Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump watches a video featuring Democratic presidential nominee Vice-President Kamala Harris as he speaks at a campaign rally in Allentown, Pa., on Oct. 29.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Alex Himelfarb is a former clerk of the Privy Council. His latest book is Breaking Free of Neoliberalism: Canada’s Challenge.
We have lived over recent decades through many turning points, without ever actually turning. Perhaps every generation imagines itself at some crucial crossroads in history. This time may be no different, even as the world is holding its breath over Tuesday’s U.S. election.
A Kamala Harris victory is vital not just for the United States but for the health of the global economy, our ability to solve global challenges, and whether democracy prevails over authoritarian alternatives on the rise.
But while defeating Republican Donald Trump is crucial, it’s not enough. Mr. Trump takes up so much space that it’s tempting to think he’s the issue, that his defeat is the answer to what ails us. Defeating Mr. Trump won’t address the conditions of neoliberalism that have given rise to the “everything is broken” politics that he nurtures and rides.
In 2016, when Mr. Trump first got elected, Jeremy Corbyn, then Britain’s Labour leader, called it a sign that neoliberalism – the orthodoxy that had shaped virtually all governments since the 1980s – had run its course. People were fed up, wanted change, and Mr. Trump represented the dangerous course they might choose absent an ambitious progressive alternative.
While Mr. Corbyn’s diagnosis was right, his prediction was not. Neoliberalism has not, and will not, simply run its course.
Neoliberalism is best understood as the single-minded pursuit of economic growth: free-market capitalism with the gloves off, where the primary role of government is to create the conditions for business to prosper and to strip away as many of the barriers to profit as politics allows. Cutting and flattening taxes, reducing welfare spending, deregulation, privatization, free trade and favouring price stability over full employment was to be the formula for prosperity and freedom.
It has not delivered, producing, instead, extreme inequality in wealth and power – a hollowed-out and indebted middle class, persistent poverty, a class of oligarchs at one end, a precariat, characterized by insecurity and few prospects, at the other.
The age of neoliberalism has been an age of crisis, global financial meltdowns, a pandemic, and the biggest instance of market mispricing, climate change.
Neoliberalism has failed on its own terms, producing an era of economic stagnation, profit without increased productivity or innovation, corporate concentration instead of competition.
Rather than protecting us from tyranny, it has brought it closer. Inequality, the shift in power from public to private, and multiple crises have eroded trust in institutions and one another, creating an epidemic of insecurity and loneliness.
If democracy can’t deliver, why not a strongman – say a billionaire – to bring governments and their experts to heel, to stand up for some against some “other”?
Mr. Trump embodies and exploits neoliberalism’s discontents.
His grievance politics connects to the pervasive anger. He provides a ready list of enemies to blame: the deep state, globalists, immigrants, liberals, governments that don’t deliver or seemingly deliver only for others. His firehose of lies and venom is part of the traditional tool kit of tyrants.
It’s ironic, because the pandemic revealed not just how vulnerable we had become but how strong we can be when acting together, through our governments. It reminded us what government can be, could have been all along. Politicians even started talking about “building back better.” But then inflation, caused largely by the pandemic, war and greed, became the latest reason to go back to business as usual.
Neoliberalism’s failures made Mr. Trump possible. Now the tragic irony is that he represents peak neoliberalism. Don’t be deceived by his America-first protectionism. The massive tariffs he’s mooting would indeed create enormous economic dislocation, but a Trump victory wouldn’t mean neoliberalism’s demise.
Quite the contrary: Steep tax cuts for the rich and powerful, unleashing the petroleum sector, more deregulation, more privatization and deep cuts to public services would show us what neoliberalism looks like without democratic guardrails, when the gloves are truly off – while Mr. Trump himself is immunized from sanctions.
Some believe that Mr. Trump would bring an end to forever wars, but chaos, trade wars, cozying up to dictators are not a path to peace. A Harris victory only buys time for the heavy lifting if we are to break free of neoliberalism and the conditions that made Mr. Trump possible – time to fight the lies and conspiracy theories that undermine solidarity, treat the climate crisis as a crisis, rein in corporate power, fight hate, take on inequality.
There’s a lot to do in little time, against a movement entrenched for decades.