The End of the “Age of Reagan”

Ronald Reagan is the most consequential American president after Franklin Roosevelt. It was during Reagan’s presidency that our modern world transformed toward the integrated, international, free trade, “neoliberal” construct that we have been living under for the past 40 years. The accomplishments of Reagan are many, but he is most important for being the administrative arbiter of transformation: overseeing the end of the New Deal system which was built upon labor and government regulation and the creation of the neoliberal system based on technological innovation, globalization, and international trade and diplomacy.

The slow movement out of the New Deal system with its antiquated models of political-economy were long overdue as the regulatory and labor-intensive model was running into problems by the 1970s, but in the 2020s we are experiencing a revival among the poorly educated punditry class yearning for a restoration of a sort of New Deal social democracy—both left and right. Neoliberal and neoconservative, or neocon in its more pejorative use, are bantered about as derogatory terms though they are always and everywhere loosely defined. To the critics who wield these terms as bludgeons for political rhetoric, what these seemingly interchangeable terms entail are a political creed and governing philosophy premised on the superiority of global capitalism and the financial economy (neoliberal) and a willingness to go to war in defense or promotion of the global capitalist and financial economy (neocon). This system, of course, was the one slowly erected by the Reagan Administration during the final decade of the Cold War.

Reagan’s success in overseeing a sweeping overhaul of the international political-economic order touched more than the Republican Party. The center-left parties around the world pivoted away from their labor-oriented “socialism” (like in Europe) and their regulatory labor-based protectionism like in North America. The Democratic Party, famously, became more “centrist” in its economic attitude, culminating in the “Third Way” policies of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats – a fancy term which simply meant an acceptance of the neoliberal economic order premised upon free trade, financial capitalism, and the free movement of labor. So too did the Labor Party in Australia under Bob Hawke and the Labour Party in Britain under Tony Blair, whereby the older labor and industrial models of semi-protectionism and government intervention were replaced with the service-driven and free trade economies that we have today.

To speak of a “uniparty” is to really speak of this underlying governing outlook: the service-oriented, free trade friendly, global economy which prioritizes capital over labor and technological innovation over worker skillsets. This is the world order that the United States led in the final decade of the Cold War, the world order which promptly expanded itself with the fall of the Soviet Union, and now finds itself under intense scrutiny by its opponents abroad and its critics at home who now frequently opine for some sort of return to domestic socialism, communitarianism, de-growth economics, and general dismissive usage of the terms neoliberal and neocon while remaining unclear what exactly they mean by those terms whenever they use them.

It is perhaps one of the ironies of American politics that the party which oversaw this transformation in the 1980s, the Republicans, are now the most vicious and bloviated critics of it, all the while the party which had once opposed the tenets of neoliberal economics are now the de facto defenders of it despite an increasingly hostile young voting base which would rather see a shift to eco-socialism while complaining about neoliberal technological capitalism with their iPhones on TikTok and Twitter.

Neoliberalism, here, can simply be understood as the primacy of markets and technology for facilitating individual choices from everything to economics to place of residence to personal identity. Government, to the extent that government should have a role in our lives—both at the societal and individual level—should facilitate the expansion of markets and technology to ensure greater individual choices in X, Y, and Z to enhance individual empowerment and self-creation. Community, too, to the extent that it is seen as a good, exists to encourage individual choices rather than be a “thick” community for people to enter into; community only exists as an affirmation network of one’s individual choices. Neoliberalism is the philosophy of individualist primacy primarily understood through the means of market economics and technological usage. To speak, then, of any “Age of Reagan” isn’t to speak of an age of ascendant American conservatism, nationalism, or Cold Warriorism (though this was true in the late 1970s and through the 1980s and into the 1990s) but to speak of this elevation of the individual through market economics and technological innovation over the regulatory state and community of traditional identification. The elevation of the individual over the regulatory state earned the ire of the New Deal liberals just as much as the elevation of the individual through market and technological forces earned the criticism of paleoconservatives.

The Age of Reagan, however, is wilting. Whether it ends or continues to transform into something new remains to be seen. But the emergent hostility to neoliberalism and its muscular defenders, the “neocons,” the dismissal of the economism of the Reagan era as the highest good to pursue in life, and the yearning for a return of 1950s America—both in social mores and pieties but also economics—indicates the possible end of the Age of Reagan just like how Reagan heralded the end of the New Deal era. Donald Trump is very far from Reagan, in just about everything—and he is transforming the Republican Party with him: crudity, isolationism, and protectionism. Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment can never be Reagan even if they are now the nominal defenders of the very system the Reagan Revolution ushered into existence; Reagan’s social conservatism and patriotism and frequent invocations of Christianity (of the evangelical variety) are alien to the Democratic elite with its social progressivism, anti-nationalism, and soft (and at times militant) hostility to (cultural) Christianity especially in its evangelical form.

Yet the neoliberal order in its most basic construct remains strong. Though many people are young and restless, they do not want to surrender what neoliberalism offers: the primacy of the self-creating individual through market consumerism and technological innovation with global reach. Radical chic neoliberalism is certainly the contemporary spirit no matter how much people feign their rhetorical support for a new socialism, a new social democracy, a new New Deal, Red Toryism, Blue Labour, America First, or the litany of other terminologies to express an anxious dissatisfaction of their spiritual lives which is blamed on neoliberalism while still holding onto all the sacred gadgets and creations of that system they claim to despise. We are still living in the neoliberal age (as it faces tensions within and without) but the Reaganite sentimentalism within it—a neoliberalism that was also grounded in moral renewal, patriotism, and Christianity—are dead as evidenced by the simple fact that the discourse on neoliberalism has forsaken morality, patriotism, and religion as being in any way essential to it.

Print