What did y’all think post-neoliberalism meant? vibes? papers? essays?

The strange career of anti-globalization politics

In a recent post, I quoted a line from Anton Jäger that has stuck with me: “The left’s real trauma might be that neoliberalism died without them actually killing it.” Jäger wrote this in March 2020, the last time we saw a stock market crash comparable to (although significantly larger than) the one occasioned this week by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. The reason neoliberalism seemed to many to have died a swift Covid-induced death in March 2020 was that fiscal austerity, the policy approach that had become synonymous with it, was abruptly abandoned by pretty much every major government out of sheer necessity. For a decade, the left on both sides of the Atlantic had defined its anti-neoliberal stance in terms of opposition to austerity; suddenly, that struggle seemed to have been won, but not because the left had triumphed—on the contrary, after the defeats of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, it was in retreat almost everywhere.

Something similar, although stretched out over a longer period of time, happened on Trump’s “Liberation Day.” If austerity was one key aspect of neoliberalism opposed by the left, the expansion of global trade via the reduction and elimination of tariffs and signing of free-trade agreements was another. The first era in which I was aware of left-wing political movements was that of the 1999 WTO protests and Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Prior to 9/11, when military interventionism became the major point of resistance, almost all the progressive activists I encountered were organizing against sweatshop labor abroad. Their basic point, laid out in manifesto form in No Logo, was that although cheap goods might seem like a good deal to American consumers, they were a bad deal for American workers, who now had to compete with workers, some of them children, being paid a pittance to work in brutal conditions. That said, much of their emphasis was on pressuring companies and consumers to boycott sweatshop goods. The question of how the global economic system should be restructured was less discussed.

By the middle of the 2010s, most progressives seemed to have forgotten this aspect of their agenda, judging by the fact that very few of them were able to grasp the crucial role protectionist appeals played in Donald Trump’s electoral wins in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. His anti-trade positions—were the main strongly held political views he has had throughout his career—were dismissed as another indication of his xenophobia (and that of his voters). If the left didn’t quite embrace free trade the way it did the Wall Street Journal/Cato Institute open-borders agenda in the wake of the 2016 election, it no longer seemed particularly animated about sweatshops in Vietnam and Cambodia. In any case, to imply the offshoring of manufacturing was a key factor in Trump’s rise was to endorse the much pooh-poohed “economic anxiety” thesis.

The Covid shock dealt a blow to globalization as well as austerity. It showed that the connectedness of the world had created new vulnerabilities, while also revealing the brittleness of the intricate supply chains that had been built up over the prior decades and America’s inability to produce essential goods. These realizations no doubt encouraged the Biden administration to continue and build on Trump’s first-term protectionist policies. Notably, though the activist left had influence on Biden’s policies in some areas, the administration’s decision to further decouple economically from China doesn’t seem to have been one of them: The main impetus for that seems to have come from centrist advisors. The decision to pursue industrial policy had a progressive inflection, given its green emphases, but what was significant was the reorientation of Clintonites like Jake Sullivan towards economic nationalism (as in his “New Washington Consensus” speech).

In other words, just as the progressives who decried the austerity of the 2010s ended up playing little to no role in its ultimate demise, the left-wing anti-globalization movement that was so prominent in my youth has been absent from the developments that finally ushered us out of the peak era of global trade. As Helen Andrews noted last year in a review of a book on the 1999 WTO protests, since then “opposition to free trade has become a right-wing cause.” After Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, most left-wing commentary emphasized the likely economic disaster it would occasion.

To paraphrase the infamous post-Oct. 7 tweet, my initial response to such reactions was: What did y'all think post-neoliberalism meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers. When I tweeted something to this effect, although less aggressive, the response I got was roughly: “We didn’t mean this way!” As the (very good) historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian said in a quote tweet: “It’s almost as if…the demise wasn’t the point. It’s what would replace it.” Fair enough, but I think that’s implicit in Jäger’s statement, which I also quoted in the tweet. In other words, the left obviously envisioned a version of the end of neoliberalism in which it played the role of protagonist. (As an aside, I don’t think what we saw this week was exactly “the end of neoliberalism,” but a serious blow to one of its key elements.) The question is why it didn’t.

I think one answer is that it never had a particularly clear vision of what an alternative global order would look like that wasn’t essentially utopian. There was clear working-class discontent over decades of deindustrialization and stagnant wages. The Sanders campaign in 2016 tapped into some of that, but for the most part, it was MAGA that was able to mobilize it. That’s because Trump, whose vision radically incoherent in other ways, offered a clear response to this discontent, in which material self-interest was aligned at the individual, local, and national level. In contrast, the anti-sweatshop left, although it was allied with the labor movement (parts of which have endorsed the new tariffs this week), always seemed to have as its main protagonists the guilt-ridden Western consumer and the exploited global poor across the world, with shuttered American factories more of an afterthought. It demanded noble self-sacrifice and empathy for distant suffering, which severely limited its appeal as a political program. For related reasons, Biden was never able to turn his reindustrialization agenda into a messaging win.

The anti-globalization activists of two decades ago should have been careful what they wished for when they said: “another world is possible.” In other words, Slobodian and others on the left are right that really existing post-neoliberalism, in the version that is currently taking shape, may well be considerably worse by many measures than what preceded it, although it will take a while to tell. Regardless, this is all the more reason that the self-defeating tendencies of recent progressive movements must be subjected to critical scrutiny, especially by those who share some of their goals.

This week at Compact

First of all, on Trump’s tariffs, we published two things: Kenneth Rapoza on why tariffs need to be consistent and permanent if they are going to lead to a new industrial renaissance; and Peter Ryan on why Trump’s agenda may prove far less ambitious than it needs to be.

In addition to that, we had regular columnists Mark Krikorian on the immigration legacy of Cesar Chavez, Dan Hitchens on how assisted suicide will undo the NHS, Chris Caldwell on the lawfare against Marine Le Pen, and Valerie Stivers on Ross Douthat’s fantasy novel; and editorial fellow Stephen Adubato on queer anti-colonialism.

Finally, we had Samuel Estreicher and Rudra Reddy of NYU Law on the limits of birthright citizenship, and Benjamin Young on why the Putin-Kim alliance will endure.

Thanks for reading!