A neo-liberal message for Pierre Poilievre
Just kidding with the headline. It’s a joke, right. The political and economic governance regimes in Canada, the United States, Europe and the rest of the world are not twisting and turning toward a revival of the dictatorship models that dominate too much of global history. No need to name names. We all know who and where they were.
But if the world is not heading straight into a new wave of authoritarianism, where exactly are we heading? As political landscapes shift amid growing economic turmoil and leadership contests, the ideological highway has moved decidedly away from the free-market neo-liberalism of the late 20th century on to a new road that’s filled with statist potholes.
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An indicator of the new and not-so-liberal political trends was last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., with star performances by an odd and troubling mixture of conservative politicians that included Donald Trump, Argentina’s new self-proclaimed libertarian president, Javier Milei, and Liz Truss, the ousted British Conservative prime minister.
The meshing of conflicting visions under a conservative banner is nothing new at CPAC events, but last week’s sessions generated signs of a escalating ideological war. A commentary in The New Republic rang the alarm on the left. “CPAC 2024: This Year America, Tomorrow the World: Sure, Donald Trump was the star. But the real story was the global coalition preparing to cast the world into darkness that is Steve Bannon’s brainchild.”
A more subdued reaction came from libertarian economist Pierre Lemieux, who found the Donald Trump/Javier Milei/Liz Truss CPAC smorgasbord represented a “dangerous philosophical confusion between classical liberals and libertarians on one side and, on the other side, the current intersection of the Trumpian, evangelical, and old-conservative movements.” In other words, CPAC was no place for people who favour liberal values and free-market economic ideas.
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Today, of course, there is no safe harbour for neo-liberals and their adherence to individualism and the free-market ideas conceived over the past three centuries by economic philosophers from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism has been under vicious and systematic demolition for decades, with Communist China leading the attack backed by accomplices in the West, on the left and right, in government and the private sector.
Replacing neo-liberalism is neo-statism, an approach to political and economic control that definitionally falls short of totalitarianism. The summary differences between neo-liberalism and neo-statism were outlined by British academic Bob Jessop.
• Liberalization — promote free competition
• Deregulation — reduce role of law and state
• Privatization — sell off public sector
• Market proxies in residual public sector
• Internationalization — free inward and outward flows
• Lower direct taxes — increase consumer choice
• From state control to regulated competition
• Guide national strategy rather than plan top-down
• Auditing performance of private and public sectors
• Public-private partnerships under state guidance
• Neo-mercantilist protection of core economy
• Expanding role for new collective resources
Another perspective on neo-liberalism was recently proposed by Canadian Conservative commentator Sean Speer. Writing in the online magazine The Hub, Speer at first glance appeared to endorse neo-liberal policy under the headline: “We need neo-liberalism now more than ever.” But then came the secondary headline: “Neoliberalism must be reformed, not replaced.”
Speer, who framed his comments as advice to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, outlined reforms he says are needed to fix neo-liberalism and replace it with what he calls “post-neo-liberalism,” which he sees as a more desirable model. According to Speer, “post-neo-liberals broadly agree on two key points: first, the neo-liberal era of market-oriented reform — including deregulation, tax cuts and globalization — has produced deleterious outcomes; and second, a better alternative ultimately lies with the diminution of markets and an elevated role for the state in the economy and society.”
Policy shifts favourably reviewed by Speer include abandonment of neo-liberalism “in favour of state-directed industrial policy.” For the United States, and by implication also for Canadian political leaders, Speer argues that there’s a role for “some combination of export controls, production subsidies, foreign investment restrictions and other government policies to strengthen America’s defence industrial base, ensure a reliable supply of critical supplies, and reduce its dependence on China and other geopolitical rivals.“
None of this is consistent with neo-liberal economic principles, despite Speer’s attempt to gloss over the fundamentals by adopting the now-fashionable label “post-neo-liberalism” — which, appropriately, appears in Wikipedia as a policy sub-set within an entry titled Socialism in the 21st century.
As Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner put it in a recent essay, we are now living in a “post-neo-liberalism moment” that could, if it continues for too long, result in a “less productive, less resilient, more warlike economy.”
Perhaps we would not be in this moment if post-neo-liberalism was formally assigned its proper name: neo-statism. In that context, Pierre Poilievre should stand with neo-liberalism — and common sense — rather than neo-statism.
• Email: tcorcoran@postmedia.com
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