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In 1989, the American pundit Francis Fukuyama presciently declared the ‘end of history’: the collapse of all existing alternatives to liberalism. That apparently unassailable order has been crumbling for years. Coronavirus is the final nail in its coffin. The ‘end of history’ had two key features. The first was the market as the dominant organising principle. ‘There is no alternative’, as Margaret Thatcher put it, to market competition. This applied not merely to companies, but also individuals, as they scrambled for employment and advancement, investing in their own ‘human capital’. Public services were increasingly privatised and marketised, with everything from healthcare to higher education subjected to competition, in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘efficiency’. The second feature was the hollowing out of democracy and the rise of the regulatory state. From the late 1980s, political participation in advanced democracies collapsed. The post-war class compromise, which had enhanced access to decision-making by trade unions and social-democratic parties, was dismantled by the new right, led by Thatcher and Reagan. Unions were crushed while social democrats shifted inexorably to the right. Increasingly feeling that politicians were ‘all the same’ – unresponsive clones, parroting a new neoliberal orthodoxy – people withdrew into private life. Voter turnout sharply declined. Political elites increasingly ruled a void, where the active citizenry had once stood. Particularly in Europe, they took their cues and sought legitimation more through their relationships with one another than with their own electorates. The state, meanwhile, was fundamentally transformed. Its fundamental purpose shifted from reducing uneven development and redistributing wealth to promoting global competitiveness. Post-war ‘command and control’ systems, where the state intervened directly to pursue particular social and economic goals, were dismantled. In their place arose new independent regulators and quangos, insulated from democratic control. Increasingly – especially in Europe – these agencies networked internationally, locking in neoliberal policy sets, making them even harder to change. After appearing unassailable for two decades, this order began crumbling with the 2008 global financial crisis. As always under neoliberalism, the state moved to protect capital with a massive bailout, turning a financial crisis into a fiscal one. In Europe, harsh austerity followed, to which rotten social democratic parties simply had no answer. Discontent mounted but found no meaningful outlet. In 2011, riots broke out across British cities; the Occupy movement re-politicised economic questions; the Movement of the Squares swept Spain and Greece; the Arab spring rocked authoritarian regimes across North Africa and the Middle East. Populist parties surged. Left populists offered a brief glimmer of hope for some, but failed miserably. They capitulated to the European Union’s monetary waterboarding in Greece. They cohabited with discredited centrist parties in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Septuagenarian throwbacks Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn failed to broaden their appeal beyond their millennial socialist base, while facing relentless sabotage from the centrist political parties they relied upon as vehicles. Particularly in Europe, left populists were simply not prepared to break radically from the status quo. Corbyn’s reluctance to embrace Brexit – the form that anti-establishment revolt took in Britain – symbolised the problem. The coronavirus pandemic is killing off the neoliberal order in a way that the diminished left could not. The ‘free market’ – supposed home to titans of industry and rugged venture capitalists – cannot survive the virus for five minutes. Investors dissolve into hysteria. The fundamental irrationality of markets is exposed as stocks swing wildly from one hour to the next. Asthmatic grandmothers display greater resolve.

Post-Neoliberal Order The hollowed-out regulatory state is no match for the virus, either. In northeast Asia, where social bonds remain stronger and states still take more direct responsibility for economic and social outcomes, Covid-19 has been effectively contained – for now, at least. By contrast, Europe’s post-sovereign states have been ravaged. The virus is wreaking havoc on societies already devastated by a decade of EU-enforced austerity. From 2011-18, the EU told member-states to cut healthcare spending or outsource services 63 times. The humanitarian disaster unfolding in northern Italy – where incomes have stagnated for 20 years, and coronavirus deaths already exceed China’s – testifies to the political elite’s abandonment of their historic responsibility of providing security to the citizenry. Spain is not far behind. Greece, whose healthcare system has crumbled amid the social crisis caused by Euro-austerity, will surely follow. The response in the world’s neoliberal heartlands – Britain and the United States – shows most acutely how the neoliberal order is crumbling in response to this public health emergency. In the space of a month, both governments have jettisoned policies considered unchangeable for decades, instead pursuing courses they would have denounced as ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ just days earlier. In Britain, this began even more the Covid-19 crisis escalated, thanks to the Conservative Party’s emerging post-Thatcherite transformation under Boris Johnson. Randian deficit hawk Sajid Javid was ousted as Chancellor to enable a quasi-Keynesian budget, including increased public spending, investment in infrastructure and a £30bn stimulus. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy and propertied received the most immediate help, with £350bn in loan guarantees and grants for business and mortgage holidays. But this was swiftly followed by a rent holiday and an extraordinary pledge to pay 80 percent of wages up to £2,500, initially for three months but ultimately for as long as necessary, plus an extra £7bn in welfare spending. The new chancellor, Rishi Sunak, pledged ‘unlimited sums’ of interest-free loans. The Bank of England similarly promised limitless quantities of new money. The total sum pledged already is equivalent to 15 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product. An even more staggering $2tr stimulus is being planned States-side. As neoliberal orthodoxy is abandoned at breath-taking speed, left-wing ideas, previous considered beyond the pale, are effectively been adopted by right-wing governments. Few may have heard of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): the claim that sovereign, currency-issuing states are never fiscally constrained but can issue money at will, only causing inflation if society’s productive capacities are exceeded. But MMT is now effectively the new orthodoxy. Neoliberals have been trying to avoid this conclusion ever since the global financial crisis, when vast sums of currency were issued – euphemistically termed ‘quantitative easing’ (QE) – for the banks’ benefit. $4.5tr in the US, over £400bn in Britain, and €1.1tr in the Eurozone – yet inflation remained negligible. Ordinary people noticed this ‘magic money tree’ (as UK former prime minister Theresa May put it) and started to demand that it be shaken for them – ‘people’s QE’. Now it is been shaken – but by the Right, not the Left. Indeed, right-wing columnists quixotically urge Boris Johnson’s government to ‘embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. Cheered on my centrists, a Tory minister admits they will end up implementing ‘most of Jeremy Corbyn’s programme’. And where is all the money coming from? Taxes? Obviously not, as tax income is sharply contracting. The deficit hawks have all flown off. Borrowing, then – but, MMT adherents argue, this is merely an accounting convention. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted in 2009, ‘we simply use a computer to mark up the size of the account’.