The Neoliberal Order Is Crumbling. It’s Up to Us What Comes Next.

Neoliberalism may not be dead, but it is no longer the unquestioned ideology of our time. That leaves a huge opening for those on the Left who want to see a political and economic order based on democracy and solidarity rather than unbridled profit-seeking.

A political movement becomes a political order when its premises start to seem inescapable. In the 1950s, Republicans bowed to political reality and supported New Deal social welfare programs; in the 1990s, Democrats embraced Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory zeal.

But as historian Gary Gerstle argues in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, no political order is immune to the destabilizing power of economic crises.

For Gerstle, 1970s stagflation undermined the New Deal order just as the Great Depression had helped bring it into being. And today, in the shadows of the 2008–9 Great Recession, with inflation galloping ahead and the pandemic still stretching across the globe, the neoliberal order seems to be faltering. What, then, might come next?

Jen Pan asked Gerstle this question and more on a recent episode of The Jacobin Show, a YouTube series and podcast from Jacobin. In their conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length, Pan and Gerstle discuss how Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are right- and left-wing symptoms of the neoliberal crack-up, how the New Left unwittingly aided neoliberalism’s rise, and why he thinks “capitalism [isn’t] in the driver’s seat” at this tumultuous moment.