The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

On the hugely negative role of the fall of the Soviet Union on the West: When I was a freshman, my writing instructor (hilariously) was a Russian immigrant - which was actually something of a trend at my school in the late 90s... half my instructors were from Russia or Poland it seemed. Anyway, in casual comments one day he said that while he hated the Soviet system (especially as his family was not among the aristocratic party members) he still lamented that its fall would be bad for the West, and the US especially. His reasoning... without the Soviet "bogeyman" there would be infinitely less restraint on big corporations... 20 years later, I can't say he was wrong in his assessment.

I'm 71 yo. I lived through most of this. This is an excellent summary of events over the past 50 years. Of the damage done, I'll say that we did it to ourselves.

My god going through all this again (the video is at the 90’s) is so depressing. What a disaster the Clinton administration was, complete, abject surrender to the new plutocratic order…

When he implied that Clinton wasn't a neoliberal until after 1994 he lost me. Hasn't he heard of the Democratic Leadership Conference??

Interesting... but the constant emphasis on the political parties and their leaders being the architects of policy is obsurd. The RICH in the US control both parties, even during the "Roosevelt era". The reality of the evolution or "flow" of US political history was always a story of changing directives and ideas of the RICH in the US, and this is how your story should be told. Therefore, this story would more closely resemble reality with a complete inclusion of the names of the specific RICH people controlling it all, at each stage of policy, and their specific personal financial interests. For example, it's not a coincidance that every southern RICH person was pro-slavery before the civil war, context matters.

Gerstle is right on many topics, but on at least two he's mistaken. First, what the Soviet Union had was not Communism; it was simply top-down authoritarianism. When Marx & Engles wrote The Communist Manifesto, they were not advocating for a system that would have had any resemblance to what happened under Stalin, Kruschev, Breshnev, etc. They'd have been appalled by that development. Second, there's little evidence that the Neoliberal Order has fallen, or has even seriously "fractured." SOCIETY has fractured, but Neoliberalism remains intact. Gerstle provides no substantial evidence to support his claim. Globalism persists, along with the offshoring of American jobs (and the importation of low-wage foreign workers into America). Also persisting is the refusal of the Federal government to supply adequate funding to the states for healthcare, housing, public education, and other necessities. The three key pillars of Neoliberal policy remain in place: privatization of public assets; deregulation of banking & finance; and a deeply regressive tax policy which benefits the rich at the expense of common people. So the Neoliberal agenda, contrary to Gerstle's thesis, is alive and well.

Great and interesting summary of Neoliberalism's history, but I find the apologia for the modern Democratic presidents very strange. The situation we are in is their fault. They were some of the most powerful men in the world and chose not to fix any problems.

He may have thought Brexit would never happen but this amateur saw it coming along with many others in the nineties while I was living in Berlin and traveling to London .these are the same people that were Stalin apologists..they see the world differently from the ivory towers!!

This is obviously an interview that is over one year old. It is very important that you inform viewers when an interview is recorded.

I'm sick of people who won't call it what workers all know it to be! It is GREED OF PERSONAL PROFITS FOR THOSE THAT PRODUCE NOTHING REAL WHILE THEY SIT AT DESK AND THINK OF NEW WAYS TO TAKE FROM THOSE WHO ACTUALLY WORK FOR A LIVING!!!

This felt like too much Obama apologizing. He did have a mandate; he had every branch of government, he said he needed a movement to force his hand, and sure enough the occupy movement was there, and what did he do? Helped the mayors to bulldoze occupy, that's what he did. And he's been helping to stiff arm real change ever since. Ironic from Mr. hope and change.

You had me till' biden who is a neo=liberal through and through.

I see Prof. G Gerstle as someone who is pro neoliberalism in his economic viewpoint until recently and can write a book like this. This means the problem is serious, will the political elites in Washington do something I don't think so because the system is too entrenched and does not allow them to.

