Trump’s Rollback of the Neoliberal Market State

John Robb:

Trump is rolling back neoliberalism and everything connected to it.

To understand what this means, here’s a narrative of Trump’s insurgency. It explains what he is doing and what he is likely to do. It starts with the rise of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an ideology of extreme free market capitalism that was popularized by Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet. By the end of the cold war in the 90’s, it became the default economic ideology of the United States when both the Republicans and the Democrats adopted it. Neoliberalism improved the world. Unfettered access to US markets (the most valuable in the world) led to twenty plus years of rapid economic globalization that lifted billions of people out of poverty and made many countries rich. However, neoliberalism came at a cost to the US. Worse, it destroyed the only engine of prosperity and political stability in the US, the US middle class. It did this through: