The Mess That Neoliberalism Has Made

Economists must shift to a “habitation economy” paradigm, which acknowledges that our economy is now centered around enhancing our living spaces and communities. This model recognizes the importance of services and infrastructure, diverging from outdated economic theories that don’t reflect today’s consumption of services and destandardized goods. The new paradigm calls for abandoning the belief that markets will naturally balance and recognizing the power imbalance favoring producers in today’s economy​.

“Any nation or economic region that begins moving toward a democratized economy is likely to meet resistance within the global financial system, which has been structured to enforce neoliberal orthodoxy. Once a country’s government increases its borrowing and facilitates wage increases for workers, its bond ratings will be lowered and its currency will be devalued in foreign exchange markets. Moreover, rich people and businesses are likely to rush to transfer assets abroad, putting further downward pressure on the exchange rate. It is therefore an urgent priority to overhaul the rules and institutions governing the global economy that have reproduced inequality, increased international tensions, and blocked more effective responses to environmental crises.”

“Around the world, governments are reasserting powers over economic life that they had relinquished at the end of the twentieth century,” but shifts in governance models “cannot simply be reduced to the natural political instincts of those who find themselves in power at any given moment,” writes Levy. In The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Harvard historian Charles S. Maier “presents his novel concept of the “project-state,” by which he means a sovereign entity with the power to mobilize all of society behind large goals.”

“Winning the wars, combating the Great Depression, building social democratic welfare states, and pursuing decolonization and economic development were all examples of large societal projects. States transformed landscapes, cleared swamps, and built massive infrastructure such as dams, ports, and highways. But they also sought to transform populations, including by educating, inoculating, sterilizing, and in some cases exterminating them. Whether they mobilized people and resources violently or through other means, the new project-states needed committed ‘masses’ behind them. Thus, it often fell to singular charismatic political leaders—be it Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Charles de Gaulle, or Jawaharlal Nehru—to achieve the necessary critical mass, often through the organization of political parties.”

Is “the stage is set for the project-state’s comeback? Not quite. According to Maier’s analysis, today’s populist authoritarian leaders—such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and former US President Donald Trump—have not so much harnessed the project-state’s latent powers as cobbled together temporary political coalitions to facilitate mafia-like corruption. Maier’s book thus leaves open the question of whether the project-state will escape the dustbin of history and be revivified and redeployed, democratically, for the common good.”

International law is extremely relevant for the general public in the wake of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza, in which international leaders failed to invoke international law as a red line for Israel’s armed forces. “Everyday people across the globe are trying to understand what international law is, why it matters, and why it feels as if it is doing nothing at this moment when we need it the most.”

“Those who wield power in the world have an obligation to be caretakers of our aspirations to be better. Abiding by these rules is the ideal but defending these previously agreed-upon principles is the bare minimum that we demand from governments around the world. And we who claim to be practitioners in this field have an obligation to voice this demand publicly and vocally. If we can’t achieve this bare minimum, then what are we doing? We have learned nothing and we are no better than the worst that came before us.”

David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College, University of London, discusses the rise of antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza. He argues in favor of differentiating between different strands of antisemitism—such as those from the right and those from the left—and unpacks how Israel-Palestine has complicated solidarity between Jews and other racialized minorities.

“Mainstream Jewish communities in the United States and in Europe have very often made alliances with governments, and with those in power. And it’s not that there are no alliances with other racialized minorities, but these have often suffered and frayed. And the vertical alliances, which Jews have made, in some ways leave them vulnerable to radical groups who sympathize with the Palestinians and who have little sympathy either with Israel or with its supporters. These vertical alliances offer some rewards and some safety to Jewish people outside of Israel, but they also bring dangers. … These vertical alliances in a time of heightened anti-racist mobilization across society reveal the different strategies being taken by Jews and by other racialized minorities. That speaks to your question about the paradox of the position of Jews in many countries, because they are fearful, and at the present moment antisemitic incidents are rising dramatically.”

Nonna Mayer, a specialist in radical ideologies and populism, analyzes the “radical right gender gap” in European populist radical rights, with the notable exception of France, where Marine Le Pen has had significant success with regards to its female vote share. She identifies a sexist dimension of many right-wing leaders that turns off female voters, which she contrasts to Le Pen’s image of an emancipated woman. “And that’s what attracts younger women to her.”

Marine Le Pen “definitely targeted the female vote … As soon as she was at the head of the party, she specially targeted women with slogans, with tracts, with leaflets. … What made the difference between her and her father, is that she suffered the image of the party. Not only was Jean-Marie Le Pen very sexist and anti-women, but he had an aura of violence and extremism. And if you go back to the way boys and girls are brought up. They are still … not educated up in the same way … Women are brought up to conform to the norm, and too extremist, too violent parties, independently from their sexism, put them aside, put them away. So Marine Le Pen very clearly launched a strategy of de-demonization to appear like a party like the other parties. And to take away that image of violence and extremism, and that’s what made the difference.”

Intellectual George Scialabba’s new collection, Only a Voice, contains twenty-eight previously published essays published between 1984 and 2021, with a new introduction that takes up a perennial question for the author: “What are intellectuals good for?” The collection’s essays demonstrate “that anxiety and ennui about the modern—about its tendency to flatten, diminish, and anesthetize; to trivialize what is Good and Great in civilization—is as essential a feature of modernity as utopianism, rationality, or skepticism.”

Scialabba sides with the minimalist defense of modernity. “If I were to attempt to synthesize where he winds up, it would be something like this: the Enlightenment trinity of reason, progress, and freedom is a precious inheritance, which should be defended against the predations of the authoritarian Right and the trepidations of the liberal center. But modernity has a dark side; highly technological, bureaucratic, and consumerist societies fail to cultivate the virtues necessary for human flourishing. What’s more, efforts to reassert the egalitarian dimensions of liberal progress—through, say, mass mobilization and class conflict—are also doomed by the waning of these virtues, which means the forms of political engagement imaginable by contemporary leftists are constrained by an increasingly enervated, mistrustful, and self-centered modern character.”

The efforts to bring about a racial reckoning to decolonize U.S. anthropology threaten to undermine the field’s very work. Advocates of this vision make the error of assuming anthropologists can be reduced to their racial identity—“in a field where our proudest accomplishment was to expose racial classification as junk science”—and that “anthropologists under their umbrella term BILPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, People of Color) agree that white-norming is the fundamental problem facing anthropology.”

“Figuring out what holds anthropology together has never been easy. Our topics are so varied, our subfields so numerous, that debates can quickly degenerate into sloganeering, which then becomes an excuse for ignoring evidence. Once anti-racism and decolonization become political slogans, they too can become rationales for ignoring evidence. As Nicolas Langlitz has argued in these pages, AAA [American Anthropological Association] declarations have become so moralistic that they ignore all the dissenting, debating, and dreaming that has made anthropology a garden of new ideas.”