I was onboard with everything said, except when you praised Biden's so called "sensitivity" ... all you have to do is look at his record that shows exactly how little sensitivity he had towards the average American citizen (especially the black and brown). And we all know damn well that he is in mental decline... and being managed by whom exactly? Frankly it's time for many of these old east coast perpetrators with their many past crimes to dwindle into obscurity to make way for some much needed new blood. The neoliberal agenda has destroyed America, what more proof do you need?.

Loved this Loved how he’s Broken down the last century into two political orders - which isn’t new, but his insight - how opposition parties were co-opted against their Historical positions - for me this was new Illuminating

Its sad that anyone would think that all these politicians are not corrupt to the core. Follow the money helps expose all of them. We live in a system that is broken.

Too lenient on Obama and totally, outrageously wrong on Jim Crow Jo. Had to press 👎

Woo. Assuming Obama would have done better with a larger left base is comical. Black Reagan wasn't gonna help anyone but his Havard buddies. Sure, race is an issue, but you can buy privilege nowadays.

What's missing from this rather superficial account of the history of economic policy since the 1970s is class anlysis and the role and necessity, of working class agency in achieving the policy change called the New Deal and the all too brief Keynesian interregnum between the domination of liberal economics prior to the Wall Street Crash and the re-imposition of liberal economics after cerca 1974, which is called neo-liberalism because it was the return to the liberal status quo ante. You could imagine from this account that economic policy changes are just the result of elections and the intellectual success of one set of ideas or another so that "policy-makers" decide upon a change merely because a new idea has "won the argument" at academic level. Nothing could be further from the truth. The New Deal was the achievement of the American working class, resulting not just from a wave of unionization over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, but as the delayed result of union organising and the steady spreading of socialist politics beginning in the 1880s with the American People's Party, and the more recent influence of the Russian Revolution. In western Europe the historical preparation for the postwar Keynesian concensus, or the "trentes gloriouse" is more obvious, in that it was the outcome of over a century of steady development of unions and socialist politics which had first triggered the Russian revolution, but outside of the countries which succumbed to fascism, had not been halted and dimantled by a red scare campaign like that launched in the US as part of the manufacturing of consent for the US to join WW1. The organised working class and its political vehicles across western Europe were able to force such a change of economic policies because they had attained the polotical and social strength with which to make rev0olutions if that change did not happen, to win elections and not have them overtturned by coups, as is the norm. Further, due to victory of the Red Army over the Wehrmacht, the bourgeoisie's first choice of response to socialist electoral victories and union strength, which is fascism, had been discredited and destroyed for a generation or two. So policy changes from liberal economics to Keynesianism and back don't just happen because this election or that politicians orr the persuasive genuis of the ideas in themselves. They did not come about for those reasons, and they will not in the future, which is why neoliberalism stilill rules despite its intellectually crtedibility havng been long since destroyed. The neoliberal counter-revolution took place in the mid 1970s, with the end of Breton Woods, and the rightwingers in the Labour party taking an IMF loan with its requirements ofr public spending cuts and the first privatisations. While Keynesianism got maybe 30 years in Britain and France, and maybe 43 years or so in the USA, neoliberalism has been allowed to run for 48 years and counting. This isn't just a generational thing or a battle of ideas thing. This is class power in action. If we want to see a major change in economic polices away from neoliberalism and toward reditribution of wealth downwards and a properly regulated, green economy there is no relying on the lies of Robert Reich or Mark Blythe and their intellectual calibre to deliver it for us, because the jkey decisionmakers are not open to persuasion. They are serving their class interests and their businesses, and it is those which have to be destroyed to get them out of the way. Which at this pint requires not an electoral revolution, but an actual revolution, since the oligarchic power of corporations and Wall Street and plutocrats is such that change through the electoral system has been rendered impossible.

The problem in the 70s wasn't the competition in manufacturing. The greed of the capitalists who offshored manufacturing to China & elsewhere so they could rake in more profits, avoid laws & have slaves instead of workers was the problem. And those things are not the same.