The global Covid response was the turning point in public trust, economic vitality, citizen health, free speech, literacy, religious and travel freedom, elite credibility, demographic longevity, and so much more. Now five years following the initial spread of the virus that provoked the largest-scale despotisms of our lives, something else seems to be biting the dust: the postwar neo-liberal consensus itself.

Nations are erecting new trade barriers and dealing with citizen uprisings like we’ve never seen before, some peaceful, some violent, and most that could go either way. On the other side of this upheaval lies the answer to the great question: what does political revolution look like in advanced industrial economies with democratic institutions? We are in the process of finding out.

Globalism began following the second world war and accelerated with the end of the Cold War. In the waning days of the second world war, a group of extremely smart and well-intended diplomats, statesmen, and intellectuals worked to secure the peace in the aftermath of the wreckage in Europe and around the world. They all agreed that a priority in the postwar world was to institutionalise economic cooperation as broadly as possible, under the theory that nations that are dependent on each other for their material well-being were less likely to go to war against each other.

Thus was born what came to be called the neo-liberal order. It consisted of democratic nations with limited welfare states cooperating in trading relationships with ever-lower barriers between states. In particular, the tariff was deprecated as a means of fiscal support and industrial protection. New agreements and institutions were founded to be the administrators of the new system: GATT, IMF, World Bank, and the UN.

Tariffs and trade barriers fell ever more, as dollars as the world reserve currency filled the coffers of world central banks. The US was the global source of liquidity that made it all possible. It came at a huge cost, however, as the US through the decades lost its manufacturing advantages in dozens of industries that once defined the American commercial experience.

The manufacturing losses coincided with a growing public perception that the institutions of government and finance were operating without transparency and citizen participation. The ballooning of the security state after 9/11 and the stunning bailouts of Wall Street after 2008 reinforced the point and set the stage for a populist revolt. The lockdowns – disproportionately benefiting elites – plus the burning of cities with the riots of the summer of 2020, the vaccine mandates, and combined with the onset of a migrant crisis, reinforced the point.

The problem of migration plus pandemic planning are only two of the data points which suggest an ominous reality of which many people in the world are newly aware. The nation-states that have dominated the political landscape since the Renaissance had given way to a form of government we can call globalism. It doesn’t refer only to trade across borders. It is about political control, away from citizens in countries toward something else that citizens cannot control or influence.

The world today is packed with wealthy institutions and individuals that stand in revolt against the ideas of freedom and democracy. They do not like the idea of geographically constrained states with zones of juridical power. They believe they have a global mission and want to empower global institutions against the sovereignty of people living in nation-states.

They say that there are existential problems that require the overthrow of the nation-state model of governance. They have a list: infectious disease, pandemic threats, climate change, peacekeeping, cybercrime, financial stability, and the threat of instability, and I’m sure there are others on the list that we’ve yet to see. The idea is that these are necessarily worldwide and evade the capacity of the nation-state to deal with them.

We are all being acculturated to believe that the nation-state is nothing but an anachronism that needs to be supplanted. Keep in mind that this necessarily means treating democracy and freedom as anachronisms too. And that is precisely the point: to achieve universal disenfranchisement of average people so that the elites can have a free hand in regulating the planet as they see fit.

What they called ‘free trade’ (not the simple freedom to buy and sell across borders but rather a state-managed industrial plan) also came at a cost: the transference of sovereignty away from the people in their communities and nations to supranational institutions over which citizens have no control.

The neo-liberal consensus built in the postwar period contained the seeds of its own destruction. It was too dependent on the creation of institutions beyond people’s control and too reliant on elite mastery of events. It was already crumbling before the pandemic response but it was the Covid controls, nearly simultaneously imposed all over the world to underscore elite hegemony, that exposed the fist under the velvet glove.

Edited for brevity by Ramesh Thakur. The full 3,000-word article can be read here. First published in the Brownstone Journal, October 20, 2024