Review of What Was Neoliberalism? Studies in the Most Recent Phase of Capitalism, 1973–2008 by Neil Davidson (Haymarket Books, 2024)
In the view of the reeling old neoliberal establishments, Donald Trump increasingly appears as the pure negation of their project. Some of his ideological outriders are happy to present him in similar terms. Yet Trump’s new regime actually exemplifies many of the features that have come to define the neoliberal era.
Consider the prominence of sympathetic billionaires in and around the new court. A product of the neoliberal period, this stratum of oligarchs crowded Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in tribute even before his Washington return.
He has charged lurid tech baron Elon Musk with spearheading a major assault on “waste” spending, prominently involving labor discipline in the largest single US employer, the federal state. Another assault on the tax system looms as a major legislative challenge in Trump’s first year. We’ve heard these tunes before.
However, for all the recapitulations of familiar themes, neoliberalism itself is definitely and finally dying. Trump’s monotonous vaunting of trade war and open contempt for the “liberal international order” mark a major shift within the structures of global capitalism. To maintain that nothing meaningful is changing beyond this point would require scrapping the designation of a neoliberal period itself.
Commentators have announced neoliberalism’s time of death before. Back in 2008, many rushed to declare the…
Auteur: David Jamieson
