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On the end of the (very) long 1960s. [For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast] Contributing Editor Lee Jones joins Alex and George to talk through the themes and stories of the month, including MAGA's war on universities, right-populists in power, and culture war. Plus we deal with your questions and comments on: lawfare, video games, and the 'new class'. What is TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out)? How should we respond to rightist attempts to rewrite the past? Why are Angela Merkel and Donald Trump representative of the age, in similar and different ways? Are people sick of subversion and just want order? What happens as the Boomers leave public life? Can we bracket 1960-2020? When should we throw the book at politicians? Links: Trump's Tariff Gamble and the Decay of the Neoliberal Order, Lee Jones, American Affairs The Techno-Populist Convergence, Alex Hochuli, Compact How Labor won the preference war (and screwed the Greens), Financial Review Saving Britain's Universities: Academic Freedom, Democracy and Renewal, Lee Jones and Philip Cunliffe, Cieo
Journalist David Sirota explains the political implications of Trump's tariffs in the U.S. and their potential effects on Wall Street vs. Main Street. Plus: did Biden's CBP fabricate documents in order to help Brazil imprison a Bolsonaro advisor? Finally: new polls reveal declining support for Israel while DHS unveils a program to search immigrants' social media for "antisemitic" content. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of The Beautiful Idea, we present an interview with author Jamie Merchant, author of Engame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline and numerous articles at The Brooklyn Rail. Merchant argues that we have entered a post-neoliberal age, with both Trump and Biden abandoning many of the touch-stones of corporate globalization that defined the... Read Full Article
On this week's episode, Jim sits down with Gary Gerstle, author, professor, and historian with a focus on “Political Orders.” His most recent book, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” came out in 2022, and explores the larger trends in political thinking which make up a consensus, oftentimes a consensus we take for granted. Their conversation covers classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and… where we are right now. You don't want to miss this clarifying discussion.
This episode, originally published in June 2024 only for subscribers, is crucial backdrop to this Sunday's (23 Feb 2025) snap elections in Germany. For more like this, join us at patreon.com/bungacast On German political derangement. Independent researcher and writer Gregor Baszak joins us to talk about German centrism being squeezed under pressure from both left and right — Sahra Wagenknecht and the AFD. Meanwhile the German economy is getting squeezed between the US and Russia, and NATO pressures Germany to up its defence spending. Is German public life remilitarising? What are the prospects for Sahra Wagenknecht's new ‘left-conservative' politics? What was the original political vision behind the Nordstream 2 pipeline? Why are Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni trying to carve the AFD out of pan-European national-populist cooperation? Where does Germany now stand in relation to the Ukraine War? Links: Europe After America, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative What's the Matter With Germany?, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD For many, Sahra Wagenknecht is a tribune of the people, Gregor Baszak, UnHerd
Air Date 1/21/2025 Decades ago, the conscious decision was made to exacerbate inequality for the sake of economic growth that would supposedly lift all boats. What probably wasn't understood at the time is that the logical conclusion of that choice would be to break democracy and usher in oligarchy. Now working people are left with only bad choices and empty promises. Be part of the show! Leave us a message or text at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Full Show Notes | Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use our links to shop Bookshop.org and Libro.fm for a non-evil book and audiobook purchasing experience! Join our Discord community! KEY POINTS KP 1: Workers Without a Party - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 12-11-24 KP 2: Democrats Bungled The 2024 Election WAY Worse Than We Thought - The Majority Report - Air Date 1-8-25 KP 3: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (with Gary Gerstle) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 1-14-25 KP 4: How Democrats Can Win Back The Working Class - Lever Time - Air Date 11-8-24 KP 5: Why Elites Love Identity Politics - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 1-1-25 KP 6: The failures of liberals and the Left have helped Trump's rise - The Marc Steiner Show - Air Date 10-30-24 KP 7: Democratic Dealignment w Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - The Dig - Air Date 11-9-24 KP 8: Why Elites Love Identity Politics Part 2 - Confronting Capitalism - Air Date 1-1-25 (54:01) NOTE FROM THE EDITOR On the path Democrats have charted DEEPER DIVES (1:02:38) SECTION A: PARTY RECKONING (1:23:40) SECTION B: NEOLIBERAL STRANGLEHOLD (1:39:24) SECTION C: CROSSED WIRES (2:08:27) SECTION D: SOLUTIONS SHOW IMAGE Description: Composite image of multi-colored people outlines crossing over each other with arrows in the background pointing two different directions. Credit: Composite design by A. Hoffman, Images from Pixabay | License: Pixabay Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Listen Anywhere!
This week, Nick and Goldy sit down with historian Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, for an in-depth exploration of neoliberalism—its origins, dominance, and decline. Their conversation examines the shifting political landscape shaped by recent presidential administrations, including the Biden administration's efforts to promote a more equitable “middle-out” economic framework. With a focus on historical context and the enduring power of neoliberal institutions, this episode offers a compelling analysis of the pathways to a new economic order and the critical role of innovative thinking in navigating today's economic challenges. Gary Gerstle is an author, historian, and scholar of American political and economic history. He is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a Professor Emeritus of History at Vanderbilt University. Social Media: @glgerstle Further reading: 1984 Super Bowl APPLE MACINTOSH Ad The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Substack: The Pitch
In case you missed it: in 2023 Hugh spoke to American historian Gary Gerstle about his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. Neoliberalism means different things to different people. As a set of economic policies it is mainly associated with reducing state intervention in commerce and society. In the course of its late 20th century heyday, neoliberalism transformed the world - for better or worse. But now its dominance is challenged by different models, such as the authoritarian capitalism of China. In his book Gary looks at how neoliberalism took hold, how it shaped society in the United States and beyond, and what its decline means. Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism.Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books. He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPT“It's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world.” -Gary GerstleAK: Hello everybody. As we try to make sense of the aftermath of the US election this week, there was an interesting headline today in the Financial Times. Donald Trump apparently has asked, and I'm quoting the F.T. here, the arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer, to run U.S. trade policy. You never know with Trump, he may change his mind tomorrow. But nonetheless, it suggests, and it's not a great surprise, that protectionism will define the Trump, presidency or certainly the second Trump presidency. And it speaks of the structural shift in the nature of politics and economics in the United States, particularly given this Trump victory. One man who got this, I think before anyone else, is the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle. He's been on the show a couple of times before. He's the author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It's a profound book. It's had an enormous impact on everybody. And I'm thrilled and honored that Gary is back on the show. This is the third time he's been on the show. Gary, is that important news? Have we formally come to the end now of the neoliberal order? GARY GERSTLE: I think we have, although there's an element of neoliberalism which may revive in the Trump administration. But if we think of a political order as ordering political life so that all participants in that order have to accept its ideological principles, we have moved out of that order. I think we've been out of it for some time. The critical election in this case was 2016, and the critical move that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made in 2016, the two most dynamic presidential candidates in that year, was to break with the orthodoxy of free markets, the orthodoxy of globalization, the orthodoxy of a world without borders where everything was free to move and the market was supreme. And the only role of government in the state was to ensure as full access to markets as was possible in the belief that if governments got out of the way of a private capitalist economy, this would spur the greatest growth for the greatest number of people everywhere in the world. This was governing orthodoxy, really from the time of Reagan until 2016. Trump broke it. Sanders broke it. Very significant in this regard that when Biden came into office, he moderated some of the Trump tariffs but kept the tariffs on China substantially in place. So there's been continuity for some time, and now we're going to see an intensification of the protectionist regime. Protectionism used to be a dirty word in American politics. If you uttered that word, you were excluded from serious political discourse. There will be other terms that are used, fair trade, not just because protectionism has a negative connotation to it, but we are living in an era where governments assert the right to shape markets as they wish to in the interests of their nation. So, yes, we are living in a different era, although it must be said, and we may get into a discussion of this at some point, there are sectors of the Trump coalition that want to intensify deregulation in the domestic market, that want to rollback government. And so I expect in the new Trump administration, there is going to be tussles between the protectionists on the one hand and those who want to, at least domestically, restore free trade. And by that I mean the free operation of private capital without government regulation. That's an issue that bears watching.AK: Is that a contradiction though, Gary? Can one, in this post-neoliberal order, can governments be hostile to regulation, a la Elon Musk and his association with Trump, and also be in favor of tariffs? I mean, do the two—can the to go together, and is that the outline of this foggy new