The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (with Prof Gary Gerstle)

2026-05-27

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While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her in the past two years. In this episode, Kim speaks with Gary Gerstle, best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and ten other books. Kim said that after reading this book, she began to feel that when it comes to economic policy, we really have a one-party system. The architect of the New Deal Order was FDR, a Democrat, but its general contractor was...

While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her in the past two years.

In this episode, Kim speaks with Gary Gerstle, best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order and ten other books.

Kim said that after reading this book, she began to feel that when it comes to economic policy, we really have a one-party system. The architect of the New Deal Order was FDR, a Democrat, but its general contractor was Eisenhower, arguably the most progressive of all American presidents. The architect of the Neoliberal order was Reagan, but its general contractor was Clinton. Kim also said that reading this book made her realize that, time and again throughout her career, she thought she was working towards progressive ends, not understanding how neoliberalism had taken hold of the Democratic Party.

Gerstle explains that “the phrase political order is meant to connote a constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles. In the last hundred years, America has had two political orders: the New Deal order that arose in the 1930s and 1940s, crested in the 1950s and 1960s, and fell in the 1970s; and the neoliberal order that arose in the 1970s and 1980s, crested in the 1990s and 2000s, and fell in the 2010s

At the heart of each of these two political orders stood a distinctive program of political economy. The New Deal order was founded on the conviction that capitalism left to its own devices spelled economic disaster. It had to be managed by a strong central state able to govern the economic system in the public interest.

The neoliberal order, by contrast, was grounded in the belief that market forces had to be liberated from government regulatory controls that were stymying growth, innovation, and freedom. The architects of the neoliberal order set out in the 1980s and 1990s to dismantle everything that the New Deal order had built across its forty-year span. Now it, too, is being dismantled. Alarmingly, there seems to be no coherent policy around whatever it is replacing the Neoliberal order–just a mad grab for wealth, leading to even greater disparities than those that led to the Gilded Age’s excesses and to the Great Depression.

Guest Background: Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including two prizewinners, American Crucible (2017) and Liberty and Coercion (2015). He is a Guardian columnist and has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Statesman, Dissent, The Nation, and Die Zeit, among others. He frequently appears on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, ITV 4, Talking Politics, and NPR.