Post-War II Political Orders under American Hegemony

Discussion

* Book: Gary Gerstle (The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order).

Branko Milanovic:

Gerstle ... "insists on the idea of a political and economic “order”. An “order” is the ruling ideology at a given point in time, synthesized and propagated by the most important parts of the political establishment. There were, according to Gerstle two such political orders in the United States during the past century: the New Deal order that began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the neoliberal order that began with Ronald Reagan.

Second, these two political orders are related, in an almost ideally synchronized manner, with the rise and fall of communism. This is not an accident. The external (international) context played an important role in the design of the US political orders.

How does an ideology become a “political order”? There is a “silent phase” of order’s construction that involves intellectuals and their theories. For neoliberalism, we have to go back to the Walter Lippmann’s Paris Colloquia, and Hayek’s and Mises’ Vienna and then more recently to Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Rush Limbaugh…Consider the years: Heritage Institution founded in 1974, Cato Institute 1974, Manhattan Institute 1976, Moral Majority defined in 1979. Ideology is then propagated throughout the public and gets adopted by one or several political movements and parties. It does not become an “order” however until it gets accepted, or, as Gerstle likes to write, until it is “acquiesced to” by other parts of the political spectrum that at first rejected it. (Margaret Thatcher is cited as saying that her greatest success was that her policies were continued by Tony Blair.)

In the case of the United States, the crucial moments of transition from ideology and political movement to order happened under Dwight Eisenhower who (as opposed to, say, William Taft) was ready to continue with the New Deal policies despite the fact that Republicans were originally opposed to all FDR stood for. And likewise, it is thanks to Bill Clinton that neoliberalism became a political and economic “order”. A given political order when it is at its peak appears like common sense. It is hardly questioned. Large majorities of the public opinion support it even if they might disagree on peripheral (from the point of view of economic order) issues."

(https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-great-order-under)