I didn’t think he would change that much from his first presidency, from his first administration. So I kind of knew what kind of policies he’d pursue. But the chaos of it and the aggressiveness and the kind of mania that he brings with it — I don’t think anybody expected it to be at this level. So it’s a combination of, yeah, he’s doing what we expected. But he’s doing it so much more aggressively and single-mindedly now that it’s really shaken up the political economy and the culture.

Within his base there’s a call to upend the system, to tear things down, to smash the institutions. And this time he came prepared to do it. And if that’s what you wanted to see, yeah, you have to be happy with it if you’re a Trump supporter.

I would say there’s a turning point in many ways. Many people now believe that. You get this feeling that there’s no going back to the Bush-Obama-era capitalism, that there has been a shift in the political culture but also in the kinds of policy packages that we can expect to see now.

So I believe there’s been a shift on the issue of neoliberalism. It’s a little murkier, so let’s try to get into that a bit.

I don’t know if Trump is the end of neoliberalism. I do believe we are in a phase of capitalism — or I guess people are calling it now late-stage capitalism. I’m not really sure what it means.

In the ’80s there was this term called “late capitalism”; Ernest Mandel wrote a book in the ’70s called Late Capitalism. Somehow it morphed into “late-stage,” and it makes it sound like it’s about to die or something, that it’s in its final stages and we’re just watching it slowly curl up into a ball.

We are at something of a watershed in our political economy. And neoliberalism, as a word, is used to describe all these various dimensions of the political economy — the global dimension, the domestic dimension. Its political components, its economic policies, the labor relations, all these things come under the rubric of neoliberalism, and it starts to become something that is so encompassing that it doesn’t have a lot of analytical traction.

I think we’re seeing some important shifts in it now. So at the rock bottom, what people mean by “neoliberalism” is just a turning away from the kind of distributive regulatory regime in the ’50s ’60s and ’70s, which also had a place for labor in it.

Yeah, the golden age of capital. So broadly speaking, social, democratic capitalism — turning away from that toward a more unregulated, market-based economic distributed regime. It’s called neoliberalism because it’s a new form of liberalism.

So what is neoliberalism? What they mean by that is not political liberalism, the liberalism of rights and of strong political inclusion. But what they mean is an unregulated economy of the kind you had in the nineteenth century. So neoliberalism means a new version of the nineteenth-century capitalism, which gave rise to all those gigantic social movements, which gave us the welfare state. So neoliberalism is supposed to mean, broadly speaking, a turn toward marketized forms of exchange and distribution without the heavy hand of the state intervening either in market transactions or in income distribution.

If that’s what we mean by neoliberalism, and we’re asking, “Is this the end of it?” The answer is no. Why the answer is no is interesting. There’s a partial way in which something has come to an end, and that’s what people are pointing to when they ask, “Could neoliberalism be ending?” The first is the social support for all these policies; the second is the global dimensions of those policies.

Perry Anderson wrote this article in 2000 when the New Left Review relaunched. He was relaunching it because he thought that we are in what could be a very, very long era of capital’s dominance, perhaps called neoliberalism. The idea was that this would require an entirely new intellectual agenda to make sense of it.

And at that moment, in that article, Anderson made this observation that the ideology of neoliberalism — the ideology that celebrates markets, celebrates individualism, celebrates a very minimalist state — is so hegemonic. He compared it to, in the early modern era and Middle Ages, the power of the Christian church. So Anderson thought that neoliberal ideology was extremely powerful. What that suggested at that time was that neoliberalism was successful as a political program, in part because it had garnered the support of the population through this ideology.

So when we talk about the social supports of neoliberalism, what it conveys is the sense that there was not only a consensus within the ruling classes and the political establishment for a kind of marketized political economy, but that it had also won the consent of the masses through a variety of means.

And now that support has collapsed. How has it collapsed? Well, starting at around the time of Occupy Wall Street, what had been made clear was that the enormous inequalities that had grown in the era of the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s, those inequalities had become so stark that there was a general cultural revulsion against it, and a general sense that people should not only have political rights but also economic rights.

Now that goes against the neoliberal ethos, which says, “Your only rights are political rights in the economy.” You get what the market gives you. That’s the ideology of neoliberalism. Now, my view is I don’t think there was ever a great deal of social support for neoliberalism. I think people always hated it. I think people hated having to fend for a job, constantly having to struggle for their wages. I think they hated the insecurity that came with it, the rolling back of the welfare state.

So what changed starting in 2010 wasn’t that the support for neoliberalism fell apart. It was that the anger against neoliberalism finally came together. And in my opinion, leftists and critical theorists in the 1990s and the early 2000s who were trying to have this Gramscian theory of how consent is generated in capitalism, and how neoliberalism and Thatcherism generated consent, they were completely off-base.

There haven’t been any big social mobilizations since the 1980s, whether in support of Social Security or anything else. The resistance to unwinding it has almost entirely been electoral and lobbying. The lack of success on the part of the Republicans and the Democrats in shrinking the American welfare state is not because the electorate or working people banded together and launched massive campaigns and rolled back their agenda. It was because every time they tried to do it, they lost in the elections. They lost in midterms, and this is what we’re seeing right now in the fight about Medicaid in Trump’s tax agenda.

Now that’s a different kind of resistance. That’s a resistance to unwinding certain policies. There’s a different kind of resistance to capitalism that has a positive agenda, which is not only just throwing sand in the wheels of liberalizers, it’s actually gaining some new rights within capitalism that you didn’t have before. That’s what the New Deal had done. My view is that it’s inaccurate to say that the support for neoliberalism has collapsed. It’s more accurate to say that the tolerance for neoliberalism has collapsed.

There was never a mass view of working and ordinary people that Thatcherism and Reaganism are good things. There was a grudging acceptance at best, but mostly there was a sense of resignation to it.

No, there was no assent to Reagan’s economic program. There was no assent to what came to be known as Reaganism. There was a revolt against the Democrats. There was a revolt against the Volcker shock, the massive increases in interest rates, the unemployment that it generated, but there was never a sense that what we want to have is a rolling back of our economic rights and the rolling back of the welfare state. That’s a talking point of certain liberal intellectuals on the Right, but it’s profoundly mistaken.

I think the accurate way of describing what’s changed is that the public is no longer willing to tolerate what it was fed for thirty years, and that’s neoliberalism. There’s an anger within the culture and a demand for some kind of shift, some kind of change, which is different from what we saw in the 1990s and the 2000s.

So while it’s a mistake to describe it as a collapse in the support for neoliberalism, that description does get at something, which is that political elites cannot take for granted that they can just get away with the marketized social policies that they had implemented the last thirty years. They know that now.

That’s an important change. Because there’s a churning within the political culture in which it’s understood that political elites are going to have to, in some dramatic way, change the way they’ve been going about doing their business.

Does that mean that they’re going to move away from the Reaganism, the Thatcherism, what we know as neoliberalism? The answer to that is largely no. There’s one component of it that they are changing — that’s what we call “globalization.” I would say, however, that the end of globalization, if we want to call it that, is not the end of neoliberalism. It is simply a change within one dimension of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism had two dimensions. There was the domestic front and there was the international front. The international front was one that tended to things like trade exchange rates, things like that. That is undergoing an important change, no doubt about that. But in terms of how states and the capitalist class deals with the domestic economy — how it accumulates capital, how it makes its profits, how it deals with labor and the welfare state — there’s zero indication that that’s going to change.

So once we understand that neoliberalism was not brought about because the masses demanded it, the question is, how did it come about? Well, it came about because in the United States, and we can just stick to the United States, it was a shift within the American political and economic establishment’s understanding of how to revive growth and revive profits.

Starting in the late ’60s all the way through the ’70s, the American economy had been pretty stagnant. The consensus by the late ’70s — especially in the business community — was that the way to revive growth is, first of all, to revive profitability. Corporate profits.

Corporate profits were being dragged down, they said, because of all the excess costs that the welfare state and the trade unions had imposed upon it. The welfare state with its high levels of taxation on the rich with its great deal of social insurance, which they thought created a disincentive for workers to work.

And then, of course, the trade unions with all the demands they made on corporate revenues for higher wages, for pensions, for benefits, things like that. So the idea was that we need to regain the initiative — “we” being the business community — so that by pushing back against all these costs, we can recoup more of our revenues and keep them as profits.

And once we have those as profits, we can reinvest them and that reinvestment will lead to higher levels of growth. Now, this was an elite perspective. In order to pursue that perspective, they had to deal with the fact that trade unions would be opposed to it. The first item on their agenda was weakening or even getting rid of the trade unions.

So in the ’70s, what we see is a wholesale assault on the trade union movement, and it’s done for two reasons. It’s an end in itself — you get to scale back the power of the unions, and through that you increase your own power in the workplace as a manager. You increase your profits because there are fewer demands that unions can make of you.

But there’s the political benefit too, which is once the unions are gone, the main source of support for the welfare state is gone. And now you can start pushing back against all the costs that the welfare state is imposing upon you as well.

