Defining the Post-Neoliberal Political Order
[1.0] Political Order Primer
A Political Order is the dominant worldview through which to experience political phenomena – it is a concept created by Gary Gerstle, applying the notion of a Kuhnian Scientific Paradigm to political phenomena. Knowing this Kuhnian connection allows to fully develop the definition of a Political Order – there are definitional pillars related to nature of the worldview itself, along with those related to the organizational development and distribution of said worldview.
The worldview component of a Political Order emerges in response to a set of Key Problems, often ones that ended the previous Political Order; Core Assumptions are developed in the process of trying to address the problems at hand. The Core Assumptions inform downstream Standards of Legitimacy that are crafted as criteria to assess solution performance; downstream of both the Assumptions and Standards are Endorsed Methods, consisting of accepted tools and techniques for solution development.
The organizational components of a Political Order are uniquely Gerstle’s innovation, independent of Kuhnian influence. Once a Political Order’s core worldview has been crafted, it needs funding, policy development, media distribution, and community engagement through a political party and related organizations. We are unconcerned with the organizational element of Political Orders in these position papers.
For complete definitions of Gerstleian Political Orders and Kuhnian Scientific Paradigms, please visit the Definitions section of CivilizationStack.
[2.0] Defining the Neoliberal Political Order (NPO)
[2.1] Problems Addressed by the NPO
The Neoliberal Political Order (NPO) emerges against the backdrop of the Cold War as a contest between competing economic systems. We can see NPO’s enshrining of democracy and capitalism as core institutions in direct opposition to the socialism and central planning of polities behind the Iron Curtain. In particular, we can see the antagonism between free markets and central planning as informing NPO’s general push against bureaucracy and regulation: the NPO sought to reduce government intervention through the use of deregulation and privatization. Finally, societal orientations that come bundled with socialism are potential nationalistic or collectivist identities – in order to cleanly demarcate itself from said socialist bundle, the NPO championed multiculturalism as a way to incorporate diverse groups of people into a market economy without having to resort to nationalist or collectivist narratives.
The transitions between Political Orders require a catalyst, a trigger: these are often crises. The Political Order that existed before the NPO was the New Deal Political Order (NDPO), which received its regime-ending crisis in the form the OPEC Oil Crisis in the 1970s and its ensuing stagflation. It was not merely the fact that the oil shock occurred, with its downstream economic and social consequences; it was the failure of the Keynesian economic paradigm to fully solve the crisis. This Keynesian impotence in the face of stagflation, with no relevant policy response, meant that an opportunity had opened up for a new Political Order. The King is dead, long live the King: the era of the Neoliberal Political Order was birthed at the death of the New Deal Political Order.
[2.2] Assumptions of the NPO
Responding the problems outlined in [2.1], the NPO develops a core guiding assumption about markets as the primary social organizing force: an unshakeable belief that markets are the most efficient means of allocating labour, goods, and capital. With this market fundamentalism comes a direct corollary that states are to exist solely as market facilitators – the major task of a given government would now be to ensure open markets rather than to directly control economic activity. Market fundamentalism also informs a worldview of human wellbeing being grounded in a form of consumerist individualism, where the good life is dictated by personal economic success and access to consumer goods.
If human flourishing is framed as consumption-based and markets are upheld as the primary organizing principle, then global economic integration is seen as a net positive – globalization becomes the ideological vehicle for spreading the consumerist good life across the entire planet. How do we make this global world come into being? Through free trade and financial deregulation. Free trade as an unalloyed good becomes an unquestionable tenet of life under the NPO.
When the unique synthesis of globalist free trade and individualist consumerism are tied together through market fundamentalism, absent any intermediary national focus, multiculturalism becomes the preferred social program for identity formation within a given neoliberal polity under the NPO. Any given group of people need common narratives and common myths to bind them together as an operational unit – under the NPO, the solution is to have a “choose your own adventure” market of balkanized personal narratives, where we can be whoever and whatever we want to be. It is under this framework that is conducive to the formation of truly idiosyncratic narratives – where downstream of the act of accepting the individual as the unit of society is the act of accepting agglomerations of individual identities – that multiculturalism is further accepted as the preferred intermediary narrative paradigm.
