A new world is being born

Four low, dishonest decades of neoliberalism ending is an impressive Christmas gift

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Video summary

The belief that they own morality—which, strangely always leads to social arrangements that advantage people like them—is a key element of the activist professional-managerial class gaining social leverage through controlling social legitimacy… The Trump campaign ad that Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you was bang on target. It is revealing of the underlying class dynamics that Trump won twice against pant-suited professional women who epitomised what working class folk (particularly working class men) find irritating about their professional-managerial overlords.
Lorenzo Warby, Lorenzo from Oz, 24/11/24

Progressivism itself — the ideology that replaced liberalism as the guiding light of the Democratic party — is experiencing an existential crisis. The DEI effort has yielded disappointing results and made a lot of people angry. Permissive attitudes toward crime and the border have created widespread backlashes among Americans of all races. The trans movement is losing the battle for public opinion… Woke culture has become a parody of itself. And so on. Almost every major pillar of the progressive movement seems to be creaking or crumbling at the same time.
Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 24/11/24

But people of color tend to be socially conservative and contemptuous of those getting ahead at their expense. They want to climb like anyone else. They don’t share the concerns of elite black and brown creatives; there’s a diploma and class divide in every community. They [i.e. white progressives] used these historically Democratic votes as an excuse to claim a monopoly on morality, which has finally broken. And I’m genuinely glad to see it break. No party that purely represents elites has the moral high ground. If the voters that party leaders derived legitimacy from don’t trust Democrats anymore, they don’t deserve power.
Radical Radha, Radically Pragmatic, 25/11/24

One of my more popular 2023 posts was a list of reasons things weren’t too bad.

Regular readers will understand this effort was entirely off-brand. But the piece was written just before Christmas and a shard of yuletide sentimentality must have pierced my shrivelled, black heart.

Barring exceptional developments, this will be my last Musing for 2024. Further pontification seems superfluous after all that’s happened in this Year of Elections. Plus, I need to go into founder mode, monk mode, or some kind of Alpha-tech-bro mode to complete a challenging project before the year ends.

So, at the risk of acting like one of those retailers who put the Christmas decorations up right after the Easter ones are packed away, I’m dropping 2024’s upbeat, festive Musing early.

Here are the four reasons you could head into 2025 with optimism.

(1) Neoliberalism has finally died
I’m old enough to have witnessed the phenomenon of individuals failing to die on schedule. Obviously, this is usually a blessing to the individual in question and their loved ones, but it does leave them stuck in an awkward limbo.

Here’s how it typically works. Someone, usually someone of a certain age, has a medical condition that is meant to end their life within a certain amount of time. The individual in question gets their affairs in order and says their final goodbyes. Then, having tied up all the loose ends, the individual who was supposedly not long for this vale of tears just keeps on living, leaving all involved trapped in a state of suspended animation.

That’s what it’s been like with neoliberalism since 2016 and arguably since 2008. In some alternate universe, our professional-managerial-class (PMC) overlords heeded the lessons of the GFC, or at least Brexit-Trump, and made the difficult but necessary decision to euthanise neoliberalism.

In this universe, they opted to double down on it.

So, despite growing numbers of voters – Left, Right and Centre – increasingly chafing against economic and social hyperliberalism, the Anglosphere hasn’t been able to move on.

Until a few weeks ago, that is. I presume future historians will see the re-election of Trump as the moment neoliberalism received a hot shot of morphine and was belatedly dispatched to the great ash heap of discredited ideologies in the sky.

(2) The Goat’s Cheese Left might be ready to “do the work”
Democratic societies are going to have a Left and a Right. The only question is whether they have a healthy Left and Right.

The Anglosphere Left has become increasingly pathological. Space prevents anything but the briefest summary, but here goes:

*The Left emerged to advocate for the working class. However, once centre-left parties were taken over by PMC types in the 1970s, they switched to pushing the class interests of the PMC.

*One of the more dispiriting consequences of the PMC’s capture of the Left was that centre-left parties suddenly had much less interest in distributional matters and developed a much greater tolerance for identity-politics frolics.

*Sensible centre-left types have long been scared to rein in the loony left fringe-dwellers. This has resulted in formerly respected left/liberal-leaning institutions, such as the Democratic Party, Ivy League universities and the New York Times, trashing their brands by championing ridiculous ideas and retailing obvious lies.

*The more pathological the Left has become, the more it has retreated into its bubble and the less amenable it has become to good-faith debate.

Granted, there are still plenty on the Left who believe the Trump phenomenon can be entirely explained away by the regrettable racism/sexism/transphobia of the low-information lower orders. And a narrative is now starting to cohere that Trump’s emphatic victory wasn’t all that emphatic and certainly wasn’t significant given the anti-incumbency mood abroad.