order coming into place in the second quarter of the 21st century?GARY GERSTLE: They can go together in the sense that they have historically in the past gone together in the United States. In the late 19th century, the US had very high tariffs against foreign goods. And domestically, it was trying to create as free a domestic market as possible. What was known as the period of laissez-faire domestically went along with a commitment to high tariffs and protection of American laissez-faire against what we might call global laissez-faire. So it has been tried. It did work at that time. But I think the Republican party and the constituencies behind Donald Trump are divided on this question. As you noted, Elon Musk represents one pole of this. He certainly wants protection against Chinese imports of electric cars and is probably going to get that because of all the assistance he gave Trump in this election. But domestically, he wants no government interfering with his right to conduct his capitalist enterprises as he sees fit. So that's going to be one wing. But there's another wing of the Republican Party under Trump that is much more serious about industrial policy that says we cannot leave the market to its own devices. It produces too many human casualties. It produces too many regions of America left behind, and that we must use the government to help those people left behind. We must structure free enterprise industry in a way that helps the ordinary working-class man. And I use the word “man” deliberately in this context. Interestingly, JD Vance, the vice president, embodies both these tendencies, sees, on the one hand, a creature of venture capital, Silicon Valley, close to the Musks and Peter Thiels of the world. On the other hand, he has talked explicitly, as in his vice-presidential acceptance speech, about putting Main Street over Wall Street. And if he's serious about putting Main Street over Wall Street, that's going to involve a lot of government intervention to displace the privileged position that finance and venture capital now has in the American economy.AK: Gary, you're a historian, one of the best around, you're deeply versed in the past, you bring up Vance. He presents himself as being original, even has a beard. But I wonder whether his—I don't know what you would call it—a Catholic or Christian socialism, or at least a concern with the working class. Is it in any way new, for you, historically? I mean, it certainly exists in Europe, and there must be analogies also in American history with him.GARY GERSTLE: Well, if he is a convert to Catholicism, I don't know how well-versed he is in the papal doctrines of years past. Or decades. Or even centuries passed. But there was a serious movement within the Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th century to humanize capitalism, to declare that free market capitalism produced too many human casualties. Too many ordinary Catholic workers and workers who are not Catholic were hurt by unemployment, poverty, being thrown out of work in the troughs of business cycles, having no social welfare to fall back on, as a result of injury or misfortune in life. And so there was a profound movement within Catholic churches, in the United States, and in Europe and other parts of the world as well, to humanize capitalism. Whether this very once important Catholic tradition is an active influence on Vance, I don't know, because he's a recent convert to Catholicism, and I don't know how deeply has imbibed its history or its doctrine. But there is a rich tradition there. And it's possible that this is one of the sources that he is drawing on to shape his contemporary politics.AK: We were talking before we ran live, Gary, I said to you, and I think you agreed, that this use of the word "fascism" to describe Trump isn't always particularly helpful. It reflects a general hysteria amongst progressives. But I wonder in this context, given the way in which European Catholicism flirted, sometimes quite openly, with fascism, whether the F-word actually makes a little more sense. Because after all, fascism, after the First World War, was a movement in the name of the people, which was very critical of the capitalism of that age and of the international market. So, when we use the word fascism now, could it have some value in that context as a kind of a socioeconomic critique of capitalism?GARY GERSTLE: You mean fascism offering a socioeconomic critique of U.S. capitalism?AK: Yes. For better or worse.GARY GERSTLE: I'm reluctant to deploy the term fascism, since I think most people who enter the conversation or who hear that word in the United States don't really know what it means, and that's partly the consequence of historians debating its meaning as long as they have, and also suggesting that fascism takes different forms at different times and in different places. I prefer the term authoritarianism. I think that tendency is clearly there and one can connect that to certain traditions within the church. The United States once had a intense anti-Catholic political tradition. It was unimaginable in the 19th century. AK: Yeah, it drove the KKK. I mean, that was the Klan hated the Catholics probably more than they hated the Jews.GARY GERSTLE: It drove the Klan. And the notion in the 19th century—I'm not remembering now whether there are 5 or 6 Catholics who sit on the Supreme Court—but the notion in the 19th century that 5 or 6 Catholics would be the chief custodians and interpreters of America's most sacred doctrine and document the Constitution was simply unthinkable. It could never have happened. There was a Catholic seat. As for a long time, there was a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, but understood that this would be carefully cordoned off and limited and that, when push came to shove, Protestants had to be in charge of interpreting America's most sacred doctrine. And the charge against Catholics was that they were not democratic, that they vested ultimate power in God and through an honest messenger on Earth, who was the pope. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became the first Catholic president of the United States. Biden is only the second. Vance is the first Catholic vice president. Before in the campaign that Kennedy was running in 1960, he had to go in front of thousands of Protestant ministers who had gathered in Houston so he could persuade them that if he became president, he would not be handing America over to the pope, who was seen as an authoritarian figure. So for a long time, Catholicism was seen as a carrier of authoritarianism, of a kind of executive power that should not be limited by a human or secular force. And this promoted, in the United States, intense anti-Catholic feeling, which took the country probably 200 years to conquer. Conquered it was, so the issue of so many Catholics on the Supreme Court is not an issue. Biden's Catholicism is not an issue. Vance's Catholicism is not an issue. But Vance himself has said, talking about his conversion, that of his granny—I forget the term he uses to describe his granny—were alive today, she would not be able to accept his conversion because she was so deeply Protestant, so evangelical, so—AK: A classic West Virginian evangelical. So for me, the other contradiction here is that Vance is unashamedly nationalist, unashamedly critical of globalization. And yet, by embracing Catholicism, which is the most international of face, I don't quite understand what that suggests about him, or Catholicism, or even history, that that these odd things happen.GARY GERSTLE: Well, one thing one can say in history is that odd things happen and odd couples get together. I don't know myself how fully Vance understands his Catholicism. I believe Peter Thiel led him to this. Vance is still a young man and has gone through a lot of conversions for a young man. He was—AK: Well, he's a conversion expert. That's the narrative of his life, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Yes. Yes. And he began as being a severe anti-Trumper, almost a Never-Trumper. Then he converted to Trumpism. Then he converted from Protestant to Catholicism. So a lot of major changes in his life. So, the question you just posed is a fascinating one. Does he understand that the church is a catholic church, meaning small c catholic in this case, that it's open to everyone in the world? Does he really understand that? But I would extend my puzzle about religion beyond Catholicism to ask, for all the evangelical supporters of Trump: where is Jesus's message of peace and love? Where did that go? So there are puzzles about the shape of Christian religion in America. And there's no doubt that for its most devout supporters in the United States that has taken a very hard nationalist turn. And this is true among Protestants, and it is true among many Catholics. And so, I think the question that you posed may be one that no one has really confronted Vance with.“What we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine.” -Gary GerstleAK: And I would extend that, Gary. I think that the most persistent and credible critics of Trump also come from the religious community. Peter Wehner, for example, former—I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He writes a lot for the Times and The Atlantic. Very religious man, is horrified—worked in the Bush and the Reagan administrations. Let's go back to—I was looking at the cover of the book, and obviously authors don't pick the covers of their books—GARY GERSTLE: I did. I picked this.AK: Okay. Well, when you look at the—GARY GERSTLE: This is this is not the original cover.AK: Right, so, the book I'm looking at, and for people just listening, I'm going to describe. The dominant picture is of the Berlin Wall being knocked down in the evening of November 1989. It's odd, Gary, isn't it, that...for the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, which is an economic order in a free market era, you should have chosen the image of a political event, which, of course, Fukuyama so famously described as the end of history. And I guess, for you as an economic historian who is also deeply interested and aware of politics, is the challenge and opportunity to always try to disentangle the economics and politics of all this? Or are they so entangled that they're actually impossible to disentangle, to separate?