his own and America’s political future, one which is notably attentive to rendering the apparent contradictory MAGA-DOGE coalition into a complementary whole.

The first speech was delivered on 11 February, 2025, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. The second speech — arguably his most impactful to date — was delivered three days later at the Munich Security Conference. The third speech was delivered on 18 March at the American Dynamism Conference. All three spoke at least implicitly about the relationship of the two parts of the Trump-Vance coalition, with the latter of the two offering the most explicit effort to date to synthesize the two seeming opposites.

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The first of these speeches appeared to be the most “DOGE”-friendly, with Vance chiding Europeans especially for their eagerness to place peremptory limitations on AI developments. He lauded recent advances in AI, offering a firmly “techno-optimist ”spin characteristic of the DOGE worldview. In his encouragement of a “deregulatory flavor”, the influence of the likes of his benefactor Peter Thiel is evident, particularly in Thiel’s expressed concern for the ways that fears of apocalypse have thwarted innovation and led to an era of technological stagnation.

However, in other respects, even in his most DOGE-friendly speech to date, Vance simultaneously emphasised how AI developments stand to benefit those of a MAGA persuasion. Several times, Vance nodded to the common enemy of both DOGE and MAGA, the weakened Leviathan of woke progressive authoritarianism. Highlighting their shared animus, Vance insisted before his largely European audience that AI should “remain free of ideological bias” and be deployed in ways that avoid being co-opted as a “tool of authoritarian censorship”.

But his most MAGA-inflected point was to underscore AI’s potential to generate new jobs in a plethora of industries. Vance rejected a common fear of MAGA technophobes (such as that expressed in Tucker Carlson’s support for at least a temporary ban on driverless trucks), stating that “AI, I really believe, will facilitate and make people more productive. It is not going to replace human beings. It will never replace human beings”.

He expressed his excitement over the ways that AI development was “grounded in the real and the physical economy”, emphasizing the hands-on work of doctors, manufacturers, and soldiers. To further the appeal to MAGA denizens, he emphasized current US leadership in this technological space, one that translates into benefits for American national security. Foreshadowing his other major speeches early in his term as vice president, Vance constantly emphasizes how MAGA ends and DOGE ends share considerable overlap.

The widely discussed Munich Security speech again had elements intended to reflect, and appeal to, both elements of the Trump-Vance coalition. Again, the “common enemy” was identified: the oppressive regime of progressive speech and idea regulation. Vance called out European liberal elites for their promiscuous use of government power to suppress disfavored views and even disqualify candidates and entire political parties from electoral consideration.

The “free-speech” dimension of Vance’s remarks reflected the libertarian commitments of the DOGE constituency, while the clear efforts to liberate “Make Europe Great Again” views from legal and political constraint are the necessary precursor to populist electoral success. In effect, Vance was signaling that (in this case) DOGE means are necessary for MEGA ends. Only a more libertarian approach to speech and political expression would clear a path to a comparable populist movement in Europe, one emphasizing the need for secure borders, a producer economy, and greater military realism.

These themes were reiterated in a more recent speech by Vance, this time in Washington at a summit organized by Silicon Valley disruptors such as Marc Andreessen. At that event, Vance confronted head-on the dominant narrative of a divide between “techno-optimists” and the “populist Right” of the Trump coalition, declaring that he rejected the idea of an unbridgeable divide between the two as a “proud member of both tribes”. Vance echoed themes from his Paris speech, emphasizing not only the desirability and even inescapability of innovation, but praising its potential to benefit workers — even citing Saint John Paul II — according to their work lives ever greater dignity.

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But in a speech before a Silicon Valley audience, Vance underscored a main MAGA point: “deindustrialization poses risks both to our national security and to our workforce”. While acknowledging the potential loss of meaning that technological disruption of older industries poses to the industrial workforce, Vance emphasized a point intended to win over both MAGA and DOGE constituencies: globalization’s “hunger for cheap labor” has been bad both for American workers and bad for innovation.

Strengthening the American manufacturing sector, he noted, would have the benefit of reintegrating what globalism has separated: design from manufacturing, engineers from assembly, thinkers from doers. Indeed, speaking in quasi-Marxian language of the dangers of “alienation”, Vance in fact articulated a view that could be easily shared by the most pro-union factory worker and the most libertarian technologist: work and products improve with integration.

An oft-repeated theme in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk is how the Tesla and SpaceX boss rejected the Steve Jobs model of “designing” in Cupertino and manufacturing in China. Instead, in every one of his manifold endeavors, Musk has sought to bring into close proximity the engineers and the fabricators, believing with considerable evidence that their separation leads to the inability of each to learn from the limitations and insights of the other. Rather than discerning a DOGE-versus-MAGA narrative, Vance stresses how the aims of each align, even as they seek to defeat a common enemy.

More clearly and consistently than anyone in this not-yet-100-day-old administration, Vance loses no opportunity to articulate the basic alignment of DOGE and MAGA. As with any coalition, there are and will continue to be tensions (as Vivek discovered). Vance may yet be proved wrong that technologies such as AI will prove beneficial not only to workers, but to humanity at large (I, for one, hope that humanity is not the “biological boot-loader for digital superintelligence”).

But Vance is not only intellectually, but politically the “child” of DOGE and MAGA. Like any child, he aims to articulate the virtues and compatibility of his parents. Those who believe, or hope, that the coalition is on the verge of dysfunctional collapse may be surprised by how durable it is — and will remain under a successor administration.

The country is plagued by an affordability crisis, a housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure, and a general sense of diminishing expectations. For abundance liberals, it’s no accident that these crises are most acute in the states and cities where Democrats hold most of the political power.

The journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have emerged as the most prominent faces of this movement. In their buzzy new book, Abundance, they argue that scarcity is a choice, and that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Progressives, in this telling, must be on the side of dynamism and productive capacity, even if this means bucking the Left’s orthodoxies.

The abundance movement gives hope for a progressive revival amid Trumpian gloom — even if proponents fail to fully reckon with the material incentives that keep many of their constituents on the side of the un-abundant status quo.

Supply-side liberals want to roll back regulations that make it harder to innovate and build. Yet it would be a mistake to cast them as neoliberals in the Clinton-Obama mold, as many on the Left are now doing. They emphasize the role of a strong, active government in shaping policy and directing markets. And while some abundance liberals describe themselves as moderates, many more are explicit about their passion for progressive ideals. The concern that unifies them is the tendency of progressive governance to hinder its own ostensible goals.

Stringent zoning laws block the construction of new housing, while burdensome rules around the use of public money make affordable public housing too expensive to build. Endless environmental reviews delay public transportation and green infrastructure projects. As Klein and Thompson put it: “Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.”

Ordinary people suffer as a result. A majority of California tenants are now “rent-burdened”, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing. The same is true in New York City. Nearly a quarter of Seattle residents spend more than half of their income on rent. Even middle-class workers are being priced out of the most desirable cities and job markets.

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Nonetheless, deep-blue cities permit far fewer new homes than those with more conservative governance. Despite having 8 million more residents than Texas, the Golden State issued only half as many residential building permits in 2023. Meanwhile, in Austin, the median rent has fallen a staggering 22 percent over the last two years, even amid a tech boom, thanks to a concerted push to build new rental housing.

Difficulty building isn’t confined to the housing sector. Large infrastructure projects in blue areas regularly run behind schedule and over-budget due to onerous regulations and activist litigation. In 2008, California approved funding for an ambitious high-speed-rail project stretching across much of the state. The project is now $100 billion over-budget and a decade behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State, with its loose regulatory climate, beats environmentally friendly California in solar and wind power capacity.

These failures partly explain why blue areas drifted most dramatically to the Right in the 2024 election, with core urban voters in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City shifting 8 percentage points toward Trump. This should terrify Democrats, but they appear incapable of correcting course.

To be sure, the toxic and inane cultural politics progressives championed over the last decade did Democrats no favors at the ballot box. But rebranding the party as more socially moderate — with performative gestures towards masculinity, sports, patriotic kitsch, and Joe Rogan fans — won’t solve the deeper problems of progressive governance.

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For some supply-side progressives, the warning signs were flashing red long before the election. Thompson began to reconsider the cause of supply shortages during the Covid pandemic, when the country was short on protective equipment, drug supplies, and hospital beds. He saw these shortages as more than mere supply-chain failures. The authorities were failing to fast-track an appropriate pandemic response in the same way they failed at housing, energy, infrastructure, and skilled labor. In a January 2022 Atlantic essay Thompson called for a broad “abundance agenda” that would harness the power of both government and markets to supply more of what people need.

Supply-side has long been a Right-coded phrase. The term refers to the economic theory that low taxes and small government boost economic output and living standards for all. Progressives have instead generally focused, to borrow Klein’s words, on “the demand side of the ledger”: subsidizing the cost of housing, food, health care, education, and other essentials.

But price controls and food stamps don’t put more eggs and other goods on supermarket shelves. Simply handing out money for people to buy a limited supply of goods drives up prices, as the inflation of recent years has made clear. Had Kamala Harris been able to follow through on her campaign promise to give $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers, the likely result would have been a rise in the cost of housing.

When demand outstrips supply, especially for inelastic goods, redistribution is an insufficient response. Hence why supply-side progressives are calling for a political shift away from redistribution toward the production and supply of more goods and services. They want a liberalism that builds and innovates and therefore lowers prices, not just redistributes.

This is a radical departure from the last 50-plus years of progressive orthodoxy, which has focused mostly on inequality and, more recently, climate change. The climate dimension is especially prone to a combination of radicalism and pessimism that alienates ordinary people. The “degrowth” movement — which calls for managed decline and even winding down industrial society in the face of ecological collapse — has gained purchase in many corners of the Left. Even many mainstream liberals espouse tacitly antigrowth sentiments.

Such policies sabotage progressive governance. Then, too, the legislative model was forged in a different era with different problems. The environmental regulations of the postwar era sought to ameliorate the harms associated with rapid economic growth and technological progress. The postwar American economy was vibrant. Suburbs and highways and factories were going up all across the country. But the air and water were polluted, manufacturing was degrading natural environments, and crime, smog, noise, and crowding had the affluent fleeing cities.

But these environmental regulations, zoning laws, historic preservation statutes, and “grassroots” public-interest policies, implemented to protect the public in a time of rapid change, have since been captured by special interests. Activist citizen and business groups weaponize these same laws to stymie construction and growth for their own personal ends.

A willingness to grapple with the failures of progressive governance — and the ideological choices underpinning those failures — sets supply-side progressives apart from many of the other rival factions seeking to remake or just rebrand the Democratic Party. But for now, the abundance faction consists mostly of policy wonks confined to media, think tanks, and academia. A few prominent politicians have expressed support for their ideas, at least as they appear on paper, and others hit on similar themes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued a State Economic Blueprint teasing new infrastructure, innovation, government investment, and dynamism. (The cover features hard hats, construction cranes, and a commercial farm that is notably not bucolic.)

However, the “pathologies of the broad Left”, as Klein and Thompson put it, didn’t arise by happenstance, and they won’t be easily cured. Though regulatory hurdles were raised as well-intentioned solutions to the problems of another age, the entrenched interests keeping them in place are very much contemporary. In the cities home to much of the Democratic base, NIMBYism remains a potent force. Affluent homeowners have moved back into the cities, but they still fear the traffic, crime, noise, and blocked views that come with high-density affordable housing and infrastructure projects. They are unlikely to be happy about slumping home prices as new housing stock becomes available.

Klein and Thompson are too quick to excuse or brush aside the vested interest affluent liberals have in the status quo. Klein has asked for grace and understanding for the contradictory but human impulses of those practicing what he calls “lawn-sign liberalism”. Elsewhere, Thompson floated promoting the abundance agenda as pushback against greedy elites but stopped short of openly blaming homeowners.

