The Death of Neoliberalism: An Autopsy of a Doomed Campaign
The dissection of the Harris-Trump race has focused on blame more than explanation. But this more meaningfully represents a shift of the global economic consensus. And that's not necessarily good.
Since the presidential election, a malaise has settled upon politically engaged leftists and liberals that is difficult to explain to unenthused observers, committed centrists and right-wing voters. Unlike 2016, there isn’t a sense of zombie-walking shock among the general public. Instead, it's been replaced by online discussions of processing and trauma and depression that haven't seemed to translate to the real world.
According to my colleagues covering the NFL, there hasn't been much of a reaction among players to the results of the election. In 2016, the election deeply divided locker rooms as teammates grappled with the changing nature of their political space. The response in 2024 seems much more localized to the most passionate political actors. This is no longer epoch-changing.
I want to explore some of that reaction and, of course, my reaction to the reaction.
If the first Donald Trump presidential election victory represents a shock to the system, the second represents the crumbling nature of failed institutions, a signal that we are at the end of a political and economic era.
Our new era is not necessarily one defined by Trump or his beliefs but heralded by them. While we will experience dramatic short- and medium-term changes to the levers of power and bureaucracies that govern our lives, the changes on a global ideological level could be even more far-reaching: the end of neoliberalism and the beginning of a new economic and political framework.
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Running to the Middle
The instinct for many is to reach for a middle ground when it comes to weighty proclamations; avoid extremes, understand that things are never as bad as they’re made out to be, believe in the power of people and community.
The tendency to minimize emerges from a fairly common cognitive trap of running to the middle. The “Golden Mean Fallacy” is a curse on politics because it is always intuitively appealing, but never grounded.
The idea that “the truth” is somewhere between “the extreme left” and “the extreme right” — terms that elide definition and change from moment to moment — is ahistorical. We have always had opposing viewpoints throughout history, and many times, one of those viewpoints is definitively correct. I am not particularly interested in evaluating the middle ground claims on slavery, women’s suffrage or Jim Crow.
History does not stop; there’s no compelling reason to think the middle must necessarily be true now when “the middle” has failed so often before.
It’s about where one draws the boundaries and, therefore, the middle. There are definitely cases where “the middle” is true, for certain values of “middle” — just as it is that there are many cases where an “extreme” is true when defining extremes in particular ways.
The Hidden Nature of Violence
In the past week, I have seen many people sounding alarms for forthcoming crises, often unnecessarily. I have had to reassure friends against their worst imaginations while giving credence to the systemic truths they speak to; there will not be roving lynch mobs on day one of a(nother) Trump presidency, but there are still people in everyone’s neighborhoods who hold unkind thoughts about marginalized people. That represents a distinct, recognizable and, perhaps, emboldened danger.
The danger is a matter of degree. While there have always been concerns about stochastic terrorism when it comes to carrying out the brutal dirty work of fascism, the more common methods of violence are mundane and well-hidden, often hijacking extant systems. From my piece on a more complete definition of violence:
This distinction between the violence of the everyday versus the violence committed by a known, specific actor has been called the difference between objective violence and subjective violence — that is, where one can identify a clear subject engaging in a specific violent act.
Typically, this distinction is reserved for describing objective violence — acts of structural violence committed by systems rather than people — the absconding of resources away from communities, ghettoizing minorities, underfunding their social safety nets and refusing to develop infrastructure to access food, water or medicine.
These deaths get absorbed into the background consciousness of the Western world at large.
I don’t expect this to be any different in a new regime, but the background violence this time will likely be committed with more bare intention rather than apathy. Instead of something as crass as direct extermination, this damage will be carried out by procedure and administration.
This could look like undercutting federal programs that protect minorities, like the potential elimination of the Department of Education, or underfunding direct support to access food, water, medicine or shelter. It means undermining access to reproductive health, which has knock-on effects on healthcare generally, with or without direct abortion care.
These changes are carried out through rulemaking and budgeting processes. They are felt in graveyards and cemeteries.
This isn’t idle speculation or mere alarmism; Trump has tried to kick millions off of federal food assistance. He wants to do it again. While millions lose access to food assistance, the price of food will likely go up — not down — as his immigration policy overwhelmingly impacts agriculture.
Donald Trump and Fascism
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Next section: The Democrats Are Bad at Politics
When confronted with the specter of fascism, we engage with the classical images that defined 1930s and 1940s Germany. But these images — concentration camps and death marches — are the product of years of successful implementation of a vicious ideology. The ideology itself takes root far earlier than those endpoints.
That is to say, Adolf Hitler was already a fascist in 1919 when he attempted to overtake the German Workers’ Party, as much as he was a fascist in 1923 when he was arrested for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch. He was as much a fascist in 1925 when he published Mein Kampf as when he ran for president in 1932.