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think sometimes you need to disentangle them, sometimes they move in different directions, and sometimes they move in the same direction. I think to understand the triumph of the neoliberal order, we have to see that politics and economics move in tandem with each other. What makes possible the neoliberal triumph of the 90s is the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. And no picture embodies that better than the taking down of the Berlin Wall. And that connotes a message of freedom and escape from Soviet and communist tyranny. But the other message there is that tearing down of those walls opens the world to capitalist penetration to a degree that had not been available to the capitalist world since prior to World War One, prior to the war, and most importantly, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And where communists came to power everywhere, they either completely excluded or sharply curtailed the ability of capitalist business to operate within their borders. Their message was expropriate private property, which meant expropriate all corporate property. Give it over to the state, let the state manage it in the interest of the proletariat. This was an extraordinary dream that turned into an awful tyrannical outcome. But it animated the world, as few other ideas did in the 20th century, and proposed a very, very serious challenge to capitalist prerogative, to capitalist industry, to free markets. And so the collapse of communism, which is both the collapse of a state—a communist state, the Soviet Union—but perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the belief that any governments could structure the private economy in ways that would be beneficial to humankind. It's what opened the way in the 1990s to the neoliberal triumph. And it's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world. And in the long term—we're in the mid-term—that was going to create inequalities, vulnerabilities to the global financial and economic systems, that were going to bring the global economy down and set off a radically different form of politics than the world had seen for some time. And we're still living through that radically different form of politics set off by the financial crash of 2008/2009, which, in my way of thinking, was a product of untrammeled capitalism conquering the world in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's and communism's collapse.AK: Yeah, and that's the other thing, isn't it, Garry? I mean, it goes without saying that the bringing down of the war fundamentally changed the old Soviet economy, the East European economies, Poland, Hungary, eastern part of Germany. But what no one—I think very, very few people imagined in '89 was that perhaps the biggest consequence of this capitalist penetration wasn't in Warsaw or Moscow or the eastern part of Berlin, but back in West Virginia with guys like JD Vance. How did the bringing down of the wall change America, or at least the American economy? I've never really quite understood that.GARY GERSTLE: Through the mass exporting of manufacturing to other countries that—AK: Wasn't that before? Wasn't that also taking place before '89, or did it happen particularly in the '90s?GARY GERSTLE: It began before 1989. It began during the Great Recession of the 1970s, where the first districts of manufacturing in the U.S., places like Buffalo, New York steelmaking center, began to get hollowed out. But it dramatically intensified in the 1990s, and this had to do with China permitting itself to be a part of this global free market. And China was opened to capitalist penetration from the United States and Europe. And what you saw in that decade was a massive shift of manufacturing to China, a shift that even intensified in the first decade of the 21st century with the admission of China in 2001 to the World Trade Organization. So China was a big factor. Also, the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rendered the northern half of the Western Hemisphere one common market, like the European Common Market. So, enormous flight of jobs to places like Mexico. And the labor costs in places like China and Mexico, and then East Asia already leaving Japan for Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, parts of the South Asian subcontinent. The flight of jobs there became so massive, and the labor costs there were so cheap, that American industry couldn't compete. And what you begin to see is the hollowing out of American industry, American manufacturing, and whole districts of America just beginning to rot. And no new industries or no new economies taking the place of the industries and the jobs that had left. And this America was being ignored, largely in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, in part because the ideology of neoliberalism said, we understand that this global free market is going to increase inequality in the world, it's going to increase the distance between rich and poor, but the distance between rich and poor is okay because all boats will rise. All people will benefit. This is not just an American story, this is also the story of other parts of the North Atlantic economy. Britain certainly, Germany was a partial exception, France, other places, and this was the ideology...growth would benefit everyone, and this was not the case. It was a fallacy. But the ideology was so strong that it held together until the financial crash of 2008/2009. After that crash, it became impossible to make the point that all boats were rising under the neoliberal regime. And this is when the forgotten Americans and the forgotten Brits of the northern part of the of Great Britain. This is when they began to make their voices heard. This is when they began to strike a very different note in politics. And this is where Donald Trump had his beginnings with these forgotten, angry people who felt ignored, left behind, and were suffering greatly, because by the early decades of the 21st century, it wasn't just jobs that were gone, but it was healthy marital life, divorce rates rising, rampant drug use. Two Cambridge economists wrote a book called Depths of Despair.AK: Yeah, that book comes up in almost every conversation. I once went down to Princeton to interview Angus Deaton. Like your book, it's become a classic. So let's fast forward, Gary, to the last election. I know you're writing a book now about politics in our time of authoritarianism, and you're scratching your head and asking whether the election last week was a normal or an apocryphal one, one that's just different or historical. And I wonder, in that sense, correct me if I'm wrong, there seems to have been two elections simultaneously. On the one hand, it was very normal, from the Democrats' point of view, who treated America as if it was normal. Harris behaves as if she was just another Democratic candidate. And, of course, Trump, who didn't. My interpretation, maybe it's a bit unfair, is that it's the progressives. It's certainly the coastal elites who have become, implicitly at least, the defenders of the old neoliberal order. For them, it kind of works. It's not ideal, but it works and they can't imagine anything else. And it's the conservatives who have attacked it, the so-called conservatives. Is there any truth to that in the last election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think the Democrats are certainly seen by vast sectors of the population as being the defenders of an old order, of established institutions controlling the media, although I think that's less and less true because the legacy media has less and less influence and shows like yours, podcasting and rogue Fox Television and all kinds of other outlets, are increasingly influential. But yes, the Democrats are seen as a party of the establishment. They are seen as the party of the educated elite. And one of the factors that determines who votes for who now is now deeply educational in the sense of, what is your level of educational achievement? If you are college educated, you're much more likely to vote Democratic, regardless of your income. And if you're high school educated or less, you're much more likely to vote Republican. I don't think it's fair to say that the Democrats are the last protectors of the neoliberal order, because Biden broke with the neoliberal order in major, consequential ways. If the defining characteristic of the neoliberal order is to free the market from constraints and to use the state only to free up market forces—this was true, to a large extent, of Obama and of Clinton—Biden broke with that, and he did it in alliance with Bernie Sanders, set of task forces they set up in 2020 to design a new administration. And his major pieces of legislation, reshoring CHIPS manufacture, the biggest investment in clean energy in the country's history. $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the biggest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system of the '50s, and arguably since Roosevelt's fabled New Deal. These are all about industrial policy. These are all about the government using its power and resources to direct industry in a certain way so that it will increase general happiness, general welfare, general employment. So this represents a profound change from what had come before. And in that way, the Biden administration can't be seen as the last defenders.“The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims?”AK: And let me jump in here, Gary, there's another really important question. There was a very interesting piece, I'm sure you saw it, by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker about Bidenomics and its achievements. You talked about the New Deal, the massive amount of investments—it was post COVID, they took advantage of the historical crisis. Trillions of dollars have been invested in new technologies. Is Bidenomics new in any way? Or is it basically just a return to the economics, or the political economy, of FDR?GARY GERSTLE: Well, it certainly draws inspiration from FDR, because at the core of the New Deal was the conviction that you could use government to direct industry to positive uses that would benefit not just the corporations, but the population as a whole. But there was nothing like the Green Energy Project in the New Deal. The New Deal, except for hydroelectric projects, was primarily about prospering on a cheap fossil fuel economy. The New Deal also was very comfortable with accepting prevailing gender and race conceptions of the proper place of women and African Americans in American life in a way that is unacceptable to Bidenomics. So there are redirections under Bidenomics in ways that modify the New Deal inspiration. But at its core, Bidenomics is modeled on the New Deal conviction that you need a strong federal government to point industry in the right direction. And so in that sense, there's a fundamental similarity in those two progressive projects. And I think people in the Biden administration have been quite conscious about that. Now, the particular challenges are different. The world economy is different. The climate crisis is upon us. So, it is going to take different forms, have different outcomes. But the inspiration clearly comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.AK: Well, let's go over to the other side and Trump. You scratching your head and figuring out whether this is unusual. And of course, it's the second time he's won an election. This time around, he seems to be overtly hostile to the state. He's associated with Musk, who's promised to essentially decimate the state. In historical terms, Gary, is there anything unusual about this? I mean, certainly the opponents of FDR were also very hostile to this emergent American state. As a historian, do you see this as something new, the pleasure in essentially blowing the state up, or at least the promise of blowing the state up?GARY GERSTLE: That impulse is not new. There have been members of the Republican party who have been talking this language since the New Deal arrived in America in the 1930s and '40s during the '50s and '60s and early '70s, they were marginal in American politics. And then with the neoliberal order coming into being in the '70s and with Reagan as president, their voice has gained enormous traction. One of Reagan's key