Yoni Appelbaum, another supply-side progressive with a new book out, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, is more comfortable naming villains. Appelbaum points the finger at Jane Jacobs, the community activist famous for keeping planning virtuoso Robert Moses from running highways through Manhattan. Jacobs’s writing and activism against large “top-down” urban development in favor of community-based planning laid the blueprint for activist groups that would squash urban development for decades to come.

In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, yet another text simpatico to the abundance movement, Marc Dunkelman argues that such activists, and progressives in general, have leaned too far into a “Jeffersonian” impulse as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition’s emphasis on developmentalism and large-scale solutions to mass problems.

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Though such honesty is refreshing, Thompson is probably right that a politics vilifying homeowners would struggle to find a constituency among affluent liberals with property in major cities. No one likes to be told that they are the problem. Even if the movement can find support among young progressives struggling to break into the housing market, the youth vote isn’t easy for progressives to mobilize (just ask Bernie Sanders); many young people are now pivoting to the Right anyway.

Immigration is another sticking point. Supply-side progressivism shares traditional progressivism’s support for expanding migration. Matthew Yglesias, a longtime associate of Klein’s, made this argument explicitly in his book One Billion Americans, published in 2020 (the title gives away the gist). However, while supply-side progressives are mostly in agreement, few seem so eager to foreground the point — understandably, given the ferocious public backlash against an unrestricted border under former President Joe Biden.

Klein and Thompson make only passing mention of the need for more skilled immigrant labor to build new infrastructure and technologies, but they spend little time defending or even making the case. Obvious questions go unacknowledged. Why can’t American citizens do these jobs? Won’t more people create even more issues with supply? The reason is surely strategic: the public has soured on mass immigration, which has been electorally damaging for progressive parties across Western democracies.

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Then there are unions. The abundance movement’s critics on the Left charge that making building easier would disrupt unions and be “politically ruinous”. It’s true that Klein & Co. identify labor laws as one of the factors holding back development. Yet Klein has also underscored his support for the labor movement, noting that countries with stronger unions build transit infrastructure faster and for less than the United States, with its much weaker labor movement. Klein is correct to warn, however, that nothing threatens the labor movement more than a public that blames it for the failures of progressive governance.

Still, criticizing labor law risks making enemies for abundance within organized labor. Likewise, few “affluent metropolitan liberals” will take kindly to the movement’s criticisms of environmental regulations, DEI initiatives, and other progressive pieties.

That’s why some abundance liberals have sought to forge partnerships across the aisle. Colin Mortimer of the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank that serves as a home for this rising strain of progressive thought, pointed to the Abundance Institute as a “Right-wing institution” promoting an abundance agenda centered around science and technology. Then there is the economist Tyler Cowen and his “state-capacity libertarianism”, which can be thought of as an inverse movement tackling the pathologies of the Right: above all, a perverse adherence to laissez-faire principles and refusal to harness the unique powers of government.

Likewise, figures in the so-called Tech Right — such as the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who have both lamented the country’s inability to build — get lumped into the abundance mix. “The degree that we can make this a cross-partisan, bipartisan issue, we think that’s fantastic, and it’s going to be all the more reason why this movement can be effective”, Mortimer told me.

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Yet the danger is that Right and Left abundance proponents will each double down on their own side’s respective preferences without taking up the productive ideas of the other: that is, Republicans will deregulate without building up state capacity, while Democrats will splurge without deregulating.

The first months of the new Trump administration are instructive. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, himself pro-building and pro-dynamism in the Andreessen-Thiel sense, doesn’t appear to share any interest in making government perform better — or at all. The new Trump administration, largely abandoning the pro-worker populist posturing of the campaign trail, now seems intent on realizing Grover Norquist’s quip about shrinking the government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

For their part, Thompson and Klein frame their agenda as an opportunity to step into the vacancy Republicans create by peddling what they call a “scarcity mindset”, in which, as JD Vance infamously claimed, illegal immigrants are taking up all of the homes that could go to native citizens. Their great hope is that Democrats might help forge a new political order that displaces the faltering neoliberal consensus.

Until recently, this did not seem so out of the realm of possibility: some Republicans had shown more openness to state interventions and industrial policy, and the Biden administration, which chose to leave many of Trump’s strategic tariffs in place, was able to garner enough bipartisan support to enact no fewer than three large spending bills centered around infrastructure and industrial policy.

Lately, however, supposedly populist Republicans have come more and more to resemble their tax-cutting, government-attacking, laissez-faire predecessors, while many Democrats are falling back into tired #Resistance tropes. Can abundance liberals (and thoughtful counterparts on the Right) cut through these familiar battle lines to forge creative new solutions to the nation’s supply problems? At stake is the future not just of the Left, but American prosperity in the 21^st century.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labor market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarizing deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favored lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

Mass illicit immigration was and continues to be a feature of the neoliberal model that first took hold in the Seventies. The neoliberal order establishes the primacy of the market over state and society by promoting the free flow of goods, capital, and, crucially, people (that last element is often omitted by progressive critics of neoliberalism). Unsurprisingly, the decade that saw the highest volume of illegal immigration was the Nineties — an era of unfettered globalization, deregulation, and free trade epitomized by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nafta facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor south of the border by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The agreement was also devastating for Mexican small farmers, who couldn’t compete with subsidized US agriculture. The resulting mass of indigent farmers migrated largely north into the open arms of American agribiz—the same force responsible for ruining their livelihoods. In 1990, the share of illegal farm workers in the United States was just 12%. By the turn of the millennium, it was about half, where it has remained since.

Until the 2010s, many Democrats embraced a comparatively hard line on illegal immigration, in keeping with the party’s working-class base. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton lamented how “the jobs [illegal immigrants] hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants”.

Back then, it was free-market Republicans like Ronald Reagan who celebrated the exploitation of illicit labor in jobs “Americans won’t do”. Never mind that these jobs were overwhelmingly occupied by Americans prior to the arrival of millions of illicit workers. Never mind, too, that native-born workers still form the majority of the workforce in sectors with large numbers of illegal employees, such as construction, household labor, dry cleaning, and landscaping.

An earlier generation of labor leaders and social democrats viewed mass illegal migration as one component in a broader suite of policies, including outsourcing and union-busting, meant to squeeze wages. United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, for example, repeatedly denounced illegal migration and would make a point of alerting the authorities to employers hiring such workers. In 2007, Bernie Sanders said: “On one hand you have large multinationals trying to shut down plants in America, and on the other hand, you have the service industry bringing in low-wage workers from abroad”. The result: “wages go down”.

Negative sentiment toward immigration is driven by the net volume and type of immigration to a given country, dividing native populations from newcomers over wages, skills, and cultural background. The last variable, culture, is mercifully less salient in the United States, given the country’s spectacular capacity to assimilate migrants. In sufficient numbers, though, low-skilled illegal immigration necessarily provokes a backlash, including in cases where migrants and the native-born otherwise lack meaningful cultural differences.

To be fair to open-borders advocates of the Left and the libertarian Right, public opinion had been comparatively indifferent to large volumes of low-skilled legal immigration until recently — that is, except among Republicans. Plus, despite high overall immigration, illegal immigration declined dramatically after 2000, with border crossings plateauing at around 300,000 a year in the 2010s. By this point, the Nafta shock in Mexico gave way to the low-growth but resilient Mexican economy of today, leading to a 90% reduction in illegal entries by Mexicans. Mexico’s role as a source of outmigration was soon eclipsed by the likes of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Successive presidents also oversaw crackdowns at the southern border and boosted deportations. The Obama administration instituted family detention, deporting 2.9 million people in its first term and 1.9 million in its second. By comparison, the first Trump administration managed 1.5 million deportations, including a smaller proportion of violent criminals.

Then came the social-justice revolution of the mid-2010s, which consummated the Democratic Party’s capture by college-educated professionals. Mantras such as “no human being is illegal” gathered strength in Democratic circles as activists denounced Obama as the “Deporter in Chief”. The progressive zealots got a boost from Trump I, the cruelty of whose child-separation policies did wonders for the cause of limitless migration. Despite the first Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, illegal immigration remained unchanged up until the pandemic; pandemic-induced travel restrictions caused overall immigration to fall near zero in 2020.

At that point, more Americans (34%) favored increased immigration than disfavored it (28%) for the first time. Emboldened in their opposition to Trump, Democrats excised what little immigration dissent remained in the party. Having previously called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal”, Bernie Sanders embraced a moratorium on deportations and called for decriminalizing border crossings under pressure from the liberal press.

The Biden administration followed suit, announcing a temporary pause in deportations and adopting a near limitless interpretation of asylum law. While a global surge in immigration was to be expected following the end of pandemic restrictions, voters correctly interpreted Democratic policy as offering an unprecedented incentive to would-be migrants. At least 10 million foreign nationals without legal permanent status entered the country since 2021, per the Congressional Budget Office, the most of any four-year period in history.

In June 2024, Biden backtracked, issuing an executive order barring migrants from soliciting asylum when average daily encounters exceed 2,500. The result was a decline in monthly crossings by around 80%. The move was supported by minorities and working-class voters but abhorred by affluent progressives. Indeed, by the end of 2024, monthly crossings were lower than under Trump prior to the pandemic.

So here we are. The question now is how tough immigration enforcement should be, and whether Republicans — and eventually, Democrats — will once again overreach in their respective preferences.

The starting point for the debate is a simple proposition: namely, that mass deportations are entirely justified, representing a return to Obama-era deportation policy. Under Biden, a total of 1.49 million newcomers were removed — a shockingly paltry figure, given the total number of unlawful entries. Currently, Team Trump seems to be prioritizing the 1.4 million migrants who have received final orders of removal. Logistically speaking, it will be difficult to deport even this number anytime soon.

The goal of the new administration should be to craft a lasting immigration policy benefiting American workers. This will require gaining buy-in from Democrats where possible. Improving the asylum system requires sending a signal to migrants they are certain to be deported unless they have a credible claim of asylum. At the same time, employing more immigration judges for the current asylum backlog is eminently desirable and an area where Republicans could work with Democrats. It’s counterproductive for the sitting president to antagonize deportees’ receiving countries — however obnoxious their leaders may also be.

A points system based on migrants’ skills — ideally similar to that used by Canada prior to the pandemic — should also be adopted. While it’s true that Americans have historically tolerated high levels of low-skilled immigration, restrictionists are correct that chain migration doesn’t ultimately serve the national interest or workers. Shifting from family-based to skills-based migration would go a long way toward taming the anti-immigration fervor of the GOP base.

During his first term, Trump expanded Obama’s family-detention policy in an effort to deter migrants of all stripes. This and later family separation was what resulted in the administration’s failure to deport more violent criminals than its predecessor: Trump I turned public opinion against itself. Disturbingly, Trump’s proposal to expand migrant detentions in Guantanamo Bay suggests a willingness to double down on past failures, though the administration appears to be prioritizing removals with infractions beyond just illegal entries thus far.

Further, the Remain in Mexico policy was a marked improvement that helped curtail the 2018 spike in illegal immigration, whose revival will similarly benefit the current asylum backlog. Contrary to progressive critiques, Mexico as a whole isn’t unsafe, with many migrants residing in vibrant metropolitan areas while they solicit asylum. Then as now, the policy’s success will turn on Trump’s willingness to maintain a productive relationship with Mexican leaders.

Like her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has displayed a willingness to work with Trump, making record arrests of migrants and drug seizures, as well as constructing facilities to receive deportees. Having cajoled Mexico (and Canada) into substantial action, the effectiveness of the president’s tariff threats cannot be denied. Given his decision to impose tariffs anyway, however, it will be hard for either country to justify continued cooperation with Washington.

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Republicans should also note that their rationale for a military intervention in Mexico directly contradicts the premise of the Remain in Mexico policy. If carried out, an invasion would fuel a migratory catastrophe. If or when Mexican cartels’ recent terror designation is taken to its logical conclusion, the resulting torrent of actual refugees would undo decades of declining illegal immigration from Mexico. Trump could, instead, aid Sheinbaum’s proposal to expand the recently inaugurated Maya Train into Central America, a prospect certain to deter migration by creating jobs and fueling development.