The argument against the fascist interpretation of Trump is that he has not led death squads or shipped people off into concentration camps. But Hitler didn’t do so in our popular conception of these camps until 1937 — the “early camps” were primarily for political prisoners and were far smaller than the network of extermination and labor camps that included Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka. The camp population did not reach beyond five figures until 1938, following Kristallnacht.
Point being: We can identify fascist tendencies in Trump’s politics even if we can't see the furthest possible end point of that ideology. And, to be clear, we did see camps. And we will again.
Let’s List It Out
I am not sure how to demonstrate Trump's fascist tendencies to those who think journalism is captured by delusion, so I won’t spend the time. Instead, we can compose a list of alarming details from his stated goals and policy achievements that dovetail with many definitions of fascism:
The first act for Trump in office was an attempt to ban Muslims from entering the country, with a half-hearted nod towards making it legal by isolating it to specific (Muslim-majority) countries. He wants to do it again, calling these countries “infested.”
It seems like many forgot the actual insurrection attempt, one where people were prepared to kill Mike Pence.
Trump’s insistence that immigrants have “bad genes” that allegedly make them more likely to commit crimes (they are not). This is not a one-off opinion; he has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that directly matches Hitler’s violent rhetoric.
Demonizing countries with nonwhite majorities as dirty or diseased is typical of him.
Trump’s admiration and desire to imitate authoritarians, including Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Tayyip Erdoğan and, of course, Adolf Hitler. His comments praising Hitler have been corroborated. These are not isolated pieces of praise; these are consistent themes for him, and he specifically praises them for their most authoritarian tendencies.
Characterizing his opponents as vermin, language that matches the words used by those committing genocide, from Rwanda to Armenia to Germany. He just keeps doing it.
He also produces the same kind of language for nonwhite non-immigrants, like Native Americans.
His consistent platforming of white supremacists — people who identify themselves as white nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis, or anything else along those same lines. It’s not just that he (often) retweets those white supremacists (or shares their content), it’s also that his campaign staff and administration officials also follow these obscure accounts. This might be why he initially refused to condemn former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and the KKK itself when pressed on their support of his campaign.
Hosting self-described Nazis at Mar-a-Lago — not just Kanye West, but Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes. Again, these are self-described labels, not wild accusations. Fuentes has explicitly called for the genocide of Jews. This is well understood in his sphere; Trump supporters invited Fuentes to the America First Political Action Conference alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Trump also engages in antisemitic tropes, like accusing Jews of double loyalty (or rather, demanding it?). This used to be something the Anti-Defamation League cared about when they criticized him. So, too, with the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
All of this, together, fits into his conception of what a “real” American is, allowing him to construct visions of who is allowed rights and safety and who is not.
His first pardon as president was of former sheriff Joe Arpaio, who committed the worst case of racial profiling in US history, according to the Department of Justice. For that, he received praise from Trump. This man was running concentration camps. That’s not a characterization from “liberal media,” that’s the language he himself used to describe the camps.
Trump regularly advocates for violence against his political opponents, both from state and non-state actors. That includes protestors, journalists and politicians aligned against him. There are lists of people he has threatened with this kind of violence. That includes threats of execution against former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, President Joe Biden, Democrats in general, immigrants in general, journalists in general and more.
Trump once again recently used “vermin” language for his political opponents, promising to “root out” those opposed to him. His “enemy within” rhetoric perfectly maps onto the fascist rhetoric used by Benito Mussolini and Hitler. That list of opponents includes journalists and “deep state” bureaucrats within the government.
These sentiments are echoed by former Trump official now considered a likely candidate to head up federal law enforcement, Kash Patel — who wants to “eradicate” disloyal members of the FBI or CIA in government and extend that eradication to journalists.
Trump is particularly fond of advocating for state violence, hoping to violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments with regularity
The note about the immigration concentration camps in Arizona is important as that became a landmark feature of the administration. Worse, this is related to why leftists are sick of Democrats: The camps never went away.
Those listed elements above replicate the patterns of fascism. Scholars of fascism have agreed with this characterization, as do people who have worked with him. Some have made the important distinction that Trump allows fascists to carry him and design his policies rather than being personally fascist. That matters, but not for this piece.
Even If He’s Not Fascist, He is Dangerous
There are non-fascist (or at least not necessarily fascist) elements of his approach that also sound alarm bells.
Robert F. Kennedy’s purported role in the administration will be to manage the federal health response. That will include deregulation of “natural health” products like raw milk or the off-label, unproven usage for medicine like hydroxychloroquine. He has also come out against fluoride in drinking water, one of the greatest achievements in modern medicine.
As experts told the New York Times, Kennedy's threats to long-accepted public health practices are unprecedented:
“I think it’s fair to say we’re in uncharted territory,” said Michael T. Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and has advised presidents of both parties dating back to Ronald Reagan. “In my 50 years in the business, I never had to encounter, even in the first Trump administration, a callous disregard for science and facts.”