[2.3] Standards of Legitimacy in the NPO
A polity operating under the NPO is one that uses economic growth and financial market stability as its guiding key performance indicators on the international stage: GDP growth and the maintenance of investor confidence are sacred cows. Further, for preeminent nations in the international community of the NPO, an additional external metric is the capacity to shape global markets and international norms – global leadership in economic and cultural influence is an implicit soft power goal. Internally, a NPO polity is ranked socially by its constituencies according to quality-of-life metrics; consumer access and market choice, the availability of products and services at competitive prices, are defining measures of societal success. Finally, on an individual basis, the unquestioned belief in meritocracy is a guiding principle within NPO polities such that people measure their own success within their respective polity – and the polity will be held to account by said people – by their capacity to climb the social ladder.
[2.4] Methods of the NPO
The anti-bureaucracy worldview that is baked into the very foundation of the NPO means that deregulation and privatization are the go-to tools in this political order. The former refers to the erosion of governmental controls over financial markets, labour markets, and industries; the latter is a euphemism for transferring state-owned enterprises over to private control. Further downstream of this dislike for state intervention, the NPO prefers monetary policy over fiscal policy – for instance, lowering interest rates instead of a launching a government infrastructure project. This dislike of the state as a direct manager of economic affairs means that even if there was a need for an infrastructure project, it would be stewarded by a public-private partnership instead of directly and solely by the government. As a rule of thumb, wherever the state would have managed an entire function in more interventionist political orders, under the NPO the untrustworthy state must be paired with private enterprise wherever possible.
In terms of social tools within the NPO schema, identity politics is operated with market logics to overcome intra-state factional conflicts. Through the unified acceptance of globalization and individualism, multiculturalism is then framed as a consumer choice issue – factional identity conflicts that would have led to wars of assimilation in times past are papered over by enforcing “to each his own” along group identity issues. Moreover, to further derisk factional identity conflicts, diversity initiatives are core tools in corporate and institutional settings to make sure that all group factions feel represented in the nominal seats of power. As such, through identity politics and diversity initiatives, a NPO polity strives to achieve social harmony that would have been approached through assimilationist and nationalist means in previous political orders.
[3.0] Defining the Post-Neoliberal Political Order (Post-NPO)
[3.1] Problems Addressed by the Post-NPO
The emerging Post-Neoliberal Political Order (Post-NPO) is a direct response to the failures of the NPO, in the same way that the NPO was a direct response to the failures of the NDPO.
The first sin of the NPO is that excessive consumerist individualism, under the framing of meritocracy and through the destruction of all intermediaries in a harmonized global world, led to the accrual of global wealth in elite hands while the middle classes were eviscerated in a decades-long rise in inequality. The backlash against globalization was not merely in the destruction of local barriers to international competition but in the deindustrialization that further gutted the primary sources of income for many middle-class families. The rustbelt in the US and the similar post-industrial wreckages all across the West are a testament to the outsourcing that globalization enabled.
The second sin of the NPO lies in its unsophisticated approach to multiculturalism, invariably implemented as mass immigration (legal or otherwise) that led to cultural fragmentation and paved the way for populist uprisings. An anti-assimilationist “to each his own” approach to multiculturalism operationalized at a mass immigration scale led to the formation of balkanized homogenous ethnoburbs surrounding major urban metropolises. Native residents were displaced from urban centres; politically influential urban cores were subjected to diaspora politics and foreign interference that undermined the political clout of native residents.
The third sin of the NPO manifested in a further tension between national sovereignty and the strength of global institutions – multinational corporations and NGOs. The eurozone crisis, in particular, was an era where the traditional centre of political authority as vested in the nation state became challenged by multinationals of all stripes. It was not so much a problem that the nation state as an institution was failing, per se, but that the nation state was the only intermediary wall that protected a people from the rising tide of globalization. Without the nation state as a bulwark of national interest, the people were left with no defenses against unaccountable multinationals. This was truly an issue of subsidiarity, where the global institutions with the most power did not have their legitimacy tied to the will of the people.