Finally, if Trump is truly serious about deterrence and American workers, he should support the passage and aggressive enforcement of mandatory E-verify. Forcing employers to confirm the immigration status of workers — and making an example of those that don’t — would go a long way in curtailing migrant exploitation and raising wages for native workers.

Progressives should back these efforts. As it is, their simultaneous defense of unrestricted low-skilled immigration and opposition to H1B visas serves the class interest of their professional constituents. After all, the exploitation of H1B workers directly undercuts the bargaining power of high-skilled college graduates—the same group that benefit from a ready supply of undocumented maids and landscapers. But this policy mix has proved deeply unpopular with the non-college majority that decides US elections.

In the same vein, it’s telling that the immigration rhetoric of populist Republicans — such as Vice President JD Vance — echoes that of pre-Trump labor Democrats. This isn’t to say that the comparably oligarchic Republican Party is truly representative of working-class interests. It does, however, speak to the changing nature of both parties’ coalitions.

Progressives can continue dismissing the impact of illegal immigration on wages — relying, ironically, on the same neoliberal economists they would otherwise condemn. The reality, however, is that working-class voters will continue to believe that their wages will be undercut by foreign workers willing to work harder and for less than they would.

Democrats should recall the counsel of the civil-rights icon Barbara Jordan: “For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process”. For their part, Republicans should avoid an overestimation of their mandate that has and likely will once more empower their progressive enemies.

But despite these promises, Americans are likely in for a period of consumer austerity no matter who wins the election. The only question is what form this austerity will take.

In somewhat simplified terms, the fundamental policy choice is between conventional or “neoliberal” austerity, progressive-environmental austerity, and what might be called “catch-up reindustrialisation” — a policy shift in favour of investment over consumption to rebuild the US industrial base and shore up America’s long-term security and economic prospects, particularly vis-à-vis China. In my view, the third option is both the necessary and most desirable choice, yet all three present their own difficulties and complications. The fact that all these choices involve some level of austerity doubtless contributes to the increasing bitterness of American politics.

Let’s start by considering neoliberal austerity. Conventional budgetary concerns have resurfaced with the inflation spikes of recent years and interest rates still near their highest levels since 2008. In the past, deficits significantly above 3% of GDP were only experienced during major economic downturns or in wartime. In 2023, however, the United States ran a roughly 6% deficit with a relatively low unemployment rate of around 4%. While paranoia about the US national debt has always proved baseless in the modern era, the limits of the present trajectory are becoming more visible, as interest payments take up greater and greater percentages of government spending.

The question for deficit hawks — today and in the past — is whether they are in fact primarily concerned with reducing the deficit. In America, this pose is often, if not typically, disingenuous — rhetorical cover for an ideological project of shrinking the state rather than responsibly balancing revenues with expenditures. Hence the most strident deficit hawks are almost invariably the most eager tax cutters. Or, perhaps more accurately, the most aggressive tax cutters often masquerade as deficit hawks but have little real interest in responsible fiscal policy.

Today, with federal tax rates at low levels, any serious deficit reduction programme would have to consider tax increases. The rates themselves may not even be the key issue: taxing corporate profits in the country where they are earned, or closing various personal loopholes, may have a greater impact at this point. But these items are largely excluded from the “deficit” agenda, especially among Republicans, who continue to indulge in fantasies that tax cuts will “pay for themselves”, despite the manifest failure of the Bush and Trump tax cuts to generate meaningful growth.

Instead, the conservative focus remains entirely on cutting spending. The problem here is that, within the realm of political plausibility, there is not all that much to cut. According to the most recent numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, “mandatory spending” (mostly Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) accounted for $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion 2023 federal budget. Defence spending added another $800 billion, constituting almost half of “discretionary spending”. Interest costs were an additional $700 billion, contributing to a total deficit of $1.7 trillion. The bottom line is that, even if all $900 billion of non-defence discretionary spending were miraculously cut — zeroing out transportation, education, veterans’ benefits, the justice system, and scientific research — that would only reduce the deficit by about half. Significant deficit reduction must therefore involve cuts to the most politically sensitive areas: defence and entitlements.

Given China’s emergence as a peer competitor — and one with a massive industrial-base advantage — cutting defence appears to be off the table. On the contrary, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, has proposed increasing defence spending to 5% of GDP, up from the current level of 3%. The reasons are clear: China built 21 submarines last year, while the United States struggled to build one; it will take up to seven years to replenish certain munitions stocks used in Ukraine, and analysts estimate that the United States would be out of some critical weapons within a week in any active conflict over Taiwan. One reason the US Navy has not been able to better protect Middle Eastern shipping lanes from recent Houthi attacks is a concern that the increased use of certain munitions there would compromise readiness for other potential conflicts.

Simply throwing more money at the Pentagon and incumbent defence contractors will not solve these problems: serious procurement reforms and broader industrial policy measures are necessary. And yet there is little doubt that America’s security situation is more perilous than it has been for generations. Legacy ideological commitments further complicate these issues. The most aggressive “deficit hawks” — such as Nikki Haley in the Republican Party or various centrist Democrats — also tend to be the most fervent supporters of interventions in Ukraine and elsewhere to uphold a “US-led liberal international order”. Although Haley and others typically prefer to imagine that foreign policy and economic policy are distinct domains, their interventionist commitments nevertheless preclude any significant cuts to defence spending.

That leaves Social Security and Medicare. Cutting Social Security is so politically toxic that Trump has completely distanced himself from the proposals of George W. Bush and Paul Ryan, once hallmarks of conservative economic policy. Republican congressional leadership also notably refused to endorse entitlement cuts in the last midterm elections. Even if Social Security cuts were politically viable, however, there has been little serious effort to think through the effects.

Significant cuts would mean workers would have to defer their own consumption, either to save more for their own retirement or to keep their elderly parents out of poverty, creating a drag on growth and complicating deficit reduction efforts. Although Social Security is structured as social insurance rather than welfare, the benefit formulas are somewhat redistributive, so major cuts would probably result in a further shift of wealth from lower-income people, with a high propensity to spend, to affluent savers, with a lower propensity to spend.

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In the past, advocates of “privatising” Social Security sometimes argued that allowing individuals to manage their own retirement savings would enable higher returns and boost growth. But the Social Security programme functions less as a professionally managed pool of capital, like the public pension funds common in many other countries or in US states, and more like debt-funded consumption stimulus. Eliminating Social Security, therefore, is not simply a matter of distributing a pool of assets to individual accounts. Furthermore, if the goal were simply to maximise returns, the Social Security “trust funds” could be authorised to make public and private investments beyond US Treasury securities. But the same small-government ideology that calls for cutting Social Security also resists giving the government the authority to make such investments, which could distort “market signals”. Devolving all responsibility to individuals, on the other hand, would magnify the impact of market volatility for each household and likely require further increasing savings. At the same time, the government would probably still be called upon to bail out retirees — whether they saved prudently or not — during major stock market crashes.

A more practical approach might aim to maximise the value derived from the existing programme rather than cutting it. Senator Vance was roundly criticised for saying that more should be done to enlist grandparents to assist with childcare. Yet there are a number of serious proposals to use Social Security to incentivise childcare or otherwise better support the sharing of resources within extended families.

The other major area perpetually on the chopping block is health care. This would appear to be more fertile ground: the United States spends 17–18% of GDP on health care, by far the most in the world, to achieve overall public health outcomes that are decidedly mediocre. Spending on health care programmes composes about a quarter of the federal budget. Surely, the system could be more efficient?

The problem, once again, is that ideological motivations are at odds with practical solutions. Those most eager to cut health care spending tend to be those most committed to “market fundamentalist” ideology, who tend to ignore the possibility that increasing state intervention might be necessary to control costs. But marketisation, in practice, has generally failed to control costs and, in theory, there is little reason to expect that it should. As the economist Kenneth Arrow demonstrated back in 1963, normal market dynamics do not apply to critical aspects of health care. Ordinary competitive and pricing dynamics are often absent, and the sector is characterised by deep information asymmetries and network effects.

The irony is that even practical incremental steps to reduce health care costs, such as government negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies or hospital monopolies, or better regulating parasitic middlemen such as “pharmacy benefit managers” (PBMs), are generally resisted by the same people who claim to be most concerned about reining in spending. As a result, “marketisation” in the US context has simply meant a refusal to employ the state to control costs, contributing to a cycle of expanding subsidisation.

In sum, the concerns of deficit hawks are real enough when it comes to health care, Social Security and defence, but the politics around these concerns remain insincere and ineffective.

A similar pattern prevails in progressive environmentalism, another sphere in which legitimate concerns have been pressed into the service of a counterproductive politics. In the United States, unlike in Europe, true “de-growth” austerity has become so discredited that most politicians have run away from it, though the impulse still exists among many NGOs and activists. Yet even if American progressives, for the most part, are not looking to shut down modern agriculture, discourage having children, or revert to hand-washing their laundry to stop climate change, they are eager to restrict consumer choices and divert public resources to promote renewable energy and electric vehicles. The Inflation Reduction Act, which includes most of the climate-related subsidies passed during the Biden administration, is estimated to cost somewhere between $800 billion to $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The actual cost is unknown, because some of the IRA’s tax credits are uncapped and theoretically unlimited — but the “energy transition” is certainly expensive.

The necessity of such costly carbon reduction efforts is often presented as beyond ordinary politics — only pathologically greedy science-deniers would oppose taking action to avert a global climate emergency! Yet while environmental concerns are seemingly universal, the environmental movement remains deeply partisan. There is no getting around the fact that climate activists frequently demand sacrifices from ordinary people while ignoring the behaviours of ultra-wealthy donors and displaying clear sectoral biases. The farmer, the coal miner, the exurbanite, and so on are all called upon to make difficult adjustments to meet various arbitrary emissions targets. But the billionaires who shuttle between multiple estates on private jets are never expected to change their lifestyles to save the planet, except perhaps to donate to the climate NGO complex. Wind and solar fields are supposedly essential — but not within sight of Nantucket. Fossil fuel companies are demonised, but tech giants whose server farms consume more and more energy are largely exempt from such criticism, as long as they make the right noises on ESG. Likewise, the environmental movement has fought to impose more and more regulatory burdens on manufacturing and heavy industry, all while turning a blind eye toward pollution offshoring to China and elsewhere.

In fact, the history of the American environmental movement and its political alliances is rather sordid. In its earliest days, environmentalism was associated with population control and even eugenics. After rebranding as an emissions control movement in the second half of the 20th century, environmental groups first teamed up with coal and utility deregulators against nuclear power. Then they took money from natural gas and Enron for campaigns against coal. Recent years have seen a turn against all fossil fuels, though nuclear has once again been grudgingly readmitted to the decarbonisation push. Ironically, the most significant opponents to new renewable energy construction are often legacy environmental groups, who helped construct a legal regime in which it is relatively easy for third parties to challenge any new energy installations on environmental grounds. This is one reason why far more solar fields have been built in red states like Texas compared to ultra-progressive states like California.

Beneath all the moral preening, then, the green movement is fundamentally just another interest group pursuing a relatively narrow, partisan agenda. It is, and always has been, primarily composed of affluent and professional-class individuals in “asset-light” corporate sectors, as well as opportunistic energy players. In many ways, it is the ultimate neoliberal coalition: a global, post-political orientation, overseen by technocrats operating through nondemocratic transnational organisations and financial markets.

To be sure, the fact that the environmental movement is a self-interested lobby does not necessarily mean that its core claims are false, even if some activists have engaged in alarmism and exaggeration in the past. Indeed, the absence of effective environmental policy is already imposing its own form of austerity, as seen in rising home insurance prices across the United States, to which climate change is almost certainly a contributor. Yet being right about some things does not make the environmental movement any less of a lobby.