However, cooler heads now seem to be working through Kubler-Ross's stages of grief and accepting that the Left needs to reorder its priorities and change its approach rather than continue to try to scold voters into compliance.

I was much cheered to read this morning – in the New York Times, no less – that ‘Transgender Activists [are questioning] the Movement’s Confrontational Approach’.

Here are a couple of the article’s money quotes:

· “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality. “We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team… No one wants to feel stupid or condescended to.”

· “Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature,” said Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a Democrat.

It seems the Left might now be ready to learn the hard lessons of defeat and reboot itself.

(3) We could be heading into economic and cultural boomtimes
Coming out of the pandemic, some of the more optimistic prognosticators argued the rest of the 2020s would resemble the 1920s. (The good part of the 1920s, before Wall Street crashed).

Low unemployment rates have been a blessing, but claiming the first half of the 2020s roared would be a stretch. However, the second half just might.

In the same way the take-up of the automobile made what had been horse-powered societies more efficient in the 1920s, several emerging technologies could soon cause long-sluggish productivity rates to perk up across the Anglosphere. Rising productivity rates are, dare I say it, a rising tide that lifts all boats. (As long as the benefits of those productivity gains are widely distributed rather than creamed off by those at the top, which is exactly the kind of fuckery the neopopulists are promising to put a stop to.)

It also appears there will soon be a burst of deregulatory activity across the Anglosphere. This should make it much harder for ruthlessly self-interested demographics – let’s call them, say, Boomer NIMBYs – to exercise veto power.

Anglosphere politicians and voters have long been frustrated about how difficult and expensive it is to build infrastructure, build affordable housing, build a mine, build a factory, build pretty much anything. In the wake of what Milei has already achieved in Argentina and what Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy are likely to accomplish in the US soon, a 1980s-style boom is entirely possible if Anglosphere governments start hacking away at overregulation and excessive bureaucracy.

(4)A less polarised, less anxious age beckons
If you want to turbocharge societal polarisation, there are few better ways to go about it than implementing neoliberal policies.

Within living memory, Anglosphere societies were middle-class societies. Pundits would, in all seriousness, talk about them being “classless”. That’s because the majority of the adult population led a stable middle-class lifestyle centred around home ownership, marriage and childrearing.

Surprisingly enough, slashing taxes on high-income earners and corporations, privatising publicly owned assets, busting unions and facilitating offshoring has increasingly turned what were once 20-60-20 societies into 80:20 ones.

It’s self-evident why those who aren’t in the top quintile of the income distribution aren’t happy – being one of the ‘losers’ in a winner-take-all society is profoundly demoralising, even though you’re in the majority. (It’s especially humiliating and frustrating for low-to-middle-income men, given the grim fate it consigns them to in the contemporary dating market.)

But the bitter irony of neoliberalism was that even many of the supposed winners weren’t having a good time. After all, those winners typically had to work hard from a young age to acquire the correct educational credentials and then work even harder once they landed a promising grad position at the appropriate law firm, management consultancy, or tech company. And even after all the blood, sweat and tears involved in achieving Master/Mistress of the Universe status, there’s was always the terrifying prospect of that hefty salary disappearing overnight. (It wasn’t just the lower orders that had to give up the job security their parents and grandparents enjoyed once Anglosphere economies were ‘modernised’.)

Not content with creating economically two-tier societies, our PMC overlords opted to put even more strain on the system by importing many millions of migrants, usually with little thought given to how the newcomers would be housed, let alone integrated.

If – and it’s a big if – neopopulists follow through on their promises to bring migration levels down and create economies that work better for the bulk of the population, Anglosphere societies could soon be much more comfortable and relaxed places to live in. Who knows, people might even start feeling hopeful enough to start pumping out babies again.

And a Merry Christmas to all
Before taking my leave, I’d like to thank everyone who has read this humble newsletter during 2024.

There’s an unimaginably vast volume of content screaming out for people’s attention nowadays, so I appreciate anyone who invests a few minutes in one of my hot and spicy takes.

Actively engaging with one of my posts goes above and beyond the call of duty. On that note, an especially big thank you to this year’s commenting and liking (or disliking) stalwarts: Aaron, Alex, Alison, Amy, Charles, ‘Chaos Goblin’, Christopher, Dexter, Engel, Gary, Jonathan, Ian, Kathleen, Kyra, ‘Lasagna’, Michael, Murray, Nigel (the other one), Penny, Piers, Scott, Simon, Sophia, ‘the long warred’, Tod, Todd, Rashida, and Tim.

All the best for the festive season and new year, dear reader. Like Orange Hitler, I should be back in the saddle in mid-January.