![]() ![]() People know they have more access to things-shiny things, fancy things, complicated things-but they grope for meaning and sense a depressing, decreasing personal control over their own future.Īlthough Trump’s anti-neoliberal messaging has been successful, his policies have never matched his rhetoric. Despite the nonstop information flow, more Americans report greater feelings of intense loneliness today than at any time before. Surveys taken during the past decade suggest that Americans have never been so pessimistic. The result, today, is a very real epidemic of American unhappiness. Read: When people were proud to call themselves ‘neoliberal’ ![]() And the consumerism that was supposed to fill our lives with the material rewards necessary for happiness instead left many feeling empty as our cultures and identities got swallowed up by the shapeless, antiseptic, profit-obsessed international economy. Automation and online commerce erased our local economies, our local meeting places, and our local news sources. Social media joined us, but also bred resentment and societal fragmentation. Technology, which had promised to make our lives easier and more connected, started to get so complicated, and advance at a pace so dizzying, that it no longer felt within our control. The newly global economy moved America’s well-paying jobs-the ones that had created the U.S.’s early- and mid-20th-century blue-collar aristocracy-overseas, but the jobs that replaced them offered lower pay, fewer benefits, and less opportunity for advancement. But then, about 30 years ago, the project started to fray at the edges. In the decades after the Second World War, Americans settled comfortably into this new paradigm, ready and eager to reap the bounty. Though it contains the word liberal, neoliberalism was devised by libertarian-conservative economists and political scientists as an alternative to the state-controlled command economy favored by Communists and other authoritarians. Broadly speaking, neoliberalism argues that barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation, and empowered citizen-consumers are the keys to prosperity, happiness, and strong democracy. Economic neoliberalism underpins the past 70 years of Western economic and cultural order. In essence, what Trump is attacking is neoliberalism. And frankly, given that Trump is running even with President Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, it’s still working. He railed against the technology companies that had seemed to replace families and churches as the new enforcers of moral order. He signaled an intent to break America apart from the world economy and the international order. He offered easy scapegoats-immigrants, Muslims, and economic elites-to blame for the loss of meaning and economic autonomy felt by many Americans. This sense of dislocation is what Donald Trump’s politics of grievance seized upon when he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2015. For millions of Americans-especially those who don’t live in the high-income urban mega-economies-it feels like life itself is unspooling. ![]()
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