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Title details for The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle - Available

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle
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The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left. The epochal shift toward neoliberalism—a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces—that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world. Today, the word "neoliberal" is often used to condemn a broad swath of policies, from prizing free market principles over people to advancing privatization programs in developing nations around the world. To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades. As he shows, the neoliberal order that emerged in America in the 1970s fused ideas of deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all. Along with tracing how this worldview emerged in America and grew to dominate the world, Gerstle explores the previously unrecognized extent to which its triumph was facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist allies. He is also the first to chart the story of the neoliberal order's fall, originating in the failed reconstruction of Iraq and Great Recession of the Bush years and culminating in the rise of Trump and a reinvigorated Bernie Sanders-led American left in the 2010s. An indispensable and sweeping re-interpretation of the last fifty years, this book illuminates how the ideology of neoliberalism became so infused in the daily life of an era, while probing what remains of that ideology and its political programs as America enters an uncertain future.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 1, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780197519660

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780197519660
      • File size: 1605 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      February 1, 2022
      A survey of the profound political changes that have marked the last 50 years. Historian Gerstle connects the current state of American politics--characterized by a rise of enthnonationalism and populism, distrust of open borders and free trade, and disillusion with democracy itself--with the fall of neoliberalism, which had prevailed from the 1970s through the 1990s. He traces the germs of neoliberalism to the 18th century, when classical liberalism promised "new forms of government, new ways of organizing the economy, and new possibilities for cultivating the self." In the 1920s and '30s, liberalism, often conflated with progressivism, shaped Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, whose "broad commitment to the public good" included government oversight of capitalism to control the dangerous market forces that led to the Great Depression. In the 1950s, however, what appeared to be an "organized and bureaucratized society" was assailed as "suffocating the human spirit," a feeling that became exacerbated in the next decade. The oil crisis and recession of the 1970s opened the door to Ronald Reagan, the "ideological architect" of neoliberalism. Reagan melded a policy of deregulation, open borders, and globalization with a revival of neo-Victorian values of order, discipline, strong families, and self-reliance. "Many of the principals in the story of neoliberalism's rise," Gerstle notes, came to identify themselves as conservatives. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a push to foster the "capitalist penetration" of new markets in parts of the world that emerged from communist rule further fueled the tenets of neoliberalism--and positioned Bill Clinton as its "key facilitator." Gerstle sees failing economic and political policies under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as the recession of 2008, as giving rise to the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter: protests from left and right that laid the groundwork for Donald Trump. Acknowledging that neoliberalism is broken, Gerstle sees the nation's prevailing disorder and dysfunction auguring both "great possibility" and "great peril." A cogent, erudite historical analysis.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
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  • EPUB ebook

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  • English

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