Finally, how did this house of cards all fall apart? The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 was the nail in the coffin for the NPO just as the OPEC Oil Crisis of the 1970s was for the NDPO. What is essential for a crisis event to unfold is that the core logic of the political order in question either leads to the crisis or cannot deal with the crisis that emerges. The core logic of the NPO is that governmental bureaucracy is inefficient, such that deregulation is one of the prime tools at the disposal of neoliberal operatives. The Global Financial Crisis was a direct by-product of deregulated markets – the legitimacy of the logic that underpinned the global NPO was called into question as a result of the fallout from the GFC, which has lasted the better part of a decade until COVID emerged. What we have experienced since 2008 is largely what can be called an interregnum between political orders. As beautifully phrased by Gramsci, we are in an era where “[t]he old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Two prominent “monsters” of the Post-NPO have already emerged:
populist nationalism as expressed by Trump, Brexit, and European right-wing movements;
progressive anti-capitalism as expressed by Occupy, Sanders, and Corbyn, among others.
[3.2] Assumptions of the Post-NPO
Neoliberal individualism is being rejected in favour of collective identities. For instance, protectionist economics are a sign that economic and political frameworks now revolve around groups rather than atomized individuals. Further, neoliberal meritocracy has been delegitimized as an aspirational goal when it has produced severe inequality – nationalistic solidarity is being prioritized. Finally, purely market-driven solution are being sidelined in favour of policy interventions.
Hyper-globalization is being rejected in favour of national or regional spheres. There is a fundamental shift away from the unrestricted movement of capital, goods, and people. One variation of this deglobalization is manifested in economic nationalism, border controls, and the resurgence of industrial policy. We are also seeing an increase in labour rights as manifested in greater pushes for unionization, especially as production gets reshored or nearshored.
Free market fundamentalism is being rejected in favour of managed economies. This new paradigm sees state intervention as a necessary way to shape markets, rather than being a distorting force. Protectionism, reshoring, and tariffs are now in common parlance; fiscal policy, as operationalized through state-driven infrastructure projects, is making a comeback. The twin re-emergence of industrial policy and fiscal policy are core to the Post-NPO.
Regime legitimacy by economic growth alone is being rejected in favour of economic stability and security. Economic, cultural, and geopolitical stability is now more important than “Number Go Up” GDP growth. One variant of this desire for security manifests in border controls and reframing the family as the fundamental unit of society; another variant of security-seeking places emphasis on environmental protection and increased governmental services. Both variants reject mere market performance as a source of regime legitimacy for polities operating in the Post-NPO.
[3.3] Standards of Legitimacy in the Post-NPO
A unified recognition of what both sides of the political aisle want in a Post-NPO consists of national strength, economic security and stability, cultural continuity, demographic security, and climate sustainability. All of these desires speak to one singular thread of legitimacy: managed stability. This means that markets and society are directed to serve collective interests rather than individualistic goals.
[3.4] Methods of the Post-NPO
While we are still living through an interregnum, several clusters of acceptable tools and techniques are consolidating and being implemented.
One clear cluster revolves around state-orchestrated economic management. This consists of protectionist tactics that involve subsidies, tariffs, industrial policy, and reshoring critical industries.
Another definitive cluster centres on controlled labour and immigration policies. While populations are seen as economic assets, uncontrolled mass migration is increasingly seen as destabilizing.
Finally, we are witnessing what can be called selective market participation. Certain critical industries – AI, defense, semiconductors, energy – are seen as matters of national security and are hence removed from the free market.
[4.0] Defining the Trade-Offs between the NPO and the Post-NPO
At a very fundamental level, the phase shift we are experiencing between the dying Neoliberal Political Order and the emerging Post-Neoliberal Political Order is the level of involvement of national governments in daily affairs. It is the classic tension between laissez faire and interventionism. We have yet to reach the full maturation of the Post-NPO and so we should hesitate to over-define its future state; however, we can rest confident that the former trends of globalization, multiculturalism, and individualism are on the definitive decline for the foreseeable future. We are entering a new era that will be defined by some sort of collectivist push – perhaps around nationalism – in addition to direct government intervention and a general valorization of stability in human affairs. These are some of the axioms that are sure to hold as we move forward.