Oddly, the green movement would probably have more success in the United States if it simply accepted its corporate-lobby character. Certainly, a movement that focused less on moral preening and NGO fundraising probably would not have made the mistake of trying to pursue decarbonisation while demonising nuclear energy for decades. It also might be more practical about encouraging the transition to clean energy and electric vehicles.

The current push into EVs, based on a combination of tax subsidies and state-level mandates, is already sputtering. Sales growth has slowed dramatically, and auto companies have shelved plans for new models. A more serious approach would recognise that the United States — unlike, say, Norway — is a large country with a weak rail network; people regularly drive long distances; and combustion vehicles’ rapid refuelling remains a significant advantage. At the same time, the United States — unlike, say, China — has little capacity to enforce top-down changes in consumer preferences and infrastructure construction. Two years after Congress appropriated billions for charging stations, not a single one has been built. A more practical agenda would have emphasised vehicles such as plug-in hybrids, which could have a major impact on emissions and would create incentives for the private sector to add more charging stations, while also appealing to consumers who desire flexibility. Such thinking, however, would require the green movement to abandon the pretence of moral purity and accept the compromises and coalitional balancing of any industry lobby.

The more likely outcome is the continuation of the status quo, in which lavishly funded NGOs persist in their attempts to push badly designed policy on a reluctant populace. Whereas neoliberal austerity is essentially an ideological movement trying to appropriate the rhetoric of economic interest, progressive environmentalism is a class- and sector-based lobby seeking to brand itself as a moral-ideological cause. Both will remain ineffective as long as they continue to labour under these self-delusions.

The third option is, for lack of a better name, catch-up reindustrialisation. As with environmental “austerity”, this does not involve conventional budgetary austerity — it may in fact require more public spending — but it does entail a shift away from maximising consumption and towards increasing investment in productive capacity. Trade measures such as tariffs intentionally raise prices, at least in the immediate term, while funding for industrial policies may come at the expense of other budget priorities.

The need for a serious industrial policy programme has become more pressing for various reasons. The first is national security. As discussed above, America’s defence industrial base has eroded considerably. By contrast, China’s manufacturing advantage is overwhelming, which has created supply-chain dependencies in a number of critical commercial areas as well. Surrendering sectors to foreign competitors often entails losing more than “commodity manufacturing”; it also means losing technological prowess and workforce skills. The United States need not look to dominate every manufacturing sector, but it will be impossible to fix the defence industrial base without improving the broader industrial base.

In addition, it is slowly dawning on American politicians that it is impossible to avoid having an industrial policy; the only question is whether to pursue one’s own, or to accept the imposition of someone else’s. China, in particular, by massively subsidising capital investment and export industries, has disadvantaged and discouraged investment in manufacturing and capital-intensive sectors in the United States. And by refusing to intervene, the United States has simply allowed Beijing to pick winners and losers.

Moreover, the fact is that, even without a self-conscious industrial policy, the US government has had to subsidise fallen national champions such as Boeing in recent decades. What has been missing is a serious plan to maximise the effectiveness of these investments, in large part because the post–Cold War neoliberal consensus precluded any open consideration of industrial policy.

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According to this conventional economic theory, industrial policy will always be inefficient, value-destructive, and a drag on growth because it interferes with market-driven capital allocation. If private-sector actors require government support or prodding to make an investment, the theory goes, then it must be a poor investment, even if necessary for non-economic reasons such as defence. These models assume, however, a form of economic rationality in which firms operate to maximise profits. In reality, firms operate to maximise shareholder value. The two may occasionally overlap, but they are not the same. As a result, firms often maintain hurdle rates well in excess of their cost of capital, and pursue financial engineering strategies instead of investment. This behaviour may be irrational in the sense of forgoing profits, but it is often eminently rational in the sense of maximising equity valuation. The net result, from a national perspective, is chronic underinvestment, particularly in capital-intensive sectors where foreign industrial policies drive down returns. This is one reason why the relationship between financial returns and productivity breakthroughs has always been more tenuous than standard models would predict, and why industrial policy can spur economic development by dislodging financial rentierism.

Government investment promotion, therefore, is not necessarily value-destructive. It may in fact enable investments whose returns, while below private sector hurdle rates, are still positive. These investments, in turn, can form the basis of new companies, technologies, and industries, as the many historical examples of successful industrial policies attest, from Korean autos to Taiwanese semiconductors to early Silicon Valley.

From this perspective, successful industrial policy is perhaps best thought of not simply as consumer austerity but rather as “deferred gratification”, or investment in the future. Notably, the Chinese government has actively suppressed domestic consumption in favour of industrial investment throughout the last several decades, and yet, contra Western economic orthodoxy, has presided over a miraculous rise in living standards, in addition to its growing geo-economic power.

That is not to say, however, that the path forward for the United States will be easy. On the contrary, American industrial policy faces a number of obstacles and complications. First, US government agencies have relatively little expertise in designing and executing industrial strategy, certainly when compared to their Asian counterparts. The US government itself is poorly structured for this end, with limited institutional capacity to integrate foreign policy and economic policy.

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Second, advocates of US industrial policy often have diverging goals in mind. Some focus on the defence industrial base, others on the “energy transition”, others on “creating jobs”. In a Venn diagram, these circles would intersect, but they are not identical. Such diffuse ambitions may impede both the passage and implementation of successful industrial strategy, as previous criticisms of “everything bagel” industrial policy have shown.

Third, the largest corporate and financial actors in the US are at best ambivalent about industrial strategy. They are deeply dependent on China, and are also prime beneficiaries of the “fissured economy” model in which intellectual property rents are separated from capital investment and labour. Furthermore, policies like the Chips Act passed in large part due to the support of incumbent industry lobbies, though policy design suffered in various ways as a result. It remains to be seen whether the United States can pursue industrial policy in critical areas that, unlike semiconductors, do not have powerful incumbent lobbies.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a critical ingredient present in the canonical East Asian industrial policy success stories is absent in the United States. Namely, the “Asian Tigers” each used global export markets, particularly the US market, as a competition check: companies that increased export share received more industrial policy support; those that did not were cut off. Without the export-market check, there is an increased temptation to subsidise “zombies”, rather than orient industrial policy investments toward improving productivity and competitiveness. US industrial strategy, therefore, may need to place greater emphasis on stimulating domestic competition. Another option involves using government procurement and investment to create milestone-based contests. In Operation Warp Speed, for example, the government offered contracts only to vaccine developers who met certain thresholds, such as Moderna and Pfizer. Unfortunately, such contracting models remain more the exception than the rule in US policy.

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, it is clear that the United States squandered its unipolar moment, not only via quixotic foreign policy interventions but also through imprudent economic policy. Deluded by abstract and idealistic theories, American leaders offshored the country’s industrial base to what is now its greatest rival, in order to support debt-funded consumption and financial asset bubbles. The result is a new era of great power competition, massive public and private debt loads, and an economy dominated by software monopolies that have done little to improve productivity. In the next few decades, America will have to commit more resources to addressing these problems. If it fails to do so, an even more drastic austerity will eventually be imposed upon it, as an already strained empire collapses completely.

Taken together, several commentators believe these trends mark the end of neoliberal governance and the beginning of a different consensus in Washington — and in a narrow sense they are right. Biden’s policies do harken back to aspects of the New Deal and Cold War liberalism, while the populist Right have promoted their own vision of economic reform. But, for reasons intrinsic to America’s party system, neoliberalism’s final chapter has yet to be written.

There are real obstacles to consolidating a new consensus — and they go beyond the obvious influence of each party’s most prominent donors or the rulings of conservative justices. The current geographic division of political power in the United States between conservative red regions and progressive blue ones reinforces a status quo which greatly privileges economic elites in both party coalitions and curtails the possibility of faster action on urgent issues.

Compared with the latter half of the 20th century, when Democrats and Republicans contested a broad range of states and a handful of landslide elections took place, the strategies animating today’s party coalitions are primarily defensive. Bold incursions by either party into the other’s strongholds are now uncommon. And the Democrats’ big-tent posture under Kamala Harris is unlikely to disturb this balance of power.

The regional pattern of party dominance is reflected in the small set of swing states that have determined presidential elections since the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. But it is illustrated just as much, if not more so, by the rise of one-party control in a majority of US states. Democrats currently hold “trifectas” (the governorship plus a majority in a state’s upper and lower chambers) in 17 states, while Republicans have a veritable lock on 23. In an echo of past “sectional” distributions of party control, geography would appear to denote ideology in the first decades of 21st-century America.

And this regional dynamic seems to go hand in hand with an accelerating political realignment or class “dealignment”. This phenomenon, wherein since the late Nineties the GOP has attracted far more working-class voters than it used to while the Left has won the vote of more and more upscale voters, appears to wary progressives and eager “New Right” thinkers alike as a harbinger of a generation-defining political realignment. But, while that is partly true, what is more salient is that the parties now coalesce support on the basis of identity-driven loyalties and deeply felt negative partisanship, and are then able to limit their economic promises, hewing instead to vague rhetoric about growth and opportunity. Campaign strategists continue to prioritise mobilising core supporters, rather than courting workers who are wavering in their partisan affiliation or engaging the country’s estimated 80 million disaffected nonvoters.

Consequently, the respective opposition party in key regions has become feeble to the point of being virtually nonexistent. Modern Democrats have been routed in several Rust Belt and Southern districts where New Deal liberals once swept the polls, while Republicanism, once a vehicle for Reaganite yuppies and wealthy suburbanites, has been reduced in the citadels of high finance and the multicultural elite to an ornery badge of non-conformity. In both cases, wage-earners who want a bigger share of the economic pie and more accountable politicians must contend with de facto one-party rule in much of the country. This is a situation that has rarely favoured more egalitarian outcomes.

The past 30 years might have altered the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions, but it has also calcified the power of regional and national elites. The political realignment has failed to catalyse any fundamental change of priorities in Republican strongholds. With few exceptions, Republicans, in spite of Trump’s 2016 foray into economic populism, remain beholden to big players in older extractive industries and a host of middle-men magnates. The combined lobbying efforts of these interests prevent local- and state-level Republican officials from reorienting their party branches to populist ideas. The GOP response to teachers’ strikes and unionisation drives at auto plants and Amazon distribution centres has predictably ranged from indifferent to hostile.

Conservative thinkers advocating substantive overtures to labour still have high hopes for Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, and a few other “anti-globalist” Republicans in the Senate. But remove the ever-churlish Trump from the equation and the GOP all but loses its insurgent garb. Belying Trump’s fading anti-establishment message, rising GOP leaders such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp have staked their reputation on attracting high-profile business investment and pet development projects. Ribbon-cuttings, not a showdown with American oligarchs, are what motivates them. Vintage Trumpian populism shows no sign of supplanting the traditional business conservatism that still guides local GOP elites.

By contrast, the Democratic Party certainly appears more attentive to the needs and hardships of its own lower-income base. Indeed, the party’s self-image as the vehicle of social uplift has endured despite attracting a growing share of wealthy and college-educated voters in  recent election cycles. Even though Democrats have haemorrhaged support from working-class whites, they continue to heavily draw black and other minority wage-earners as well as white progressives who want a stronger welfare state. On the basis of this alliance, it is hoped by the party’s reformers that if Harris wins the presidency she will continue to legislate in Biden’s “post-neoliberal” vein.

This optimism derives in part from stalwart Democrats’ rose-tinted view of the records of blue cities and states. As housing costs began to soar last decade, a handful of Democratic governors and mayors billed themselves as reformers ready to take on powerful real estate interests and build more affordable housing. They likewise tried to aid their working-class constituents through minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave, experiments in fare-free public transit, and efforts to raise enrolment in health insurance subsidised by the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s key social programme.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and one finds little has been done in major US cities to alleviate economic insecurity. Whether due to permitting obstacles or vested interests, the housing shortage is now a full-blown crisis. And the problem is only bound to get worse. Nationwide, a record-breaking twelve million renters now spend half their income on housing while nearly seven million units need to be built for heavily rent-burdened low-income people. This shortfall stands in contrast to Harris’s plan to build just three million homes.

