Neoliberalism’s quarter-century seems to be stagnating even in America, amid deepening inequalities, school and police shootings, mass incarceration, tech-driven tsunamis of empty information, dangerous climate change, chillingly intrusive surveillance, degrading marketing, and our own tribal and sectarian reactions. In Iraq, where only 12 years ago young Republicans were reconstituting the Iraq Stock Exchange, and in Afghanistan, tribalism and fanaticism have buried liberal democracy. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is brandishing trappings of Ottoman imperial glory and sending a frisson or two of that glory from the gates of Vienna (besieged by the Ottomans in 1683) to Brussels today. Vladimir Putin is stoking Russian-Orthodox and Slavic resentments against what he casts as a decadent but imperious Western liberalism. China’s Xi Jinping is reinforcing an oxymoronic communist state capitalism with appeals to ancient Confucian understandings of the state as an organic, familial structure, with himself at its head. India’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has displaced the Congress Party, the long-dominant carrier of the vaguely social-democratic legacies of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Rulers eager to escape that conflict have tried to revive national religious and mythic traditions to sanctify modernization and reconcile it with their own power. McWorld, as the title of Benjamin Barber’s 1995 book put it.
If this newly flat world had a summit, it was Davos, and when September 11 revealed that it also had an abyss or two, an American President from an old, Puritan lineage led a “coalition of the willing” on a mission to carry democracy and capitalism to millions presumed eager to embrace it in Afghanistan and Iraq.īut even as many societies embraced variants of a neoliberal economy, their ruling elites had to reconcile its benefits with its social disruptions, which often aroused not liberal-democratic enthusiasms but religious and tribal resentments- Jihad vs.
The European Union contemplated admitting 60 million Turks, pending economic and political reforms. The Harvard economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer coached Russia’s fitful movements in that direction. “One thing the Cold War did accomplish,” wrote the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, “was to vindicate democracy and capitalism.” Thomas Friedman gazed at multinational corporate logos on buildings and baseball caps in Bangalore and announced that The World Is Flat, reflecting a belief that cosmopolitanism and liberal democracy would inevitably follow open markets. When the Iron Curtain collapsed 25 years ago, leaving what seemed a world without walls, many Very Serious People heralded neoliberal capitalist democracy’s triumph on earth.
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