Last week, several hundred academics, think tankers, and political operators gathered in a spectacular new building whimsically named The Treehouse, across the street from Harvard Business School, to discuss the obsolescence of neoliberalism. The Treehouse is named after its primary donor, the cofounder of a private equity firm that has made its profits by targeting, stripping, and enshittifying the nation’s survival infrastructure. The tension between the venue, its funders, and the topic might have been the subject of at least a snide comment at a different kind of gathering—but this was not that kind of gathering.
This was the kind of gathering paradoxically presented as a chance to gleefully cross swords with one’s enemies and revel in the spirit of contentious debate. What this amounted to in practice was a series of often evasive forms of rhetoric and making-nice with one’s political adversaries—in the spirit, well, in the spirit of what exactly?
One of the ironies of the category of neoliberalism, around which the gathering was organized, is that it was born as what the Germans called a Kampfbegriff, a fighting concept, in the 1930s. Intellectuals who felt embattled by collectivism on left and right used it to describe a needed renovation of classical liberalism, an update that would safeguard market freedoms during a time of mass democracy and national self-determination. When the term was taken up by its critics in the 1980s and 1990s, it became both a political catch-all pejorative and a category of analysis for what felt like the inexorable advance of a more ruthless form of capitalism than the postwar settlement of social democracy and the Fordist welfare state.
Post-neoliberalism, by contrast, seems to be meant as an irenic term. It connotes less supercession than sequencing, marking a new common ground on which political adversaries might be able to meet and find some form of compromise. It is the opposite of a fighting concept. Rather, it is intended as a concept of consensus. What was happening then, in the conference hall of the private-equity Treehouse, was the attempted consecration of post-neoliberalism as the new common sense of the center.
What was the content of this new concept? Rhetorically, it included allusions to ideas of place, the dignity of work, the importance of storytelling, the new-old cliches of abundance, wellbeing, and human flourishing. It also involved what was referred to several times during the day as “the whole person,” which was interpreted by at least one speaker as a renewed role for (Christian) religion in politics and public life.
The entire edifice sat on a foundation of false binaries, that posited a move from a fallen era of atomization and cold calculation into a fuller lifeworld of connection and human warmth. As one of the current administration’s top economic advisers put it, elegantly but misleadingly: until recently, there was globalism, technocracy, trust in elites and rules; now it is about sovereignty, democratic accountability, and sanity. Back then it was about a world of market fundamentalism and open borders; now, he said, it is about market pragmatism in a world of nations and cultures.
A prominent IR scholar and CEO of a progressive policy think tank began the day by saying that we would “not be debating hypotheticals.” We would not be asking whether neoliberalism was, in fact, over—or what exactly it had been. Rather, we would proceed from the stipulated premise that it had ended. This was a convenient but analytically catastrophic choice, as it forced participants to ignore the durable continuities of the past several decades, and to accept that politicians, at least during our life times, had never before spoken about place, the dignity of labor, or the importance of community and storytelling, let alone nations and cultures. It forced us to accept the proposition that an era when border patrol budgets ballooned was also a time of “open borders.”
Apparently, before, it was all line-go-up charts and calls for efficiency and growth by any means. Now, it is not. This is, of course, willed amnesia. Politicians have always invoked the fuller “human” values. They did so at the heart of the Clinton project in the 1990s (Clinton in 1993: “there is dignity in all work, and there must be dignity for all workers.” Second inauguration: “Our greatest responsibility is to embrace a new spirit of community for a new century.”) They did so again in the midst of George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism. That both Clinton and Bush made these proclamations while announcing cuts to welfare is no rebuttal. The same dissonance between claim and practice is happening now—just look at the Big Beautiful Bill.
More interesting, perhaps, is to ask what topics of the immediate past were explicitly not mentioned at the gathering. The list would include: social justice, racial justice, gender justice, and—most alarming—climate change. Maybe what is being assembled is not a post-neoliberal consensus, but one would have to say, while wincing, a post-woke consensus. This is more apt because what is being edited out are the touchstones of social mobilization from the #MeToo, Sunrise Movement, and Standing Rock moments of 2017, through the George Floyd rebellions of 2020, the demands for trans rights, and the mass disobedience of Extinction Rebellion.
There was some nodding to the idea of challenging the hegemony of financial markets, but no practical proposals about how that might be done. When proposals did come up, they were in the spirit of pivoting away from traditional forms of exercising control over capital. The lunchtime slot was given over to a fireside chat between a doyenne of ethical capitalism and a well-known advocate of conservative populism. In a moment when he was not avoiding the question, the latter delivered the standard conservative message of worker power without unions. This took the form of a throwaway proposal for worker representation on boards—something rather difficult to imagine under the current Trump administration. But by that token, everything discussed that day was difficult to imagine under the current Trump administration.
