After the Pandemic, Disaster Capitalism Will Reign — Unless We Fight Back
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a fleeting sense of radical possibility quickly gave way to a wave of cuts and privatization. After COVID-19, get ready for a repeat, as leaders around the world push for austerity again.
People walk past a closed business in a Manhattan shopping district on August 12, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Like most great economic upheavals, the crisis of 2008–9 yielded a momentary sense of possibility.
Wrenched from a complacent slumber by the sudden meltdown of the global financial system, even governments of the center-right seemed to be doing the unthinkable. The End of History was over. Deficit hawkishness was out and Keynesianism was back in, or so the story went. Even nationalization, that anachronistic tool of postwar statism, was no longer off limits.
With the landslide election of what many believed would be the most ambitious liberal administration since the 1930s in the United States, the political-economic consensus in place since the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared poised for a sweeping and potentially radical revision.
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