Neoliberal Consensus in Crisis
In the First World, incumbent politicians seem to enjoy an advantage. First World people like our stability. If a politician is doing a good job (or even a bad one) we will typically allow them to keep their job until they term-out or retire.
I personally view this as a negative because it has outsourced our political system to people who don’t really care about the country but will be reelected anyway because drastic change is seen as rocking the boat too much for comfort.
Ever since the 1990s, the First World has been lulled into a false sense of security. The Western powers and capitalism won out against the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. There is no need for course correction because our way won the Cold War.
As a result, we have continued to operate under the neoliberal consensus for decades. The neoliberal parties and politicians have seen success after success at the ballot box. This went on for quite some time.
Then Donald Trump was elected, and for the first time in years, a major power was under the control of an individual who challenged the established neoliberal consensus. The First World was shaken up as factions started to wrestle for control.
Then Covid struck. Trump, now the incumbent, was thrown out of office due to perceived inadequacies in handling the virus. The neoliberal consensus struck back, placing neoliberal founding father Joe Biden into office.
None of the other neoliberal leaders were affected by the events of 2020. It had, for a time, looked as if the neoliberal consensus had reestablished itself as the dominant power in the First World.
That all started changing as the 2020s went on. Russia’s Special Military Operation into Ukraine saw the neoliberal world order challenged. In a sense of self-preservation, the neoliberal powers started to put money and material into the Ukrainian war machine at the expense of their own citizens.
At the same time, despite their initial victory lap after Covid, inflation was on the rise. The prices of everyday necessities started rising to unsustainable amounts. People who would normally be considered well off started feeling economic pain.
To add to this pressure, increased uncontrolled mass immigration led to demographic displacement and wages being driven down as illegal migrants happily worked for cheap. First World citizens were suddenly burdened with the costs of an influx of more people than the social safety net could manage.
The response of the neoliberal consensus was not to provide relief for the people. The response was for the people to suck it up. This increasingly condescending attitude from the governments who were supposed to look after their people led to a massive backlash in the form of the anti-incumbent waves we have seen over the past two years.
The major players of the 2020s, France, Germany, the United States, Britain, Japan, South Korea, Canada, etc. Have all faced some sort of backlash from voters as discontent increased.
Two years ago, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was voted in due to anti-incumbent sentiment. Ironically, he himself may be voted out of office due to his actions as incumbent and subsequent martial law declaration.
Over the summer, Emmanuel Macron of France saw his parliamentary majority slimmed down by the combined efforts of the French Left and Right. While it has not been enough to throw him out of office, he has been forced to deal with a minority government which has already gone through two Prime Ministers.
Macron, elected in 2017, has been the face of European neoliberalism for the past 8 years. Despite his low approval ratings, he has been able to etch out a win in nearly every subsequent Presidential election due to the two-round system and the opposition’s disagreements.
While his position is not in any immediate danger, his governing abilities have been hampered by the parliamentary chaos that has engulfed France over the summer of 2024. Should his majority be outright lost in future elections, Macron will be defanged.
The summer of 2024 also saw the landslide election loss of the British Conservative Party. The Conservatives, who had been in the majority since 2010, governed as the typical neoliberal party and failed to really conserve anything at all.
While there had been times over the late 2010s where it looked as if the Conservatives would face a loss, especially with left-wing firebrand Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour, these losses never materialized. Jeremy Corbyn was later replaced by more moderate Labour leader Keir Starmer.
That loss finally materialized in the summer of 2024. Labour under Starmer swept to victory, less on their own merits and more on the failings of the Conservatives. As someone on the right, I personally find Starmer to be a less impressive man than Jeremy Corbyn was, but he happened to be in the right position at the right time.
Despite the win for Labour, they are not at all popular. Keir Starmer is more of a Tony Blair style Labour politician as compared to Jeremy Corbyn, who was more akin to Bernie Sanders in the United States, had Sanders led a major party.
The Starmer government has not really done anything revolutionary that would be needed to improve the lot of the British people. They have kept the Conservative’s foreign policy in regards to Ukraine.
Mass migration is still occurring, although Starmer has apparently said that mass migration was the fault of the Conservatives, indicating that he sees it as a problem. However, at the moment it is just words. Good on him for acknowledging the problem, but it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t do anything about it.
As a result of this duopoly, Labour themselves may be swept out of power in the next elections if they do not do something revolutionary. British politics will become like America, where they vote in one party, nothing changes, then vote in the other party next election, rinse and repeat.
Then came America. The ruling Democratic Party had sought to avoid an anti-incumbent wave by swapping out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris at the eleventh hour. While our propaganda press gave the illusion of this working, it ended up failing.
Donald Trump swept all the swing states needed to win, and then some. Kamala Harris failed to flip any counties, the first for a candidate since Herbert Hoover and his landslide loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Republican Party swept both chambers of Congress and are set to enter government in 2025 with a trifecta of legislative, judicial, and executive authority. On top of this, Trump also won the popular vote, a first for a Republican since 2004.
Trump has promised revolutionary change, from our immigration system to the way our executive branch operates, as well as drastic purges of the federal bureaucracy. Should he succeed, the American government will never be the same again.
This was in contrast to the message sent by Harris and Biden’s campaign, which was one of stagnation and normalcy. The problem is, people weren’t liking the Biden/Harris stagnation and normalcy. They were elected in 2020 with the promise to return the adults to the room, but the adults ended up being out of touch and stubborn.
The Democratic Party, who had long prided themselves on being the party of the working man, discarded the working class in favor of marginalized groups such as transgenders and illegal aliens. The wealthy, who they used to shun, ended up agreeing with them on nearly every issue.
Rust Belt Rick working at the factory for low wages watched as the party which his family traditionally supported raised his taxes and allowed mass amounts of people in who would work for cheap while outsourcing his job in the name of free trade. To make matters worse, the money that was taken from Rick would be used to house people who came illegally.
Now, we need to be careful here. The Republican Party without Trump is your typical neoliberal party, and was responsible for ushering in the neoliberal consensus in the first place. Never underestimate the willingness of the Republican old guard to metaphorically shoot themselves to prevent Trump from delivering on his agenda.
Then we have the Germans. Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s Chancellor who came in after Angela Merkel, suffered an embarrassment as their coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, left the coalition in November, putting them in minority status.
Scholz, another Starmer style Tony Blair “socialist,” initially created a coalition between the SDP, FDP, and the German Greens. They ended up in power during the Russian SMO in Ukraine and decided that they would throw everything and the kitchen sink into it.
Ironic, considering the Greens are traditionally anti-war, yet the foreign minister, a Green, is probably one of the most rabid war hawks I have ever seen. What a betrayal of your base! Is it any wonder why Chancellor Scholz is now receiving a vote of no confidence? Elections are set to be held in February. I hope the AFD wins.
This brings me to the magnum opus of today’s piece: Canada. Justin Trudeau has been in office since 2015. Winning on a liberal platform and name recognition from his father, who had been Prime Minister himself.
The Liberals, being based in a relatively liberal country like Canada, had seen success over success in the part decade. The election of Donald Trump allowed them to fearmonger their way to power, seeing themselves as the bulwark against Trumpist populism in Canada.
Not anymore though. Despite Trump’s victory, recent polling still has the Liberal Party losing in a landslide to the Canadian Conservatives. Even Canadians have seemed to have enough of their leadership.
The Canadian Conservatives aren’t revolutionaries like the Trump, they are liberal in their own right, but it says a lot considering how despite being painted as Trump apologists, the Canadian public doesn’t seem to care.
Anti-incumbency has gotten so bad for the neoliberal consensus that they have even begun to do away with the concept of fair elections entirely. In Romania, insurgent candidate Călin Georgescu won against neoliberal candidate Elena Lasconi.
As a result of this, the Romanian Supreme Court annulled the results of the first round of the election. Weird how the supposed protectors of democracy protect democracy by outlawing it when they don’t like the results.
In Georgia, they kicked out their French-Born EU shill President, who is also refusing to accept the results of their election. Hold on people, I thought refusing to accept the results of an election was bad? Or is it only bad when Donald Trump does it?
So what does all of this tell us? It tells us that the neoliberal consensus which has ruled for decades is starting to come crumbling down and has indicated that they won’t go quietly. That it is not their fault for the ills of society but the fault of the people for pointing it out.
The only country in the First World that operates under the neoliberal consensus and has managed to avoid this fallout is Japan. The Liberal Democratic Party (despite the name, being their conservative party) has consistently been dominant for years and will probably be dominant into the future.
I would argue that this is because the issues in Japan are an entirely different sort than the issues plaguing the rest of the First World. There is no unfiltered mass migration into Japan and the country is homogenous. Fringe issues like wokeism don’t really have mainstream appeal either.
Conclusion
I believe that all of this is poetic justice. The neoliberal consensus prided themselves on being the winners of the Cold War, the vanguard of democracy, and are being voted out democratically because they failed to adapt to the times and said that the problems plaguing people aren’t actually a big deal.
If there is anything I hate most, it is snarky condescending people who think that they are invincible. The neoliberal consensus became that exact concept over the past two decades. They though that they could never be wrong and thus could do no wrong.
This is a dangerous mindset to have, because it leads to issues like in Romania where elections are annulled because the establishment could do no wrong. I would not be surprised if we see more of that in the future. Macron seems like the type of guy who would go for a South Korea style martial law to save the republic stunt should the French Left and Right succeed to neuter him.
The remaining neoliberal states could enter an era of Anocratic Liberalism. Anocracy is defined as a regime which mixes democratic and autocratic features. I would not be surprised if we see a neoliberal version of Vladimir Putin arise somewhere in Europe.
The latter half of the 2020s will certainly be interesting.