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THE RISE AND FALL(?) OF AMERICA'S NEOLIBERAL ORDER

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Gary Gerstle
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Abstract

This paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 28 , December 2018 , pp. 241 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2018 

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the Royal Historical Society, and its past and current presidents, Peter Mandler and Margot Finn, for persuading me to go public with my thoughts on American neoliberalism. I also wish to thank Sven Beckert, Steve Fraser, Art Goldhammer, Joel Isaac, Alex Jacobs, Ira Katznelson, Russ Kazal, Michael Kazin, Desmond King, Nelson Lichtenstein, Liz Lunbeck, Lisa McGirr, Jim Sparrow and an anonymous reader for the TRHS for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks, finally, to Jonathan Goodwin for his research assistance, to Andrew Spicer for expertly guiding this work from lecture to published paper and to Linda Randall for her copyediting.

References

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45 This shared moral perspective may help solve the mystery of what bewildered Thomas Frank about Kansas, i.e., why the poor of his state seemed so willing to subordinate their class interests to those of the rich. Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York, 2017)Google Scholar; and Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 2009)Google Scholar.

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