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Previous efforts to ensure wages kept up with living costs have likewise proved insufficient. App-driven gig work has become ubiquitous in large metro areas, testing Democrats’ commitment to full employment and pro-worker principles. From California to Massachusetts, Big Tech has successfully fought legislation that would classify gig workers as employees and have tried to resist industry-specific minimum wage bills. Despite the Biden administration’s investments in infrastructure and clean energy, urban economies continue to reflect neoliberalism on steroids: the pace of gentrification, pushing poorer residents to outer neighbourhoods, has put them at a further disadvantage when it comes to finding decent work.

These trends have heightened the perception that Democrats cater to affluent professionals while offering, at most, minor relief to the wage-earners who provide their margin of victory in major elections. That is bad enough for a party once considered to be the tribune of workers. Rather absurdly, however, the Democratic Party’s deference to tech, real estate, and finance has been accompanied by ham-fisted choices which have exacerbated quality-of-life problems for many working families. These range from radical misjudgements influenced by social justice paradigms to less obvious but still pernicious forms of incompetence.

Most notoriously, recent ill-conceived experiments in drug decriminalisation under the framework of “harm reduction” in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon eroded public safety enough to dampen economic activity in core neighbourhoods. Those case studies have since become a source of ridicule and embarrassment for Democrats trying to thread the needle between maintaining vibrant commercial centres and reforming the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, other trends only underscore the ways in which blue-city governance has become strangely inept. Since the pandemic, truancy rates and learning loss in public schools have exploded — an outcome that more and more analysts attribute to extended remote-learning protocols in Democratic districts. Those decisions had a disproportionate effect on lower-income and nonwhite students whose family breadwinners were nurses, truck drivers and warehouse packers who by definition could not work from home.

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Urban Democrats’ handling of immigration politics has also compounded tensions in their coalition. During Trump’s term, it was a point of pride among progressives to live in a sanctuary city that shielded undocumented immigrants from detention and deportation raids. The surge in migrants since 2021, however, has strained municipal resources and working-class neighbourhoods due to the pressure put on scarce housing and already-overcrowded schools.

Some on the Left insist concerns about these burdens are inherently reactionary. But for others it is a matter of public trust and effective administration. In key cities, congested streets teem with overworked “deliveristas” yoked to those very gig platforms which fail to provide a living wage; migrant mothers and children hawk snacks and cheap toys throughout parks and subways; while municipal agencies turn a blind eye to the proliferation of illegal and unsafe flats. All this has snuck up on hopeless local politicians at the same time that homelessness and evictions have spiked.

Conservatives, of course, are more than happy to pin these various challenges on misguided progressives. Yet, far from being too ambitious, Democrats’ urban governance instead reflects the extent of “policy capture” in their party. Absent a GOP fit to govern large cities, many of today’s business titans have turned to an all-too pliant Democratic Party eager to build its donor network. That relationship is unlikely to fray anytime soon, whatever one makes of the party’s episodic populism under Biden.

The truth is that if Democrats had devoted less energy to cosying up to elites and committed themselves to grand public projects and social investments in the spirit of the New Deal, fewer of their loyal supporters would be contending with extraordinary rents, mediocre jobs, underfunded transit, and underperforming schools. And a genuine record of governing “for the people” would be resonating in places which have long slipped from the party’s grasp.

One might think, therefore, that the unity displayed at the Democratic Convention is shallow and that Harris is helming a coalition susceptible to fracture. But the current state of the GOP campaign suggests Trump is no longer poised to exploit discontent in the Democratic base over their party’s contradictions and shortcomings. Nor are Republicans making the barest effort to offer a positive alternative. On the contrary, it is the Democrats who remain at once the party of government and the agents of, well, limited yet “hopeful” change.

This returns us to the regional divide which constrains the advance of a post-neoliberal order. Even if Harris wins and sticks with Biden’s flagship policies, her mandate — and thus her obligation to deliver reform — will be determined by the scale of her victory. It is certain the result will relieve elites in both parties. In fact, trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans may well revert to battles over culture, identity, and values, muffling vital issues of economic power and life chances. Until one party wages an insurgency that rallies struggling Americans of all stripes, transformational change will remain out of reach.

There is, however, a problem: aside from his questionable hairstyle and swamp-draining rhetoric, Milei actually has very little in common with Trump. For all his faults, Trump stood on a platform that rejected the neoliberal orthodoxy that had defined the Republican Party ever since the Reagan era. Trump’s agenda, by contrast, was markedly anti-libertarian: he advocated economic nationalism and protectionism, lambasted globalisation, promised to protect social welfare programmes, vowed to support local industries, and even courted the labour movement.

Though he didn’t deliver on all those fronts, Trumpism, like analogue national-conservative movements in Europe, encapsulated an intuitive understanding that the values cherished by conservatives — family, community, religion, solidarity — can only flourish in a context where the state intervenes to restrain the socially destructive effects of unfettered capitalism. Trump’s former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer captured the new conservative zeitgeist when he said that libertarianism is “a philosophy for stupid people”.

In this regard, as Sohrab Ahmari has noted, Milei represents a rejection of “nearly everything ‘MAGA’ populists… claim to stand for”. Milei is a self-described ultra-libertarian and pro-market extremist who has vowed to “liberalise and privatise everything” (including organ transplants), slash welfare programmes, gut workers’ rights and permanently shackle the Argentine economy to the Federal Reserve by abolishing the Central Bank of Argentina and adopting the US dollar as the national currency. “The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself,” Milei said at the latest WEF summit, echoing Reagan’s famous inaugural address.

And yet, his agenda doesn’t so much resemble the Western neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher as the much more extreme neoliberal regimes implemented in the Seventies and Eighties by the US-backed military juntas that ruled much of Latin America at the time. Even Milei’s rhetoric seems to be plucked straight out of the Eighties playbook: he claims to be on a holy crusade against “communism”, which he accuses of being the root of all Argentina’s, and indeed the West’s, ills.

Of those ills, none is of greater concern to ordinary Argentines than inflation — or rather, hyperinflation. The country has been suffering from soaring prices for years. By the time of last year’s presidential election, the rate of inflation had reached a staggering 150%. No wonder Milei’s anti-elite rhetoric and promises to take a sledgehammer to the economy resonated with so many Argentines. Unfortunately, however, Milei’s slash-and-burn policies will only make a bad situation worse.

While Milei has only been in power for a few months, the consequences of his scorched-earth economic approach are already being felt. His first decision was to devalue the Argentine peso by 50% — part of an “economic shock therapy” that he claimed was necessary to fix the country’s problems. Yet, as was to be expected, the drastic devaluation of the peso has only caused inflation to skyrocket even further, almost doubling to 250% since Milei took office in December. Since then, the price of gas has doubled, while food prices and healthcare costs have risen by roughly 50%, according to official government data. Meanwhile, salaries and pensions have failed to keep up, leading to the largest contraction in workers’ purchasing power in decades.

To make matters worse, Milei has stayed true to his promise of taking a metaphorical “chainsaw” to public spending, slashing subsidies in a wide range of sectors, from transport to utilities — on top of shutting down half of the country’s ministries. For ordinary citizens, the effects have been devastating. According to a recent study by the Catholic University of Argentina, poverty levels have risen to 57% — the highest level in 20 years, and an almost 10% increase since the end of last year, when Milei took over.

Milei says this is a necessary pain the country must endure before things get better. But there’s no evidence for this. If anything, the worst is likely yet to come, considering that Milei’s drastic fiscal austerity will probably lead to a further economic contraction amid already-floundering growth. No wonder the IMF has already slashed Argentina’s GDP forecast for 2024.

So why, Milei’s defenders might weigh in, does a recent poll show that a majority of Argentines continue to support him? Because, as the Argentine journalist Lautaro Grinspan explains, Milei “has placed responsibility for households’ mounting economic difficulties on his ‘inheritance’ from Peronist predecessors, and the blame game seems to be working”. But for how long? After all, resistance is already mounting, with workers going on strike in several sectors and anti-Milei mobilisations filling the streets. If his policies don’t start to deliver results soon, Milei could find himself with a full-blown social uprising on his hands, similar to the one that shook the country in 2001.

Faced with such disorder, Milei has already started to crack down on the right to protest — including proposals to identify protestors and then bill them for the cost of mobilising security forces and even remove them from welfare support lists. Some fear even harsher forms of repression. According to one lawmaker in Milei’s coalition, protestors should be dealt with with either “prison or bullets”.

More than anything, the threat served as a telling reminder that while neoliberals like Milei often claim to be libertarian and anti-statist, in practice neoliberalism requires powerful, even authoritarian, state apparatuses to impose its logic on society — and stifle any challenge to the dominant order. It’s no coincidence that the extreme free-market experiments pursued in Latin America in the late 20th century relied on extensive state terror. Nor is it surprising that Milei has repeatedly sought to downplay the crimes of the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, and which was responsible for the death and “disappearance” of an estimated 30,000 people — though it certainly calls into question the president’s commitment to “freedom”.

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Moreover, contrary to Milei’s claims, many of the economic problems faced by Argentina can be traced back to the legacy of those policies — not to “communism” or statism. Even after the end of the military rule, several Argentine governments experimented with “pro-market” neoliberal policies. Under Carlos Menem, who ruled from 1989 to 1999, Argentina “flexibilised” the labour market, deregulated virtually every sector of the economy, privatised several state-owned companies, liberalised international trade, pegged the peso to the dollar, and took on large amounts of dollar-denominated debt. Those policies dealt a serious blow to the country’s competitiveness, eventually resulting in a deep recession that the government was unable to overcome. The experiment ended catastrophically with the financial collapse of 2001.

This was followed by a decade-long economic recovery and boom, buoyed by strongly redistributive policies. The subsequent slowdown led the conservative Mauricio Macri to attempt to rekindle the economy by once again embracing market-oriented reforms — and taking on more dollar-denominated debt. When the country’s foreign-debt obligations ballooned to unsustainable levels and the peso collapsed against the US dollar in 2018, Macri made the questionable decision to take another $50 billion loan from the IMF — its largest-ever credit package.

To make matters more precarious, in recent years, the economic impact of the pandemic, the rise in commodity prices and then the Federal Reserve’s post-pandemic interest rate hikes have all contributed to the massive inflationary surge. Thus we can see that Argentina’s problems aren’t rooted solely in “excessive government spending” and “money printing” — in fact, Argentina’s fiscal balance was actually in line with the regional average throughout the decade to 2022, and last year was smaller than the US’s — but more specifically in the country’s over-reliance on dollar-denominated debt and an outward-oriented development model. It goes without saying that further tying the Argentine economy to the American one by going for full-blown dollarisation would only make things worse. It would mean fully submitting Argentina to American monetary governance — though it would, of course, once again make the country “safe” for global capital.

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But if this is true, why are so many MAGA-conservatives attracted to Milei? It’s partly down to the growing importance of culture-war issues in the formation of people’s political outlook: Milei’s non-conformist stance on issues such as vaccines and climate change automatically makes him “based” regardless of what his economic policies may be.

In more strictly political-economic terms, however, it shows that conservatives, particularly in the US, still very much live in the shadow of Reaganism: they adhere to a cartoonish form of libertarianism, where the state is the source of all evil and oppression, while the self-regulating market — or “true capitalism” — is framed as a promised land capable of delivering freedom and prosperity.

This is tragically naïve. For all the problems of government overreach that we face today, and its threat to human freedom and autonomy, conservatives would do well to reflect on the fact that the alternative — subordinating social life to the logic of the market — leads to equally toxic outcomes: it breaks down social and communitarian bonds, weakens forms of collective identity, and breeds atomised and alienated individuals. In this sense, it’s not an alternative at all; it’s the world we already live in, one in which authoritarian states coexist with equally authoritarian, socially destructive market-based logics. By contrast, as Karl Polanyi observed, the true “conservative” alternative consists in “embedding” the economy in society, in subordinating it to its citizens’ material needs, beliefs, values, customs and traditions — in other words, the opposite of Milei’s authoritarian libertarianism.

