I have been thinking lately that we’ve all been wrong, sold on a bill of goods based on new packaging when the contents are the same.
The recent passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” by the Republicans revealed the game. When it was all said and done, it is a signature piece of legislation that could well have been signed by George W. Bush. Within the orbit of late-20th and early 21st-century Republican orthodoxies (and even some Democratic ones) there was nothing radical or new about this bill: attacks on the social safety net (save when those cuts affect subsidizing farmers); the massive expansion of a militarized “homeland security” state; incentivizing energy sources that extract rather than renew; and, of course, cutting taxes for the rich. The “Big Beautiful Bill” really is Dick Cheney’s dream bill.
What has happened under Trump instead is a changing of the veneer. It has become more crass and cruel, not because Trump actually represents the grievances of the white working class (a group that is, by the way, in general not crass or cruel), but because he has channeled and brought to governing the magnetizing vibes of the dark web, alt-social media, Jerry Springer-style televised takedowns, and the pumped-up headlocks of entertainment wrestling. The change has been virtual, not real.
I thought, therefore, that I’d use this post to say a bit about “neoliberalism,” which has been the regnant economic and governing philosophy in the United States for much of the last 50 years. My belief for a time—and I really believed this—was that Trump was putting an end to neoliberalism. Something new was on the horizon.
But this is not happening. From a policy standpoint, Trump, in as much as he has any “policies” at all, is George Bush III. I realize that tariffs have not been part of the neoliberal program. They are peculiar to Trump’s unexplainable concern with the trade deficit. But while he’s interested in regulating the flow of goods and people to the United States in a quixotic quest to solve the trade-balance “problem” and restore American manufacturing, all along he’s done nothing to hinder the flow of global finance. Indeed, he’s done more than any president to make it easier for the most aggressive forms of speculative finance to thrive (read: crypto).
Deregulation and finance have long been the cornerstones of neoliberal policy. Under Trump II, deregulation has been throttled and the Big Banks are thriving. Manufacturers? Not so much. Tariffs and supply-chain uncertainty are just not good for American manufacturing. Trump is part of the neoliberal regime, not its destroyer.
The only real difference with the current president, and it is a big one, is that he has made every effort to destroy the veneer of “compassion” and “human rights” that Bush-Cheney relied on in pursuing similar policies. What’s changed with Trump is not the regime, but its look: trolling, dark memes, misogyny, conspiracy, and nativism. While Cheney hid the cruelty in black sites, the Trump White House has turned cruelty into a form of political performance. That is, it’s White House media operations that have changed. In the Bush years they were run by “compassionate conservatives.” Today they are run by digital-native clones of Hannibal Lecter.
This is not to say that the performance does not matter. It matters—a great deal—especially to those who are relentlessly victimized by it. But we can’t minimize just how much the change here is not about substantive policies but about appearances and vibes. Trump wants to look like he’s doing something. For him, “doing something” means being nasty. All the while the policy basics remain largely the same as they’ve been since the 1980s, when neoliberalism took hold in Washington D.C.
Neoliberalism has its intellectual roots in a post-World War II intellectual movement that capitalized on the end of the war to imagine a different kind of political and economic order for the world, one that was far less tied to the state and far more tied to free markets. Among its most famous proponents after the war were the journalist Walter Lippmann, the economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek, and the economist Milton Friedman. In its simplest form, neoliberalism was about letting the market take the place of the state in the governing of human affairs. Neoliberals venerated the market because they believed it was, relative to the state, a benign force; they also believed that it would operate far more efficiently because, unlike politics, the market had invisible and apparently inviolable “laws” that were congruent with the laws of human psychology, particularly the law of self-interest. Greed was good.
Over a decade ago, I wrote a book about neoliberalism. So I have thought a lot about it. In that book, I was trying to think about neoliberalism as not only an approach to economics and governing but also as what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “social imaginary,” a way of imagining our relationships to one another in society and to the modern world.
