Now is a unique moment for challenges to neoliberalism – political movements across the country are converging on a rejection of neoliberal principles – the creation of new critical imaginaries is necessary to build on this energy and reject neoliberalism once and for all

John Whitlow, “If You Can Unmake It Here: Crisis, Contingency, and Law in the Making and Unmaking of Neoliberal New York,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, April 2022, pp. 344-345, https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/121/2/339/297868/If-You-Can-Unmake-It-HereCrisis-Contingency-and?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

Despite the world-making and subjectivizing valence of neoliberalism, one of the core arguments of this article is that the neoliberal project is now on shaky ground and that we find ourselves caught up in a new conjuncture, the resolution of which is contingent. This conjuncture was inaugurated by the Great Recession of 2008, when the neoliberal economic system collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions,3 “congeal[ing] decades of class bifurcation, downward mobility, and environmental, political, and social brittleness that [had] increased progressively since the Reagan era” (Berlant 2011: 11). In the United States, this economic collapse was not met by an organized alternative to neoliberalism—as New York’s elite met the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, or as Thatcherism responded to the crisis of embedded liberalism in the United Kingdom—but, rather, by the restorationist Obama presidency, which sought technocratic fixes to deep-seated political economic problems. These fixes largely maintained existing power arrangements and relied on neoliberal assumptions about the proper role of the state vis-à-vis society and the market economy. Put another way, the financial meltdown of 2008 destabilized the material basis of economic growth within the parameters of the neoliberal economic order, but it did not provoke the immediate delegitimation of the neoliberal social order (Gago 2017).

The broader delegitimation of neoliberalism is fundamentally a political-ideological problematic that has unfolded in fits and starts over the past dozen years.4 This process has been punctuated by key moments that have signified a rejection of many of the nostrums of the highly unequal, austere, law-and-order society midwifed by the likes of Thatcher and Reagan. Left social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter and intensifying labor militancy have grown in influence and scale to the point that their demands have begun to shift the problem-space of moral-political questions that animate our present. Old, taken-for-granted saws about letting the market do its work and running the government like a business enterprise have lost much of their luster, particularly amid a global pandemic that has necessitated substantial state intervention and collective action. Similarly, long-dominant logics of carcerality have been undermined in both popular discourse and policy making, with calls to defund and/or abolish the police growing in the public consciousness. On the political right, Trump’s presidency reflected—and perhaps amplified—an authoritarian, nativist movement that appears at best ambivalent about many of the core precepts of neoliberalism. Overall, although we have not yet seen the consolidation of a coherent post-neoliberal political formation, it is safe to say that we are living in a present in which the nature of the state is being hotly contested and reimagined, from multiple political angles. The intensity of this contestation signals that we find ourselves caught in a distinct conjuncture, the settlement of which is up for grabs.