How did these two movements succeed in tearing up the fabric of Western society? Neoliberalism envisioned governance for the sake of individual and corporate enterprise, rolling back redistributive and regulatory policy in the name of “freedom”. Neoconservatism, meanwhile, though later more famous as a foreign-policy doctrine, was initially rooted in a scepticism towards domestic class and racial justice. Under the auspices of both schools of thought, the state was reconceived and morality was “restored” to the private sphere of “family values”.

No intellectual better embodied this peculiar fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism than the late historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died in 2019. Indeed, she was one of the most important and forgotten ideological pioneers of our times: an intellectual who did as much as her better-known husband, Irving Kristol, to invent the neoliberal-neoconservative complex.

Himmelfarb’s origin story is revelatory for two reasons. First, thanks to the central role Christianity played in her analysis (despite her Jewish background), her work serves as a challenge to those Christians belatedly joining the Left in attacking neoliberalism, and who do not appreciate how Christianity helped to cement neoliberalism’s position in the Republican Party in the first place. Second, even more importantly, Himmelfarb’s emphasis on religion forces secular liberals to re-examine their own participation in the Reagan revolution and its aftermath — the “Age of Reagan” has been one that later Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been pleased to inhabit. For the unholy combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism goes much further back than the Sixties, and into the era of Cold War liberalism in the Forties — since that is when Himmelfarb got her start.

Born in New York 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents, Himmelfarb studied at Brooklyn College before enrolling at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, having met Irving in 1940 at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyist militant group they both frequented for a time in Brooklyn, where both hailed from. At Chicago, alone after her husband departed for service in Western Europe as an infantryman, Himmelfarb was drawn to the work of the 19th-century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — and ended up writing what became her first book on him, published in 1952. Her aim was to push back against the emergence of an optimistic and progressive liberalism that, she feared, shaded too easily into Leftism.

Acton, born in 1834, was a strange kind of liberal in his own lifetime, and only became a canonical figure in the middle of the 20th century. He was a Roman Catholic who resisted papal infallibility, his mind fixed on eternal moral certainties in an age that placed an emphasis on the evolving nature of liberal civilisation; he was suspicious of the nation state at a time when liberals treated it as their main instrument of progress; he even became sympathetic to socialism, at a time when liberalism so often took the form of economic libertarianism.

Amid the consolidation of the Cold War in the late Forties, as the world reckoned with a rising tide of totalitarianism, Acton’s adage about the corrupting power of absolute power assumed a new currency. No less than Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, suggested to Himmelfarb, on a research trip in 1946 to England, that he was starting an Actonian club to resist the “totalitarianism” of the new planning state  (which ultimately became the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society). For Himmelfarb, however, Acton’s revival initially served a very different purpose: to immunise liberals from dreaming big and instead recognise that politics is a scene of transgression rather than a forum of opportunity. By emphasising this, Himmelfarb helped define what later Cold War liberal Judith Shklar immortally dubbed “the liberalism of fear”, a replacement of the ambitious and optimistic liberalism of the 19th century with a more cautious, disabused and threat-oriented creed.

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Like many other Cold War liberals, Himmelfarb had a particular (and mistaken) diagnosis of how liberalism could easily self-destruct. If liberals called for too much emancipation and progress, she thought, they would connive with evil forces to bring them about. They would, in other words, easily fall for the communist promise to achieve good things through immoral means. And if they neglected Christianity’s insight into the endurance of original sin, liberals would treat the state as a workable device of liberation and progress, rather than regarding it as a malignant expression of eternal depravity. The consequences, she warned, would be devastating, giving people who are tarnished by original sin the capacity to use state power to kill millions.

Though a Jew concerned about the abuse of minorities, Himmelfarb laid extraordinary emphasis on this point, in turn making Christianity integral to Cold War liberalism. While liberals had spent the prior century often viewing religious forces as an enemy, she called for a new liberalism based on Acton’s Christian vision of sin. Acton, who had rejected “integralist” forms of Christian Right-wing politics that longed for a return to medieval theocracy, was principally important for reforming secular liberals who sought to secure freedom against secular totalitarianisms such as Nazi and Soviet tyranny. He recognised, Himmelfarb wrote, “the presence of eternal and absolute” morality, in contrast to liberals who “had no sense of the religious sanctity of those principles” and compromised away freedom.

Indeed, it was liberal Christianity, Himmelfarb wrote, that might turn out to be essential in a Cold War world that knew the threat of religious authoritarianism even as secular revolution could bring even worse oppression. “Clerics are not alone in carrying the banner of religion,” she wrote. “They have been joined by a multitude of those who, in Acton’s own time, would almost certainly have been in the camp of the opposition.” Liberals needed to get over their anticlericalism, was the message, and use religion to save themselves.

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It had to be the right kind of Christianity, of course. Acton was an Augustinian, and his vision of sin forbade excessive optimism. Humanity couldn’t save itself; man’s fallen nature made power a permanent threat. Instead, the Christianity useful for Cold War liberals saw God as the external judge on history, where the notion of secular progress supposedly leading to human emancipation was little more than an alibi for crime. For Acton, Himmelfarb explained, “history did not have a meaning or purpose in itself; it acquired meaning only by comparison with a fixed moral standard outside it, and purpose by fulfilling a moral end imposed upon it”.

This Augustinian core of Cold War liberalism is often conveniently forgotten. In an otherwise excellent recent book, for example, Louis Menand paints a portrait of Cold War liberalism as a utopia of innovative modernism, rather than one rooted in the religiosity that suffused the Forties and Fifties. One Cold War liberal icon, Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, divulged once in a letter to another such icon, American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that he “had never read a line” of Lord Acton’s. Yet that did not stop Irving Kristol from crediting Berlin for “assuming the role of Lord Acton” as “conscience and critic” of believers in secular progress. And in spite of his own private reservations about a faith-based liberalism, Berlin understood that it defined the age of Cold War liberalism, writing in 1952 that “one of the most notable characteristics of the literary and artistic scenes” was “the revival of religion”, whatever its “pulverisation of… all the older forms of liberalism [and] secularism”.

Here is where Himmelfarb becomes representative of broader trends. Of all the Cold War liberals of this era — including Lionel Trilling, the Columbia English professor whom she and her husband lionised — Himmelfarb knew most about Judaism, though that was not saying much. For these Jews, ancestral preservation was hardly a powerful driving force — though there was a little more in Himmelfarb’s case because of her family’s observance of custom and ritual, and she took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while an undergraduate. For the most part, however, the identity politics of staying true to Judaism was not a significant motivation, compared to their very explicit appeal to Christian values to serve political goals. For Himmelfarb, Augustinian Christianity was a kind of ideological training ground for the intellectualism she conceived.

During the same period, Irving Kristol, schooled by his wife, also pursued a new religious orthodoxy, including a kind of neo-Actonian Judaism that rejected the optimism towards progress so prevalent among earlier liberals. Indeed, Kristol’s engagements with Christianity, with its emphasis on the permanence of sin, fed his epic denunciation, in January 1948, of modernising accounts of Judaism that presented it as a progressive social ethics rather than an acceptance of the strict limits that evil places on human possibility. This wasn’t because either Himmelfarb or her husband ever embraced observant Judaism, let alone converted to the Christian faith. It was because they believed Acton’s neo-orthodoxy was politically useful.

Both, in other words, fit well with Hannah Arendt’s quip that Orthodox Judaism was the Judaism that she didn’t practice. We can broaden her serious joke to the observation that, for a striking number of Cold War liberals like Himmelfarb and Kristol, Augustinian neo-orthodoxy was the Christianity they wanted everyone else to adopt. It would save them from the enthusiasm and naiveté of trust in the state.

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Himmelfarb’s dalliance with Acton, and her Christianisation of liberalism, was fateful in the long run. It morphed, after all, into the successor views Himmelfarb soon adopted, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, with an emphasis on “family values” as the crucible of morality and the state as dangerous or fickle. Yet this wasn’t an immediate journey.

That Himmelfarb wasn’t immediately a neoconservative or neoliberal prepared to indict the welfare state in the name of Hayek’s market fundamentalism is made clear by two facts. First, in her early studies, she saw Acton as the great alternative to Edmund Burke, whereas Hayek saw them as equally inspirational. “When Liberals finally came to admit that Conservatism might be a store-house of political wisdom,” Himmelfarb complained as late as 1953, “they settled upon Burke as the arbiter of politics and morality. But the insights of Conservatism might have been more readily found in… an Acton, who set absolute morality against history.” Second, she registered that Acton’s liberalism could support social reform. Acton had come to insist that property was not absolutely sacrosanct even in a liberal state, and even repudiated — at his “most radical”, Himmelfarb said — the affection for laissez-faire economics of his youth. For a time, she outright rejected Hayek’s competing appropriation of their common sage.

Clearly, then, it would require a step beyond Cold War liberalism in a Christian key for Himmelfarb to reach her mature neoconservatism. While continuing to appeal to morality, she gave up her insistence on Acton’s liberal Christianity, even as she emphasised Christianity as a cultural force (and a source of many evangelical voters). By the Eighties, she was a crucial contributor to the intellectual destruction of the welfare ideals that were actually triumphing after the Second World War, while she was rifling through Acton’s writings. An activist state, she insisted, “consigns” the poor “to a culture of dependency and degrades those it professes to help”.

But everything — including the political movements Himmelfarb helped to rationalise, and which continue to warp the world — has to start somewhere. Easily the most consequential move in Himmelfarb’s evolution was her redefinition of liberalism in a Christian key, because it was only a short step from there to her mature views. If the trial of neoconservatism and neoliberalism continues in future years, Himmelfarb’s case suggests that the inquest will have to reach Cold War liberalism too.

Last year, the Ukrainian government essentially outsourced the entire post-war “reconstruction” process to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. They signed an agreement to “provide advisory support for designing an investment framework, with a goal of creating opportunities for both public and private investors to participate in the future reconstruction and recovery of the Ukrainian economy”. In February, J.P. Morgan was brought on board as well.

The two banks will run the Ukraine Development Fund, which aims to raise private investment in projects potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars across sectors including tech, natural resources, agriculture and health. BlackRock and J.P. Morgan are donating their services, but, as the Financial Times noted, “the work will give them an early look at possible investments in the country”. The opportunities are significant, particularly in the agricultural sector: Ukraine is home to a quarter of the world’s chernozem (“black earth”), an extraordinarily fertile soil, and before the war it was world’s top producer of sunflower meal, oil and seed, and one of the biggest exporters of corn and wheat.

From certain perspectives, the war is clearly good for business: indeed, the greater the destruction, the greater the opportunities for reconstruction. At Davos this year, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said he hoped the initiative would turn the country into a “beacon of capitalism”. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, also spoke cheerily of Ukraine’s post-war future. “There is no question,” he said, “that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment.”

Seeing opportunity amid the tragedy, 500 global businesses from 42 countries have already signed the Ukraine Business Compact “to help realise its huge potential” — or secure their slice of the Ukrainian pie. “Most are standing on the sidelines for now, given the security threat,” the FT reported. “But there are already companies on the cusp of moving in — especially in the low-hanging-fruit industries of construction and materials, agricultural processing and logistics.”

Over the years, across a series of similar events, Western governments and corporate leaders have made no secret of their enthusiasm to use the post-Maidan regime — and now the war — to radically alter Ukraine’s political economy. The agenda: to open up the country and make it safe for Western capital by transforming it into a special economic zone. This neoliberal shock therapy should, in their view, include “strengthening the market economy”, “decentralisation, privatisation, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform”, and “Euro-Atlantic integration”, as well as widespread “deregulation” and the slashing of “outdated labour legislation leading to complicated hiring and firing process, regulation of overtime, etc”. In short, the Washington Consensus on steroids.