Recommendations like Kennedy’s have led to measles outbreaks, increases in tooth decay, deaths and hospitalization from the consumption of raw milk, delays, many times fatal, in seeking effective treatment because of the usage of alternative medicine, poisoning from the dangerously unregulated supplements market and more.
In addition, we’re facing the prospect of inflation accelerating under Trump’s proposed tariffs policy. The precise impact of these proposals is unclear given that we don’t know which companies will be granted waivers, or how tariffs will ripple throughout the supply chain; tariffs are difficult to model, though the error tends to underestimate their negative impact rather than overestimate, especially when retaliatory tariffs are taken into account.
That's just two of the issues this forthcoming administration presents. We could further include extensions of Trump's previous stint, like the elimination of science funding leading to a “lost generation of scientists” and a paucity of research in the coming years coming from STEM fields. The environmental regulation rollbacks created more damage in four years than we can reasonably recover over the course of decades. It takes more time, resources and willpower to undo damage than to cause it.
And we haven't yet touched on Trump's alarming comfort with sexual assault or instances of personal (as opposed to policy-level) racism that are also well worth considering. We have also seen multiple studies establish a shockingly granular correlation between his statements and spikes in hate crimes.
Evidence suggests that hate crimes increased substantially during Trump’s presidency. For example, anti-Semitic incidents in the USA increased 86% in the first quarter of 2017 (post-election) compared with the same time period in 2016 (pre-election)vi. Similarly, there was a 91% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the first half of 2017, compared with the same time period in 2016 (pre-election)vii. These trends continued throughout Trump’s presidency, with annual hate crimes remaining around 20% higher during his administrationviii. Other research specifically tied these increases in hate crimes to Trump himself, finding that counties that hosted a Trump rally showed hate crime rates almost double those of similar counties with no rally [1]
…
even brief exposure to Trump’s prejudiced rhetoric (a single statement embedded among other political quotes) led participants — particularly those who personally supported Trump — to express greater prejudice towards a minoritized group [2]. Similarly, a second investigation found that exposure to Trump’s rhetoric had an emboldening effect for prejudiced individuals, leading them to express greater acceptance of others’ prejudiced behavior, as well as to personally be more willing to disparage a member of a minoritized group [3].
If this is all true, how the hell did the Democrats lose?
The Democrats Are Bad at Politics
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Next section: What Is Neoliberalism
Examining why the Democrats lost and the Republicans won is difficult, in part because our data is messy and in part because we don’t have the tools to break it down. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable in the United States when it comes to predicting election results before polls close, and that casts doubt on their ability to accurately capture voter sentiment after the fact.
It would be nice to compare exit polls, but there aren’t many organizations conducting them. News organizations have largely used the exit polls conducted by Edison Research — if you’ve seen exit polls from NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc., you should understand that they were all conducted by Edison and distributed by Reuters.
The next-best thing is the Associated Press’ “VoteCast,” which conducts surveys before and during the election of registered (not likely) voters, many of whom have already voted. There are a lot of critiques of their approach, but it is at least another datapoint.
Nevertheless, the demographic data these polls produce are not often useful and are deployed instead to blame specific demographics for Harris’ loss, as opposed to explaining what motivated their decisions to stay at home or vote for Trump.
Instead of wondering why the share of white women voting for Harris declined when compared to Trump, or the same for Black men, liberal observers have often admonished those voters. It is not, to many people, worth asking why these groups split the way they did. Paternalism seems more important than rectitude.
When constructing reasons that the Democrats lost, it has also become convenient to argue that the Democrats did not fit into one’s own ideology and project that upon the electorate.
As an example, New York House Democrat Tom Suozzi and Massachusetts House Democrat Seth Moulton attempted that tactic when they argued that Democrats lost because they didn’t do enough to bar trans women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, covered here by the conservative National Review.
There is no data to support the assertion that buying into trans panic would have helped the Democrats. Even as sparse as exit polling data is, it tells us that voters didn’t particularly care about that issue, citing “the state of democracy” as their top concern and the economy as their second concern.
In fact, neither major exit polling firm thought it worth their time to even ask voters about the culture war around trans people.
The last time the GOP ran on this issue, they catastrophically underperformed in special elections and the 2022 midterms. Andy Beshear was just re-elected in Kentucky as governor after strongly defending trans rights both publicly and with the power of his office. Polls of likely voters show that they don’t care about the issue, and often find Republican ads on the issue to be mean-spirited.
The instinct to argue that Democrats lost because they did not advocate a particular ideology applies to policy positions I agree with, too. Would that I could blame the Democrats’ loss on their depraved stance on the genocide in Gaza and inability to attract leftists. There is little to no chance that this alone swung the election away from Harris.
That’s not to say it didn’t have an impact.
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