Neoliberalism, I argued, operates as much on the level of fantasy and anxiety as it does in regulatory policy or banking transactions. Its key concept, or so I argued, is the power of “invisible orders.” There are ways to run the world, the neoliberal says, that do not rest fundamentally on what we can see, but on the unseen. Market power is the epitome of an unseen order.
This much neoliberalism claims. Here I want to stress three guiding principles of neoliberalism that I address in my book, but do so here in a way that is more legible. To keep things palatable, I’ll give them namesakes. They are:
The John Hughes Principle
The Ronald Reagan Principle
The Superman Principle
The John Hughes Principle is about abandonment. I love John Hughes films—The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, and more. (For a list, see Wikipedia.) One of the defining characteristics of a John Hughes film is the absence of adults. These are films about kids, typically teenagers, whose parents, as well as pretty much all adults, are in absentia. Hughes made these films in the middle of the 1980s and 90s, the heyday of neoliberal enthusiasm. To me at least, they explore what “kids” are left with when “adults” refuse to take any real responsibility. In this way, the films are an oblique commentary on neoliberalism.
When it was being championed, before it was a kind of universal common sense, neoliberalism was directly and explicitly set against the “paternalistic state.” That’s how neoliberals characterized any state that set up a social safety net, guaranteed education and minimal health care for children, and regulated powerful business interests to keep them from abusing and exploiting land and people. Neoliberalism instead said, “Let the kids be! Laissez faire! They can take care of themselves. We (that is, the ‘grownups’ in government and finance) have other more ‘important’ things to do, like make money.” Hence, in neoliberalism laissez faire started to look a lot like a form of abandonment, one rooted in a reckless appetite for acquisition and accumulation.
As president, Trump is ever present, but not really present. He is the father many of us wish we’d never known: distracted, unpredictable, and removed from the real world. His is a world entirely his own. He is trying to create a government that is in absentia—this is what his attacks on the “deep state” entail—and he is trying to govern in absentia (stories keep turning up about how Trump does not know what is going on in his own government). It is all a way of letting the kids—that is, us—fend for themselves. Bueller!
The Ronald Reagan Principle is about deferment. One of the striking characteristics of the Reagan presidency was the fact that despite the “good vibes” (“It’s morning in America!”), the Reagan years were full of economic hardships. What Reagan was a master at, both in terms of policy and rhetoric, was deferring things to a future date. He spoke incessantly about the future, more than the past. His fiscal policies—tax cuts, deregulation, and debt—were all about deferring matters to a future date. He convinced Americans that they could deal best with their problems by deferring them.
Practically speaking, this became a neoliberal truism. While the postwar architects of neoliberalism would have been uncomfortable with massive debt acquisition, a strategy of deferring fiscal problems to the future, Reagan taught us to accept deferral because, for him, the future was always brighter than the present. Hence, under the neoliberal regime, kicking problems down the legislative alley became an art.
While both parties have participated in this art, the Republican Party, still more sharply defined today by the Reagan legacy than one might think, has mastered it. The Big Beautiful Bill is a high point in the half-century history of the neoliberal regime. Its fiscal approach is all about deferral, kicking massive fiscal problems down the road.
The Superman Principle is about emergency. The one allowance the postwar neoliberal architects made for a big and strong state was in cases of national emergency. Indeed, the state appears in neoliberal thought as a kind of Superman, flying in to save the day when things go very bad. In this way, neoliberals were never anti-state. They just argued that the strong state had a very limited role: to deal with emergencies.
Trump, in turn, has made “emergency” the rationale for governing, really the only rationale. The severe and cruel immigration enforcement, the tariffs, the lawfare—it’s all been explicitly justified in terms of national emergencies. Indeed, according to the Trump administration, we are currently under invasion from Venezuela!
Abandonment, deferment, and emergency: these have been at the core of the neoliberal regime. And it turns out that that regime is not dead after all. Just more cruel. Gone are the Happy Days of Ronald Reagan, the dreams of a bright and brilliant American future. Arrived are dark conspiratorial forebodings, emergency alarms, and cranky memes. The regime change has been virtual, not real.