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The term post-neoliberalism only really holds if one approaches it through the question of scale. At the level of the world trading system, Trump and his trade team did indeed create a rupture in 2017 from which we have not shifted much. The use of tariffs as political tools—which itself piggybacked on the use of sanctions as political tools across subsequent administrations of both parties—does mark a historically important break with what preceded it. The example of the Biden administration, advised in part by some of the conveners of the event, shows that post-neoliberal trade policy can be used for a variety of ends: from rearmament and expanded military capacity with a hawk’s eye on China as a new adversary, to supply chain resilience, attention to regional inequalities, care infrastructures, and bolstering worker rights. At the level of international economic relations, then, nobody would deny that a post-neoliberal world has arrived.
If we drop one level down, to that of the nation, there are also historically unique developments afoot in the United States. The number of shares that the state now holds in private companies, its capture of a large percentage of profits from chip exports, and equity stakes in Intel and dozens of smaller projects—mostly in the extractive sector—show a willingness to overstep the boundary between private and public allocation of resources in ways that represent a notable break with neoliberal principles.
Yet even at the national level one wonders what happened to the promised attack on the power of Big Tech, the sector of the economy that most illustrated the dangers of lax regulation, private rule, and worker precarity. On any fair assessment, the possibility of a post-neoliberalism from the right was dealt a perhaps fatal blow by the fusion of the current government with the needs of top Silicon Valley technology firms—especially those overseen by close Trump allies and supporters such as Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. As economic historians Susannah Glickman and Nic Johnson have argued recently, the style of governance being currently deployed resembles nothing so much as the destructive short-termism of the private equity sector from which so many top officials hail. Post-neolilberal or hyper-neoliberal?
What was promised by some on the post-neoliberal right was a return to the interests of workers, understood as wages and benefits generous enough to re-fix the social anchor of the male-breadwinner trad-family in the disorienting slurry of modern life. What has happened so far is a mockery of that promise. In practice, the MAGA-right version of post-neoliberalism has done nothing to realize the supposed values of community, place, dignity of labor, or any of the other fanciful terms proposed by the administration’s economist at the event. Instead, it has produced extraordinarily high levels of corruption and self-dealing; bilateral deals with overseas investors to privatize profits; and the inevitable prospect of future federal backstops for colossal investments by a small number of technology firms, with at best residual effects for the portion of the population not left behind by globalization—those positioned to profit via rising stock prices with fingers double-crossed that the bubble does not burst in the near future.
What little effective follow-through there has been with respect to belonging has occurred almost entirely in the negative: through appeals to the libidinal and sadistic pleasures offered by memes and short videos of mass deportation rather than through any change in the material circumstances of the American working class.
Given the fact that the current version of postliberalism from the right has failed to deliver on any of its promises to workers and has instead yielded a new, intensified form of cronyism and state capitalism, what are we to make of the larger project of locating a post-neoliberalism that could somehow encompass both left and right?
What emerged from the day was that post-neoliberalism is being proposed as the new centrism. Unlike the neoliberalism of the 1930s, this is not a project designed to nurture its ideas on the margins and stage a long march through the institutions before eventually breaking through into power, as the neat tale of the Mont Pelerin Society–to–Reagan-and-Thatcher arc teaches us. As I wrote about years ago, this was the hope of the president of the philanthropic foundation who launched this initiative in 2019 and who spoke to the gathered audience by video link. But the essence of the original neoliberal project was that it was a group of people who may have had diverse methodologies but were united in one thing: their hatred of a common enemy—socialism.
No similar enemy exists for the post-neoliberals gathered in the Treehouse. The opponent, such as it is, is a comic-book version of shareholder value and financial hegemony, which ironically exists as much as ever, with only tentative attempts to dampen its power. Rather, the shadowboxing and kabuki hosted by Harvard suggests that post-neoliberalism today is not engaged in a war of ideas or an insurgency against institutions, but is instead doing the status-quo stabilization work that think tanks have performed for decades.
One of the awkward moments of the day was when a historian of science delivered an excoriating take on the “fracking” of our attention by tech platforms and asked whether the event’s daytime talk show-like fixation on “listening” and “storytelling” wasn’t a bit too therapeutic, offering a pressure valve to prevent anything actually changing. We don’t want to just tell stories, he said, “we want power.” The line landed in the room with a thump—because the obvious follow-on was “power for who”? The point of the event was that post-neoliberal talking points were open access, available to anyone, and that “we” was a shifting category, only definitively excluding those who might live beyond America’s borders.
While the MAGA grouping uses its power to stage a Gramscism from the right—the kind called for since the 1970s by Alain de Benoist and the Italian MSI, through to Andrew Breitbart and Christopher Rufo—the response of its targets is simply to ask for something softer; to try to meet them halfway in a foggy and nebulous language of community, storytelling, and place. The sharper weapons forged in the crucible of 2020 are set aside. Instead, what is offered is an ample buffet and a fifteen minute timeslot on a couch from Design Within Reach. “Can’t we all get along?” the post-neoliberal centrism asks. “Or, if not, can’t we still enjoy what we have for a little longer?”
