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D. Malcolm Carson's avatar

I don't know, I think you're looking at the right set of facts, not sure I agree with the conclusions. Labels do tend to become meaningless after a while, but associating neoliberalism with classical liberalism seems way out of bounds. All of the "neo-s" (neo-liberalism, neo-conservativism, and neo-Marxism, i.e. wokeism) are in my opinion fundamental corruptions of the original, so much so as to render them near opposites. Basically, existing power structures pick and choose aspects of any philosophy at hand so long as it serves the purpose of tricking those who might be inclined towards that philosophy into signing on to supporting the hegemonic status quo. That bastardized clone then gets labeled "neo-[insert legitimate political ideology here]".

I don't think you can correctly blame the 2008 financial collapse on "the free market". The 2007 financial system looked nothing like a free market, "too big to fail" had already been established years earlier and its implementation in that context arguably greatly contributed to converting a real estate and stock market correction into a worldwide financial collapse and sustained recession. The involvement of the federal government in the specific housing mortgages that initially set off that correction itself was broad and extensive and went back decades. Free market principles has almost nothing to do with any aspect of that collapse; all of the causes and effects were entirely within the context of extreme levels of government involvement.

You also have it exactly backwards when you say that, "This is precisely the scenario that climate change prognosticators have warned of . . . [b]ut it didn’t even take catastrophic climate change to get here." No, those "climate change prognosticators" are largely responsible for the current crisis by virtue of having voluntarily rendered Europe wholly dependent on Russia for energy. Putin has for years been entirely explicit about his intention to use Russian energy to gain leverage over his European neighbors, and now we can see that he had very good reasons to do so. The only reason for "the West" to fail to counter that with our own efforts to develop our own alternative non-renewable energy sources is climate change (well, and anti-nuclear hysteria, but that's related).

But there is a kernel of truth at the base of this article that I do think is critical: anyone who believes that the kinds of narrative-based warfare currently consuming the West are going to amount to more than a "hill of beans" on the geopolitical world stage in the coming years is probably in for a huge wake-up call. You can see it in the spasm of neoconservative triumphalism in the immediate aftermath of the invastion, seeing our misdirected attempts to make ordinary Russians "feel the pain" from Putin's invastion as some sort of meaningful reinvigoration of the West and vindication of their decades-old fever dreams of reenacting the glories of WWII and the Cold War. The ruble and Putin's approval ratings have only gone up even as our unity steadily dissipates in the face of the cold hard realities of food and energy prices.

To me, the most interesting and underreported part of this whole episode has been not the isolation of Russia, but the isolation of the West. If you look at the map of who has and hasn't signed on to the sanctions regime, it's basically only the West (presuming that Australia, NZ, Japan and South Korea are included) that has signed on. The map of those who haven't signed on looks almost exactly identical to the Cold War-era "Non-Aligned Movement", but the difference is that the NAM was relatively poor and powerless during the Cold War, and increasingly not so much now.

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Thomas Edwin Woodhouse's avatar

Both the right and the left have been blinded by their focus on, and subservience to, their respective ideologies. A pragmatic approach to our crises: climate change, national confrontations et al., is desperately needed.

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