The neoliberal order was no exception. Despite being a project incubated in Republican circles and launched under Ronald Reagan, its full-scale consolidation occurred under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
Imo the neoliberal order was a response to the Civil Rights Era, a WORLDWIDE movement that gave ordinary citizens more rights and power than any other time in history. To disempower them, capitalism was weaponized to create neoliberal policies to make poor people stay poor, without capital, and thus powerless.
But it was not until Reagan that neoliberalism actively shaped the policy agenda of the federal government. Deregulation became the mantra of the decade, its most visible manifestation being the assault on collective bargaining and the further weakening of already struggling unions. Progressive taxation was contested ideologically and dismantled politically: When Reagan was elected, the income tax system was structured in 15 different brackets, with the highest reaching 70 percent; after his presidency, the country was left with just two brackets, 15 and 28 percent.
"Neoliberals,” Gerstle writes, “had long argued for the need to ringfence free markets, limiting participation to those who could handle its rigors.” Now they also embraced a religiously imbued neo-Victorian moral code, setting themselves in opposition to the permissiveness and moral relativism of the 1960s and 1970s. The race-biased mass incarceration of an “underclass” — regarded as unfit to handle those rigors — seemed to offer the ultimate solution. Liberation and repression, freedom and order, were not incompatible; in the neoliberal equation they were strictly interdependent.
A political order must have the ability to shape the core ideas of political life. It must be able to do so not just for one political party’s most ardent supporters but for people located across the political spectrum. The New Deal order sold a large majority of Americans on the proposition that a strong central state could manage a dynamic but dangerous capitalist economy in the public interest. The neoliberal order persuaded a large majority of Americans that free markets would unleash capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and personal freedom throughout the ranks of Americans and then throughout the world. Neither of these propositions today commands the support or authority that they once possessed. Political disorder and dysfunction reign. What comes next is the most important question in the United States, and the world, now face.
“The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/06/how-neoliberal-order-triumphed-why-its-now-crumbling/
Imo the neoliberal order was a response to the Civil Rights Era, a WORLDWIDE movement that gave ordinary citizens more rights and power than any other time in history. To disempower them, capitalism was weaponized to create neoliberal policies to make poor people stay poor, without capital, and thus powerless.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/92993192-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-america-and-the-world-in-the
Capitalism has already killed us all. https://www.ecowatch.com/planetary-boundaries-ocean-acidification-climate-science.html
Murdering the entire planet’s megafauna for capital is, well, not leftist.