advisors in the 1980s and 1990s, one of his favorite lines was, “I want to shrink the size of the federal government until we can drown it in the bathtub.” It's a wonderful image and metaphor, and captures the intensity with which conservative Republicans have wanted to eliminate the strong centralized state. But they have not been able to do it to a degree that makes that have satisfied them. It turns out that Americans, for all their possible ideological opposition to big government like big parts of it, like Social Security, like Medicare, like a strong military establishment that's gonna protect the country, like clean air, clean water. So it's proved much more difficult for this edifice to be taken down than the Reaganites had imagined it would be. So, the advocates have become more radical because of decades of frustration. And what we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine, as the abortion issue signifies. What they have in mind is corporate freedom. The freedom of Elon Musk's companies to do whatever they want to do. The freedom of the social media companies to do whatever they want to do. The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims? Peter Thiel has said, very forthrightly, that democracy no longer works as a system, and that America has to consider other systems in order to have the kind of prosperity and freedom it wants. And one thing that bears watching with this new Trump administration is how many supporters the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk's are going to have to be free to tear down the edifice and the institutions of the federal government and pursuit of a goal of a reconfigured, and what I would call rogue, laissez-faire. This is something to watch.AK: But Gary, I take your point. I mean, Thiel's been, on the West Coast, always been a convenient punchbag for the left for years now, I punched him many times myself. I wanted to. But all this seems to be just the wet dream of neoliberals. So you have Musk and Thiel doing away with government. Huge corporations, no laws. This is the neoliberal wet dream, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Well, partly it is. But neoliberalism always depended on a structure of law enforced by government that was necessary to allow free markets to operate in a truly free and transparent manner. In other words, you needed elements of a strong government to perfect markets, that markets were not perfect if they were left to their own devices. And one of the dangers of the Elon Musk phase of the Trump administration is that this edifice of law on which corporations and capitalism thrives will be damaged in the pursuit of a radical libertarianism. Now, there may very well be a sense that cooler heads prevail in the Trump administration, and that this scenario will not come to fruition. But one certainly has to be aware that this is one of the possible outcomes of a Trump administration. I should also say that there's another very important constituency in the Republican party that wants to continue, not dismantle, what Biden has done with industrial policies. This is the other half of JD Vance's brain. This is Tom Cotton. This is Marco Rubio, this is Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri. And they want to actively use the government to regulate industry in the public interest. And there's a very interesting intellectual convergence going on between left of center and right of center intellectuals and policymakers who are converging on the importance of having an industrial policy, because if Elon Musk is given his way, how is the abandoned heartland going to come back?AK: It's cheering me up, Gary, because what you're suggesting is that this is a fairly normal moment. You've got different wings of the Republican Party. You've got the Cottons and the Rubios, who were certainly not revolutionary. Why should we believe that this is a special moment then?GARY GERSTLE: January 6th, 2021. That's the reason. Trump remains the only president in American history to authorize an attack on the very seat of American democracy. That being: Congress sitting in the Capitol. And once he authorized the attack, he waited for three hours hoping that his attackers and his mob would conquer this building and compel the legislators inside to do—AK: And I take your perspective. I'm the last person to defend that. But we're talking about 2024 and not 2021. He won the election fairly. No one's debating that. So, why is 2024 a special election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, here's the key. Well, maybe it's a special election in two ways. It may signify the reconfiguration of a genuinely populist Republican party around the needs of ordinary working-class Americans. And we should say, in this regard, that Trump has brought into his coalition significant numbers of Latinos, young blacks. It has the beginning of a look of a multiracial coalition that the Democrats once had, but now appear to be losing. So it may be an epochal moment in that regard. The other way in which it may be an epochal moment is: what if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way? That's how January 6th, 2021, still matters. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but I think we have to understand that that is a possibility, especially since he has shown no remorse for the outcome of the last election. If I read into your comments, I hear you saying: he won this time. He doesn't have to worry about losing. But Trump is always worried about losing. And he is a man who doesn't really know the Constitution, and the parts that he knows and understands he doesn't especially like, because his dream, along with Elon Musk's dream, and this is one reason why I think they are melding so tightly, at the apex of American government should be unbounded executive power. This is not how the country was set up. And as Congress and as the courts begin to push back, will he accept those limits, that there must be bounds on executive power? Or will he try and break through them? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's something that we have to be concerned about.AK: I wonder, again, wearing your historical cap you're always doing, the more you talk, the more Trump and Trump's Republican party is Nixonian. This obsession with not being responsible for the law. The broadening of the Republican party. Certainly the Republican party under Nixon was less singularly white than it became later. Isn't, in some ways, Trump just a return to Nixon? And secondly, you're talking about the law and Trump ransacking the law. But on the other hand, everything he always does is always backed up by the law. So, he has a love hate relationship with the law himself. He could never have accomplished anything he's done without hiring all these expensive lawyers. I don't know if you saw the movie this year, The Apprentice, which is built on his relationship with what's with Roy Cohn, of course, who schooled him in American politics, who was McCarthy's lawyer. So, again, I'm not trying to defend Trump, but my point is: what's different here?GARY GERSTLE: Well, a key difference from Nixon is that when push came to shove, Nixon submitted to the rule of law, and Trump did not. Nixon did not unleash his people on Congress when a group of senators came to him and said you're going to be impeached if you stay in office, you should resign. He resigned. So the '70s was a moment of enormous assertion of the power of Congress, and assertion of the power and authority of the Constitution. That is not the story of Donald Trump. The story of Donald Trump is the story of the Constitution being pushed to the side. If you ask, is there anything new about Americans and politicians trying to manipulate the law in their favor? There's nothing new about that. And Trump, having made his fortune in New York real estate, knows there's no such thing as perfect markets, knows that judges can be bought and corrupted. And so, he has very little regard for the authority of courts. Everything's a transaction. Everything can be bought and sold. So, he understands that, and he has used the law to his advantage when he can. But let me bring you back to his first inauguration speech. There was no mention of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in what he had to say that day. I think we'd be hard pressed to find another inaugural speech that makes no reference to the sacred documents having to do with the founding of the American Republic. And so I think in that way, he is something new and represents, potentially, a different kind of threat. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. And let me add one other element that we have to consider, because I'm suggesting that he has a fondness for forms of authoritarian rule, and we have to recognize that hard rights are on the march everywhere in the world right now. The social democratic government of Germany has just fallen. Britain may soon be alone in terms of having a left-center party in control and upholding the values of liberal democracy. The world is in a grip of an authoritarian surge. That is not an American phenomenon. It is an international phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon I understand well enough, but if we're to understand the kind of strongman tendencies that Trump is exhibiting, the appeal of the strongman tendencies to so many Americans, we have to understand the international context in which this is occurring. And these movements in these different countries are fully aware of each other. They draw strength from each other's victories, and they get despairing from each other's defeats. So this is an international movement and an international project, and it's important, in that regard, to set Trump in that historical context.AK: Final question, Gary, there's so much here, we'll have to get you back on the show again in the new year. There's certainly, as you suggested, a great deal of vitality to conservatives, to the Cottons, the JD Vances, the Steve Bannons of the world. But what about on the left? We talked earlier, you sort of pushed back a little bit on the idea that the progressive elites aren't defenders of the neoliberal order, but you kind of acknowledged there may be a little bit of truth in that. In response to this new conservatism, which, as you suggested, is in some ways quite old, what can and should progressives do, rather than just falling back on Bidenomics and reliance on a new deal—which isn't going to happen now given that they had the opportunity in the COVID crisis to spend lots of money, which didn't have any impact on this election, for better or worse. Is there a need to re-architect the progressive politics in our new age, the age of AI, a high-tech age? Or do we simply allow the Bernie Sanders of the world to fall back on 20th-century progressive ideas?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I'm not sure where AI is taking us. AI may be taking us out of democracy altogether. I think one of—AK: You're not giving it any chance, if that's the case.