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This programme has, arguably, been underway since the mid-Nineties, when the West used IMF loans-cum-conditionalities to impose on Ukraine, just as it did on Russia, a series of radical free-market-minded reforms that crippled the economy. As the Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik has pointed out, the IMF played a key role in precipitating the 2014 crisis: Ukraine’s then-President, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to accept IMF demands that he cut wages, slash social spending and end gas subsidies in order to integrate with the EU, and turned instead to Russia for an alternative economic agreement. This was the backdrop for the Western-backed Euromaidan protests and, eventually, the 2014 regime change.

After 2014, the West’s economic agenda was stepped up once again. Western multinationals had long had their eyes on Ukraine’s vast agricultural wealth, but a 2001 moratorium on the sale of land to foreigners had always represented an obstacle to unrestrained privatisation. As post-Maidan governments turned again to the IMF for financing, aid was conditioned on a series of land reforms that would finally allow foreign corporations to acquire vast tracts of the country’s farmland. In the 2015 TV series, Servant of the People — which starred Zelenskyy as the fictional president, Goloborodko — the conditions required by the IMF for a new loan are rejected and the Western delegation is expelled. But in reality, things went rather differently. In 2020, Zelenskyy gave in to the IMF’s demands and finally repealed the moratorium.

“Agribusiness interests and oligarchs will be the primary beneficiaries of such reform,” said Olena Borodina of the Ukrainian Rural Development Network. “This will only further marginalise smallholder farmers and risks severing them from their most valuable resource.” But the World Bank could barely contain its excitement, gushing: “This is, without exaggeration, a historic event.” Even though the new law isn’t set to come into force until next year, US and Western European agrobusinesses have already bought up millions of hectares of Ukraine’s farmland — with 10 private companies reportedly controlling most of it.

As war has raged, the West’s calls for “structural reforms” in Ukraine have only intensified. In mid-2022, the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), an influential European think tank, published a report, Macroeconomic Policies for Wartime Ukraine, which argued that Ukraine’s aim should be “to pursue extensive radical deregulation of economic activity”. Even more troublingly, according to the Oakland Institute economic observatory, Western financial aid “is being used as a leverage by the financial institutions to drive post-war reconstruction towards further privatisation and liberalisation reforms”. The European Union, for example, made it clear that the bloc’s decision to suspend interest payments on Ukraine’s loans would only be activated if there were “compliance with political prerequisites” with regard to labour reforms, for example, and the privatisation of state assets.

It came as no surprise, then, when last year the Ukrainian government adopted wartime legislation to severely curtail the ability of trade unions to represent their members. It gave employers the right to unilaterally suspend collective agreements and effectively exempted the vast majority of employees from Ukrainian labour law — a dramatic rollback for workers but a boon for global capital. Western governments have silently consented to the reforms and, in fact, leaked documents from 2021 indicate that the UK, via its development aid arm, UK Aid, and its embassy in Kyiv, was funding consultants to assist the Ukrainian government in selling the labour market reforms to the people.

As the Ukrainian government has simplified and accelerated the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, Zelenskyy would seem to have gone out of his way to similarly express the country’s “openness” to Western capital. Last September, he virtually opened the New York Stock Exchange, symbolically ringing the bell via video stream. He used the occasion to present “Advantage Ukraine”, his government’s new investment initiative (which relies on another British firm, WPP, for its marketing side). Zelenskyy said that his country was “open for business” — that is, for foreign corporations to come and exploit its resources and cheap labour. “I committed my administration to creating a favourable environment for investment that would make Ukraine the greatest growth opportunity in Europe since the end of the Second World War,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Predictably, the president of the NYSE Group, Lynn Martin, wholeheartedly welcomed Ukraine’s decision to offer “unfettered access to capital”.

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Dodging shells on Ukraine's eastern front

By David Patrikarakos

In January this year, addressing the participants of the meeting of the National Association of State Chambers, Zelenskyy described American business as the “locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth”. No one would blame Zelenskyy for choosing the lesser of two evils here: Western banks over Russian tanks. Yet, the grim fact remains that even if his nation succeeds in repealing the Russian invasion, the future in store for Ukraine is not necessarily one of sovereignty and self-determination but, most likely, one of Western economic tutelage.

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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Bret Easton Ellis: 'My generation wanted to be offended'

By Bret Easton Ellis

So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

Amid this collective myopia, we have not noticed that an economy powered by renewable energy does not guarantee a fairer or more equal society, or one that favours workers over the interests of capital. When you take a look at the dynamics of existing renewable energy production (particularly in the United States) you find that it intensifies and exacerbates all the worst aspects of our highly unequal neoliberal political economy.

To understand these dynamics, we need to look to the Seventies and the rise of neoliberalism. During this crisis decade, power and influence was shifted toward capital and an associated free market ideology. Though often portrayed as anti-government, neoliberals in fact promoted quite an active state, creating the institutional conditions for markets, the extension of private power, and above all the insulation of states from democratic control. One of their greatest influences, Friedrich Hayek, had argued against “central planning” in favour of a different kind of system: “Competition…means decentralised planning by many separate persons.” The expanded Keynesian redistributive state was their prime target, but this critique extended to all kinds of large-scale bureaucratic institutions: unions, universities, and even massive monopolistic corporations of the time, such as General Motors or IBM.

In other words, neoliberals set their sights on the very institutions at the heart of the post-war boom. Their vision of a new competitive market order aimed to demolish these large, rigid institutions in favour of smaller, more flexible production guided by a decentralised price mechanism. It was an ideology that seized the electricity sector at precisely this historical moment. For most of the 20th century, electricity had been provisioned by massive investor-owned and vertically integrated utilities — each given a “natural monopoly” service territory where they controlled the entire grid. State-run public commissions oversaw these utilities to ensure consumer prices and investor returns alike were “fair and reasonable”. Because electricity is in fact a complex infrastructure where supply and demand must always remain in balance to preserve grid stability, utilities centrally planned the grid by necessity.

In the context of the Seventies energy crisis, electric utilities epitomised the kind of inflexible and corrupt institutions targeted for demolition. And, interestingly, an associated environmentalist ideology conformed to this neoliberal critique of “big” and “centralised” utilities. Most prominently, Amory Lovins proposed a “soft energy path” based on small-scale and decentralised energy production and efficiency. Although Lovins promoted any kind of decentralised energy production — including many small-scale forms of coal generation — soon it became clear that renewable energy production from solar panels and wind turbines were the most attractive to environmentalists.

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Why the West should go nuclear

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Advocates imagined a shift to renewable energy aligned with a “small is beautiful” approach, scattered about pastoral rural landscapes, and inspiring ideas of local or community ownership. Against a complex and centrally-planned system, “grassroots” local communities aspired to get off the grid entirely. In short, if most of the 20th century was about large-scale social integration of complex industrial societies, the neoliberal turn represents an anti-social reaction against society itself. For parts of the Right, there was “no such thing” as society, only individuals. But the environmental Left made a comparable turn: large-scale complex industrial society was rejected in favour of a small-scale communitarian localism. In this framework, “communities” could opt out of society and usher in democratic control over energy, food, and life. As the icon of the German Green Party Rudolf Bahro said in the Eighties, “we must build up areas liberated from the industrial system…a new social formation and a new civilisation”.

It should be no surprise that Lovins’s soft energy path ideas gained the ear of proto-neoliberal and deregulator-in-chief, President Jimmy Carter, who invited him to the White House in October 1977. Carter personified this new decentralised energy ideology, wearing cardigan sweaters in his prime time addresses and decorating the White House with solar panels. But while environmentalists often lament the path not taken with Carter’s conservationist ethic, his approach to the energy crisis (among other things) was a political disaster. Ronald Reagan crushed Carter by nine points in 1980 and Carter only carried six out of 50 states. For a country that had just endured a cost-of-living inflationary crisis of its own, Reagan’s message of “Make America Great Again” and solving the energy crisis through increased production resonated much more strongly than Carter’s moralism and calls for sacrifice.

But what is crucial is how this vision of a decentralised renewable-powered utopia actually accompanied a broader project of electricity deregulation started under Carter himself. About a year after meeting with Lovins, Carter signed the Public Utility Regulatory Policies of Act of 1978. Deregulation eventually opened up the field of electricity generation to competition against utilities. The process was slow but by the Nineties it unleashed a totally new frontier of investment in electricity production for capitalists untethered from the utility system: so called “independent power producers” or “merchant generators”. The main beneficiaries of this process were smaller-scale natural gas producers, but it also included a new class of capitalists building renewable energy projects such as solar or wind farms. These producers need not care about the grid as a shared social system, and can focus instead exclusively on their private profits and efforts to outcompete other sellers in wholesale electricity markets.

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How far will the eco-fascists go?

By Mary Harrington

Profit could also come from the state itself. As research by Sarah Knuth shows, by the Obama years, renewable energy capitalists were showered with lucrative tax credits to incentivise production. The credits allow renewable energy developers to partner with an exclusive class of “tax equity investors”: a special kind of wealthy person whose “tax burden” is so high they use renewable projects to shelter their wealth from public coffers. These tax equity investors represent some of the most powerful and wealthy actors imaginable, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Warren Buffett — whose company Berkshire-Hathaway is one of the biggest investors in renewables — famously said, “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.” Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is simply a continuation of this policy of attempting to achieve climate goals through the tax code (albeit with a “direct pay” provision that will allow some public power entities to take advantage).

This shift away from utilities and toward decentralised merchant generation explicitly undermined the labour unions who had built up their power under the older, established utility system. As James Harrison, the director of renewable energy for the Utility Workers Union of America, told the New York Times, “The clean tech industry is incredibly anti-union… It’s a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organize.” It was, therefore, no surprise that labour unions were on the frontlines fighting deregulation from the beginning in the Nineties. It is much easier to organise workers in centralised power plants than scattered solar and wind farms whose, after all, only provide temporary construction jobs.

Once these installations are built, the jobs disappear and the only plausible economic benefits besides rents flowing to private landowners are marginal increases in local tax revenues. Not only are renewable energy jobs temporary, they are also often simply bad jobs. Labour journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley’s profile of the solar industry has revealed dystopian labour conditions: temp agencies send subcontracted workers from site to site, separated from their family for weeks, and exposed to occupational hazards such as extreme heat, alligators, and snakes.

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Oat milk is killing the planet

By John Lewis-Stempel

Neoliberal electricity restructuring is benefiting Wall Street above all, as well as Big Tech, who see it as a more efficient means to partner with renewable generators and claim green credentials for operations powered by “100% renewable energy” (these accounting fictions are provided by tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates while firms still rely on the fossil- and nuclear-powered grid for their actual electricity). Google has emerged as a fierce proponent of deregulation in the American South fundamentally so it can avoid utilities and partner with more scattered renewable capitalists. Naive environmentalists (who propose an extremely difficult vision of a grid powered by 100% renewable energy) have become unwitting allies of the Googles and Berkshire Hathaways of the world — and fail to recognise their renewable advocacy often enables the further neoliberalisation of electricity.

Seduced by climate rhetoric, the Left has become the unwitting ally of this programme. But the electricity grid is a shared social infrastructure that should be managed by a single entity. In other words, while private investor-owned utilities are often corrupt and negligent, the Left needs to defend and reclaim the general idea of electricity as a utility, or an essential service critical to the public good. A revived electric public utility system could indeed integrate some renewables in sunny and windy regions (on land and offshore), but grid planners will acknowledge some level of “firm” low carbon generation like hydroelectric and nuclear power will be required. But this vision of public energy development won’t come about unless we confront the power of renewable capital, their Wall Street backers and the general neoliberal political economic model that underpins the industry today. Sloganeering around renewable energy as if it’s a good in-and-of-itself may have drawn attention to the climate crisis — but it is no good at creating the politics we need to solve it.

