A “political order,” U.S. historian Gary Gerstle writes, “is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.” The New Deal met that definition from the 1930s to the 1970s, and neoliberalism, he asserts, did so from the 1970s to the 2010s, when it began to splinter after the war in Iraq and the economic crash of 2008.
In “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” Gerstle offers a rich and sophisticated discussion of neoliberalism, which he says is based on “the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymieing growth, innovation, and freedom” — in other words, the mirror image of the New Deal that came before it.
It was Gerstle himself (with historian Steve Fraser) who originated the idea of a specific, modern U.S. “political order” in a 1989 book, “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980.” Thirty years later he expands on that concept. A political order, he says, must have “consensus across the political spectrum” to “produce elections-proof structural realignments.” It must have a “protean character,” which enhances “its appeal, allowing its proponents to move in directions both old and new, right and left.” In doing so, it bends the opposition party to the will of the new dominant party.
The neoliberal order was no exception. Despite being a project incubated in Republican circles and launched under Ronald Reagan, its full-scale consolidation occurred under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
The fundamental requirement of this neoliberal project, Gerstle writes, was the radical expansion of the “terrain of human activities subject to market principles.” Personal freedom and fulfillment depended on it: An unconstrained market would unleash the individual creativity and energy that had been sedated under the New Deal order. But this liberation — of the market’s transformative power and of individual liberty — paradoxically required a strong and energetic state, “necessary to free individuals from the encroachments of government.” Finally, the emphasis on individual emancipation — “the thrill and adventure of throwing off constraints from one’s person and one’s work” — could (and did) appeal to a New Left prone to denounce corporate liberalism’s suffocating conformism.