The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond

The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism— globalizing, neoliberal, financialized. Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system but something larger: an institutionalized social order.

Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: dismantling barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; deregulating banking and

we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it—casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism.

But it is counterproductive to address them through moralizing condescension, in the mode of progressive neoliberalism. That approach assumes a shallow and inadequate view of these injustices, grossly exaggerating the extent to which the trouble is inside people’s heads and missing the depth of the structural-institutional forces that undergird the

The progressive-neoliberal bloc combined an expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition.

If the left hopes to revive the idea of the working class as the leading force within a new counterhegemonic bloc, we will have to envision that class in a new way—intersectionally, if you will—as not restricted to the white, straight, male, majority-ethnicity, manufacturing and mining workers, but as encompassing all of these other occupations—pai

While claiming to foster small business and manufacturing, reactionary neoliberalism’s true economic project centered on bolstering finance, military production, and extractive energy, all to the principal benefit of the global 1 percent. What was supposed to render that palatable for the base it sought to assemble was an exclusionary vision of a j

Of course, many of the progressives weren’t themselves interested in or focused on the economic stuff. But there was an elective affinity between their meritocratic, crack-the-glass-ceiling view of “emancipation” and the free-market ethos.

Prior to Trump, the hegemonic bloc that dominated American politics was progressive neoliberalism. That may sound like an oxymoron, but it was a real and powerful alliance of two unlikely bedfellows: on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ+ rights)