“What if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way?”GARY GERSTLE: Well, there are different versions of AI that will be coming. But the state of the world right now suggests that democracy is on the defensive, and authoritarianism is is on the march. Those who predict the death of democracy have been wrong in the past. So I'm not predicting it here, but we have to understand that there are elements of life, technology, power in in private hands today, that make democracy much harder to do effectively. And so, this is a period of reflection that groups who care about democracy at all points on the political spectrum have to be thinking very seriously about. As for the here and now, and politicians don't think in terms of 10 or 20 years—or you have to be a leader in China, where you can think in terms of 10 or 20-year projects, because you never have to face any election and being tossed out of office—but in the here and now, I think what Democrats have to be very aware of, that the party that they thought they were is the party that the Republican Party has become, or is becoming: a multiracial, working-class party. And if the Democrats are to flourish—and in that regard, it's very significant—AK: It's astonishing, really.GARY GERSTLE: It is astonishing. And it's important to to note that Trump is the first Republican nominee for president since George W. Bush in 2004 to get a majority of votes. And the only person to do it before him in the last 30 years was his father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Kamala Harris came within 200,000 votes of becoming president of the United States. That's not well enough understood yet. But if 200,000 votes had changed in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would be the president elect of the United States. However, she would have been the president elect while losing the popular vote. And one has to go very far back in history to find the Democrats being the beneficiaries of the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. And I think the fact that they lost the popular vote for only the third time in the last 50 years, maybe? I mean, when they elected someone...has to suggest that they have to do some serious thinking about how to reclaim this. Now, Bernie Sanders is coming out and saying, they should have gotten me on the public stage rather than Liz Cheney, that going after suburban Republican women was the wrong route. You should have stuck with me. We had a left/center alliance that worked in 2020. We could have done it again. But that's not my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Bernie-style politics is distinctly less popular in 2024 than it was in 2020. The Democrats have to figure that out, and they have to figure out what they have to do in order to reclaim majorities in American life. And in order to do that, I think their economic programs are actually on the right track, in that respect, under the Biden administration. I think they probably have to rethink some of their cultural policies. There were three issues in this election. The economy was number one. The immigration issue was number two. And then, the trans issue was number three. The Republicans ran an estimated 30,000 ads declaring that the Democratic party was going to take your children away by turning them from boys to girls or girls to boys. The Democratic party has to do some hard thinking about how to have a progressive policy on immigration and how to have a progressive policy on issues of trans matters without losing a majority of the American people, who clearly are, at this moment, not with them on those important issues.AK: It's an astonishing moment, Gary. And I'm not sure whether it's a revolutionary moment or just surreal.GARY GERSTLE: Well, you've been pressing me, on a number of occasions, as to whether this is just the normal course of American politics, and if we look in that direction, the place to look for normality is...incumbents always do badly in high-inflationary times. And Ford and Carter lost in the 1970s. Every incumbent during COVID and during the inflationary period in Europe seems to have lost a recent election. The most normal course of politics is to say, this is an exceptional moment having to do with the enormity of COVID and what was required to shut down the economy, saved people, and then getting started up again, and we will see something more normal, the Democrats will be back to what they normally do, in 2028. That's a possibility. I think the more plausible possibility is that we are in the midst of some pretty profound electoral realignment that is giving rise to a different kind of political order. And the Democrats have to figure out if that political order is going to be under their direction, what they have to do to pull that off. AK: And maybe rather than the neoliberal order, we're talking about, what, a neo-authoritarian order? Is that—GARY GERSTLE: Well, the Trump forces are maybe neo-authoritarian, but we don't have a name for it. Pete Buttigieg—AK: Well, that's why we got you on the show, Gary. Don't you have a name for it?GARY GERSTLE: No. You know—AK: We're relying on you. I hope it's going to be in your next book.GARY GERSTLE: Well, I have till January 20th, 2025, to come up with the name. Pete Buttigieg called it the Big Deal rather than the New Deal. I don't think that cuts it. And there's some other pundits who are arguing about building from the middle out. That doesn't cut it.AK: That sounds terrible. That sounds like—GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's—AK: Designing political parties by committee. It's like an American car.GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's problem. You can't name, effectively, in a positive way, what he's done. One thing that's going to happen—and this may be a sign that things will continue from Biden to Trump, in terms of industrial policy. Do you have any doubt that Trump is going to plaster his name on every computer chips plant, every battery factory? Trump brought this to you, he's got to be there for every opening. He's not going to miss a beat. He'll see this as a grand publicity tour. I think there's a good chance he will take credit for what Biden has started, and that's going to upset a lot of us. But it may also signify that he may be loath to abandon many of these industrial policies that Biden has put in place, especially since the Biden administration was very clever in putting most of these plants, and chip plants, and battery plants, in deep red Republican districts.AK: Well, Gary, I know you're not particularly cheerful. I don't suppose most of our audience are, but you actually cheered me up. I think things are a little bit more normal than some people think. But we will get you back on the show after January—what did you say—January 25th, when you'll have a word to describe the New World Order?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I said after January 20th, 2025, you can expect me to have a name. I probably should—AK: Gary, now, we'll have you back on the show. If you don't have a name, I'm going to report you to Trump.GARY GERSTLE: You'll have to bury me.AK: Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not burying you. We need you, Gary Gerstle, author of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, a man who makes sense of our present with historical perspective. Gary, as always, a pleasure. Keep well and keep safe. And we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.GERSTLE: Thank you. A pleasure talking with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe
Our politics are increasingly divided on fundamental issues like the legitimacy of elections and the nature and integrity of the basic systems of American government. That's the most important fact of this election. But strange new zones of agreement have been emerging, too — on China, outsourcing and health care. What should we make of that?In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” the historian Gary Gerstle describes these shifts in consensus in terms of political orders — these eras that stretch for decades, when both parties come to accept a certain set of ideas. In this conversation he walks me through the political, economic and social factors that shaped two political orders in the last century: the New Deal order and the neoliberal order. And we apply this lens to what's happening in our politics right now.It may seem strange to take a step back in time right before the election. But I think Gerstle's framework helps uncover an overlooked dimension of the 2024 race and where politics might go next.Book Recommendations:The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim AlbertaUnderground Asia by Tim HarperThe Known Citizen by Sarah E. IgoThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact0checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Michelle Harris and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
On German political derangement. [Patreon Exclusive] Independent researcher and writer Gregor Baszak joins us to talk about German centrism being squeezed under pressure from both left and right — Sahra Wagenknecht and the AFD. Meanwhile the German economy is getting squeezed between the US and Russia, and NATO pressures Germany to up its defence spending. Is German public life remilitarising? What are the prospects for Sahra Wagenknecht's new ‘left-conservative' politics? What was the original political vision behind the Nordstream 2 pipeline? Why are Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni trying to carve the AFD out of pan-European national-populist cooperation? Where does Germany now stand in relation to the Ukraine War? Links: Europe After America, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative What's the Matter With Germany?, Gregor Baszak, The American Conservative The Left-wing maverick who could stop the AfD For many, Sahra Wagenknecht is a tribune of the people, Gregor Baszak, UnHerd
Join Alan Dunne in conversation with Gary Gerstle, Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of "The Rise and Fall of The Neoliberal Order", as they delve into the shifting landscape of the global political order. From the decline of the New Deal Order to the ramifications of the Global Financial Crisis, Gary traces the trajectory of the Neoliberal Order and its impact on contemporary society. Exploring the nuances of Bidenomics, they analyse the sustainability of current fiscal and industrial policies amidst rising inequality and geopolitical tensions. Gary shares insights on the potential rise of authoritarianism worldwide, the implications of protectionism, and the prospect of increased antitrust activism in the US. Finally, they turn their attention to the upcoming US presidential elections, examining the contenders and the pivotal factors that could shape the outcome.-----EXCEPTIONAL RESOURCE: Find Out How to Build a Safer & Better Performing Portfolio using this FREE NEW Portfolio Builder Tool-----Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.IT's TRUE ? – most CIO's read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.comAnd please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.Follow Alan on XFollow Gary on XEpisode TimeStamps: 02:26 - Introduction to Garry Gerstle05:50 - Understanding political order and neoliberalism12:04 - How important are the economic principles in dismantling the neoliberal order?20:06 - What will drive the new political order?29:01 - How the West's approach to China has changed36:19 - Do banks have too much power?43:34 - Is the U.S deficit a constraint going forward?47:24 - The 4 freedoms of...
Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led to something approaching real social democracy, and why the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath signified the end of this momentous era. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area Guest: J. Bradford DeLong (@delong), author; professor of economics, U.C. Berkeley References: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (Basic; 2022) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944) The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter (1942) "A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (This Land Magazine; 2009) "China's Great Leap Forward" by Clayton D. Brown (Association for Asian Studies; 2012) What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press; 2022) Apple's "1984" ad (YouTube) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936) "The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained" by Emily Stewart (Vox; Nov. 18) "Did Greenspan Add to Subprime Woes? Gramlich Says Ex-Colleague Blocked Crackdown" by Greg Ip (Wall Street Journal; June 9, 2007) "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same," from President Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address (Jan. 27, 2010) "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx (1852) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Simon & Schuster; 2020) The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (U. Chicago; 2022) Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by: Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In Episode 346 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, Gary Gerstle. Dr. Gerstle is the author and editor of more than ten books, including the “Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order,” and his most recent, “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” which was chosen as a Best Book of 2022 by the Financial Times and Prospect Magazine. Gerstle and Kofinas spend the first hour of their conversation discussing the last one hundred years of American history, which spans two political orders—that of the New Deal Order, which ascends in the early 1930s and comes apart in the mid-to-late 1970s and the Neoliberal Order, which begins its rise in the late 1970s-to-early-80s and starts to disintegrate in the mid-2010s during Obama's second term in office and the election of Donald Trump. The second hour of their conversation is devoted exclusively to understanding the rise and fall of the Neoliberal Order and how the excesses of that period have created the conditions for the political, economic, and social crises that are currently gripping the nation. Gerstle and Kofinas also speculate about what may come out of this period, what a new order could look like, what the various factions are that will drive it forward, and what policy ideas, priorities, and ideological frameworks are likely to animate it. You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces, you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 12/26/2023
FROM THE VAULT: ALEX'S PICK (1) In which we lay the liberal establishment down on the shrink's sofa. It's a systematic analysis of liberal derangement: of the inability to accept, explain, or respond to the breakdown of the current order. Why can't the liberal establishment accept that the 2008 crisis would eventually have political consequences? Why can't liberals explain why they keep losing? Why can't they offer anything but more of the same? Symptoms: Incredulity and denial of political change Unwillingness to take responsibility Moralisation No belief in political causation (things just happen) Fetishising disinformation Elite persecution complex Hysteria & catastrophism Nostalgia for a very recent past & rewriting history Repetition compulsion
This week David talks to American historian Gary Gerstle about the shape-shifting journey of the US Republican Party, from the Civil War to the battles of today. How did the party of the North become the party of the South? When did the war party lose its appetite for war? Why does an organisation born out of anti-Catholicism now see its mission as to get Catholics onto the Supreme Court? And what could finally break the party apart?Gary Gerstle's latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.For more on the Great Abortion Switcheroo of the 1970s.Listen again to David's episode on Hume and American default.Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The majority of people who participate in or follow US politics focus on four- and six-year election cycles. But certain political and economic developments take place over much longer time scales, as our guest this episode knows well. Historian Gary Gerstle, author of the recent book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, calls these longer stages in our political history “political orders”—a concept he created with Steve Fraser (co-editor of a previous book). Political orders are a new way to conceptualize political time, Gary explains to Michael and Felicia. They are political movements that are able to popularize certain norms and ideas with the general public, and also sway opposing political parties to align with said norms and ideas. This week, Gary takes Felicia and Michael on a historical journey spanning nearly a century to discuss domestic and international factors that led to the ascension and demise of the New Deal and neoliberal orders. They also discuss the present, including different possibilities for the next political order. One possibility, Gary explains, is a revived progressive political order—one that “harks back to successful elements of the New Deal while also guiding us in new directions, with the ability to take into consideration those issues that the New Deal either ignored or repressed.” Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders. You can find transcripts and related resources for every episode at howtosaveacountry.org.
In this episode:Julius Krein, founder and editor of American Affairs journal, joins the podcast to talk about problems in America's advanced post-industrial economy, and how we can address issues like family policy, debt, innovation, taxation, and labor marketshow Americans should really think about capitalism as “private wealth accumulation,” and break out of the “textbook economics” bookish view of market systems, important as they might bewhat listeners need to know about the landscape of the political and social realignment in recent American history, and where the Right needs to continue moving to create a new “inside consensus” on various policy frontsTexts Mentioned:“America Pulls Back from Values that Once Defined It” by Aaron Zitner“The Last Gasp of an Ideology” by Julius KreinThe Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle“The Digital Age Produces Binary Outcomes” by David GoldmanAmerica, Inc.? Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State by Linda Weiss“The Long, Slow Death of Global Development” by David Oks and Henry WilliamsRegime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick J. DeneenBecome a part of ISI:Become a MemberSupport ISIUpcoming ISI Events
In recent weeks, America got a preview of how the new Republican House majority would wield its power. In attempting to perform a basic function of government — electing a speaker — a coalition of 20 House members caused Kevin McCarthy to lose 14 rounds of votes, decreasing his power with each compromise and successive vote.This is not normal. Party unity ebbs and flows, but the G.O.P. in recent decades has come apart at the seams. Nicole Hemmer is the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, an associate professor of history and the author of two books about the conservative movement and media ecosystem, “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics” and “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.” And she says we can't understand the current G.O.P. without understanding when, where and how these dynamics began.We discuss why the Cold War bonded Republicans as a party, how the 1994 Republican congressional victory inaugurated a new era of intraparty fighting, how Rush Limbaugh's rise created a new market for far-out ideas and new pressures on conservative politicians, why conservative media has had so much more sway than liberal media over grass-roots voters, how the business model of Fox News differs from that of MSNBC and what kinds of political ideas those businesses produce, how the G.O.P. is now caught between the pincers of the donor class and the grass roots, when the chief Republican enemy became the Democratic Party, why more moderate conservatives have become so weak and more.Mentioned:The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa WilliamsonThe Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary GerstleAsymmetric Politics by Matt Grossman and David A. HopkinsRealigners by Timothy ShenkBook Recommendations:Fit Nation by Natalia Mehlman PetrzelaDreamland by Carly GoodmanFreedom's Dominion by Jefferson CowieThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker and Kristina Samulewski.
Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led to something approaching real social democracy, and why the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath signified the end of this momentous era. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area Guest: J. Bradford DeLong (@delong), author; professor of economics, U.C. Berkeley References: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (Basic; 2022) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944) The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter (1942) "A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (This Land Magazine; 2009) "China's Great Leap Forward" by Clayton D. Brown (Association for Asian Studies; 2012) What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press; 2022) Apple's "1984" ad (YouTube) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936) "The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained" by Emily Stewart (Vox; Nov. 18) "Did Greenspan Add to Subprime Woes? Gramlich Says Ex-Colleague Blocked Crackdown" by Greg Ip (Wall Street Journal; June 9, 2007) "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same," from President Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address (Jan. 27, 2010) "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx (1852) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Simon & Schuster; 2020) The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (U. Chicago; 2022) Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by: Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
“One can usually pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of wealth — that behind a person's prosperity lies some rational basis, whether it is that person's hard work, skill and farsightedness or some ancestor's,” writes J. Bradford DeLong. “Inflation — even moderate inflation — strips the mask.”DeLong is an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury and the author of “Slouching Towards Utopia” — a new book about the wave of economic growth that transformed the world in the 20th century. In it, he argues, among other things, that inflation isn't just economically damaging; it's one of the most destabilizing, destructive forces in all of politics. Left unchecked, it has the power to swing elections, erode the foundations of core social institutions and usher in wholesale changes in political and economic regimes.That's exactly what happened the last time inflation was this high. In DeLong's telling, the inflation crisis of the 1970s was weaponized to discredit the reigning New Deal economic order and helped give rise to the small government, pro-market political turn of the 1980s — the consequences of which we are living with today. So I wanted to have DeLong on the show to walk me through that story and some of the questions it raises: Why is inflation is so uniquely politically destructive? What are the right — and wrong — lessons to take from the experience of the 1970s? What kinds of political transformations could today's inflation could bring about?We also discuss why inflation spiraled out of control in the 1970s (and whether it could have been stopped sooner), the efficacy of price controls as a way of taming inflation, why DeLong believes it's a mistake to take the 1970s comparisons too literally, how unchecked inflation can decimate social trust, how economic thinking became obsessed with “moochers” and “slackers” in the 1980s and '90s, whether the 2007-08 financial crisis brought an end to the neoliberal era, what DeLong would say to his younger self serving in the early Clinton administration and more.Book Recommendations:The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary GestleFree Market by Jacob SollAdam Smith's America by Glory M. LiuThoughts? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. (And if you're reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion" in the subject line.)You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Sonia Hererro. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
