Security is framed not in the sense of coercive security but in the sense of social security, environmental security, and addressing the angst many people feel. On the left, neoliberalism is attacked mainly on its economic premises. I call it propertarian protectionism: what they want to defend is the nation and property. The new right is a nationalist right-Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Matteo Salvini-that attacks neoliberalism mainly on its cultural premises, and partly on the front of global trade, but with no reference whatsoever to redistribution or social protection. Gerbaudo: The so-called populist decade of the 2010s was a breeding ground for a new left and a new right.
Jaffe: You write that the populist outbursts of the last ten years or so have been the dialectical negation of neoliberalism, and that the rise of right and left populism acts as an antithesis to neoliberalism. That was the crystallization of this neoliberal consensus. While its rise is associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, many of its ideas-trickle-down economics, privatization, and so forth-also infected the center-left, through figures like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Gerhard Schröder, in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s both a coercive state and a regulatory state.įor many years, neoliberalism was the dominant ideology, permeating the entire political space. It advocates minimal intervention on the state’s part except for defense, policing, and creating and regulating markets.
Gerbaudo: Neoliberalism is an economic and political doctrine that centers around the view of the market as superior to the state. Jaffe: Before we get beyond neoliberalism, can you explain it? Politics, both right-wing and left-wing, is dealing with new social demands that are different from those dominant in the neoliberal era. We are in a new ideological era beyond neoliberalism, which has lasted for forty years. Paolo Gerbaudo: In the aftermath of the 2010s-which were dominated by populist insurgencies of all kinds-and the COVID-19 crisis, the rules of political discourse and policymaking have changed. Sarah Jaffe: Give us a quick rundown on the argument of the book. We sat down recently to discuss the book, the class composition of the new politics, whether the left should embrace the nation, and more. Is neoliberalism actually ending? And what comes next? Political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo explores those questions in his new book, The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made it even easier to imagine the end of the world, and the response of those same states has been quite different. But it staggered on the next decade saw most Western states respond with the typical neoliberal playbook. The neoliberal era appeared to be at its end. The 2008 financial meltdown and the global economic crisis that followed put thousands of cracks into what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”-the idea that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In this edition, Sarah Jaffe talks to Paolo Gerbaudo, the author of The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic (Verso).
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Santiago/Getty Images)īooked is a series of interviews about new books. President Joe Biden speaks at Mack Truck Lehigh Valley Operations on Jin Macungie, Pennsylvania. In The Great Recoil, Paolo Gerbaudo argues that the left needs to speak to people’s fears and connect them to hope.