Today, neoliberalism, broadly understood as the extension of markets and market logic into ever-expanding swathes of social and political life, is everywhere misunderstood as a straightforward legacy of the liberal Enlightenment. Worse, its supposed emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility is widely seen as a vestige of dated illusions of human reason and freedom that are now too big for humanity’s boots. Wasn’t it the silly notion that reason could light the way to freedom that lit up the ovens in the death camps? Surely, if the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s that reason doesn’t need to be freed — it needs to be constrained. Far from needing to be raised up, humanity could use, so the popular prejudice goes, being knocked down a few notches.

But what critics fail to realise is that neoliberalism long ago left behind the rights-bearing human subject, one that was capable of self-reflection and worthy of autonomy and freedom. Humanity must be divested of these illusions. The real ideal is heteronomy, or a will that is relieved of responsibility and conditioned by external forces that stipulate the proper conduct of life. These ideal subjects are aware that their untrained, non-expert judgments are potentially dangerous; they thus look constantly to external rules to ensure they make the “correct” choice. And if no such rules exist, they demand them. Think, for instance, of the profound unease many felt when governments did not stipulate whether and how they might hug family members as the pandemic wound down.

If you spend too much time in academic circles, you might get the idea that neoliberalism’s supposed valorisation of freedom and autonomy is an evil that lurks behind every corner. For instance, critics of therapeutic fads like the self-esteem movement of the Nineties and recent obsessions with promoting “mindfulness”, “wellbeing” or mental health often argue that these crusades are really part of an overarching neoliberal project bent on creating ideal, self-governing subjects —autonomous, self-reliant individuals who won’t call on expensive state or employer supports. However, what is frequently left out of such analyses is the question of why it is so taken for granted that such subjects need to be created in the first place. The human capacities that had so animated the liberal Enlightenment — rationality, a capacity for self-reflection and conscious judgment — are now seen as uncharacteristic not just of women and minorities who had once been left out of it, but of the vast majority of humanity.

Indeed, flipping through the pages of newspapers and magazines, one is persistently reminded that it is humanity’s persistent lack of capacity for self-determination that supposedly underlies a host of social ills. Mindfulness gurus tell us that we spend our time on “autopilot”, going through the motions of life unthinkingly and leaving disaster in our wake. Governments have been receptive to such claims, seeing interventions that help citizens to “pay attention to what’s happening in the present moment” as the solution to myriad social issues. What is more, the fact that we are unaware of this — that we carry on thinking that we are in control of our lives, much less our inner lives, is part of the problem.

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JS Mill and the despotism of progress

By Patrick Deneen

But don’t worry, the “experts” have the solution. Fund their ever-proliferating programmes. Buy their new book. Adopt their creepy brain surveillance technologies. And before long, when we give up our silly illusions of freedom, wellbeing and happiness will prevail.

At the heart of this confusion lies the fact that neoliberalism long ago dispensed with Mill’s notion of freedom as about removing barriers to human flourishing. Today’s crusades, from attacking “white privilege” to accommodating the needs of proliferating minority groups, are much more focused on protecting child-like citizens from each other. Longstanding movements for indigenous self-determination, for instance, have gradually shifted towards therapeutic obsessions with the indigenous person as a “traumatised” subject in need of extensive intervention. Even institutional defenders of free speech can’t help but reach for justifications based on protecting the weak and vulnerable.

Having jettisoned the Enlightenment subject on which so many liberal freedoms rest, it is little surprising that contemporary society finds it difficult to place freedom at the centre of social and political life. Even David Harvey’s widely referenced Marxist critique of neoliberalism struggles to wrest a powerful subject from its entanglements with neoliberal logic. He criticises neoliberal assumptions that, for example, all “agents acting in the market… have access to the same information”, as at best “utopian”. In other words, a key criticism of neoliberalism as an economic doctrine rests on its emphasis on a classical liberal subject that does not really exist. Unmasking this fiction becomes a key part of explaining why neoliberalism so often leads to ruin. It seems we can’t challenge the power of neoliberal economics without destroying the classical liberal subject along the way.

But if the Enlightenment subject, capable of reflecting on emotions and experience and rationally deciding how to live, is a myth, then freedom is not only not a goal — it’s a problem. Vulnerable subjects don’t need to be freed. They need to be protected.

In the place of this “myth”, we have valorised what Kant, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, warned against: an ideal human subject that is content (or perhaps in today’s parlance, sufficiently “mentally well”) to revel in self-imposed immaturity. The good citizen now has learned to embrace a rule that springs from a foreign will as a matter of course. This is why “neoliberalism” is a bit of a misnomer. Instead of revitalising some kind of classical liberal project, it sounded its death knell. And in its place, our democratic will was subordinated to that of the expert and the technocrat.

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Race was invented by liberals

By Sohrab Ahmari

Today, as a result, whenever public discussion erupts, someone always seems to interject that now everyone suddenly thinks they’re an expert. But this is precisely where even liberals fall short. The truly liberal response to such comments would be “every cook can govern”, not “that persons of talent, the more known and respected the better, should put themselves forward”. Yet the former was not said by Mill or any 19th-century liberal – but by the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R James in 1956.

The latter, on the other hand, was written by Mill, in reference to the American Civil War in 1861. It’s interesting here to compare Mill’s remarks with those of his contemporary, Karl Marx, who was also writing about the same events as they unfolded. While both men agreed that slavery and the power of slave owners must end, as August Nimtz describes, they differed profoundly on which force would prove decisive in bringing this about. And Nimtz continues, history seems at least to show that it was the middle and working classes, and not men from Mill’s milieu, that often proved most decisive in the conflict.

And yet, descend from the halls of academia and into the hellscape of our social media squares, and you will find that it is Marx who is vilified as the incarnation of illiberalism. The ominous label of “cultural Marxism”, or now just “Marxism”, is wielded to decry the erosion of individual rights. Yet it was Marx, writing in 1842, who emphasised that “the truly radical cure for censorship would be its abolition”. And it was Marx who defended freedom of the press, describing it as a thing of “beauty” “without which my nature can have no full, satisfied, complete existence”. What is more, Marx himself did not waver in his commitment to democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is the solution to the riddle of every constitution”, because it is where “we find the constitution founded on its true ground; real human beings and the real people… posited as the people’s own creation”.

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In fact, although his writings were later twisted by his successors to justify repression in his name, Marx’s commitment to liberty, democracy and free speech surpasses many liberal theorists. By the time Mill wrote anything on the American Civil War, for instance, Marx had written (or had ghostwritten via Engels) at least 18 articles on the topic. Moreover, following the emancipation of the slaves, while Marx and Engels looked immediately to agitating for the expansion of freedom in the form of suffrage to former slaves, it was Mill who considered the potential need to hold back the freedoms of the “privileged” in order to make enfranchisement a possibility. He even mused that without black suffrage, a “military dictatorship” lasting “two generations” would be necessary before “the stain which the position of slavemaster burns into the very souls of the privileged population can be expected to fade out”. While Marx was analysing the colonies as illustrating capitalism’s tendency to eat up whatever “primitive” forms of freedom existed there, Mill defended “despotism” as legitimate when dealing with “barbarians” provided those in power had the best of intentions.

Where Marx differed was in his belief in the self-governing capacities of all human beings, not just the learned or the better or the higher or whatever is the going excuse of the time. Against the grain of conventional wisdom, Marx’s advocacy for individual freedom often surpasses the efforts of Mill and other liberal luminaries. Marx vested his faith in human reason and held that history could be shaped by the collective force of rational thought.

Where does this leave us today? Well, we clearly do need those copies of On Liberty, but to have a true commitment to liberty we could do with also recalling the liberal core of Marx’s writings. For while Marx and Mill agreed on more than history gives them credit for, it was Marx who surpassed Mill in the expansiveness of his vision of human freedom and in his refusal to accept external limits to its expression. Today, everywhere we see excuses, and sadly often in Marx’s name, for why freedom should be rolled back to “protect the vulnerable”. But in the 19th century, it was Marx, more than Mill, who looked down those pathways to freedom that thinkers of the liberal Enlightenment built, but that they often could not bring themselves to travel.

But there were signs of an alternative timeline if you looked closely, one marked by fragmentation as much as unity. Cultural events rippled in the consciousness; there were traces of the possibility that the apparent age of integration might actually be one of fracture.

The two Germanys unified in 1991 but the Soviet Union dissolved the same year. Mikhail Gorbachev was dubbed a “hero of deconstruction”. Yugoslavia began its disintegration shortly afterwards. In late 1991, the Somali state descended into a civil war and would have no central state for over a decade. The Swiss People’s Party racked up supporters as it drafted people against membership in the UN. The Freedom Party in Austria sought to revive nationalism along with the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, and the National Front in France. In Italy, the Northern League called for the secession of Lombardy. Many of the mainstream press’s post-2016 “populist” villains appeared on the stage in the early Nineties.

Pundits were hard on the trail of this alternative plot. In The Atlantic in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan warned of “the coming anarchy”. “Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change,” he wrote, “but it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.” Kaplan foresaw “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged glass pattern of city-states, shanty states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms”.

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Black gold fuelled the Iraq War

By Helen Thompson

How to envision this world? Francis Fukuyama had borrowed “the Last Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche. Kaplan proposed a “Last Map”, three-dimensional and holographic:

“In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional colour markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centres’ of power, as in the Middle Ages.”

“This future map,” he concluded, “will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.” Of course, the goal of Kaplan’s map, appearing in the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, was to contain and control the chaos. It recalled the oversized maps of Cold War thrillers from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983). Bruce Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net (1988) also featured a global simulation called Worldrun, used “as a forecasting tool for development agencies” and also as a game. In the interface, “long strips of the Earth’s surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption.”

The Last Map’s vision of anarchy was dystopian — a future to be avoided at any cost. This is the dominant perspective one gets from the airport bookshelves and magazine racks: the anxieties of those who perceive themselves to have access to the levers of power, the mapmakers, those who need to figure out how the dials can be tweaked to return order from disorder. Implicitly and often explicitly, this is a story about the reassertion of American overseas power. In a phrase he would repeat variations of for decades, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1988 that “the only alternative to America is anarchy”.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

But there were others who saw the crack-up coming and cheered it on. After the Cold War’s end, they surveyed the globe and thought: now that capitalism had won, why not go all the way? Fragmentation, they believed, was the new frontier of liberty. Paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and conservatives like Charles Murray and Paul Craig Roberts opposed the moves to greater integration that marked the Nineties, cheered the hardening of borders and called for the revision of immigration laws to discriminate against people from blacker and browner countries, revived race science to support their claims. Some dug deep into medieval history to claim that segregation was good and small collectives should protect their own. They promoted, in other words, many of the principles associated now with the far-Right.

Yet they all had something in common: they were market liberals and libertarians. How did people from the supposed camp of open borders become champions of higher and thicker walls? How did adherents of an ideology supposedly built around the universal figure of homo economicus embrace hoary theories of genetically determined intelligence and ignorance? When did zealous advocates of global markets turn against what one called “the beast” of the “New World Order”?

When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

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America is showing its age

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What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

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Larkin's lesson for Northern Ireland

By Tom McTague

At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

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Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

This post-Cold War period was a historically sublime moment: capitalism had won but what capitalism meant was still undecided. Libertarians were among the most active in this process of re-imagination, with solutions from designing boutique polities and bespoke states to rehabbing existing zones, colonies, and city-states. For these thinkers states should dissolve into platform polities and “start-up societies” offering customised services to customers instead of securing rights for citizens.

For decades, these capitalist radicals surveyed the world for experiments in anarchocapitalism comparable to existing favourites, such as the Wild West or medieval Iceland. They started their own experiments in “micro-ordering” and sparked wide-ranging discussions about the basic requirements for building collective life and the foundational facts of human nature. When Silicon Valley prophets such as Peter Thiel said in 2009 that “if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries”, he was speaking out of this alternative zeitgeist. Anyone who thinks globalism is the only way that capitalist radicalism manifests itself should acquaint themselves with those less interested in scaling up than scaling down and opting out.