The world is so much richer than it was 150 years ago that past generations might look at society today and declare it a utopia. But how did we get here, and are we really living in utopia? Economist Brad DeLong joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. We discuss the key factors that allowed economic growth to explode around 1870, why Brad builds a grand narrative around the 'long 20th century', and why economic growth is the most important lens for understanding human history in the last 150 years. Recommended reading: Slouching Towards Utopia - https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/ What We Owe the Future - https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/william-macaskill/what-we-owe-the-future/9781541618633/ The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order - https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en& To make sure you hear every episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, our sticker-of-the-month club, and our insider Slack. Become a supporter today! Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.instagram.com/neoliberalproject/ https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject Join a local chapter at https://neoliberalproject.org/join
The self-regulated market cannot respond effectively to the most critical challenges we face – inequality, climate change, an unhealthy relationship with rest of nature, pandemics and public health, social and racial division and tribalism, crippled government, and endangered democracy. So how did this notion dominate for 35+ years? And why is it crashing now? I talk with GARY GERSTLE, Professor of American History Emeritus at University of Cambridge, England, about his book, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER: America and the World in the Free Market Era. You can learn more at garygerstle.com
Sam is back! He and Emma are joined by Jamie Martin, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, to discuss his recent book The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Economic Global Governance. First, Sam and Emma dive into developments in Ukraine as the UN sends in Nuclear Inspectors, a massive flood in Pakistan displacing millions, and the clear public support behind Biden's student debt relief. Jamie Moran then joins as he gets right into the story of liberalism's international systems based on sovereign encroachment, and why the conventional narrative begins with the Bretton-Woods conference in 1944 that saw the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, aligning with the United States emerging from its isolationism to the peak of a globalized liberal order, and being followed (with the failure of the Bretton-Woods system in the ‘70s) by a new project of neoliberal hyper globalization, forcing austere reform on what they saw as “developing economies.” Next, Professor Martin dives into why HIS history of the subject started well before Bretton-Woods, seeing the leveraging of sovereign states by international economic coalitions into painful domestic reform as a tale as old as capitalism, burgeoning in the middle of the 19th Century with the nation-state boom bringing countless new governments onto the international stage, and the lasting European empires (largely France and England) granting these nations “sovereignty” under conditions of severe extraction by their former colonizers. These systems largely continued in the wake of the colonial expansions of the 18th and 19th Centuries, leading up to the first World War which saw Europe and the US create wartime international bodies that actually exercise their colonial power collectively, and translated (however poorly) into the post-war systems such as the League of Nations. Looking at the next couple of decades, Professor Martin explores how Britain (and France to a lesser extent) came to largely dominate the economic discourse of the League of Nations, employing imperial creditor arrangements in the wake of the 1920s' depression to bolster their international leverage, and why the US' isolation from the League was due to this very reason of protecting their own sovereignty. Walking through the years following World War II, Sam, Emma, and Jamie Martin discuss how the lack of borders allowed US creditors to overtake the Bank of England and other EU creditors by containing extortion to the financial realm, and putting them in peak position going into the Bretton-Wood conference, and ensuring the IMF and World Bank functioned under their control. Wrapping up, they explore other translations of these colonial practices around sovereignty (including the Cold War's emphasis on anti-communism), and reflect on why a fetishized nostalgia for these systems is severely misplaced. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma watch Marco Rubio struggle over how “unfair” Joe Biden is being, Sam waits with beta – I mean bated – breath for the rest of Tim Pool's album, Mike from South Carolina calls in to discuss the GI Bill as a Vet, and Ryan from Arizona explores his states' recent elections. Dave Rubin thanks Liberty U students for praying his gay away, Eamon from California discusses the fire hazards prevalent in the critiques of the Uvalde teachers, and Sam and Emma explore the destruction in Pakistan, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Jamie's book here: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976542 Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: ZipRecruiter: Some things in life we like to pick out for ourselves - so we know we've got the one that's best for us - like cuts of steak or mattresses. What if you could do the same for hiring - choose your ideal candidate before they even apply? 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Try Aura for 14 days for free: https://aura.com/majority Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Get your last round of free COVID tests here: https://www.covid.gov/tests The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
Host Reed Galen is joined by Gary Gerstle, the Professor Emeritus and Director of Research in American History at Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge. They discuss how the New Deal and its subsequent political order influenced American government throughout the Cold War, how the fall of communism gave way to mostly unfettered capitalism and the subsequent neoliberal order, and how this neoliberal order and the political and economic decisions made along the way led us to our present-day circumstance of political polarity and chaos. To hear more from Gary Gerstle, be sure to pick up his latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, available wherever fine books are sold.
An interview with Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. The book illuminates how the ideology of neoliberalism became so infused in the daily life of an era.
Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University joins the Essential Podcast to talk about the nature of political orders and the collapse of the political order known as neoliberalism that came to power with Ronald Reagan.
Krystal and Saagar discuss the West's sanctions reckoning, GOP primary elections, DeSantis vs Trump, Uvalde police misconduct, Fed policy implications, MSNBC scolding, economic collapse, gas tax mistake, & more! To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/ To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and Spotify Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ New Yorker Feature: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-rise-of-the-internets-creative-middle-class Skanda Amarnath: https://www.employamerica.org/ https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2022/06/22/a-break-the-glass-moment-on-inflation-00041266 https://www.employamerica.org/blog/the-first-dose-of-supply-side-damage-is-here-the-dark-side-of-fed-and-financial-conditions-tightening/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Krystal and Saagar discuss the West's sanctions reckoning, GOP primary elections, DeSantis vs Trump, Uvalde police misconduct, Fed policy implications, MSNBC scolding, economic collapse, gas tax mistake, & more!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/New Yorker Feature: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-rise-of-the-internets-creative-middle-class Skanda Amarnath: https://www.employamerica.org/ https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2022/06/22/a-break-the-glass-moment-on-inflation-00041266 https://www.employamerica.org/blog/the-first-dose-of-supply-side-damage-is-here-the-dark-side-of-fed-and-financial-conditions-tightening/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week, the S&P 500 entered what analysts refer to as a bear market. The index has plunged around 22 percent from its most recent peak in January. Many growth stocks and crypto assets have crashed double or triple that amount.New home sales declined 17 percent in April, causing some analysts to argue that the housing market has peaked. And, in response to rising inflation, the Federal Reserve just approved its largest interest rate increase since 1994, meaning asset prices could dip even lower.To understand what's happening in the stock market right now, you have to understand the era that preceded it. Rana Foroohar is a columnist at The Financial Times, and the author of several books on the economy including “Makers and Takers” and “Don't Be Evil.” Her view is that a decade-plus of loose monetary policy has been the economic equivalent of a “sugar high,” which kept the prices of stocks, housing and other assets going up and up and up, even as the fundamentals of the economy have been eroding. This “everything bubble,” as she calls it, was bound to burst — and that's exactly what she thinks is happening right now.So I wanted to have her on the show to discuss the economic choices — and lack thereof — that led to this point. We also discuss why the increasing power of the financial sector hasn't resulted a stronger economy, whether the housing market has indeed hit its peak, the massive missed opportunity for public investment while interest rates were low, why policymakers treat asset price inflation so differently from other types of inflation, the true costs of the meat we eat and clothes we wear, why crypto represents the apotheosis of hyper-financialized capitalism, why I'm skeptical of the argument that we're moving rapidly toward a less globalized world and more.Book recommendations:All That She Carried by Tiya MilesBeautiful Country by Qian Julie WangThe Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary GerstleWe're hiring a researcher! You can apply here or by visiting nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/NewsThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Andrea López Cruzado; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.
Cambridge University's American History professor Gary Gerstle discusses his most recent book, about how the neoliberal order came about, why it is faltering, and the indeterminacy of what comes next.
