The Other Side of Tuesday: A Long View of this Political Moment

In the last week before Election Day, two major pieces went beyond our collective polling doomscroll and took a long view of our uncertain moment.

In the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann’s “Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America: Why Has No One Noticed?” argues that the transformation in economic thinking we have seen in both parties over the last four years actually has longer roots. What Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg called the “Big Deal” economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration grew out of a decade of work following the pain of the 2008 financial crisis.

And on the latest episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast, historian Gary Gerstle traced an even longer arc of change. Gerstle focuses on political orders, a way of thinking about political time beyond two- and four-year election cycles, based instead on the lasting power of shared ideas and institutions. He talked with Ezra about how the New Deal order became the era of neoliberalism, and how the failure of the neoliberal order left us in today’s moment of transition.

Neither the Lemann story nor the Gerstle interview will prevent any pre-election waves of anxiety. But if we read and listen to them carefully, they will remind us of three things that will be crucial post-election, no matter the outcome.

First, the old order broke because it failed to keep its most important promise: that a rising tide lifts all, or even most, boats. At the most basic level, a successful and enduring political system must be able to provide for its people.

Second, most of the media has focused on Joe Biden and “Bidenomics” in its narrative about today’s economy. But the reasons we find ourselves in this most perplexing moment, with the economic successes of the last four years frustratingly muted, go well beyond the policies of the last four years. To understand our moment, we must look further back in time and also imagine further into the future.

And third, even amid today’s confusion, we can sense convergence on the outlines of a new political order—but some versions of our shared future are far better, while some are far worse.

The Neoliberal Order Failed Because It Could Not Provide

To earn lasting support, Gerstle reminds us, political orders must deliver, reasonably credibly, a good life for most people. This is a basic point, but one that bears repeating as we look back at neoliberalism and forward beyond it.

Gerstle asserts that the neoliberalism of the 1980s began with shining promises. Some were economic. We would enjoy almost unimaginable productivity and freedom if only we would “remove the shackles from capitalism.” But neoliberalism’s promises were also cultural and emotional, something today’s post-neoliberal critics sometimes overlook. Reagan excited the American imagination. “His core message,” Gerstle notes, “was freedom. It had a profound popular base. Giving individuals autonomy to go their own way . . . to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.” For so many Americans, says Gerstle, this was thrilling.

Neoliberalism promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Market-first economists, Gerstle reminds us, knew that this would probably increase inequality, but this increase would matter little because “the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody . . . would have a better life.”

But this set of hopes would not come to pass. Neoliberalism’s market-forward approach did make progress in some important areas, including catalyzing more innovative business practices and, critically, reducing extreme poverty globally. But ultimately, by the early 2000s, neoliberalism was failing on its own terms, including on growth itself. As Mike Konczal and colleagues have noted, between 1950 and 1980—the New Deal era—the economy grew, on average, 1.3 points faster than in the neoliberal years between 1980 and 2016. And during the neoliberal era, inequality grew significantly, whether measured by wealth, income, or race. By 2016, multiple inequalities threatened the political system and its stability as a whole, and growth certainly did not mitigate the problem.

The Great Recession and its long, slow, jobless recovery made neoliberalism’s failings clear to all. As Gerstle notes, “The market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of a financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss—but not by a lot.”

This is, of course, familiar history. But, especially now, we must remember that neoliberalism’s political weaknesses were born of its own failure to provide materially—and this material weakness drove a downward spiral, hollowing out neoliberalism’s once hegemonic political strength and making way for a new political order.

We Are All Post-Neoliberals Now

Political practices, of course, can be very much alive even when they no longer serve us, and even when their animating ideas have lost their explanatory power. As Gerstle notes, “marking the end of the neoliberal order doesn’t mean that neoliberalism disappears . . . [or] that suddenly there are no more advocates of strong free markets.”

On the eve of the 2024 election, post-neoliberal ideas are everywhere—from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley to Brian Deese and Jake Sullivan—even if these ideas have not been fully institutionalized. On both the Right and the Left, now-mainstream figures argue that unshackled markets are not an end in themselves, but instead must be shaped toward particular goals that reflect clear values. Market-shaping became mainstream with the election of Joe Biden in 2020—the beginning of a transformation few saw coming. In Lemann’s description of 2021 and 2022:

With nothing close to a mandate, Biden passed domestic legislation that will generate government spending of at least five trillion dollars, spread across a wide range of purposes, in every corner of the country. He has also redirected many of the federal government’s regulatory agencies in ways that will profoundly affect American life. On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power. All of this doesn’t represent merely a hodgepodge of actions. There is as close to a unifying theory as one can find in a sweeping set of government policies.

Future historians will help us understand more deeply how all of these strands, from industrial strategy to the rise of neo-Brandeisian antitrust policy, came together in the Biden White House. It is tempting to situate this Biden economic transformation with, well, Joe Biden. We can marvel at how his team did so much with so few political levers and so many structural constraints. And we can also lament, as so many do, the fact that Biden proved to be a poor salesman for his own accomplishments—decade-long investments that seem invisible to voters who are anxious right now, burdened by the costs of life’s basic needs even as prices stabilize.

But both Lemann and Gerstle remind us that our shift in economic understanding is not just about Joe Biden. Neoliberal practices and beliefs cast a long shadow, but in some meaningful sense we are all post-neoliberals now.

Gerstle notes that many leaders in the Republican Party, most notably JD Vance, “have become deeply committed to industrial policy.” Vance sometimes talks about putting Main Street above Wall Street. It is hard to know how much credence to give to these pronouncements, given other rhetoric from both Vance and Trump that is untrue, illiberal, and unabashedly violent. Further, Vance and Trump are also being pulled in the other direction, toward a newer form of capital power embodied by people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk that we struggle to fully comprehend, given its scale and dominance. But the very fact that conservatives are now wrestling with their own visions of post-neoliberalism suggests that a new, more stable political order could emerge and prove lasting.

For Better or for Worse

Our political sea change is happening. It is on much less stable footing than the New Deal was at the end of FDR’s presidency, but then again Joe Biden has had four years and not almost 12, and certainly never commanded congressional majorities anywhere near FDR’s 70-percent plus.

What we must push toward now, no matter the 2024 election outcome, is a political economy that addresses our most gutting social and economic inequalities in ways that are better, and not worse. Can we look toward an election in four years where the baton has been passed in both parties, and the American people have options on the Right and the Left that genuinely do what the public is demanding, embracing Main Street over Wall Street?

This will require deft political leadership. With the economic wind at her back, Kamala Harris has already shown that she can take the best of the last four years of transformation and make the economic promise more real to voters. She has focused on creating better, more stable jobs in new sectors, especially care, and also on the government’s role in creating better conditions for affordable housing and home care. Harris proposes to do this part by making more capital available to middle- and working-class Americans, and in part by punishing bad corporate actors who seek to extract from consumers rather than to serve them fairly.

Donald Trump, to state the obvious, would not do any of these things—and in his absolute lack of conviction toward any political order or any sense of common good, is far more likely to do deep harm.

Keeping our eyes on the horizon as well as on this election’s immediate effects will require discipline and wisdom. Lemann and Gerstle both remind us of the importance of taking the long view.

It is hard to think about the long arc of political time, especially the day before this particular election, of all elections. But we have big ambitions. They cannot be conceived of, or won, in two- or four-year increments. Even getting this far toward a new political common sense has taken time.

It has been 15 years since the Great Recession. Part of what is best about the sea change since then is a focus on the basic value of greater equity—which is both more important and more nuanced than it might first appear. We at Roosevelt have long argued that we can have more growth and more genuinely shared prosperity than economists believed 50 years ago. To achieve this, we must improve and manage capitalism. We must affirmatively shape markets rather than let them be run purely by the forces of capital. And a more equitable economy will be better for a democracy that requires the kind of freedom that is impossible for those who are hungry, anxious, necessitous—again to reference FDR.

We don’t know which version of post-neoliberalism will win politically this election, or over the long term. But we do know that better is possible, and that there are many of us who are ready to play whatever hand 2024 deals us toward those better ends.

If You Ask Eleanor 

“This Election Day I want to urge each and every citizen to try and use his vote. . . . [P]utting in good people from the bottom up is what builds a good organization and gives us the kind of government we are constantly saying we want but which we so often do not really take the trouble to work for.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day (May 23, 1963)