Mack Penner
For more than a decade, there has been a flourishing cottage industry in predicting and proclaiming the demise of the “international regime” called neoliberalism.[1] An opposite if not equal enterprise in disclaiming such proclamations has tagged along.[2] Lately, though, this discursive equilibrium has all but crumbled as blunt-force events, emanating most of all from the United States, seem to force the conclusion that, at last, something has truly cracked. The neoliberal era that began in the 1970s has now, it seems, come to an end, buried, perhaps surprisingly, by the forces of the far-right.
Amidst the daily maelstrom of those blunt-force events, drawing up a compendium is a Sisyphean task. Sticking to the general, and leaning on an existing assessment, it is helpful to refer to the political economist Branko Milanovic who early in the year declared that the second Trump administration “marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism. Both of its components are gone. Globalism had now been converted into nationalism, neoliberalism has been made to apply to the economic sphere only. Its social parts—racial and gender equality, free movement of labor, multiculturalism—are dead. Only low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit remain.”[3] Fair summary.
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