Sam and Emma host Gary Gerstle, Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, to discuss his recent book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. First, Emma and Sam dive into the continued rise of mass shootings over this weekend, the Uvalde Police's continually changing story, Dr. Oz's victory in the PA GOP Senate Primary, and Elon suddenly scrapping his Twitter deal after finding out about Twitter BOTS, but definitely not his crashing Tesla stock. They're then joined by Professor Gerstle as they work through the concept of political orders as these prolonged eras of dominant ideologies, with the two that he largely covers being the New Deal political order, lasting from FDR's reign up until the ‘60s or so, and the Neoliberal Order, burgeoning in the ‘70s and lasting up until the end of Obama's presidency, looking at these two orders in contrast, with the former compelling the right to assimilate into a democratic socialist ideology, and the latter seeing a Clinton-lead democratic party assimilating into corporate liberalism and deregulation. Next, they get into the factors that drive the emergence of new orders, starting as a modest movement of political organizations and actors, before networks of donors, constituents, think tanks, and policy networks and political actors arise around it as it proves itself as a viable political system. They then look to the crises that left the vacuum for these orders to step in, with the 1930s Great Depression marking the largest capitalist crisis in US History, and the ‘70s recession occurring alongside rising racial tensions, US imperialism, and a reemergence of international industrial competitors seeing US Capital suddenly threatened from all sides. Sam, Emma, and Professor Gerstle then walk through the evolution of political orders and how one took issue and influence from its priors, first looking to FDR's desire to create a new form of liberalism, one that puts everyday Americans in a position to actually enjoy their freedom, before Freidman and Hayek come around and reject his appropriation of liberalism, but still looking to government as a corporate facilitator, particularly with the role of the military in ensuring the safety and freedom of markets worldwide. After covering the role of the fall of the USSR and Clinton's assimilation to neoliberalism, Sam, Emma, and Professor Gerstle walk through our contemporary moment as the neoliberal order stalls, and the difference between a fight between a far-right and a progressive left and the single-camp transitions of previous orders. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma discuss Dr. Jill Biden's unveiling of a new Nancy Pelosi stamp, just as pride month starts, in an unfortunate moment of institutional fetishization, Dave Rubin obsesses over Elon Musk fighting to get his workers back to work, before inquiring about who died and left COVID in charge. Sam and Emma discuss the original rise of TERFism in England, cover the Ohio GOP's new bill requiring genital inspections of young girl athletes, a Wisconsin high school gets bomb threats for trying to teach their students to respect queer people, Miles from LI talks the evolution of “based,” and Louie Gohmert comes to the defense of the Right's right to lie right to the Government. Plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Gary's book here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-9780197519646?cc=us&lang=en& Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://madmimi.com/signups/170390/join Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Check out today's sponsors: Ritual: We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why. 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Support the St. Vincent Nurses today! https://action.massnurses.org/we-stand-with-st-vincents-nurses/ Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Matt's other show Literary Hangover on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/literaryhangover Check out The Nomiki Show on YouTube. https://www.patreon.com/thenomikishow Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out The Letterhack's upcoming Kickstarter project for his new graphic novel! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milagrocomic/milagro-heroe-de-las-calles Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Subscribe to AM Quickie writer Corey Pein's podcast News from Nowhere. https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/
Mid-Atlantic - conversations about US, UK and world politics
Roifield speaks to Prof. Gary Gerstle about the last 40 years that chart the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War and their pivotal place in American and world history. They discuss how neoliberalism originated as much on the Left (the New Left) as on the right, among individuals such as Paul Goodman, Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs who were seeking ways to emancipate the self in an increasingly regulated and bureaucratized world See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Professor Gary Gerstle is the author of the brand new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. Gary Gerstle FBA (born 1954) is an American historian and academic. He is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. In this podcast, we discussed his previous book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, how the New Deal political consensus gave way to neoliberalism, how neoliberalism triumphed in subsuming both major parties on both sides of the Atlantic - hitting it's true stride with the election of messers Blair and Clinton in 1997 and 1992, and the ways in which this political consensus is coming to an end with challenges from the left and right in the form of Corbyn, Sanders, Trump and Brexit. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era - https://amzn.to/3w8dfnf The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 - https://amzn.to/385cljq https://twitter.com/glgerstle https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gary-gerstle http://www.garygerstle.com/ https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/prof-gary-l-gerstle-fba HELP ME CROWDFUND MY GAMESTOP BOOK. Go to https://wen-moon.com to join the crowdfunding campaign and pre-order To The Moon: The GameStop Saga! If you haven't already and you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and our mailing list, and don't forget, my book, Brexit: The Establishment Civil War, is now out, you'll find the links in the description below. You can listen to the show on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5AYWZh12d92D4PDASG4McB?si=5835f2cf172d47cd&nd=1 Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chatter/id1273192590 Google Podcasts - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5wb2RpYW50LmNvL2NoYXR0ZXIvcnNzLnhtbA And all major podcast platforms. Watch Us On Odysee.com - https://odysee.com/$/invite/@TheJist:4 Sign up and watch videos to earn crypto-currency! Buy Brexit: The Establishment Civil War - https://amzn.to/39XXVjq Mailing List - https://www.getrevue.co/profile/thejist Twitter - https://twitter.com/Give_Me_TheJist Website - https://thejist.co.uk/ Music from Just Jim – https://soundcloud.com/justjim
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. – epigraph in The Long Land War by Jo Guldi (2021) Every political order contains within it tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities that at a certain point become too difficult to maintain. – The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (2022) In the Economica Centenary Coarse Lecture delivered virtually to the London School of Economics in 2021 Thomas Piketty lightheartedly remarked on his English as part of a larger point about how linguistic limitations can reduce our access to important information and data worldwide. And like the epigraph above opening a book about the global struggle for occupancy rights, Piketty was noting just how dependent scholars are on the kind of primary sources to which they can use and access. Coming from one of our era's preeminent scholars of political economy it was more than just a self-deprecating lead-in for his 2020 Capital and Ideology, a book that enlarged the focus of his famous 2014 Capital in the 21st Century by expanding the geopolitical reach of its analysis of the structure of inequality with its emphasis on political and ideological forces as key causative factors rather than purely economic and technological ones. As he mentions in this interview, his latest book concisely refines his arguments. Coming in at a short 277 pages the professor's A Brief History of Equality, translated by Steven Randall (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) will come as a bit of relief for readers acquainted with his much lengthier earlier works. Piketty offers up this comparative history of inequalities among social classes in human societies – or, as he points out: a brief history of equality acknowledging the long-term trend toward greater social, economic and political equality. The book opens with ‘the movement toward equality' and ‘the slow deconcentration of power and property' before reminding readers of our ‘heritage of slavery and colonialism' and then broaching ‘the question of reparations'. You will hear Professor Piketty share his thoughts on why this question is key for reconciling societal divisions and what reparations could represent in terms of social justice. As he points out, both in this interview and in the book, ‘everything remains to be invented' which is offered in the same optimistic spirit with which he argues that the struggle for increasing levels of equality requires ‘collective learning'. The crisp progression of ideas in the ten chapters of his narrative leads to its concluding implications that the need for increasing equality at the global level is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. Not everyone will agree with the professor's vision or his interpretations but few will question his authority or transparency in such deliberations. The professor's research and data can be studied through his homepage, and the World Inequality Database. Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, Director of Studies at The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, and Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab and Database. Keith Krueger lectures in the SILC Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
Neoliberalism means different things to different people. As a set of economic policies it is mainly associated with reducing state intervention in commerce and society. In the course of its late 20th century heyday, neoliberalism transformed the world - for better or worse. But now its dominance is challenged by different models, such as the authoritarian capitalism of China. In his new book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle looks at how neoliberalism took hold, how it shaped society in the United States and beyond, and what its decline means. Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Gary Gerstle, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including two prizewinners, American Crucible (2017) and Liberty and Coercion (2015). He is a Guardian columnist and has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Statesman, Dissent, The Nation, and Die Zeit, among others. He frequently appears on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, ITV 4, Talking Politics, and NPR. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One year on from Joe Biden's inauguration David and Helen talk with Gary Gerstle about what's gone wrong. What is the strategy behind this presidency? Has it tried to do too much or too little? And are the dark warnings of another American civil war really plausible? Plus we discuss whether the original American Civil War should really be used as the template for political breakdown.Talking Points: It's hard to be a transformational president when your congressional margin is as slim as Biden's is.Are critics being too harsh? Unemployment is down, the pandemic recovery was quicker than anticipated, and there is a broader renegotiation of work conditions for lower-paid workers. But these are not the seismic shifts many hoped for. Biden may want to be a transformational president, but the conditions do not suit transformational politics.Did an overreading of Trump's incompetence on the pandemic inflate expectations of Biden? What would Biden's presidency look like if Democrats did not have a majority in the Senate?The unexpected victories in Georgia have also led to heightened scrutiny of the holdout Democrats, Sinema and Manchin. Republican senators seem to be getting a free pass. Are fears about a looming American civil war overblown?What do we mean by civil war? The idea of the federal government fighting a group of secessionist states seems inconceivable. The notion of factions vying for control over the center is somewhat more plausible.The American Civil War was not just about tribalism or ideology. There were incompatible political economic systems. The very fact that the United States has had a Civil War, however, is still part of American politics. As T.S. Eliot said, ‘Serious civil wars never come to an end.'Will the burgeoning discourse around illegitimate election results actually translate into more overt political violence in the future?Mentioned in this Episode: Biden's recent speech on voting rightsBarbara Walter's book, How Civil Wars StartGary's forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal OrderFurther Learning:Is Civil War coming to America? More on Merrick Garland's investigation Eric Foner for the LRB on the electoral collegeAnd as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/talkingpolitics.
This video interview explores how it is that the “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook… anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome.