It’s no longer about markets. It’s about identity.
The historian Prof. Gary Gerstle maintained that the neo liberal order was coming to an end, that free movement of goods, money, ideas and talent characterized the neo liberal order and that it was in the process of losing ascendancy. Losing ascendancy does not mean disappearing, it means losing ascendancy. Peter Zeihan says much the same and locates the issue in the guarantee offered by the US Navy since WW2 to police the sea lanes of the world. Also large diesel engines and cheap fuel may have as much to do with trade as any deliberate policy measures. I digress.
Somewhat to my surprise I agreed with the leftist professor of history.
So far so good. I have ordered his book and will read it skeptically. (The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order).
The neo liberal order got going about the time of Reagan and Thatcher and was characterized by reliance upon, and praise for, the market. In the period under discussion, various US Presidents, of whom Clinton is prominent, also pursued neo liberal promarket policies. This illustrates the tendency for large movements of policy to continue despite changes in the party holding the presidency. Canada obtained free trade with the US, and many liberalizing trade measures were adopted throughout this period roughly 1970-2000.
The next assertion of the professor was that the dominance of neo liberalism was coming to an end. I also agree with that assertion, perhaps for different reasons than those of the learned professor.
The effects of the neo liberal order were various and I shall try to point out the major features. This is obviously me talking, not Professor Gerstle.
off shoring of domestic North American manufacturing, which led to the gutting of manufacturing towns, increasing despair and drug addictions (viz Angus Deaton on deaths of despair in the working class) and much cheaper goods at the stores
Industrialization of much of the rest of the world. When did you first notice that clothing you wore came from Cambodia, Indonesia, or Vietnam?
Very significant increase of the national share of wealth to the top 1% and eventually the top 1% of the 1% as the economy became more monetary and intangible and less a matter of things produced. Software firms worth more than Boeing or Ford for instance.
Oxycontin plagues and mass drug addictions
Very high rates of non white immigration of peoples to Europe and North America. You are not supposed to notice this, by the way. But assimilation is not proceeding too well in many European countries and the same process is well underway in the United States.
The remainder of Professor Gerstle’s talk concerned Trump, Orban and Bolsonaro and the supposed authoritarianism of same and the threat to democracy. I should say “democracy” because clearly the word has become code for something other than changes of governments in a populist direction. These are held to be threats to “democracy” which seem to consist of changes of history of which leftists disapprove.
Here is where I depart from Professor Gerstle’s alarmism about populist changes to governments.
He was also concerned with the January 6th insurrection on the hill and the menace it portended to the continuity of American institutions. I was once very alarmed by January 6th riots until I began to believe the entire event was a police -infiltrated and significantly police-inspired stunt to disgrace Trump. It has worked.
Prof. Gerstle along with many other Democrats believes that democracy is under attack.
Let me try to set forth the reasoning of many on the Trumpist right, if “right” is the term to be applied. Here we get to territory that will summon forth political disagreement.
For many of us, a combination of events has persuaded us that democracy is already in grave danger from the following, which is largely drawn from the US experience.
A politicized leftist judiciary and prosecutorial apparatus
A politicized federal police
A politicized intelligence apparatus
An almost certainly manipulated if not stolen presidential election
Uncontrolled immigration of people, some of whom are in the United States with subversive intentions
The immigration of 20 or 40 millions is not being controlled because the Democrats want to achieve permanent electoral supremacy by endowing the illegals with votes
A minor but serious plague has been used as a pretext for a massive repression of personal liberties both of trade and movement on the basis of compulsory vaccination by radical mRNA therapies that have been insufficiently tested, and which appear to be causing a serious increase of deaths in the general population
which plague was engineered by experiments in gain of function (increased lethality) research funded by US sources in Chinese laboratories (RFK I pushing these buttons as a central part of his electoral campaign)
A push by all global leaders and bureaucracies to reduce energetic throughputs, the basis of wealth creation, in the name of a spurious climate agenda.
A fundamental attack on sex roles being carried on as the focus of the next personal liberation struggle.
So yes, the people, rightly or wrongly, are unhappy with the state of their governments and what these governments have so clearly indicated they wish to do.
Consequently, as a result of governments being so badly misaligned with their electorates, and so apparently ready to call opposition to their intentions as “far right” “fascist” “transphobic”, and so ready to denigrate the white settler populations of which the electorate is still mostly composed, the neo liberal order is coming to an end. This is occurring not because of trade issues, or income inequality, but because of fundamental challenges posed by left wing governments to the people who still compose the electorates.
To what do we belong? To the nation, or to various sexual and cultural minorities?
Trump has a clear answer. Biden, if he has an answer at all, says that most Americans belong to an illegitimate race. And if he cannot say this, his minions state it or insinuate it.
The neo liberal order is coming to an end because the issues have decisively moved on from trade and markets to identity and belonging.
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