Neoliberalism arrived with globalization or else globalization arrived with neoliberalism; that is how the Great Regression began.footnote¹ In the 1970s, the capital of the rebuilt industrial nations started to work its way out of the national servitude in which it had been forced to spend the decades following 1945.footnote² The time had come to take leave of the tight labour markets, stagnant productivity, falling profits and the increasingly ambitious demands of trade unions under a mature, state-administered capitalism. The road to the future, to a new expansion as is always close to the heart of capital, led outwards, to the still pleasantly unregulated world of a borderless global economy in which markets would no longer be locked into nation-states, but nation-states into markets.

The neoliberal about-face was presided over by a new goddess known as tina—There Is No Alternative. The long list of her high priests and priestesses extends from Margaret Thatcher via Tony Blair down to Angela Merkel. Anyone who wished to serve tina, to the accompaniment of the solemn chorus of the united economists of the world, had to recognize the escape of capital from its national cages as both inevitable and beneficial, and would have to commit themselves to help clear all obstacles from its path. Heathen practices such as controls on the movement of capital, state aid and others were to be tracked down and eradicated; no one must be allowed to escape from ‘global competition’ and sink back into the cushioned comfort of national protections of whatever kind. Free-trade agreements were to open up markets and protect them from state interference, global governance was to replace national governments, protection from commodification was to be replaced by enabling commodification, and the welfare state was to give way to the competition state of a new era of capitalist rationalization.footnote³

By the end of the 1980s at the latest, neoliberalism had become the pensée unique of both the centre left and the centre right. The old political controversies were regarded as obsolete. Attention now focused on the ‘reforms’ needed to increase national ‘competitiveness’, and these reforms were everywhere the same. They included more flexible labour markets, improved ‘incentives’ (positive at the upper end of the income distribution and negative at the bottom end), privatization and marketization both as weapons in the competition for location and cost reduction, and as a test of moral endurance. Distributional conflict was replaced by a technocratic search for the economically necessary and uniquely possible; institutions, policies and ways of life were all to be adapted to this end. It follows that all this was accompanied by the attrition of political parties—their retreat into the machinery of the state as ‘cartel parties’footnote⁴—with falling membership and declining electoral participation, disproportionately so at the lower end of the social scale. Beginning in the 1980s this was accompanied by a meltdown of trade-union organization, together with a dramatic decline in strike activity worldwide—altogether, in other words, a demobilization along the broadest possible front of the entire post-war machinery of democratic participation and redistribution. It all took place slowly, but at an increasing pace and developing with growing confidence into the normal state of affairs.

As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics.footnote⁵ This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised.footnote⁶ The inflation of the 1970s and the unemployment that accompanied its harsh elimination were followed by a rise in government debt in the 1980s and the restoration of public finances by ‘reforms’ of the welfare state in the 1990s. These in turn were followed, as compensation, by opening up generous opportunities for private households to access credit and get indebted. Simultaneously, growth rates declined, although or because inequality and aggregate debt kept increasing. Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations. The promised service economy and knowledge-based society turned out to be smaller than the industrial society that was fast disappearing; hence a constant expansion of the numbers of people who were no longer needed. This surplus population of a revived capitalism on the move looked helplessly and uncomprehendingly at the transformation of the tax state into a debt state and finally into a consolidation state, and at the financial crises and subsequent rescue programmes as a result of which they found themselves worse and worse off.footnote⁷ ‘Global governance’ didn’t help, nor did the national democratic state that had become uncoupled from the capitalist economy for the sake of globalization. To make sure that this did not become a threat to the Brave New World of neoliberal capitalism, sophisticated methods were required to secure popular consent and disorganize would-be resisters. In fact, the techniques developed for this purpose initially proved impressively effective.

Lies, even blatant lies, have always existed in politics. We need think only of Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council, with his aerial photographs proving the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As to Germany, one still remembers a defence minister, greatly revered up to this time as a social democrat of the old school, who claimed that the German troops sent into Afghanistan at the urging of the us were defending, ‘at the Hindu Kush’, the security of Germany. However, with the neoliberal revolution and the transition to ‘post-democracy’footnote⁸ associated with it, a new sort of political deceit was born, the expert lie. It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts.footnote⁹ It was followed, inter alia, by the European Commission’s ‘Cecchini Report’ (1988), which, as a reward for the ‘completion of the internal market’ planned for 1992, promised the citizens of Europe an increase in prosperity of the order of 5 per cent of the European Union’s gdp, an average 6 per cent reduction in the price of consumer goods, as well as millions of new jobs and an improvement in public finances of 2.2 per cent of gdp. In the us, meanwhile, financial experts such as Bernanke, Greenspan and Summers agreed that the precautions taken by rational investors in their own interest and on their own account to stabilize ever ‘freer’ and ever more global financial markets were enough; government agencies had no need to take action to prevent the growth of bubbles, partly because they had now learned how to painlessly eliminate the consequences if bubbles were to burst.

At the same time, the ‘narratives’footnote¹⁰ disseminated by mainstream parties, governments and pr specialists, and the decisions and non-decisions associated with them, became ever more absurd. The penetration of the machinery of government by previous and future Goldman Sachs managers continued apace, in recognition of their indispensable expertise, as if nothing had changed. After several years during which not a single one of the bank managers who had shared responsibility for the crash of 2008 had been brought to justice, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder returned to the New York law firm from which he had come, which specializes in representing financial companies under government investigation—and to a princely million-dollar salary. And Hillary Clinton, who together with her husband and daughter had amassed a fortune in the hundreds of millions in the sixteen years since leaving the White House—from Goldman Sachs speaking fees among other things, far above the earnings even of a Larry Summers—entered the election campaign as the self-designated representative of the ‘hardworking middle class’, a class that in reality had long since been reduced by capitalist progress to the status of a surplus population.

From the perspective of neoliberal internationalism, of course, which had developed the propagation of illusions into the fine art of democratic government, the post-factual age began as late as 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum and the smashing of Clintonism by Donald Trump.footnote¹¹ Only with the collapse of post-democracy, and the end of mass patience with the ‘narratives’ of a globalization that in the us had benefited in its final years only the top 1 per cent, did the guardians of the dominant ‘discourse’ call for obligatory fact-checking. Only then did they regret the deficits experienced by those caught in the pincer grip of the global attention economy on the one hand and the cost-cutting in the education and training sector on the other. It is at that point that they began to call for ‘eligibility tests’ of various kinds as a prerequisite for citizens being allowed to exercise their right to vote.footnote¹² The fact that the Great Unwashed, who for so long had helped promote the progress of capitalism by passing their time with the Twitter feeds of Kim Kardashian, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber e tutti quanti, had now returned to the voting booth, was registered as a sign of an ominous regression. Moreover, distractions in the form of ‘humanitarian interventions’ or a reanimation of the East–West conflict, this time with Russia instead of the ussr and over lgbtiq rights instead of communism, seemed to have exhausted themselves. Truth and morality ceased to count, and in England a Tory politician, when asked why he was campaigning to leave the eu against the advice of ‘the experts’, brazenly replied: ‘People in this country have had enough of experts!’footnote¹³