Has the coronavirus doomed neoliberalism? You could be forgiven for thinking it has, given the disorienting stream of bizarro-world news headlines washing over us. Right-wing Repub­licans eagerly rush to hand out freshly printed money to the same hapless masses they once derided as “takers.” The Financial Times calls for “radical reforms — reversing the prevail­ing policy direction of the last four decades,” including a “basic income and wealth taxes.” “High neoliberalism already had a preexisting health condition,” observes a writer in the National Review, “and this global pandemic may be fatal for it.”

On the other hand, it also feels like we’ve seen this movie before. After the 2008 financial crisis, Richard Posner, the preeminent ideologue of the laissez-faire Chicago School, published a tract acknowledging the crash to have been “a failure of capitalism,” while the New York Times wrote of a “humbled” Alan Greenspan who “admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets.” Go back another decade, to the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and thumb through the op-ed pages and the genteel weeklies: you’ll find a whole genre of essays musing on “what Marx got right” from the pens of decidedly non-radical writers — a journalistic trope we’ve since grown accustomed to in times of financial panic.

Every decade or so, it seems, the econ­omy seizes up, central bankers go into overdrive, and commentators temporarily converge on the view that the neoliberal era is over. Then everything goes back to normal, only worse. The recurring crisis of neolib­eralism has proven to be a central feature of neoliberalism itself.