That was the essence of it. That was not brought into office through some sort of mass working-class desire for neoliberalism. It was imposed on them. And once it’s imposed on them, well, they wanted to fight back. But if you don’t have trade unions, if all your social institutions are being dismantled, how are you going to fight back? There’s nothing left. All you have left is the elections.

So once all they had left was their vote, it actually made the job very easy for the political parties because for those four years, in between the elections, you’ve kind of got a free hand to do whatever you want because the trade unions aren’t there and the social institutions aren’t there.

That consensus within the ruling class for this new kind of market economy has more or less been in place for upward of forty years now.

This is a good question, and it should be dealt with at two different levels. The first level is: Could these politicians be harbingers of a kind of an elite skepticism toward neoliberalism? Again, by neoliberalism we mean the unfettered rule of markets over our social institutions. And the second level is: Even if they are skeptical toward that, are they skeptical toward the underlying issue, which is the prioritization of corporate profits and managerial power over the interests and the lives of the rest of the population?

I think that distinction is often lost in these conversations. So let’s just start with the first question. Is it possible that people like Trump, people like Hawley, are skeptical about traditional free-market rule? I think the answer to that is: yeah, they’re skeptical in the sense that they are willing to move away from some components of it in the interests of the larger class project to which they’re committed. Now, that larger class project is what I’ll deal with in the second dimension that I talked about, but the very fact that they’re interested at all in questioning it should not be elided or minimized. I think it’s a big deal and it’s resonated with the population.

The reason it’s resonated with the population is because, as I said earlier, they’re very angry. They are now no longer willing to tolerate the traditional regime. The dilemma that the American ruling class — and the European ruling class — faces is that they are not the ones who want to move away from forty years of neoliberalism. It’s being kind of thrust upon them by the population.

So what they’re trying to figure out is: How can we maintain the broader aspects of our power over the population while reengineering the institutions in some way to absorb all of the attacks and the criticism and the resentment of the electorate? That’s what they’re trying to do. Now, toward that, you can get someone like Hawley coming around and saying, “We need to preserve the social safety net.” You can get someone like Trump saying, “I won’t touch Medicaid and Medicare.”

But understand what those things are. They are not, in any way, a revitalization of the welfare state. At the very best they’re saying we will keep it status quo ante. Status quo ante is what’s caused all the anger among the population in the first place. So it is not much of a solution. All they’re saying is, we won’t keep with the accelerated pace at which we’ve been dismantling everything and forcing markets down people’s throats.

But from the people’s standpoint, it’s not nothing. It’s something, right? And they’re so desperate right now for some kind of relief from forty years of misery that a large section of the electorate sees that as something it can hold onto. So it is quite possible that you’ll find elements of the Republican Party — and in Europe, elements of the Right even — coming around some kind of support for a weak redistributive program. And by that we mean some kind of weak welfare state. That’s entirely possible.

That’s right. We should understand that as slowing down the pace of the dismantling rather than reversing the dismantling.

No. And you know, populism at one time meant massive attacks on elite power. Today’s populism simply means slowing down the attacks on the working class. That’s all it means. Okay. But look, it’s not insignificant. Even Hawley — people point to him as a harbinger of changes within the Republican Party, but he’s pretty isolated. It’s a very small contingent within the Republican Party now that is interested in preserving the social safety net. There are literally about a dozen, maybe eighteen congressmen and one senator. So we’re not talking about a major change in the party.

But again, we shouldn’t ignore it. It’s not insignificant. And if it weren’t for them right now, you would see in Trump’s tax bill a wholesale attack on Medicaid. Now there’s a deeper issue, which is suppose that version of the Republican Party, that wing of the Republican Party, that wing of the European right, does grow to some extent. And we do see a turn toward trade unions and we do see a turn toward some kind of move away from free trade and things like that. Does that mean an end to the last forty years of class dominance and employer power? The answer to that has to be no.

This means, in my opinion, neoliberalism is not the issue. Remember, we started by saying the essence of neoliberalism is a turn to the kind of nineteenth-century rule of markets. The point is that what a fully fledged democracy requires is not so much a scaling back of markets in and of itself, but the full participation of ordinary people in the political institutions that rule over them. It is possible that you can have an unfettered rule of capital in a situation where you have corporatist institutions.

What we’re trying to understand is: What do working people need in order to pursue their interests in a situation where their interests are not aligned with the interests of the wealthy?

The reason working-class people fought for democracy is that they thought democratic institutions, the right to vote, would be one more arrow in their quiver to try to fight for decent lives in a situation where they don’t have much control over the key institutions of society: the workplace, the government, things like that.

So they thought the vote is one very important element of that — trade unions are a very important element of that. Now, the desire on the part of the ruling class to roll back all these institutions, like trade unions and the other social institutions, was that they wanted to exercise unilateral dominance over politics and over economics.

There are several ways in which they can exercise unilateral dominance. One way is through free markets, but they can also do it by organizing civil society into what’s called corporate bodies. It’s not corporations. It means collective entities that organize people’s interests in some way. Trade unions are a corporate body. Civic associations are a corporate body. Political parties can also be a corporate body.

It is often forgotten that in the 1920s and 1930s — when the far right held the most power that we’ve seen the last century — it didn’t do it through free markets. It did it through what’s called corporatist institutions. That meant they were trade unions. They were civic associations. They were citizens’ groups. All of these things that we associate with a thriving democracy can also be instruments of capitalist power. The classic instance of this was fascism.

In fascism, it wasn’t the rule of free markets. It was the rule of corporations through things like civic associations, citizens’ bodies. They even took control of the trade unions. The reason I make this point is that what the Left ought to be fighting for is not an end to free markets per se, although that’s important. It should be the end of corporate hegemony over society. That hegemony of the employer class can be exercised through free markets, but it can also be exercised through things like company unions. It can be exercised through things like right-wing neighborhood groups whose actual function is to watch over the citizens. It can be exercised through a media that, on the face of it, is a free media, but in fact is thoroughly captured by their private owners who use it as instruments of propaganda.

That means that when we see the Republican Party moving formally toward supporting such things like some form of trade unions or social institutions — don’t take that as a victory for the Left. Because, in the context of employer and corporations’ hegemony over politics, these overtures toward unions, et cetera, can be turned toward employer interests and not toward workers interests.

So right now, when we see someone like Trump or Hawley saying we should move away from neoliberalism, that doesn’t mean that they’re saying we should move toward worker empowerment. They could simply be saying we need new forms of social control. And those new forms of social control formally, on the surface, can actually look like the kinds of institutions that we associate with a thriving democracy. Historically, the polar opposite of a democratic society, which is fascism, had all sorts of institutions that were anti–free trade, anti–free market, none of which went toward labor’s interests.

I think that you can say we’re deglobalizing if by that we mean that the continuing expansion and integration of the global economy is coming to an end. It’s not that the integration is coming to an end, but the continuing expansion of the integration is coming to an end. And that actually, if we understand deglobalization to mean that it’s actually been underway for about fifteen years now, since the 2008 crisis.

What we see since the 2008 crisis is the level of integration — if we measure it quantitatively — of the global economy has flattened out. From about 1980 to 2010, it was moving upward. The global economy was becoming more and more and more integrated. At around 2010, it leveled out, which means it didn’t disintegrate, it didn’t dismantle the integration, but it just entered a holding pattern with the existing level of integration remaining more or less the same.

That means an end to the expansion of global integration. Is it possible that we could actually start seeing a reduction in the degree of integration? It’s definitely possible. But if I had to guess, I would say what we’ll see is a slight reduction in the level of integration and then a new plateauing out. That is to say, you won’t see a continuing deglobalization over time. What you’ll see is a ratcheting downward of the level of integration and then plateauing after a point. And the reason for that is simple: the degree of integration is so great that unwinding it so that you have a substantial return to national isolated economies would be so disruptive that governments wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

Yeah, for sure. It’s been a cataclysmic event. Now, it’s still early in the game and Trump has backtracked on so much of what he’s done. But you know it’s in typical Trump fashion. He raised the tariffs to ungodly levels so it seemed like we were going to have a global catastrophe, and now he scaled it back to simply really high levels, which don’t appear to be cataclysmic, but they’re still quite high by historic standards.

And nobody knows where it’s going to end up. But we have to expect a distinct possibility of some degree of winding down of that integration.

There’s a certain amount of confusion, and that’s because neoliberalism has become this catchall that encompasses everything. So I think there is a scaling back of the American Empire, but it’s not because of Trump. I said this several episodes ago: what Trump is doing is simply recognizing a fact, which is that American geopolitical power is no longer unchallenged the way it was thirty or forty years ago. Geopolitical power ultimately rests on economic dominance and American economic dominance in the global economy is simply not what it was forty years ago.

There are countries now that succeeded in moving up the economic ladder globally. China is the best example, but not just China. In Latin America, economies like Brazil. You have South Asia, the Indian economy. You have obviously Russia, which has managed to fend off all of Europe coming to the aid of Ukraine.

All of this shows that the United States can’t just unilaterally call the shots anymore in the global economy, and that means then that it has a choice: it can either continue with the fantasies of the kind that Biden had, which is that you’re going to remain a global political hegemon, even though economically you just can’t call the shots anymore. Or you bring down your global political ambitions in line at the same scale as your economic ambition, as your economic capacity.

And I think if it hadn’t been Trump, if it had been anybody else, they would’ve had to do the same thing. The US just can’t call the shots anymore. So there is a scaling back of America’s reach globally. Does that mean the American Empire is shrinking? Yeah, it has to, because empire is simply your influence over other countries — that’s going to shrink. There’s no way around that.

Does that mean that American imperialism is ending? Absolutely not. It’s just going to be a weaker imperialist power than it was forty or fifty years ago. So when we say tariffs are bringing about an end or a dismantling of one aspect of neoliberalism, does that mean that the tariff regime is something American workers should support? The answer is no, not really because it goes back to the point I made earlier, which is neoliberalism is not the issue. The issue is do working people have any real say in what’s going on around them? What tariffs are really a gift to is not workers, but to capital. What tariffs do is decrease the amount of competitive threats that employers face from their rivals in other parts of the world.

Now that is a gift to the employers. There is a section of the Left that thinks if you somehow bring back manufacturing, that will mean you can unionize again. It does not. If you just look at these new workshops of the world, whether they’re in China or in parts of India or in parts of Latin America, where capital has flowed in the last twenty years to revive manufacturing over there or to build manufacturing, those are workshops from hell.

The working conditions there are worse than we’ve ever seen in manufacturing anywhere in the world. Worse than the nineteenth-century manufacturing that you saw in England and Germany. Manufacturing does not mean the revival of trade unions. Organizing means the revival of trade unions, and the fact of the matter is the corporate class has learned from the last eighty years how to immunize itself from organizing efforts within manufacturing as well. They’re about four, five decades ahead of the Left, which still lives in this fantasy world of 1930s and ’40s, where if you could just have manufacturing, you’ll repeat the histories of the ’30s and ’40s. You will not, because the forms of managerial power and control have evolved astronomically since that era.

We’re going to have to come up with entirely new organizing strategies, even in manufacturing. So even if the Trump tariffs bring back some degree of manufacturing to the US, which they probably will to some degree, it doesn’t mean it’s going to bring back trade unions. That depends on organizers learning the new landscape — not just in the services but also in manufacturing.

There’s no reason to assume that, in this new landscape, bringing back manufacturing raises the likelihood of trade unions and organizing trade unions. There’s simply no reason to believe that because the power, the managerial forms of control in manufacturing are completely different than what they were in the 1930s. We’re going have to reinvent what organizing means, which means then “the end of neoliberalism” internationally in the global regime should not be seen as a panacea or even as a gift to the Left or to workers per se. It is, in the first instance, a gift to capital.

We are still in the era of the unchallenged dominance of capital. The fact that it’s experimenting with new institutional forms should not delude us.

There are signs of a ruling class and a political establishment that’s very anxious. That’s worried about the fact that the tranquil waters of a pacified and dejected and cynical population can no longer be taken for granted. So they’re experimenting with new social institutions and economic institutions that might do two things: in some way quell all of the anger and the resentment within the population, but secondly, still preserve the basic power imbalance between the holders of wealth and the rest of the population.

And what we as leftists should not do is be confused by the fact that they’re using the rhetoric of anti-neoliberalism and the rhetoric of anti–free trade. We shouldn’t confuse that with the rhetoric of social empowerment. For that, it’s never going to come from on high. It’s never going to come from the right wing lifting the scales from its eyes and saying, “Well, now we want to be a party of the working class.”

That’s only going to come if working people and ordinary citizens impose on these power centers their own vision of what a more democratic society would look like, and insist that the institutions that they’re building be free of the control of the employers, free of the control of their corporate and political overlords, and be subject to their own dictates, their own democratic decision-making. None of that is on the agenda in all of this right-wing populism, even in the Democratic Party’s populism.

Because as I said earlier, the fight right now between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Democrats want a more multiracial, a more socially heterogeneous political class that rules over people, and the Republicans are happier with a whiter, more traditional political class that rules over people. Neither of these two parties is thinking about the bottom 80 percent of the population.

And until that happens, you might get a move away from what’s called neoliberalism, which is the rule of markets. But you won’t get a move away from class dominance of the wealthy and the elites over the population, because they can do it through a variety of different institutions, only one of which is free markets.