[Book fragment, p.4]
«A NEW WORLD IS POSSIBLE: POST-NEOLIBERAL PROGRESSIVISM
Something profound is happening in politics—in the United States and around the world. A political backlash against the dominant world order has led to the rise of the right, including the election of President Donald Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK, and a shift toward authoritarian regimes across Europe and Latin America. At the same time, and in response to this deeply unsettling reality, progressive forces are rising. Many bold ideas for changing the structure of our economy are becoming mainstream—from a newly muscular antitrust movement seeking to break up monopolistic private companies to a labor movement energized by successful teacher strikes across the country.
Measured conventionally, very little about today’s politics makes sense. Many attempts to explain the chaos and sclerosis point to Trump and Trumpism, political partisanship, or regional animosity. But we believe that the chaos is a sign of something deeper: the death of one worldview and the ascent of another.
Neoliberalism, the once-hegemonic economic paradigm, is in ruins. The neoliberal ideal— that markets would bring both economic and political freedom, and that our economy and politics should therefore privilege individual private choice and profit-driven private-sector companies—has dominated our thinking in the US, Britain, and much of Latin America for decades. The movement may have begun with a few intellectuals gathered at Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland in 1947 (Burgin 2015), but by the 1980s, neoliberalism was fully in power. Neoliberal leaders, backed by prevailing economic dogma, shaped government in the image of markets and convinced voters that only market solutions would suffice. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” President Ronald Reagan declared in his inaugural address; “there is no alternative” to capitalism, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher often said during her premiership.»
[…]
Link for download: https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/RI_EmergingWorldview_report-202001-1.pdf
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Felicia Wong is the president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, which seeks to reimagine the social and economic policies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt for the 21st century. She is the coauthor of Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.