On November 5, women and men of the United States will choose the new American president, handing over the government of their country for four years to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Whoever wins will have to deal with a nation in deep crisis, divided from a cultural and political point of view as it has never been since before the Civil War broke out in 1861. Decades of impoverishment of the less wealthy classes, the increase in inequality, the dilapidation of state infrastructures, the decay of public schools have, in fact, undermined Americans' trust in federal institutions.
Historian Gary Gerstle in his illuminating essay “ The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order ” (Neri Pozza, 2024, Euro 24.00, pp. 400, also e-book) helps us understand how and why the US crisis, which has profound effects on the entire West, is not the result of contingent events: it is a profound systemic crisis . The crisis of Western democracies, crushed by income inequalities and social disparities, populist leadership and waves of ethno-nationalism, is the most evident sign of a fracture in the political order that has dominated the world for decades: the neoliberal order, which took shape in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and from there conquered and transformed the entire planet following the slogan “freedom to the market!” like a mantra.
The economic principles of neoliberalism are well known: minimal state and free trade; free movement of capital, goods and people; privatization and deregulation; globalization of markets as a factor of prosperity for both the West – firmly in the driving seat – and for emerging countries. We also know well where these ultra-liberal choices have led us. The decline of the neoliberal order, in fact, originated in the Bush years, with the failed reconstruction of Iraq according to ultra-liberal criteria and the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008, and was manifested in the rise of Trump and the left led by Bernie Sanders. Is it all the fault of the American right, of the Republican conservatives who gave the control room for eight years to an evidently inept president like Bush?
Gary Gerstle invites us first of all not to look for simple answers when an epochal social, political and economic transformation is at stake that concerns what remains the most powerful nation in the world . Gerstle suggests that if neoliberalism has established itself it has also been thanks to values such as trust in personal freedom and individual emancipation, the cult of technological innovation, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, which after the end of the Cold War have found fertile ground even in progressive circles. It is no coincidence that its main supporters include both the conservative Ronald Reagan and the progressive Bill Clinton.
To understand the trajectory of the neoliberal order and where its fall may lead us, it is necessary to abandon prejudices and resort to historical research, reconstructing the way in which ultraliberalism consolidated itself , dismantling the previously prevailing New Deal order.
Gary Gerstle thus reviews a hundred years of American history to find the ideological, social, electoral, organizational, and cultural traces of a system of ideas and values that has constituted a lasting political order, dominating the right as well as the left. As he writes in the book: "The New Deal order had persuaded a large majority of Americans that a strong centralized state could manage a dynamic but dangerous capitalist economy in the public interest. The neoliberal order had persuaded an equally large majority of Americans that the free market would free capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and personal freedom in the United States and around the world. Today, none of these proposals enjoy the support or authority they once did. What comes next?"
There is no certain answer, at least in Gerstle's pages, which however end with a reflection that cannot be avoided: the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021 shows how dangerous the breakdown of a political order can be . If a new one arises, it could be voted to equality and solidarity, but also to authoritarianism.